Folks, welcome back to another edition of the Daily Bible Podcast. Well, hello and good morning. Welcome back. We are thrilled to have you. And I'm gonna start us off with a question. Ecstatic, ecstatic. I didn't say that. Overwhelmed with inexpressible joy. I didn't say that. I just said thrilled. Well, okay. Taking it to a whole another. I was saying those things level. Whole nother level. Alright. Right. So we have a question here and it's a multiple part question, so I don't wanna do it any injustice by trying to speed answer it. In our timeframe. So I think I'm gonna break it off into multiple pieces. Okay. So this is really about how to shepherd, how to disciple our kids, how to instruct them correctly. So a quick bit of context here. Now at Summer Camps, it's known at least for some summer camps, ours in particular. There's a lot of pressure to say, Hey, get right with the Lord. And there's a presentation of heaven and hell and why you should avoid one and go to the other. You should avoid hell. That is yes, in case that wasn't clear. And so some people sensitive to that look at that as a scare tactic or scare technique to perhaps, and they're not using this word, but perhaps manipulate someone into, turning into a Christian, submitting their lives and they resented that. It seems so anyway, listen, if I'm reading this story, rightly so, they didn't appreciate that there was a sense of foreboding that was given to them. This darkness, if you don't turn, this can happen to you and you don't want that to happen. So this is some of the backdrop with that. We don't want to. We don't wanna manipulate our kids into salvation, but neither do we want to be dispassionate and pretend like it's not a big deal, right? So with that, how do we effectively instruct our children with that in mind? Oh, and this is also related to our prior podcast where we talked about regeneration. If this is God's work, he makes us to be born again. How do we keep that in mind and still reach our kids with truth, with the gospel, with urgency without feeling like we're manipulating them into a decision so that they say the prayer or raise their hand or throw the pine cone in the fire. Right. And what have you help work us through that. Yeah. Yeah. We do this in other areas. You really, unless you're. Put your kid on a leash. You don't control much about what your kids do. But you're still gonna tell them, Hey, don't do this. For example, you're gonna teach your kid from an early age, Hey, the stove is hot. Don't touch the stove. Why are you gonna do that? Because you don't want them to feel the stove is hot. And you're gonna say, don't do that. And you're gonna hope that they understand that they shouldn't do that. And you're gonna warn them about that. And you're gonna talk about how bad it hurts, and you're gonna talk about the damage that it can do. And you're gonna talk about all these things and you're gonna instill a little bit of fear in them so that they're not gonna go near the stove still. You're, you can't control that at the end of the day. They could walk up while you're cooking and just slap their hand right there on the stove. And so we just, because we don't. Want it to give our kids fire insurance when it comes to their salvation. Meaning we don't want them to only fear hell. And that's the reason why they're turning to Christ for salvation. We should just, like, we warn them about not touching the stove, warn them about something that could hurt them and harm them. And hell is definitely one of those things. The reality is hell, the torments of hell if you love your child and I'm answering this generically, I know the person who wrote this in loves their children deeply. If you love your child then you're gonna tell them, Hey, I want what's best for you. And what's best for you is certainly to avoid an eternity in hell. And here's how you avoid an eternity in hell. Now, I gave the qualification that shouldn't be the only reason why somebody turns to faith in Jesus Christ. And so if we're pursuing our kids in. Only thing we're doing with our kids is saying, you don't wanna go to hell, you don't wanna go to hell, you don't wanna go to hell. So trust Jesus then we're missing it. And that's where we could fall prey to this guilt of trying to scare them into eternity. We should warn them about hell because Jesus does. You read the Bible it's all throughout the Bible, but we should also hold out the loveliness of Christ. We should also hold out the desirability. We should also hold out God's love, that God loved them so much that he gave Jesus to die on the cross for their sins so that they don't go to hell. And that God's love for them is that he wants to be with them and he wants to bring them to be with him where he is. And that's why Jesus came. So it has to be the both end. Amen to that. And I can't deny the fact that that's a really hard thing to do. Oh, for sure. We will always in the flesh struggle with whether or not we're approaching this with the right tenor, the right tone. I think about Paul in two Corinthians, chapter five, he says in verse 11, therefore, knowing the fear of God. We persuade others. He's talking not about his own kids. He's talking about those who's evangelizing and how much more as parents do we feel that sense of I know the fear of the Lord, I know the terrors of hell. At least I know what scripture says about them. And so of course, I want to persuade my kids to respond. Now how you do that and. What conditions in which you do that and how often you do that. Those are all questions of judgment and wisdom that scripture doesn't detail. It doesn't prescribe well, only three times a week do you just give your child and only, once a week you offer the offer of salvation. But even as we said about regeneration. God uses means and largely we are the means that he uses, yeah, to draw people to himself. That doesn't mean God can use or can't use something else, but that he largely uses the ordinary means of grace in the family to do something like this. So knowing the fear of God, we persuade others and that includes our kids. How you do that's gonna depend on their temperament on yours. How much of the Bible that you know and whether you think it's a good time to call them to repentance yet again. I know with my own kids, I am, we're always talking about these things. We're never not talking about them. In fact, here's something, if you show up at my house, one thing that you'll hear us talk about often is death. Yeah. We constantly highlight that. And I constantly remind, I, I meet with my two sons. My my older kids, I meet with them pretty regularly and I talk to them all the time saying, you don't know how long you got. You don't know. One of them has a profession of faith, the other one doesn't. And so I know largely I'm talking to one in particular, but I'm talking to all of us. Really. We don't wanna take life for granted. And so I, I'm okay with using that. But that's not my only tool. I don't pull out the hammer and think everything's a nail. Sometimes I'm using the screwdriver, sometimes I'm using the drill. Other times I'm using something else entirely different. I guess it really comes down to knowing your kids, praying for your kids in particular, and trusting the Lord to use you to reach them according to his timetable. And I'm not gonna use regeneration, and I'm not gonna use any theology to absolve me or abdicate me of my parental responsibility. I'm gonna use all the tools that God has afforded me and trust that it's at his timing and his purpose. He'll accomplish it in his good pleasure. Man. You're using aggressive tools though. You got the screwdriver, you got the drill, you got the hammer. I was gonna, the next one was gonna be a ruler, but I thought No, they get the idea. Yeah. Okay. Fair enough. Yeah, I only sandpaper. Yes, that's right. I'm going for it, man. Yeah, yeah. That's awesome. I am. Yeah, it's so important, isn't it? And I guess it's funny 'cause I didn't even think about those things. That's what came to mind. Yeah. Second Corinthians 5 21 too. Yeah we implore you be reconciled, right? It's not like, Hey, you might want to be good for you to do this. Yeah. We implore you. Or maybe not 5 21. I think that's the great exchange, but 25, 20, thank you. Yeah we beg you to be reconciled again. And we're gonna use any means necessary to do that. You'll often hear me say this. In fact, I said it multiple times in child dedication recently, that as parents, we should do everything. Possible to put our kids in the way of the gospel. What I mean by that is not put them in the way destructively of the gospel, but put them in the path of it. If the gospel is like the stream, you want them immersed in the stream and so do everything you can to get your kids as much gospel exposure as you possibly can. That includes coming from you. It's also from the church. It's from, the student ministry. It's from Adventure Club. It's all of these things. Get them in the way of the gospel as much as you can. That's right. Alright, let's jump to our DBR and we will hit more of that question, I guess our next episode or in a couple, we'll see here Matthew chapter 12. We've got Mark chapter three in Luke chapter six. So we've got quite a bit of ground to cover, but in the podcast we're going to cover some of it together because there, there is some. Repeated scenes here. Now again, as you're reading it, look for the nuances because these are going to be written from the different perspectives of Matthew, mark, and Luke. But there's similar stories here and for us to pull some app application out of them and just to describe them in general. I think we can cover a lot of it together here. But in Matthew 12, we open up what Jesus as Lord of the Sabbath. This is gonna show up again in Luke chapter six as well. But Jesus in his disciples are going along and his disciples are picking some. Grain. And the reason this is a problem is the oral law. Now that's important. That's an important distinction. The oral law, which is the additional explanation of the Old Testament law. So this is not directly from God. This is kind of the, the commentary of the religious leaders. They had declared that to pick the heads of grain. As you're walking through the field was to the same as harvesting. And harvesting would've been work, and work was prohibited on the Sabbath. So the Pharisees are gonna come to Jesus and see his disciples picking the heads of grain. And the reason they're doing that is because they were hungry. And so Jesus is gonna come to them. Or the Pharisees are gonna come to Jesus and confront them and say your disciples are breaking the law. They're working on the Sabbath. And Jesus, in his wisdom, is gonna respond by pointing to the example of David eating the bread of the present. And the point there was David was hungry and his men were hungry, and there was a need, there was a human need that superseded the need to follow the strict rules and regulations about the temple guidelines. And so David and his men or the tabernacle at this time were given the bread of the presence. That was something that was not according to law, allowable because they weren't priests. And yet the human needs superseded that because God cares more about that than he does strict adherence to the law at the cost of. The human need here. And so here again, Jesus is saying, you guys are abusing the people that are following you by requiring things to the detriment of the people. The disciples were hungry, they needed food. Jesus is saying, look, man was not created for the Sabbath, but the Sabbath was created for man. And you've perverted God's design for the Sabbath. And I really think that's the point that Jesus is making. This is the point that I think scripture makes and it's that the law serves the purposes of God's goal for you to love him and love people. When the law is used to do the opposite, you're misusing the law, right? You are mishandling it. This is not the way that God intended for us to understand the law. And I think it still works that way today. The law is meant for us to serve people, and this is what I was trying to get to. We've been talking about this now for several months, interspersed ways. Really the ministry that God's given you life for the purpose of people. That is your job is not to make widgets. Your job is to serve people. Your job is not to preach sermons. Your job is to serve people, right? Do those sermons right? Your job is not to set up chairs. Your job is to serve people by giving 'em a place to sit. That's a different framing of what you're doing, and I think the law's goal is to help us love God and love people. That's why Jesus says the whole law. Sits on those two realities. And apart from that, you really don't have the law. The law's purpose is to help us love God and love people. So don't miss the forest for the trees, is what Jesus is saying. Yeah that's super helpful that clarifies what I was saying. I don't mean to say we can abrogate the law or set it aside because we've got a need that we feel like supersedes that it's, yeah, you're right. It's the Pharisees we're using the law to the detriment of the people rather than understanding that it's meant to be for their good. From here, we encounter a, another scene dealing with the Sabbath, where Jesus in Mark chapter 12, or Mark chapter three, here in Matthew chapter 12, and in Luke chapter six, we find this in all three of them Jesus is gonna be in the synagogue here and the Pharisees are nearby and they're watching, and most likely I think this was probably a plant I because they see what's happening and they know what's going on here. And so this man approaches Jesus with a withered hand. And Jesus looks around at them and knows and here's another testimony to Jesus's deity and note these things as you're gonna be reading it. 'cause it shows up a lot in our reading right now. Jesus either perceives thoughts or knows what's going on in, in the hearts of other people. And so he knows that the religious leaders are looking at him trying to see is he gonna break the law by healing this man? He's grieved, he's angry. This is the same problem as the Sabbath, right? This is here. Jesus is saying, look, we need to care about people and love people, and here's a man who had a need. And so Jesus is going to ask them the question, is it okay? Would you stop and help your animal on the Sabbath? And the implication is, yes. How much more should we help a human being made in the image of God? And so he heals the man. But this is the animosity is increasing and it's not one sided. It says, Jesus looked around, I can't remember if it's Mark's account or Luke's, where he says, he looked around grieved and he was angry with them in their heart. So it's not just that Jesus is just frustrated or like, come on guys. Like he's angry at their hatred of this man who was created in the image of God that they would be, they would rather him continue in his suffering than be healed in that moment, just to keep the Sabbath law. Yeah. It says here that he looked around at them with anger. This is Mark chapter three. Yeah. Mark three grieved at their hardness of heart. So Jesus' anger is tinctured with grief? There's a, so there's a com emotional complexity in Jesus' response here. Yeah. It's not just one thing. It's not just the other. There's more than one thing happening, and his anger and his grief are working in tandem to express his displeasure at their unwillingness, and I think that's it. Their unwillingness to see things the way that Jesus. Wants him to see it, which is of course, the right way. Everything about your life is meant to serve love for people, and if it doesn't, you're doing it wrong. Yeah. Well, the Pharisees are enraged by this and they have been humiliated now and so they're seeking to destroy Jesus. It says in the text, and Jesus knows it's not as our much like we find in John in John's gospel. And so he's gonna withdraw and he goes from there, it says, many followed him again, Jesus is famous. It's just that reminder that all the crowds wanna be around Jesus. He's healing them. He's doing all of these things, and yet at verse 16 it says he was ordering them again, not to make him known. It wasn't his hour, it wasn't his time yet. And so Jesus is there. He's stepping into really the continued ministry of why God had called him out in, into his public ministry in the first place. Now we get to. One of the more juicy sections of the gospel is that creates a lot of questions, and that is this section on the blasphemy of the spirit. We find this again in all three, ooh, well, two of the three accounts. We find it in Matthew here in Matthew 1222 through 37, and also in Mark chapter three verses 20 through. 30. Luke will hit it, but not until a little bit later on. But the blamy of the Spirit, what happens here is Jesus heals a man and the Pharisees are there and they accuse him of healing the man in the power of Satan. He does this by the prince of demons, only by Alible, the prince of demons. That's the, that this man casts out demons. Verse 24, notice verse 25. Again, Jesus deity, knowing their thoughts, he responds to them. And he asked them a very simple question. He says, how can a kingdom stand of his divided against itself? He says He can't. And so if I'm casting out demons then and I'm doing it by the prince of demons, then what am I doing? I'm working against myself. And so then he goes on and he makes the statement, he says, I tell you, every sin and blasphemy will be forgiven people, but the blasphemy against the spirit will not be forgiven. And whoever speaks a word against the son of man will be forgiven. But whoever speaks against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven either in this age or the age to come. So the blasphemy of the spirit is right there and it's unforgivable and that begs the question, what is it? First it is to attribute the power of Christ to, or the power of the spirit. Specifically working through Christ to demonic activity to say that what God's spirit has done, the Holy Spirit has done is evil or wicked, or enabled by wicked forces. That contextually is the blasphemy of the spirit. So then the question is begged, can we still today commit the blasphemy of the spirit? And that's something that I've wrestled with and gone back and forth on and I've for a long time said no, because Jesus isn't here doing these miracles, and so we can't do that. But I'm not so sure. I'm not so sure it's not still possible to have the same heart posture towards the work of God that we see happening. That we would attribute what he's doing through the Holy Spirit to demonic forces or evil evil forces. And I think we, we see that. When people look at the good things in the church and they say that it's evil and that it's wicked and that it's depraved and that I can't say a hundred percent, that's blasphemy of the spirit, but I think it's a very close heart. Heart to the same heart that we see here in the Pharisees. Yeah, it's at least related and whether or not you can formally commit the blasphemy of the spirit as you see it here in these two chapters I agree it, it's not entirely clear. But it is certainly true that you can reject God's operation of his spirit. You can so be dead to what he's doing, that it's effective in the same result. The result is the same. The consequence is the same for both you. You can't be saved from that. Yeah. Every other sin that you can commit against Christ can be forgiven except for one. And I think that can be done today by a con continual rejection of the spirit's operation through the preaching of his word, receptivity to the gospel. And so I think it's still possible. In a sense that it can be, the consequences can still be. Endured. Whereas I don't know if the technical blasphemy of the spirit, that is the one where you look at Jesus' ministry and say, that's of the, of, that's of the devil. I don't know if that can be done still. So I'm with you. I'm a bit divided, but I think this, the warning is still there. Yeah. Beware that you don't suppress the spirit's operation. Yeah. We're. Pressing time, and we still got quite a bit to get to cover. He talks about the tree is known by its fruit. This is something that, that we talk about in other places in the New Testament as well. And this is the fact that our faith is gonna evidence itself that you should expect fruit from your walk with Christ. That should be evident there. And Jesus is making that point here, that you're gonna have a good tree, produce good fruit, a bad tree produces bad fruit. But let's talk here about the sign of Jonah. Because the Pharisee say, Hey what sign do you do to, to show us that you can have the authority to say all these things and do all these things? And Jesus lists the sign of Jonah and he says, as Jonah was in the belly of the fish, three days and three nights, so will the son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth. So if Jesus crucified on Friday, we've got Friday, Friday night. Saturday, Saturday night, Sunday morning, he rises. That's not three full days and three full nights. So Pastor Rod what do we do with this? Do we need to move Jesus' resurrect Jesus' crucifixion? Do we need to move his resurrection? How do we need to handle this? No. You need to understand how Jesus is using this reference and in short it is possible in the Jewish mindset to have three. Partial days still be threefold days. And so when Jesus is using this, he's saying, look, I want you to appeal to the story of Jonah. And just like Jonah endured this particular thing that is going into the heart of the earth and then coming back being quote, resurrected, that's gonna be the way I'm gonna do this. And so Jesus is simply pointing out the fact that he's gonna be in the heart of the earth for three days. And by our accounting, it would not be that it's like two days, two and a quarter or something like that. No, maybe not as a Friday, Saturday, Sunday. So three days he touches, but really he's only in the grave for what, 48 hours? Something like that. Yeah. And so we're gonna say, no, we don't have to throw out our bibles. We have to understand scripture on its own basis and not try to inject 21st century precision when we say three days. And we, especially when we say three days and three nights, we, we assume a certain understanding about that, and that's correct. But here we're listening to how Jesus presents it and what he's intending to describe. But again, the connection with Jonah is the primary point here, not the actual duration of time that he's in the heart of the earth. Yeah and Les that shake your confidence. We understand that today, you go to some cultures today and there are different things like you can make hand gestures and some cultures today that are. Very offensive. Whereas here in the United States, that hand gesture doesn't mean anything at all. And so we have different ways of interpreting and different hand gestures that we make, things like that. Words mean different things in different cultures. And so this is not. That strange for us to think that back then their accounting of time looked different than what our accounting of time looks like now. Let's keep going here. As we get into we can probably move to Luke six. In Mark chapter three. Again you're gonna read a lot of the same things that we just read. You're gonna cover a lot of the same ground that we just covered. He includes the calling of the 12, and that's there, that's also back in Matthew chapter 10. So these are the apostles, these are the disciples, rather that he's calling here. And probably of note here is that he calls those, he. Hired, mark says, including Jesus, Judas. So Jesus intentionally calls the one that's gonna betray him, and that's part of God's sovereignty at work there. That's part of him knowing. He lists Bartholomew here. Bartholomew probably another name for Nathaniel. And so in John's gospel, Nathaniel is present, but here he's called Bartholomew. Bartholomew probably means son of Timaeus bar meaning son of and tall MEUs probably being the the Hebrew there of his name. So Bartholomew could have been. The same as Nathaniel there, as we get into Luke six again, some similar territory, Lord of the Sabbath. You've got the withered hand, you've got the calling of the 12 and then you've got what we call the sermon on the plane, and we'll differentiate that from the Sermon on the Mount, which we're gonna get to tomorrow's reading. Or the next day, because this says here that he came out into a wide and open plane and there's some differences here, but there's also quite a bit of similarities between this and the Sermon on the mount. And so the sermon on the plane here is Luke six 20 through 49, and in part of this, at least I think what Jesus is doing is he's. Turning expectations upside down with the blessed statements that he makes here. These are things that you would look at and say, okay, I, that's not how I would necessarily expect it to go. And yet he's showing that things are different. If you're seeking for the riches, you're seeking for peace, you're seeking for glory, you're seeking for satisfaction here on earth, then you're gonna be left without it. But if you're looking to the right things, if you're looking to the right place then you're gonna find that satisfaction. You're gonna find the kingdom, you're gonna find the joy that you're looking for. You're gonna find the comfort in the peace that you desire there. And so he's. He's calling for that. And then much like the Sermon on the Mount, he's gonna get into a lot of kingdom ethics here. This is what we should do. This is how we should live, and this is the, these are the types of things that we should do as Christians and what's expected of the fruit of the spirit in our lives. And so similarities between the Sermon on the plane and the Sermon on the mount, but probably different occasion. All right, well, let's wrap up this episode of the Daily Bible Podcast. God, thanks for your word, and we just pray that you would help us to take it and jest it and apply it. And Lord, we do pray that you would help us to be shrewd in how we pursue our, not only our children, but any of the lost people in our lives with the gospel, that you would help us to convey to them an appropriate urgency. And part of that does include warning them of the. Penalty of rejecting Christ and the the dangers of hell that exist. And yet we do want them to also see Christ as lovely and beautiful. And we do know, and we confess that you are the one that opens blind eyes, but help us to do everything in our power to be able to cause that to happen by sharing the gospel faithfully with them. And we pray this in Jesus name. Amen. Amen. Keep bring your Bibles. Tune in again tomorrow for another edition of the Daily Bible Podcast. See you. Bye.

​Well, thank you for listening to another episode of the Daily Bible Podcast, folks! We're honored to have you join us. This is a ministry of Compass Bible Church in north Texas. You can find out more information about our Church at compassntx.org. We would love for you to leave a review, to rate, or to share this podcast on whatever platform you're listening on, and we hope to see you again tomorrow for another episode of the Daily Bible Podcast. Ya'll come back now, ya hear?

Yeah. I would agree with everything that you said