Works of Yesterday Don't Guarantee Tomorrow
We'll praise Jesus today everyone. I have just a short
message that I wanted to talk about today. And that is the fact that our works
or what we did in the past, do not guarantee our well being for the future. Now
in the world, we understand this concept. But many Christians do not receive or
understand this concept spiritually. In other words, they believe that if they
have said a prayer in the past and done a good work in the past, such as put
their faith in Jesus and believed in Him, then that good work or that act of
faith in the past will guarantee their future entry into heaven. So they bank
on the fact that they did good in the past, and then they think that everything
else from that moment of time into eternity doesn't matter. Praise Jesus today
everyone.
So I want to give an analogy of this from just the world,
from something that happened in my life, just to kind of bring this down to
earth to help us understand. So some years ago, about half a decade ago, I was
working a maintenance job at hotels. I did this job for about six or seven
years on and off. And during that time, praise Jesus everyone. During that
time, I was working as maintenance and construction. They put me in a position
where I was to demolish and help renovate a hotel. So there was a hotel that
had, I don't know, say 45, about 45 to 50 rooms. And they wanted these rooms to
be demoed, specifically the bathrooms. So they wanted the whole entire bathroom
ripped out, the shower, the toilet, the walls, even the studs and everything
taken out, all the way down to the floor, even the concrete taken out. And they
wanted the whole thing redone to reshape the rooms and make the hotel better.
And I was actually
put in charge of this job. So for about two years, guys, my main job was to
demolish and rebuild these bathrooms. So about 40 to 50 rooms at this hotel. It
took me two years. When all of this was said and done, after the whole, you
know, after everything was done, after I had demoed everything with a team, and
then, you know, taking everything to the dump, and after new people were hired,
and after we put everything back in all the way down to the tile, it was
finished. And I think it looked pretty good. I learned a lot from that
experience. And it was truly just an amazing experience that God allowed me to
have to develop as a man in learning how to do something in the world.
Now imagine that I,
still being hired at that particular company, said to them, you know, half a
decade ago, I renovated your bathrooms. And I was able to bring a hotel from
making, you know, grossing 1 million a year to 1.3 million dollars a year, or
whatever the case was. And so I, what if I had a bit of pride in that? But the
bad kind of pride, the pride where I thought that I was entitled to not just
make more money, but to do a whole lot less. So what if I said to them, well,
because half a decade ago, I renovated this building, and I did all this stuff,
I don't really have to do anything anymore for you guys. In fact, I don't think
I need to lift a finger. I don't need to build fences. I don't need to take out
the garbage. I don't need to pressure wash the sidewalks. I don't have to help
guests. I don't have to do anything with my job related to maintenance or
construction, because five years ago, I renovated this hotel, and now you're
making more money because of me. What if I had that attitude? Do you think that
the employer or the owner of that hotel would continue to pay me as his
employee? What do you think? Just honestly.
So in reality, we know how things work in the world. If you
get arrogant in the world, and you stop performing, you'll be fired. You'll be
canned immediately. It's not about what you just did in the past. Maybe that
helps you in an interview get a job, but if you can't perform in the workplace,
the things that you wrote down on paper of what you did in the past, you'll be
fired. And so we understand this as men in the world. You have to perform, and
it's not just about a performance that you did a half a decade ago or a decade
ago, but it's about how you can perform this minute, this hour. So whatever
your job is, whether you're an accountant or whether you're a construction, you
need any build houses, whatever you do, you have to currently be able to make
money and do a good job and prove yourself worthy of whatever job that is,
whatever career you have. If you can't do it, you should not be paid. And in
fact, your employer should fire you because you're worthless to the company.
It's just plain and simple how the world works.
So why do we as men understand this concept so well, but
then when we transition to faith, we say that we can achieve things in the
past, like we can just have a faith experience in the past. And now we're
accomplished because we have believed in the finished work of Jesus on the
cross. We're accomplished and we know we're entitled to heaven and the boss can
never fire us because we're tenured. So we think we could get really prideful
thinking that God has to keep us as his employees, even though we don't want to
work and we don't want to work out our salvation every day for him. So if this
concept of not working today doesn't work in the world, it certainly will not
work with God. Men are imperfect, but men also think like God, even if they are
ungodly people. All of us want to be treated fairly. All of us want respect.
And when it comes down to it, we prove by our own feeling of wanting to be
deserving of something that there is morality. God is perfectly moral and it is
perfectly just of him to fire us if we are not his workers, if we're not doing
work, if we're not enduring with Jesus and bearing good fruit, we know that he
will cut us off.
Now, this gospel that I'm displaying for you today is not
openly preached in church because this gospel will not make money. The gospel
that makes money says, “come to my church. You
don't have to do anything. You don't have to really repent. You don't have to
have an ongoing progressive testimony where you're hearing from God daily. You
can be homosexual. You can be trans. You can be whatever you want. Just be you
and just know that you will be accepted in our church.” That sort of false
gospel makes money because it's very inclusive to all religions and all beliefs
and it gets a lot of people involved in that church and wanting to pay money to
have their ears itched.
The other day I was thinking about the concept of AD and
BC. Now, BC used to stand for Before Christ and AD anno Domini. I don't know if I'm
pronouncing it correctly, but basically it means in the year of our Lord. This
stood for a long time. But at some point fairly recently, and this may go all
the way back to the 16th century, but fairly recently within the last 10 or 20
years, a lot of people wanted to be, they say, more inclusive. So all our
textbooks in California and actually probably in the whole United States, they
went from saying BC when talking about something before Jesus to calling it
BCE, which means Before Common Era. Instead of saying AD, which means in the
year of our Lord, now they say CE, which means Common Era. And the main reason,
if you look up why they did this, is because they're trying to be inclusive to
all religions, which totally denies the fact that Jesus did the work of dying
on the cross and resurrecting. It wasn't the Muslim god. It wasn't the Buddhist
god. It wasn't any other god that died on the cross and separated history from
history. No other god separated the Common Era from Before Common Era. That was
Jesus. So to try to be inclusive and deny the facts that Jesus is the one that
did this, it shows hypocrisy and it shows that people are trying to be
inclusive to demons and to lies.
Now as men of God, we are not inclusive to lies. We exclude
lies from our life. We exclude liars and everything that is not true from our
life that we can walk in purity and in righteousness and accept Jesus as our
Lord and the God of our life. So I hope this message makes sense to somebody
that, you know, someone that's out there that wants to truly put their faith in
Jesus and not just be cowardly because a lot of Christians are just deceived in
religion. They're trying to be inclusive. They don't think they have to work
out their salvation with fear and trembling. They're just wanting their ears
tickled. They want a kind of a church experience where they're just told
they're okay, they're going to heaven, they don't really have to repent or get
sin out of their life. They don't really have to have a relationship with
Jesus. And this kind of religion, guys, we have to reject because it is bringing
people to hell. It's bringing children to hell. It's bringing families to hell.
And unless we reject false church, then God will also
reject us. We have to have genuine faith and we have to have a testimony that
is current today. So again, all of us understand this concept in the world. We
can't prove that we're worthy of keeping our job in this world by just what
we've done in the past, but we have to be daily proving that we're worthy to
get the money that we're making every day. And if we can't do our jobs, we'll
be fired. And it's the same in the kingdom of God. If we are working for Jesus
with pure attitudes and right hearts, then the Lord's covenant stands in our
life. His blood covers over us. But if we're a coward, if we're rejecting
Jesus, if we're not standing for His truth, then it also stands that He will
also deny us and be ashamed of us in front of His holy angels.
So are we standing with Jesus or are we standing with men?
Are we trying to please Jesus and live for Him? Do we have a genuine
relationship with Him? And are we working for Him every day, working out our
salvation with fear and trembling? Or are we just trying to appease men and
live for men? Anyways, I hope this message encourages you in the Lord, and I
hope that we can go in faith today. “So Lord Jesus, I pray for Your true
church. I pray for people to come out of false religion. I pray for people to
come out of the lies of our culture that says that they can continue to sin and
just pay tithe to the church and they'll be good in the end. I pray people will
come out of this satanic church system that binds them to sin and ungodliness.
I pray that people throw off their witchcraft, they throw off their lies, and
they sever themselves from the ungodly, and that they touch nothing unclean. We
pray to just be holy and pure before You, Lord, and walk the straight and
narrow path and endure with You, Lord, to the very end. I pray this in Your
name, Lord Jesus. Amen.”
