Q&A Genesis 20-21

Hey everyone, thanks for tuning in again to another Q&A with the pastor. And if you've just stumbled across this podcast and you're normally expecting sermons, what we're doing with this time is we are just asking Pastor Goad questions from his sermon from the previous week. And one of the ways that you can participate in this is by emailing a question in or asking one of us after the sermon. You can email congregation at jpbc.org. Most people only know you based on your high scores in Farmville and World of Warcraft. Is that right? I don't know what the first thing is, but I have played the World of Warcraft, yes. Now, why don't you just go ahead and let people in a little bit on your life. You're married, right? Correct. A little bit about that. Maybe you have a child as well? My wife and I just celebrated our ninth anniversary Wednesday, actually. So, yes, been married to My best friend, a wonderful woman, Lisa Goad, and we have a two-year-old daughter named Lillian. All right, let's get questions about the sermon. Now, you said, now that we've gone past the important stuff, you said it's not about obedience or it's not obedience which keeps us in the covenant with God. So, as a response to that, why should I obey any part of the Bible? Yeah, we have to realize that what brought us into the covenant is the same thing that keeps us in the covenant. One is God himself bringing us and giving us the faith to believe in Jesus. And what keeps us in the covenant is not our own strength or own worth. It's still God keeping us. One of the things I'm most impressed by in Scripture, always moved by in Scripture, I should say, is John 17. Jesus saying, Father, keep them. We need to be kept. That's actually a very humbling thing to remember. Jesus, right before he dies for us, is a good reminder for us that we need to be kept or else our sin, our hearts of treason, will destroy us. So, our works, our obedience, do not keep us in the covenant as if we're adding something to Christ. So, why do we obey? I want to obey Christ because He has loved me. It's out of His love for me and then my response in faith that makes me want to do what will most glorify Him. It's no longer about me and my glory. Now that I have seen the truth, now that I have seen what life I'm supposed to lead from Scripture, I think I obey Because I desire to glorify God. That's why I should obey. Would you say it's a good test of your faith to examine how you are obeying God or pursuing Him? If you have no desire to obey, and if you have no fruit of obedience, there's no reason to think your faith is true. Now, whenever you fail constantly, we see Abraham failing constantly. But we also see God always bringing him back. keeping him, and then Abraham responding with faith. So it's not a life of all faith, and that's the problem. We should expect God to always bring us back. And I think also there are examples in the Bible about, and you talked about this failing well, and how we may fail, but we are still pursuing righteousness and glory. What if there are parts of your life where you You don't want to obey. You are just intentionally disobeying God. We see this with younger people in their pursuing of sexual lifestyles where they know they're a part of the covenant or they would say they're a part of the covenant and they, for some reason, think God will overlook certain sins in their life and they're making an intention to not follow God. What is your response as a pastor? What's your response as a friend? and also an overseer of people who may be pursuing intentional sins with inside this church. Yeah, I would actually get rid of the whole hypothetical, what if we all had some lockbox of an area that we're not letting God. I think we all have them. It's a matter of when we become aware of them. I certainly love to have my own personal downtime. I think this is what I need to relax. Sometimes I have to realize I have to give that up, you know, wherever, TV, playing a video game, exercise, whatever it may be for the sake of my wife or for serving God in another way. If someone is constantly seeing that God is trying to penetrate that area and always holding him back, That should give a lot of pause in terms of assurance of faith maybe, certainly a right standing. It should bring a lot of fear because you're not fearing God enough to let him into that particular area. I think what we should be praying as Christians is always for God to reveal us more of those little lock boxes we have. But if someone always has, you know, this is my thing, God can't touch this. my dating life, my entertainment in that one hour a day, my little guilty pleasure. Maybe you watch The Bachelor and you know you shouldn't. I don't know anyone who does. I always know I shouldn't. You need to be mindful that that is you saying you do not fear God when you are continually rejecting His penetrating a certain part of your life. And that should be a fearful situation. Would you counsel someone to come to you for one of the deacons in the church if they're walking through that struggle where they know that they are failing and they know that it's wrong? How do they, you know, do they pick up a CCEF pamphlet or do they, you know, read a proverb a day or, you know, what? Yeah, maybe it's something that's, you know, maybe it's depression or maybe it's smoking cigarettes. Something that actually has an addictive power that you want to quit, but it's just become so natural. Maybe it's gluttony. You know, maybe it's, there's a lot of things that you should start, you know, I know this is probably something coming up in the questions in the sermon, you should Talk to other people about it. That's what the brothers and sisters are there for. If you need pastoral care, if it's something that's just been deep and dark and you need someone you can trust and you don't know anybody else you can trust, yeah, I hope that I would be found trustworthy. Not talking about your sin and temptation is putting yourself right in Satan's favorite place for you. So, yeah, not talking about it is definitely the best way to keep your sin alive as well. Let's talk about confronting other people and let's talk about being confronted by other people. You gave a true example in your life of how you were confronted by a brother in the church about your tone in communicating with someone else. And then you also talked about God's confronting us and God using the word in a lot of ways to confront us in our sin. How do we set up relationships like you had where someone confronted you and rebuked you on a sin? How do we set up those kind of relationships for accountability? But also not to overstep that and have like 50 accountability partners and things that you don't want to go out in the world because everyone has been told by you to confront you constantly on what you're doing. Yeah, let me, this is an important clarifying point because really I had two brothers tell me I was wrong. And another... Did you ignore the first one? Well, the first one, the first time someone said, you know, the first brother that came emailed me and said, no, this wasn't helpful. It was much more mild. I went back and I re-read the email I was responding to in my own email. And I was not convinced. Completely. And then the second one was much harder and firmer. And so I read it all over again. I still wasn't completely convinced I was as wrong as the two brothers were saying I was, but I was convinced that they are indwelt by the Spirit, that they are godly men, and if they're both that convinced, that's two witnesses. And I should therefore be convinced. I realize I can be very blinded by my own sin. And when I said the apology, I wasn't personally convinced that I had done enough wrong to warrant it, but I was convinced that they were right. If that makes sense. Yeah. And so I had to convince myself that even if I don't see my wrong, I was wrong. Because I believe God speaks to my brothers and sisters and he wants to speak to me through my brothers. So now getting back to your question, how do you set that up? You have to intentionally ask for it. I don't think you need every brother and sister in the church to be your economy partner, even though they should all be there encouraging you, watching each other. There is a big one another that always is fulfilled in our gathering together. You know, we're singing congregationally together. That's encouraging each other as we hear each other sing. Well, the New Testament would tell us that not all of us are gifted with discernment over one another. So that's where you I think you for very hard cases, that's why I praise God. We have a number of men who are gifted with pastoral gifts and they have an ability to understand who you are and understand what scripture says and then be able to tell. I've experienced that gift in many brothers. So I think, you know, a big part of it is before you get into sin, you need to go ahead and be talking about your regular temptations and your past of temptations and talk about how the Spirit speaks to you during the sermons and your Bible study regularly. And that way you've already set up some relationships that they know you well enough that they know how to confront you. So it's not something you just do whenever you're in sin. You need to go ahead and have those relationships established before you ever, you know, get, well, you have some regular practice of your very life. That's why I'm trying to set up the salvation groups and whatnot throughout the church. So I would, my recommendation would be to find two or three brothers or sisters. And your spouse is always a great, if you're married, your spouse is always a great discipler and corrector. But having two or three other brothers and sisters of the same sex is extremely important to go ahead and start building up that proactive relationship so that when you need building up, when you're down or when you need a strong correction, those strong relationships are already there to help you. Along the same lines of rebuking, one of the church members sent me a question. based on your sermon. And her question was, well, 17 three says, quote, If your brother sins, rebuke him. And if he repents, forgive him. And quote, What about Proverbs 19? That says it is his glory to overlook a transgression. Do you see a tension within those? Do you see a non agreement within the Old and New Testament in rebuking a brother or intentionally overlooking a brother? One of my favorite things to do is wrestle with Scripture. And one of the most important principles we've learned from the Reformation, well really, it's not just the Reformation, from Augustine and before him, is how to interpret Scripture with Scripture. It's a real science and a real art. And so the rule is always you take the more clear text and you interpret the more vague text with the clear text. If I were to look at this, Jesus' words are much more clear. In Proverbs, well, they're more general principles. And so, just in the very front of it, before you even get to the content, the fact that Jesus' words are more clear, you always make that the primary text, and the Proverbs the secondary. So, if I look at Proverbs in that way, I look at Jesus' words as making it clear that I am supposed to be rebuked, and I'm supposed to be rebuking others. And the Proverbs text, I think, is more just saying, when you walk around in life, if you take every possible wrong against you personally and build up grudges, you're not going to enjoy life. You have to walk around with a gracious spirit. Not every possible wrong. Not every time somebody cuts you off, you need to follow them into the parking lot and ask for forgiveness and give a review. You're going to be wronged regularly in this fallen world. I think you need to be armed with grace. I think that's what Proverbs 19 is saying. I think Jesus is addressing the brethren, the brothers and sisters that meet regularly. And so whenever we see sin in each other's lives, we should be warning each other. That would be the different context. What about rebuking a non-believer? Do we have the right to do that? Should we do that? How do we tell another person that they're either sinning against us or another person? while bringing glory to Christ, speaking in the words of evangelism for their hearts, but also protecting us. You know, if someone is constantly doing something around us that brings harm to us, maybe in an emotional way, how do we do that if they're not a believer and it won't respond to the word's rebuke like we would? Yeah, my mind goes immediately to 1 Corinthians 6 where Paul talks about a number of different lifestyles that one cannot be living and confess to be a Christian. And then he says, of course, I'm talking about those inside the church. Because those are the people that you can judge. Those who are confessing to be a Christian, well, you can make a proper judgment. If they're saying they're following Christ and yet practicing homosexuality or practicing adultery, You can confront that because scripture is so clear. If you're saying Jesus is the Lord, the Word of God is sovereign over you and you need to submit to it. For a non-Christian, there's still a creature who's supposed to be honoring God. It looks different. I think the judging looks different. But I think you should still, if you have a relationship with a friend and you can see that they are doing something that's going to be damaging, destroying to them, their family, to others, to give them a warning. I know you don't believe in God, but this is what God's Word says. These are good instructions, and if you think about this and meditate upon it, this is going to lead you into a happier life, because this is what God has created you for. So, it definitely looks different. You definitely have less of an umph position, I guess you would say. But I still think it's something that one should do. It should be done with much more caution. Making sure you say if you believe this, or if you obey this, you're not really saved. You need to believe in Jesus Christ. You talked a little bit about expecting ourselves to be different. As a Christian, we should expect our lives to be Different not only than other people who are not Christians, but different than what our our lifestyle was before One of the things that you didn't elaborate in so I'm going to ask you to elaborate on it more you talked about Dating and while our church doesn't have a lot of people in the dating stage How would you counsel people and how their lives should be different in their dating pursuits? Do you have a personal interest in this mr. Griffin? I have an interest in everything you say. This specifically. Counsel me. So I'm obviously speaking of Abraham after 20 some plus years. His strategy on how to deal with his wife being beautiful in a foreign city hasn't changed. It should be embarrassing for him not to have changed his strategy based upon how much God had taught him and carried him. And just too many Christians, it's kind of like that secret compartment we started with. We don't change things. We don't let the Word of God penetrate every part of our lives. So I mentioned dating just briefly. You know, obviously, if you're a believer and you're dating a non-Christian, That is opposed to one of the most clear principles of scripture. You're not supposed to be unequally yoked to Christian and non-Christian. I don't believe in evangelistic dating. A Christian doesn't also just date around for fun. That's what that would be implying. I think you date with purpose. Of course, somebody here will be saying as they're listening, no, don't use the word date, that's court. Establishing a relationship with the opposite sex is something much more serious than just dating around. That is, that should be a biblical principle. So I've been in the dating mix for a long time. So yeah, the most basic things are, you know, seek out that partner with intentionality. Don't just make, don't have relationships for relationships. seek out relationships for the glory of God. And if what you're doing and how you're pursuing it isn't actually glorifying God and leading you to a more glorifying life, it's not right. So, yeah, I mean, that's a general principle. I don't have to get way back in the past of dating to actually think about it. All right, kind of, so we don't go into a, we haven't, but so we don't go into a moralistic look on how we should live. You stated it's not a matter of what you've done, but it's what's been done for you. And you also said because you do certain things, whether it's go to church or live a certain way or make certain decisions, that doesn't make you a Christian. So, I'm going to ask you, I'm just going to put you on the spot, what makes you, Keith Goad, a Christian? Well, I'm tempted to think. You know, I'm a preacher, how can I not be a Christian? I'm the one who's going up there and... Proclaiming the Word of God regularly. How is that not a work that makes me set apart as a Christian? And I have to constantly remind myself, it's grace alone. It is grace that I have ever heard the Word of God. It's grace that I was able to understand it. It's grace that allows me to believe in it. It's grace that leads me to faith. So, if you ask me why I'm a Christian, it's because God said, I love you in Jesus Christ. And in the death and resurrection, I put my faith in Him. And that's how I'm a Christian. That's why I'm a Christian. That doesn't mean I'm not tempted to think. It's still something I do. That's the pride that's always bubbling up. But yes, grace from God and Him giving me the faith to believe in Him. I'll say you pass. Luther is shaking his head, yes. Grace alone, faith alone. That's right. One thing I want to ask, this is the last thing from your sermon that I'll ask you. You mentioned how we pray with the same authority that Christ prayed. Now, granted, we're not divine. how we can be like him as far as our desire to submit to God's will. We see Christ praying for God's will to be bestowed. He wanted to align himself. But can we expect the same results like Christ did within his own prayer? I mean, surely as divine as he was, he knew what would happen. How can we pray like him in a way of expectation? That's a very good question. First, the big difference between Jesus' prayers and our prayers is that the Father and the Son, in eternity, in their simple essence, they have one will. So, when the Son is praying, He's praying according to the same will as the Father. So, His prayer is always aligned with God's will, which is a big difference. Now, he also has the opportunity and the great authority to be able to say, in the name of the Son, I am your Son, Father. I am praying this according to your will, and I'm praying as your Son. Now, we don't get to take on God's will. As you said, we're not divine. We don't get to become part of that divine nature. But we get to pray with the same authority as the person. So there's three persons in Trinity, one essence. We get to pray with the same authority as the Son, who's the second person of Trinity, but we don't get to have the essence. I feel like I'm getting too complicated here, but the point being, my prayers, I have to realize, aren't always aligned with the will of God. But what I should do is try to work in my heart the the fruit of having my will more aligned with God. I think praying, as many theologians have said before me, and I think they're right, praying is oftentimes a way to align my will with God while I'm giving, telling God what my desire is. So, as I get to pray to the Father, I mean, one, I wouldn't be able to pray to the Father if it weren't for me praying in the name of Jesus Christ, who's his Son. Two, I do have a great authority. When I say, when I'm praying the name of Jesus Christ, I'm bringing these things to you, and the Father actually hears me as His child. But, if I'm praying, and His will is actually something else, I have to be willing to submit to that will. That was very good. crystal clear. You're very gracious. Well, okay, so that's all the questions. Now, this weekend you're preaching on which chapter of Genesis? Do you know yet? Yes. The preaching calendar determines what I preach. Genesis 22, it's really what, you know, I think the high point of the whole Abraham narrative. It actually is the bookend. It's finishing this man of faith, his journey that began back in Genesis 12. We're looking at Abraham and the test of his faith in sacrificing his son Isaac. Very emotionally impactful. Yeah, I've been very moved in my study by this story. If you could summarize this coming weekend sermon in one word, what would it be? Not be God. Provides. Provides. Well, you gave me the subject. I gave you the verb. It's the two words. God provides. That's it. At least it's not provided. It still provides for us. Or is he dumb? No, no. He has provided and continues to provide us in the perfect tense. I'm not a grammar guy. All right. Well, Keith, thanks so much. If you've got a question that you want to ask the preacher from the previous sermon, please email us your questions at congregation at JPBC dot org or catch either Keith or I after the sermon. And we would I would love to try to stump Keith next week. based on this upcoming sermon. Keith, thanks so much for your time.