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Welcome everybody to Gospel Talks podcast where we help Christians all over the world

become more effective in relational evangelism and discipleship.

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My name is George Bonoka.

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I'm joined by my dear friend Jeff Musgrave, who's the founder, author of The Exchange

Ministry and all the books, The Exchange Bible Study, Giving the Exchange, Living the

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Exchange.

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You can find all of that on exchangemessage.org and you can go to store there and you can

also explore other parts of the website.

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We have an online course.

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and several other things.

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We go to churches, we give webinars, seminars on how to reach your neighbors with the

gospel of Jesus Christ, how to build a relationship and be that bridge from Jesus to the

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rest of the world.

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And this is episode number 78 and we're really excited about the topic today because it's

one of my favorites.

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It's one of my favorite chapters of the Exchange Bible Study.

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There's only four and this is the third chapter and the title

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The episode for today is called Outrageous Love and chapter three, the chapter on God's

love, in my experience has always been the favorite chapter when people who accept Jesus

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Christ as savior through the exchange Bible study and they look back and they try to, you

know, discern which chapter was the most effective or most favorite.

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It's usually chapter three that gets that endorsement over and over again.

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And

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I guess part of it is, know, the question in my mind, I don't know, Jeff, if you've

thought about this, I was thinking about this, I thought about the people that I've taken

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through the Exchange Bible study.

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I wonder why people love this chapter so much.

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Well, think chapters one and two are wonderful about God, that God is holy and really

literally can't do anything wrong, but he can't tolerate any wrong.

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And recognizing we're all sinners, that's that's kind of bad news for humans.

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And then it gets worse.

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I never even send people into lesson two without letting them know.

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Lesson three is my favorite, we're going to get there in a moment.

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And so I think in some respects, being able to get to the good news, I mean, the good news

is, though I'm a center and deserve it to be to spend eternity apart from God forever, God

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loved me and he reached to me and he provided an unbelievable and I love the word that you

use outrageous means by which to be able to reach out to us.

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Yeah, this is the good news.

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And it just grabs you because without this, we are all sunk forever.

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Yeah, I think there probably been moments in all of our lives where we think about when we

got a piece of bad news.

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And I think we remember bad news, especially very, very personally impactful bad news.

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But the good news, I mean, we love to remember.

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It's like, I happen to remember some of the bad news moments of my life, but I love to

remember the good news.

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And I think that's why people who finish

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The Exchange Bible study, look back and go, man, I love chapter three.

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That was so cool.

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I think it's because of the contrast.

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And I think you talk about this in giving the exchange.

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Randy Alcorn says that that contrast is what makes the gospel so beautiful.

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When it stands next to hell, it's what makes it stand apart.

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It's what makes it so vibrant and colorful and beautiful is that it's standing next to

this terrible, horrible thing.

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called hell and that's the price for sin.

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And then Jesus is standing there and saying, you know, I loved you and I died for you.

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I think there's something all of us are attracted to when we see something like that.

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I totally agree.

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You know, I've been thinking about this because I knew this podcast was coming up.

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I actually find myself having a hard time to um

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put into words, the personal relationship that I have with God through his love reaching

to me.

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I mean, it's one thing to talk about a concept called love that God has expressed and talk

about the things that he's done.

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But when I talk about the relationship that I share with him because of his love, it's I

find it hard to put that into words.

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It's almost like it's too intimate and too wonderful.

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And sometimes even beyond my comprehension of being able to say it, I experience it not

only on a daily basis, but on a moment by moment basis.

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But but being able to put it into words, sometimes it difficult.

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Yeah, I think that's why I wanted to call it outrageous love because it's ridiculous a

little bit and it's under it's un-understandable a bit and it it's just you can't even you

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can't even begin to imagine you look at all the worldviews in the world you think about

how all the different little g-gods relate to their followers how many of them die for

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their followers and we we have something very different

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in Christianity, our God loves us so much, He died for us.

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Why would a creator ever need to die for a creature or ever want to die for a creature?

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That's ridiculous.

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mean, but nonetheless, this is what the gospel says.

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The Creator died for me.

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have a quote from Randy Alcorn in conversations with Jesus, in which Randy was sitting

down with some religious leaders in the eastern part of the world.

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And he had a Muslim leader and a Buddhist leader and they were each kind of saying, here's

how I view the world.

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And when Randy got his turn,

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to say, here's how I view the world.

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He said, so what you're all saying is that it's kind of like, God is on top of the

mountain.

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And we all have to find our path to climb to the top of the mountain to be with God.

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Yeah, yeah, yeah.

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That's what we're saying.

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He said, What if I told you that God didn't expect us to try to find a way to him, but

that he came down to us.

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And I just love that beauty of recognizing that the difference between a genuine

relationship with God versus a religious view of life is that I'm not talking about trying

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to be good enough to do something.

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I'm talking about being rescued.

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I love the word rescue.

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I love the word deliverance.

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I love the word redeemed.

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These are the things that that

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are so beautiful about this outrageous love that God has for us is that he came down and

met our need rather than expect us to try in some way.

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And I, I, think the thing that is so important for us to recognize is that we, we forget

how awful we are.

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There is no way to God.

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That's why Jesus said, I am the way, the truth and the life.

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No one comes to the Father but by me.

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And it's it's the reality that this is the only way for God to come to us.

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Yeah, yeah, we were just doing family devotions last night.

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We were reading Proverbs.

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We were reading the Proverbs of the day with Maile and we got to a big word and the word

was atonement.

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And she said, what is atonement?

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And I said, that's what Jesus did for you to make it possible for you to be with God.

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And it's the price of your salvation.

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She said, well, what's the price of my salvation?

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That's silly.

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You can't pay for salvation.

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I said, that's good.

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You can't pay for salvation.

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The price was blood, His blood.

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That was the only kind of blood that could pay for your sins.

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for someone, for God to go into relationship with humans, with His creatures, knowing He'd

have to die for them, because isn't that what Ephesians tells us?

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That this was

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This was planned.

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The rescue mission was planned for eternity.

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He knew, he knew when he created us, he'd have to die for us.

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That's pretty remarkable to know you're going to have to pay that high price for these

creatures and yet you still create them.

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when people tell me that they don't believe in God, I am, I always ask them so you know,

that they don't believe in the Bible, excuse me, usually, it starts with I don't believe

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in God.

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And then I start pointing to the Word of God.

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then they don't believe the Bible.

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I'll ask them the question.

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So what would you say is the central theme of the Bible?

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I love that question, because eventually, I get to talk about

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this the central theme, which is redemption.

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I mean, from the very beginning, before man fell, God knew what was going to happen.

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And he had already provided a way.

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And so all of all of that scripture narrative, uh the big picture is God redeeming humans

and uh to be able to kind of help people

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go away from this intellectual, I don't believe these concepts to let me show you what God

actually did for us.

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It changes it from a conversation about the mind to a conversation about the heart.

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And I think that is what is so powerful about Lesson three in the exchange Bible study is

we're no longer talking about intellectual stuff.

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We're talking about a God who loves you.

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Yeah, it's very, very much more personal.

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think, you know, we go through the first two chapters of the exchange.

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It's very much judicial.

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Here's the law.

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Here's why we're in the situation of, you know, what we're in.

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It's very di...

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You know...

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Excuse me.

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The Bible diagnoses the human problem, right?

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But...

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And it's very hard to get through that part of the conversation with unbeliever.

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But this is all the more brighter, this is all the more reason to be excited because of

this love once we get through it.

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what we've tried to do with the exchange Bible study is start the first few pages with

just helping people to recognize the importance of love in their own life.

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And at one point, there's a question in here about having a it's better to have a meal of

vegetables than to have a

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feast with all kinds of meats and delights.

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When there's peace, and love and tranquility with the vegetable meal, and when there's

contention and strife with the with the feast.

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I ask in this in the Bible study, has there ever been a time in your life when you had a

feast but you couldn't enjoy because of the tension in the room?

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And I was doing the Bible study with a couple and the woman looked at me and said, I hate

that question.

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Whoa, you and she's, it was very, very clear that there had been many times in her life in

which there was so much tension in the room and, and she was recognizing her need for

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love.

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So that's what we start with.

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It's just,

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helping everybody recognize we all need love.

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Love is powerful.

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And there's not a single human that can live and thrive without loving and being loved.

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And so that's, that's really all we're doing there at the beginning.

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And then we start talking about God loving humans.

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And I love this on page 29.

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In the Bible study.

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I've got a leaders guided my hand, the by the way, for those of you that don't know, the

exchange comes in to

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different books, we have the book for the inquirer, the person who's seeking after God and

trying to learn.

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And then we have a leaders guide, the leaders guide is the same Bible study, but it is

surrounded with discussion questions.

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And the discussion question on page 29 is, how have you since God drawing you to himself

recently?

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And this is really interesting.

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I've done this Bible study with people who tell me they're atheist.

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And, you know, when we're doing lesson one, and when we're doing lesson two, it's kind of

this intellectual conversation of, well, wouldn't a God who was good do this instead of

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that, and those sorts of questions.

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But when we get to that question, I don't know how many times I've watched a guy who tells

me he doesn't believe there's a God.

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say, Yeah, I have since that.

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And in fact, here's what I happened to me the last week and start telling me the stories

of how they sense this God that they don't believe in reaching out to them and drawing

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them to himself.

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Yeah.

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Yeah, you know what's interesting about that is John chapter 6, I think, where Jesus says,

unless the Father draws them, they won't come.

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So it's such a biblical question to ask.

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How do you feel that, you know, how do you believe that God has been drawing you?

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And also, it's a confirmation of sorts, because if they respond positively, right, they

say, you know, I think God's been drawing me through this, this, this, this other thing.

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Well, then we know they're coming.

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They're on the way.

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because those he draws will come, and they can't come unless he draws them.

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And so I think that's just such a beautiful truth that even the prompt for the leader's

guide in there, it's just come directly from the way Jesus Christ approached this.

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Yeah, and and the whole Bible study kind of flows.

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So once we have established the importance of love, and then establish the fact that God

loves not just everybody, but he loves you.

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And that's we really work at getting our friend to recognize and say, you know, God, God

loves me, then we start looking at, okay, so what did he do?

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So if indeed, our sin separates us from his holiness,

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and our sin demands his justice, then how in the world can a God who is genuinely holy and

genuinely just have a relationship with sinners like me?

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And to be able to begin to see that what he did was he had pity on us.

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And he reached out to us in redemption.

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And we use a little uh picture here that the word redemption paints a wonderful word

picture because

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of their sin, God's people were taken captive and held as slaves.

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Out of his love and pity, God purchased them and set them free.

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So that's the definition of redemption, to be purchased and set free.

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And it literally was a picture of the slavery that had happened to the Jewish people

because of their rebellion against God and how God redeemed them literally had pity and

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brought them out of slavery because of his deep love.

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And then we personalize that to each of us that we're all slaves in that slave market of

sin.

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We've we've not only been dominated by sin, but we've offended God with our sin.

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There's no reason for him to reach to us, but he did.

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And, and that's the beauty of what Jesus Christ did for each one of us.

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Huh, you know, that's really interesting that you talk about obedience like that.

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I was, I've been studying Luke chapter two, where Simeon and Anna give, you know,

testament to Jesus Christ, who he is, that he's come to save Israel and save the world.

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And one of the things that comes up in that is that, I mean, there's this tremendous level

of obedience and devoutness on the part of Simeon, Anna, Joseph, and Mary, who are all

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surrounding Christ.

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And when you think about obedience and its importance, obedience is important because what

you obey to you are a slave of, what you obey you are a slave of.

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Paul talks about that in Romans.

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Well, what you're talking about is the other side of this equation.

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The only reason we can obey God is because he loved us.

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Love makes that obedience possible.

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Otherwise, we're still stuck in that slavery market to sin.

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where we are only slaves to sin because sin owns us, right?

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And now because of the redemption, because of the atonement, because of the remissions of

sin, because the blood of Christ, because of Calvary, we have the ability to obey Christ

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because he loved us.

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It's an option now.

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So it's interesting.

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2 Corinthians chapter 5 verse 14 and I always remember the verse because it's the same as

Valentine's Day and it uses this phrase the love of Christ and the ESV says control the

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KGV says constrains the word underneath of that is literally put in between a rock and a

hard place it pushes me to a point where I have to respond

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the love of Christ constrains me, it controls me.

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That's what motivates us.

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Not only does it enable us to obey, but it motivates us to obey.

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It's it's we don't obey because we have to in order to be able to maintain a relationship

with us.

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He bought that relationship for me.

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We we obey him because we love him.

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And because he loved us so much.

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That's so beautiful.

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We we don't have to

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focus on loving him more.

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All we have to do is focus on how much he loves us.

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And John said it this way in first john four, we love him because he first loved us.

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Right, right, it's what Jesus says over and over again in the Gospel of John, right?

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And in John's epistles, he says, you know, if you love me, you will keep my commandments.

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And it's not like if you love me, you need to try to, you know, it's like, it's an

inevitability, right?

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It's inevitable.

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Because he loved you, you will, this is who you will become, just because that's the power

of his love.

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His love is...

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His love is like a magnet.

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mean, it draws you towards him and you'll want to become like him.

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But all of it is driven by love.

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It's not driven by fear.

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I mean, it's so different from so many other worldviews where the God of so many other

worldviews, the little G God, is driving people to conform out of fear.

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And that's not Jesus.

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Jesus is drawing people with love.

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Yeah.

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In the Exchange Bible study, we make a little bit of a shift here because we're talking

about the fact that he loved us to the point of redeeming us.

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And then we start talking about the specifics of how he redeemed us.

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We introduced the concept of the Exchange.

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And uh there are three parts to the Exchange that we talk about in the Bible study.

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But the first part is the substitutionary part where Jesus literally

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died the death that we deserve.

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And we use the verse.

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Second Corinthians chapter five, verse 21, where God made Jesus to be sin for us who knew

no sin that we might be made the righteousness of God in him.

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But we try to draw this to a recognition that God loves us so much, he wants to be close

to us.

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But his

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holy, just nature drives him away from us or drives us away from him.

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And what we try to do is create that feel of tension so that the unbeliever can look at

this and recognize, this is the only way not that I think it's one thing to show the

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exclusivity of Christ.

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But for someone to be able to actually discover it and to be able to say

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Oh, there is there.

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It's not that God demands only one way.

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It's that there is no other way that that this beautiful, glorious gift of a substitute, I

loved you so much, I died in your place, so that you could have my life.

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And literally, we get the life of Jesus.

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So not only do we have the fact that he died in our place,

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But on the other side, he literally gives us his life.

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That's what it's not just that the love constrains me, but now I am enabled through the

life of Jesus living in me to be able to obey him.

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yeah, yeah, I love that.

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You know, this is something that if we don't get this right, our Christian life can seem

really weighty and almost like legalistic or it can feel like, you know, all we need to do

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for Jesus is try a little harder.

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And that was never the purpose.

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The purpose of the law, according to James, the purpose of the law is the word of God like

a mirror, right?

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And you stand in front of it and you go, wow, I look really disgusting.

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I look really filthy.

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You see all the flaws.

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And he never tells you once in the Bible to grab the mirror, take it off the wall and try

to wash yourself with it.

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You know, that's what it's like to try to wash yourself with obedience.

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He says, no, you look at the mirror and something outside of the mirror has to come in and

change you and save you.

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That's God's grace.

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That's Jesus Christ.

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That's the love of Christ.

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only does he save us, he cleanses us literally, I mean, so that ugliness of what we

actually were, is now made beautiful to him.

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I love that picture in the Old Testament of a sweet aroma of the of the offerings to God.

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And then in Second Corinthians, too, it tells us that we are the sweet aroma of Christ to

God, that that

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that I he actually looks at me now and sees me as lovely and sees me as lovable, not

because I am but because God has given me Jesus has given me his own life.

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Right.

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Well, and that's what's so powerful about the way you're putting it right there is, you

see, there's a shift that should happen in our mind where we stop thinking about God's

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love as just one of his character qualities and see it as the transformative powerhouse of

a thing that it is, right?

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Because salvation is a love work of God in your life.

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Sanctification is a love work of God in your life.

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All the things that God is doing in your life are

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That's the big change, the big powerful change.

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That's the power of revival is the love of Jesus Christ.

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Like you want to know what like the powerhouse is of a ministry or of preaching or you

know anything like that, anything to do with salvation.

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It's the love.

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It's the love of God.

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And so that's the engine of all these things.

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before we leave this section in the Bible study, we we've finished with two other

thoughts.

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And that is that this exchange that God made for us is complete.

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It's finished.

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Jesus said on the cross, it is finished.

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The Bible says that his blood cleanses us from all sin.

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And so helping people feel see the completed finished Word of God and then helping people

see that resurrection power.

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And I really believe that that is that resurrection power is what is unleashed as our

hearts are connected to God in love.

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It's the resurrection power of Jesus.

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That is the power of the Christian life.

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It's the life of Jesus in me.

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The Galatians 2.20, I'm crucified, nevertheless I live.

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It's that resurrection power that has been given to me, placed into me.

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And then of course, I think nobody

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who knows the exchange Bible study well, we'll think of chapter three without thinking of

the summary of, chapter three, which is the story of the prodigal son.

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Uh, I don't know about you, George, but I think the story of the prodigal son is the most

beautiful story in all of history, all of literature.

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I think everybody's familiar with it, but,

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in the Bible study, instead of going verse by verse and reading it, it just retells it in

plain everyday English.

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It doesn't add to it.

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It doesn't elaborate on it.

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It just tells it in English.

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And because the beauty of the story, it is extremely moving.

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And I think the most poignant point of that story, and I if it's okay with you, George,

I'd like to read from the Bible study itself.

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The son has

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spent all of his money.

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He's offended the father, he has hurt the father.

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And yet, he makes a decision, I'm going to go back and ask the father if I can be one of

his servants.

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I'm going to humble myself, I'm going to go home.

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And when he goes home, he finds out that the father is ready to meet him.

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And he starts with his little speech.

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of, uh you know, I've offended you and I'm not worthy to be your son.

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But and I'll start here with reading.

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His father interrupted him.

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What the son did not know was that his father had been on that porch for days watching and

waiting for this very moment.

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His heart was bursting with compassion as he called to the servants bring forth the best

robe in the house and dress this boy in something proper.

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bring back the family ring and put it back on his finger.

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And by the way, he's going to need some shoes.

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And then it goes on and says standing there with tears streaming down his face looking at

the weak, emaciated form of his son.

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He added bring out the fatted calf and kill it.

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Let's eat and be happy again.

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For this my son was dead and is alive now.

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He was lost and is found and the father and the son

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and the whole house begin to celebrate.

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Friend, this is a picture of God's attitude toward you.

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Your sin and his perfect nature have driven you apart.

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But he cannot tolerate and overlook your sin.

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But he longs to forgive you through the substitutionary death of his own dear son.

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He is watching and waiting.

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for you to admit your sin and seek his forgiveness right now.

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And George, I don't know how many people I've done this Bible study with that at that

point they say, I want to do that right now.

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I don't want to wait.

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I get it.

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I understand it.

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I want to go into the arms of the father right now.

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Yeah, yeah, well, and it's so powerful that that parable that Jesus gives because of its

children and their father.

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And I think all of us, the reason our relationships with our dads are so important and one

of the reasons our society is so broken is because the relationship between dads and their

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kids are broken.

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But the reason that relationship is so

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is because it's anchored in a bigger relationship between us, creatures, and our Heavenly

Father.

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And so in that story that Jesus tells when he says, is the Father, this is how the Father

felt, well if you study that story from a cultural perspective, that a Jewish father would

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have had so much pride and arrogance that he would have berated that kid

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That kid coming back to town to seek forgiveness from his father would have been a death

march.

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I mean, they would have had cause in the book of Leviticus to stone this kid.

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Kids were killed for much less in those days.

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This kind of disrespect was unheard of, but the father, like you said, was waiting and he

ran and he took the shame.

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And I think that rings even more

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profoundly today in our society as it stands with all the broken family relationships that

it ever has, which is why I mean, I sat across from Tony who's, you know, been in prison,

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you know, was in jail for years and, you know, drugs and gangs and big, huge, tall dude,

six foot seven and, you know, 350 pounds and most of it muscle covered in tattoos.

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And he's crying.

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And he looked at me, he goes, you know, man, I never

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cry.

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And I just think about how beautiful it must be that a person who's been through quite a

hellish life could cry, you know, for one of the first times in his life when he reads

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that ending of chapter three and says, wow, God's my father and he's been waiting for me.

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Yeah.

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Most kids today are waiting for their father.

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They don't know about the story where the father is waiting for them.

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Well, and think that that's why it speaks so badly or so well to every, every human,

because every one of us wants the, the approval of our father.

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Everyone wants the love of our father.

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And even people who have never known that long for it, it's, it's built into the human

soul because you said it, it's mirroring that even larger story.

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And so that's why the story is so moving.

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And then when we recognize, that's that is actually God's attitude toward me.

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Now, we think of God as apart from me because he's he's so holy and I'm so sinful.

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But but to watch the picture turn and to recognize No, he wants me he's waiting for me.

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He's longing for me.

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He's ready to wrap his arms around me.

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Even before I apologize.

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That's what he wants.

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And it's just beautiful.

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I will say this, George.

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I've told you that a lot of people that I've done the Bible study with have gotten saved

right there on that page.

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But I've also found that it is my religious friends who need lesson four.

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And I think we're going to talk about that next week.

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Being able to talk about the pictures of faith that we see in Scripture, because even when

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begin to think, okay, I get it, God wants to restore me, we still by works oriented people

want to put our own selves into it.

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So I have to do this and I have to do this.

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And so Lesson four kind of helps a person to be able to recognize what what is it that

actually is required of me to be able to enter into this love relationship with Jesus.

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Yeah, well I think that's beautiful.

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Is there anything else before we close this out?

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No, I had a couple other things that I had thought about, but we'll put them into another

podcast another time.

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Okay, all right.

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Well, we love you guys.

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And this is so important to share as we're laborers in the harvest.

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This is so important to share the love of God with people today.

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It's such a hate-filled world that this is so much more, this is incredibly important to

share with your neighbors and your community and your family members and all those fans,

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the acronym.

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And if you don't know what that is, go back and listen to the episode a couple, 10

episodes back.

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Well, we love you guys.

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Pray with us as we pray to the Lord of the harvest that he would send forth laborers.

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And we will see you next week.