What Kind of God Do You Want?

The gospel begins with one vital question: What kind of a God do you want?

Now, why would that matter? Well, you are responsible for you. Tell me no, you can't.

There's a spirit in all of us that discerns the attitude, the words, the personality, the tenacity, and we buy into a person's aptitude, their frequency, their vibrancy. We decide if we're gonna gel with this journey or if we're gonna resist and retaliate and criticize and pull away.

And, when I say what kind of a God do you want? That bothers a lot of people.

And here's the next question: Why does that bother you? Why would that bother anyone to ask them the question, "What kind of a God do you want?"

Well, it's sarcasm, and I don't like sarcasm. You loved it when you were a teenager. You love sarcasm when you're watching comedy. You love sarcasm when it deals with hot topics such as gender and race and other things. People are extremely sarcastic, and it's occasionally appropriate.

I'm simply asking, let's remove the sarcasm. Let's go scientific.

If you could develop the ingredients for your own custom-made deity, what are the essential elements that you would include in your mixture?

Let's just come up with a few, a handful. Don't overburden yourself. Let's start basic. Let's go scientific. Since humor is occasionally offensive to people who don't love to get out there on the edges, let's start in the middle with numbers, money, desire, things that people really like. Okay.

So let's scientifically define a couple ingredients that would be essential in your best gathering together of components to formulate this ideal deity.

Are you ready for this adventure? Now it's intellectually strenuous, it's emotionally complex, this is tapping into your spirit because you're asking yourself to intellectually engage with the spirit world.

And a lot of people just run away in fear. They don't know why they're afraid. They're not sure. They don't want to address. This is a very difficult topic. It's personal, which means I don't want to think about it. And I'm definitely not going to share with you what I think because I'm embarrassed.

Because quite frankly, I don't think about it enough, and I don't have an answer. So my answer is it's personal, which means I haven't personally considered it enough.

Well, might I suggest then that your definition of God determines a lot about you, your relationships, and your future, and your eternal destiny, and that perhaps the most important thing about you is what comes to your heart, your mind, your soul, your spirit, when you consider the individual identity of the one known as God in your life.

You can call Him whatever you'd like. You can call Him the Oneness, you know, whatever deity or godness or external strong.

So, what kind of a God do you want?

I think it's home. Boom. I think it nails it. I think that connects the bat with the ball at a good velocity and trajectory that will transcend and launch the ball out into the field in a successful manner.

So let's swing the stick and hit the sphere using the personality that I've been gifted with. This is my composition. You can resist, you can retaliate, regurgitate, you can dry heave, you can hang up. You can chop it off. You can keep scrolling. You can do whatever you want.

But here's how I would phrase it: "Oh, what kind of a God do you want?"

I throw a little humor, add a little salsa, a little bit of spice on it. Because if you have the God that you want, you're getting your results.

Which is hilarious, that you would formulate God instead of God formulating you. So right out of the box we have, in the beginning, God created. Now there's three components there.

Number one, in the beginning, timeless. Before time, before you, you had a beginning, you had a birthday, God doesn't. God never celebrates birthdays, at least not His own.

And people scratch their head because they have parasites—I mean because they don't they're trying to think right and they're trying to get their brain to think a little harder and they're like "oh man in the land before time" hmm that's interesting so in the beginning number one — timeless, number two God just steps out there and says here I be I am He so my favorite definition of God is.

God is the One who gets to fully and accurately define Himself.

Come on, big smile, big smile. You can move your facial muscles into a gesture of agreement, a composition. God gets to define God and you know it's true.

If there is a God and He did not define Himself, He would be disqualified from holding the position of Deity. Because it is true that there kind of cannot be eight billion definitions of God. There has to be one God, self-defining, self-expressing.

Then it says God created. It does not say in the beginning humans kind of created themselves or nothingness anyway.

So, if you're going to pick a God, part of what makes the question irritating to people is the fact that they have, in their own mind, in the average person's mind, they have a mostly accurate definition of God. And I'm trying to get to that 2% of unknown.

To the unknown God, if you believe that your perception of God, you know, if you ask the average person authentically, are you 100% like all the way to the top, completely, purely, positive, that there's nothing about God that you are even slightly inaccurate.

Like you are 100, 100, 100, a triple 100 in every attribute you can list. Can you list for me all 100 attributes of God from Scripture?

Let's say you believe in Allah. Can you give to me all 100 names of Allah according to the Quran right now? From memory and from your heart and your soul. That you know them and you've thought about them. I need 100 attributes of your deity right now.

Okay. So, you're saying that some of those your little foggy on 100 names for God in the Bible. 100 identities, attributes, or names. Go.

Okay. So, there's a little bit of a lack. There's a little fogginess. Human, confusion, very possible.

Quite common, actually. Would you like God to clarify Himself to you personally? There's another question.

If God were able to clarify His identity to you personally in such a way that you would really, really, really, truly know that you know Him directly and personally in all of His functions, all of His attributes, His identities, how He functions, how He has, you know, people like to use the word essence.

They say He has offices, He has operations, He has unique personality. If you could truly genuinely have God reveal Himself to you directly, would you see a benefit to that conversation happening for the delivery and the reception?

Would you be open to a God who opens up Himself and desires to make Himself known, communicate, deliver?

If God were to offer to you the knowledge of Himself, would you stay in the classroom long enough to intake that understanding?

Number next question: How does God communicate His identity?

I'd like to quote for you some words. These are not my words. They were around hundreds of years before I was conceived. These words are actually thousands of years old, and if you can receive it, these words were settled on ink, on parchment, in heaven, before God ever said, “Let there be light.”

So these words are indeed eternal and here they sound like this: God. I like that first word. It's a good word. You'll have to listen with your spirit. Because just bypass the personality of the delivery boy. Here it is ready:

God Who at sundry times—beautiful word, a deep word, cheesecake word—God Who at sundry times and in diverse manners spake in time passed unto the fathers by the prophets. Hath in these last days spoken unto us by His son through the Spirit.

Now I'm done quoting. I cut off a tear at the end. I should have told you when I stopped quoting scripture. But did you hear it? Sundry times, diverse manners through the prophets and now through His son, through Scripture, through the Spirit, through preaching, through the power, through vision, through nature, through dreams, through your conscience, through sensation, through your senses.

He connects, He communicates, He conveys, through numerology, through unavoidable patterns, through happenings in nature, through non-coincidental coincidences, through seeming serendipity, through random outcomes that somehow weave together the tapestry of your experience through an amalgamation of sensation beyond the natural.

To where you know that you know that there's a sixth sense, that life is more than your tongue, life is more than your fingertips, life is more than the smell of something freshly cooking, that life exists beyond your eyelids and that when you close your physical eyes you can still sense the spirit of someone else from across the room.

The intuition is unavoidably a genuine thing that is embraced by every culture. It is known.

And why does this matter? We are more, we are composed of more than the physical.

God is a spirit, and they that worship Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth.

Accuracy, genuosity, humility, curiosity. We must approach Him as being willing to receive Him for who He is apart from demanding that He conform to our fingers.

I do not need a God that can be formed and held and in taken through my eyes.

What is a graven image? It is something formed generally with hands for the purpose of satisfying the desire of the eyes, so that I can feel that I'm connected with this being or this deity.

Well, is the desire itself evil to want to connect with a father figure that is beyond myself a guide, somebody that is strong and powerful and can help bring positive outcomes? People worship, they fear the gods of weather, and productivity, and wealth, and whatever.

It is not wrong to seek God. It is wrong to approach Him with the senses as my primary—because now I'm positioning myself as God. I am demanding that He conform to my ideology.

I need a God Who makes sense to me. He has to fit between my ear lobes. I need a God Who fits inside my head. I need a God Who is smaller than my heart. I need a God Who intellectually, scientifically conforms to my expectations because I am God essentially.

Hmm. Or I need a God who's larger than me.

Is God bigger than you? Long pause.

Is God then stronger than you? Shake your noggin.

Is God better than you in some area? Mmm these are difficult questions.

Number 4. Is God more patient than you?

Number 5. Is God able to guide without forcing Himself into your life?

This is getting really deep.

Number 6. Ready? Big word. Compassionate. Enough to get involved in your tiny, seemingly tiny daily activities.

Number 7. Do you want, if you could build a God, did you want a God who is close at hand or distant? Far, far, far away. How close do you want this God?

Do you want Him closer than a brother? Do you want Him dwelling, intermingling? Do you want Him mixing, interweaving? Do you want Him closer than anything that can be described?

Do you want a God Who is clean, pure, orderly, sequential, decent, scheduled, systematic, pattern, predictable, faithful?

Do you, what kind, what sort of Deity would you draw? Do you want a God Who thinks higher and bigger thoughts than your own? Do you want a God Who knows things or do you want a God who's limited?

Do you want a God Who overwhelms people or do you want a God Who reveals Himself gradually and makes Himself known to those who are passionate enough to pursue Him diligently with all of their heart, soul, mind, and strength?

Do you want a God Who is boring? Or do you want a God Who would reward you?

It would be a rewarding journey to get to know Him and in fact His identity and the exploration of His excellence could be seen as a thousand doorways and you stand in a vast vestibule hallway. And, you have a thousand doors to enter and explore all the treasures of the riches of the glory of the excellence of Who He is and how His being contributes to your existence.

Do I want a God Who gets tired like me? Do I want a God Who gets grumpy like me?

Do I want a God Who's oppressed by radiation and hormones and physical salutations and Who slows down and ages and His joints and His muscles ache and burn and get acid?

Do I need a God who's gonna get diabetes or have to have His shoulder replaced or His back corrected and go see the chiropractor? Do I need a God Who has strong medical bills? Do I need a God Who is the Great Physician or who needs to go see the great physician and have His labs drawn, get His life energy levels tested.

What sort of a God do you want to serve or believe in?

Now, the definition of God is God. That's a loop. But God gets to define God, the degree to which I can align my belief system with his declaration of definition is then the degree to which I will activate and walk and pursue and make motion.

You know, people talk about setting goals, and I would say stop setting goals yourself. Let the emotion that deterministically causes the flow of setting a goal, there has to be some motivation present.

Tell me no, tell me that's wrong. Prove to me scientifically that setting a goal can be done completely devoid of all motivation. No motion, no consideration, nothing moves me to action.

Will a goal... What is the purpose of setting a goal if there's no motion to activate that goal? People stop setting goals, right?

So instead of setting goals yourself, alone for your benefit or even for the benefit of others. Why? Deterministically intellectually evaluate and try to self-motivate. Stop motivating yourself for yourself or by yourself. But instead, allow life to invite you to Himself.

By intermeddling—that's a fun word for playing around with, the very being of who God is, because God is essentially at His root center core, a being. He is a being that generates His own energy. He is the only One Who is Self-sustaining. He's the only One Who is the source of life.

And He holds all things together by the words of His power, His intellect, His intentions. Not mine. Stop pretending that you're Him. There we go. That's another good phrase.

Thank you, God, for letting anything good ever come out of my mouth, but stop pretending that you're Him.

So in the pursuit of God, we developed the right appetite for motivation, and we align our identity with His in proper correlation and harmony where He says, "I made you for this purpose. I designed you to accomplish this."

He said, Oh, my left foot moves forward like that and it catches the weight and the balance and then the knee moves and then the hip joint moves over the top of that and then the back swings a little bit and the shoulders and the arms, everything, wow, I can walk.

God designed us to accomplish something, to walk according to good works that He has foreordained, that He has designed as potential. It's a massive word, I love the word, it's not a Bible word, but it's a Bible concept. The concept is potential.

God designed potential personally crafted for us to accomplish something, that He has designed, potential, personally crafted for your walking into.

And it's a joint venture where He is the primary and I am the collaborator. He is the captain and I'm just tagging along, I'm the child.

"Let God be the Primary Mover, and you'll find that motion is less frictionuous." It's not effortless. Life is not effortless. There should be a little bit of struggle, and in the struggle is the delight of exploration.

People go to school for years. To learn the thing. Why? Takes time. If you're gonna go in the school of exploring the Divine, I would encourage you, number one, to just let God give you His dictionary of self-definition.

Once you have a solid definition from God of who God is, then you are free to proceed to function.

All of the gospel is on the solid foundation of the identity of God.

God identifies Himself as your Maker, as compassionate, as willing to humble Himself, as willing to suffer, as willing to carry the weight of all of our deficiencies.

God recognizes that we are significantly different than Himself, that we get tired and He does not, that we have mood swings that are rather quite selfish and yet sometimes medically induced, as a combination of just living in a sinful, cursed skin bag, and we don't feel like it.

And we stay childlike in our decision-making, and we don't have the courage or the character to do what we know we should do for the day. And we fall short of our own expectations.

We make a list of ten things to do, and we have an amazing day if we ever get to seven of those 10 top things to accomplish for the day. It's a good day, if we hit to number seven. We always come short of our own goals.

How much more then do we fall short of God's goals for our life? Oh, potential. Have we achieved 100% of our divine potential? It's a massive question to wrestle with.

Arguing intellectual wrestler, will you grab a hold of this opponent and wrangle away to success forward through all the holds and the grips that He can place on you?

What I'm saying is, from a clear understanding of the declaration of deity from God Himself, then we can proceed into fluid comprehension of the simple Gospel, which is number one, God. Number two, not God.

I am not God. Why? Because refer to number one, God defines Himself.

The difficult differential between my personal identity and the true identity of God is that I am smaller, I am shorter, I am more selfish. He is more selfless, I am less loving, He is more loving, I am a small person, He is a large person.

All these differences is the gap of the difference between our natures, which means there has to be a solution. There's a penalty for the divergence of our natures.

There's a natural separation because we have different interests. We have different levels of accomplishment. I would not even make it on the JV team. God is super graduate beyond Olympic champion level forever and ever and ever and here we are in basic PE showing up as a four-year-old and trying to roll around and just get familiar with the basics of whatever sport you want to fill in the blank there.

So then we're not even in the same league when it comes to intellect. His ways are significantly higher. His thoughts, are as the high as the sky beyond our intellect. His comprehension of all future possibilities. Most people think that God plays checkers. Well, if I move here, then God knows that and He moves there. No, God's not on two level chess or 3D chess or 5G chess.

God knows 10,000 possible outcomes from every one of your utterances. Absorb. Long pause.

God is fully aware of every possible outcome for every possible future because do you know what's possible? With God all things are possible.

That means there's possibilities plural. That means there are paths of righteousness, not one path, but paths of righteousness. I can freely and deliberately select to take a left-hand turn, and that will result in a different future. And it's okay. And God knows every possible way.

But there's got to be single. No, that's your human linear relationship to time. We, by the Divine design, cannot fully comprehend eternity. It's just one of those things that we effort endlessly become baffled by on purpose.

Similarly the Trinity does not fit into a cute box of delineation and simplification where we, well, this is the spirit, this is how this is a God's function of His spirit, we can identify with it. And here's the Son, this is God in the flesh, God becoming man.

And then this is God the Father, because we all need a Father figure. But the fullness of the Godhead cannot be articulated or processed, or computed, or run through a system, we can by faith believe that God is who He says He is.

We can by simple trust recognize that we cannot fully comprehend eternity or the nature of the Godhead from every possible facet or perspective.

Back to the Gospel: number one God; number two not God; number three massive, massive separation. Eternal divergent because I'm not God. There is a divergence.

There's a segmenting. There's a separating. There's a splitting. There's a moving away from that results in an eternal destiny of separation from the identity of God and all of his glory. His goodness, His comfort, His joy, His warmth, His peace, His provision, His kingdom, His glory, His goldenness, His clear streets, His river of life, His presence, His purpose, His passion.

I will be separated from Him forever and ever and ever by my own selection. I freely and deliberately chose to resist, to rebel, to push away.

I had ample opportunity. I had significant hours. I had several days. I had weeks, months, and years to evaluate this person of God and to pursue him passionately enough to believe that He is Who He says He is, and He will reward those that go after Him.

And yet I chose to refuse Him. I chose to refuse Him. Long pause repeat. I chose to refuse him.

That's number five though, is that it's my responsibility. People don't like that part. They want God to be responsible for their choices.

So they foster a stilted, tweaked, redefined, split-word, mathematical approach to regeneration before simple trust. That's not the gospel.

What is the Gospel? There's five points. Number one, God, the one true God of Scripture. Number two, Sin. Man sins. Sin is anything that is not God.

Whatsoever is not of faith is sin. Faith in who? Faith in God. Faith outside self. Faith beyond me. I am not the source of all things good.

There is a God because I'm not Him.

I can't drop the microphone. But I would pick it back up and say it again. There is a God because I'm not Him. I don't like that. It's too intellectually sharp.

Dude, you need to study comedy. You need to take a course on what is funny, how to decompress under pressure.

You know how people handle life under pressure? Number one, fear. Oh, man, it's just fun to be afraid. I think I'll just freak out. And I'll say things like this, "I don't know. I don't know. I don't know."

Okay, you're fearful. Why? You don't have the data. You're refusing to process the information. You're unbelieving. Why are you unbelieving? 'cause you don't want to believe. 'Cause you don't wanna face the facts. You don't wanna fill in the blanks. You're given a test and you're like, "Well, I don't know, I don't know." That's not an excuse.

Find the answers and put them where they belong. Don't be lazy.

Fearful, unbelieving, abominable, repulsive, disgusting. It's in our nature. We are not God.

People react in fear. People react in frustration, confusion, anger, violence, retaliation, revenge, all that is one cluster. People react in cowardice and shirking away and running away and just depression and defeat, and I give up and I don't think I can, and putting it all in themselves, and recognizing their own limitations, and just pretending that it's just not possible, and laziness.

Or, you can laugh. You can alleviate the pressure of having to deal with the fact that God exists, and that you're not Him, and that He decided your gender, and your gender has a role, and you have opportunities and you have something you can function in society to do today, to serve others and to serve God more.

And that you are compelled by the nature infused into your being to do the thing that will actually make you happy. By doing the thing. What's my thing to do today?

Well, why don't you ask the Operator, the Chief Engineer, the Designer at the factory, look in the owner's manual, what am I designed to do today? Do the thing that you're designed to do.

Check in with the Inventor. Let's see, I'm an invention made by an Inventor, capital I, and I'm trying to figure out my function. What is step one? Oh, open up the box. Okay, step two, read the instructions.

I'm doing that. I'm doing that. I put the ink into the printer, plug the printer in, now connect it to the network.

Divine unboxing. You know, a lot of people don't ever get themselves out of the box. They've never been fully unboxed.

I would like to invite you to video your own spiritual unboxing, not being weird, not being goofy or physical, you know, keep your clothes on. But what I'm talking about is getting your spiritual gifts ready for maximal usefulness for God, I guess.

You know, I'm speaking about a printer that I recently purchased and we had to get the printer out of the box and I read everything on the outside that told me what the functions and the capacity and why it was better and how it has these new cool kind of bottles of ink instead of cartridges and of course it does color connects to your phone and you can bypass Wi-Fi and it's built by a reputable company and it has an eco tank ink system.

So, functionally, I was enjoying anticipating opening. I see the jugs and I put the jugs in there and I plug it in and I get the ink loaded and plug it into the wall and the lights come on and you push the buttons and you follow the steps and there's six steps to success to get your printer rolling and you got to calibrate it and make sure that it's lined up properly.

Do you know most believers sadly if we were to use this illustration of a printer when they they have not fully experienced the extremities of their own capacity, infused into them the technology gifted to them by God, they've not fully used it? The maximum range of their voice and their expression of their soul, they've not tapped into it.

They've not filled up. They've not had the cartridge installed properly and tested and utilized in a public performance setting under pressure, to the benefit of God and the glory to bring other people a higher opinion of who God is, because am I the designer, that I put the brand stamp on my own life?

Is my last name that valuable, or does my name bring more glory to my family lineage, or does it bring glory to my primary Heavenly Father?

What is the Gospel? The Gospel number one: understanding God being curious and humble enough to pursue the identity of the one true God who defines Himself in Scripture and beyond.

I love how the atheists say “Well, if you delete the Bible if you just if you stop just stop talking about the Bible, if you get rid of Scripture, then now tell us about your God.” I'm like, "Oh, you have a voice box. How did that get there?"

You're speaking to me using a foreign structure of linguistics and numerology called language. You're speaking words with the full assumption that I'm able to receive and articulate and imagine some sort of version of what you're trying to express.

How did words get here? Give me the etymology, the meaning, the root, the history, the core, the beginning, the essence of language. Where did language originate? Why can a dog understand tones and emotions and patterns, but why can't I have a meaningful dialogue and intellectually stimulating conversation with my pet? Beyond a few phrases.

The Gospel is centered upon a proper definition of God, who, by definition, God must define Himself.

Once God is allowed and given permission in space and a platform and significant amount of time to express Himself gradually through several layers, several pages, several chapters and books, and several situations, several connections and relations, events, happenings, the structure of a spider and a spider web.

What can we learn about God? What notes have we taken about what in the world who would have invented a spider? How much pressure and weight can a spider's web hold? Where does it all come from? What's the drive? The structure of this creature is so weird, so delicate, so amazing, so small, so powerful, so ugly, so weird, the eyes.

Have you seen the zoomed, I mean the hair, the fur, the freakiness, the gripping of the phalanges, the number of legs, the weaving of the web. What in the world?

All this comes from nothing or is this an expression of something significantly larger than me because I certainly could not scribble onto any document. I could not formulate out of any substance to make a spider, it's too tiny.

There's no way I couldn't make one eyeball on one spider, I couldn't make them. I couldn't make him scary. What makes a spider scary? Why am I afraid as a human knowing the spider can't do hardly anything to me? But yet there's a measure of fear. Where does that come from?

There's a measure of admiration. There's a little bit of curiosity like dude, who are you? Why are you here? What are you doing? What's your purpose in society? Why do you kill bugs? Why do you live on the life, blood of other creatures? That's kind of goofy.

Spiders have venom. They have dexterity. They have amazing mobility. They can jump. They can carry things. They can structure. They make thousands and thousands of eggs. They have families.

The Bible says they take hold with their hands and they enter into the king's palace. They get inside the castle. You can't keep them out. I mean nowadays you have to spray a bunch of pesticides anyway.

That's just one tiny feature. Don't get us thinking about beetles. How many thousands and thousands of species of beetles there are. And that's just one subset of all the insects that there are.

And the big question is who? Not why these things exist. Not what they are. Not how they function. Not to what degree or what extent or the history of the diversity or all that stuff. But the question is who? Whose personality is expressed into the wing of the Junebug in the little humble beetle, thousands upon thousands of styles and different variations.

How many different kinds of spiders are there?

So what is the Gospel? Number one, God gets to be God. Number two, I get to be me when I fully recognize how I am not God and how God and I should be in tandem in relation, but we're not right now in proper alignment.

So then number three, separation is inevitable every day along the way and it's only getting worse and it gets to an extreme. We're approaching an extreme separation that can be avoided.

Number four, only God himself can solve the problem. Let God be God and step in as the Savior. Stop trying to supplement and add to the simple salvation through Christ. Allow God to solve the problem that is created when He created you and we chose to go our own way. All we like sheep have gone astray. Naturally we go away.

All two-year-olds have a rebellious streak and they can't even articulate why, but they're just self-centered. We are essentially prideful, selfish, rebellious, at least sometimes. Therefore, separation, inevitable.

Number four, Savior. We need a Savior, a significant Savior, a humble Savior, a Savior who recognizes the problem. He carries the weight, He shoulders the burden, He replaces our guilt with His glory.

He takes our filthy limited righteousness, our partial attempts. He takes our small crayon drawings, He carries that, our unrighteousness on His record and He transfers on to our spiritual record legally His abundant, pure, pristine, perfect record of righteousness.

It's called “imputation”. It means to input, to deposit. I get an extraction of the filth and an infusion of the excellence. This is the exchange of the miracle moment of believing that the Son of God came to seek and to save that which was lost.

I was lost, condemned, far from God having been fallen short. I was in darkness, I was in a bad place. I needed a Redeemer, someone who would love me and value me and purchase me and pick me up hold me.

I was falling and he caught me. I was in undescribable state of loss and He rescued. In loving kindness, Jesus came my soul in mercy to reclaim. When I was falling, sinking, darkness, despair, corruption, destruction. I was facing the abyss Eternal separation pain opposite of God everything.

I was in danger. Then God—but God who is rich in mercy and grace, by the love where with He loved us. He stepped in. He caught me in His everlasting strong hand. He secured me. He pulled me up. He came to me.

He offered me the option of selective salvation where I could choose Him and he would choose me and I invited. I willingly recognized I could not be my own savior.

And point number five, choose freely, deliberately, your choice, your responsibility. It is on you. Of course, God invites you. Of course, He extends the invitation. Of course, He draws you, He compels you. He wishes, He wants, He desires you to come to Him, but ultimately the choice of reception must be in the heart and the mind and the soul of the receiver to receive it.

If you and you have freely and deliberately chosen each other as partners for life, who's forcing who? It's free will, God. And that is beyond our capacity. There's massive contention over the freedom of the will because people want to think that they don't like the responsibility, but I'm telling you, you are responsible for selecting your own Savior.

That's painful, stop it, no, I got a lot of Bible, I can show you a lot of Bible verses why I'm not responsible for selecting my own Savior. You choose Christ. He wants you to choose Him, but you choose Christ.

Select a Savior, yourself or the Son of God. Those are the two options. Religion, tradition is stupid. It's dumb.

When you get to, you know, you're going to logic with God on the day of judgment, you're going to tell him that you have some religious label. You're going to come to Him with some name of a city or a philosophy, say, "Look, I ascribed to the Greco-Roman philosophy of identifying..."

He's like, "Dude, I'm the actual God. I'm the I AM that I AM. Who are you coming to me with a Roman label? The Romans were instrumental in my crucifixion.” Why are you associating yourself at all with the Roman ideology, the Roman philosophy, the Roman flavor of anything is repulsive to God.

I wrote a Book to those people to help them understand who I am better, and they refused to believe it because they read it with their own intellect instead of My Spirit guiding them.

I am the Author of eternal life.
I am the Author of Spirit-filled living.
I make the words glow.
I make them come alive.
The words that I speak unto you, they are Spirit, and they are life.

Jesus said to the scribes, "Why is it that you cannot hear My words, even because you do not believe Me?"

The words are not human.
They are not reasonable.
They are not built for the intellect.
These words are built for the Spirit resonance.
They operate on an entirely different spectrum of frequency.
It is Spirit words that connect with the Spirit.

John chapter 4—the woman at the well—they talked about who they worship, and Jesus is like, "I don't think we're on... we're not even speaking the same language."
The real God seeketh such to worship Him; they that worship God must worship Him in Spirit and in truth.
You know, John 3—Nicodemus—he got all hung up on the physical, and Jesus was talking spiritual.

We're not talking about water birth; we're talking about the new birth, where the Spirit of God comes to dwell in somebody, where their spirit becomes born again, where they actually experience life in the Spirit with God above.

Internally infused with the spark—not of your intellect.
People are so stuck on themselves and their own capacity of their own brain, and they think they're amazing.
We need a God.
I cannot fully function apart from God.
Select Him.
Choose Him.
Embrace Him.

Realize—whatever you know—I would plead with you intellectually: whatever is necessary to escape separation from God should be considered.
Even if it's beyond my capacity to receive, I should explore.

Give myself. Dedicate a season.
If the doctor told you that you have lab tests coming up on Monday, they're gonna test your blood or do some kind of labs, and they said it's a fasting lab—I don't know what that means, but I think it means I can't partake in the substance of nutrition for maybe a day before.

If God told you that you needed to do a spiritual fast for a season—a day, a week, or whatever—and only dedicate full devotion to understanding who He is, what He expects, and then you stop listening to human logic about what generates salvation...

Your eternal life is so significantly more valuable than anyone else's opinion about what you should believe.

I would encourage everyone to break the chain of human tradition.
Stop listening to other people's opinions of God, and instead go directly to Him.

Break every preconceived concept, because the devil is a deceiver.
He fakes, he pretends, he gives you a twisted, perverted rendering—a caricature, a cartoon drawing of God with big ears and a funny nose and missing teeth.
That's the kind of god most people believe in: a twisted god who does not provide full salvation.

It is salvation that is essential to graduate from this life into the next life.
So it is salvation that Satan fights the most.

And we got to chop this short, because typically people don't have the tenacity or the intellectual durability, nor do they have the travel time to fit a one-hour podcast.
Although Joe Rogan can spontaneously go for three-point-something, and other people have the gift of gab, and they'll pop a microphone in their face and they'll go for multiple hours about politics and commerce and entrepreneurship and everything else that matters so temporarily...
But you give somebody one hour on a microphone talking about God and everybody goes to sleep.

Anyway, the essence of God is that God gets to be God.
The essence of man is that man is not God.
The essence of those two being separated is there's a significant problem—number four: only Christ can solve that problem.

It's called “redemption”.

Reconciliation—that God, who is not a sinner, can be reconnected with us, who are sinners.
How does that happen? Through Christ.
Why is Christ so significant? Because He suffered.
Summarize the Gospel in one word: Christ.
Put it into two words: Christ saves.
Put it into three words: Jesus suffered substitution.

He took my place. Why?
Doesn't matter why. That's just how it is.

Someone had to bring together extreme purity in the form of God and extreme stupidity, and limited functionality, and just defective humanity in our form.
In order to reconcile the two together, God had to bridge the gap.
God had to be the Reuniter.
He's the Savior.
He's the Redeemer.
His Name means salvation of God.
He's the Anointed for the purpose.
He came to bring us to the Father.

"No man comes to the Father except through Me."

So through Christ alone, we can achieve that which we cannot achieve—which is God styling the world unto Himself through Christ.
God wants that harmony, that connection, that purpose, that function.
He wants to be infused into helping you live.
The life that I now live, I live unto God.
I live not my own, but in this flesh, there's more than just me.
I now have the capacity of the supernatural—the Spirit within.
I now have the gift that can be stirred up to serve others.
I'm now living out of abundant love for God and a love expressed to others.

I now have a dual functionality—the Great Commandment: love God, serve others.
I now have the Great Commission: Hear the Gospel. Deliver the Gospel. Receive the Gospel. Enjoy the Gospel. Produce the Gospel. Deliver, puncture, push the button, record, speak, communicate the Gospel.

As we have received, so what we also to share.
Amen.