Speaker 1: 0:01

Welcome to the Daily Blade. The Word of God is described as the sword of the Spirit, the primary spiritual weapon in the Christian's armor against the forces of evil. Your hosts are Joby Martin and Kyle Thompson, and they stand ready to equip men for the fight. Let's sharpen up.

Speaker 2: 0:20

All right men, welcome back to Mark, chapter 2. We've been in it all five days and here I want to look at the attitude of the religious leaders and I want to warn you, I want to extol you, I want to rebuke you. If you need to be rebuked, please do not have the critical heart of the religious Pharisees that we see Jesus come in contact with over and over and over. And I'm telling you, one of the great shadows about doing ministry with men especially bold, strong, opinionated, hard-nosed, love the Lord and ready to push back darkness, kind of men is one of the greatest shadows that men like us can have is that we can have a critical heart towards the work of God and actually be opposed to what God is doing, instead of a part of what God is doing.

Speaker 2: 1:14

Beginning in verse 5, mark 2 says and when Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralytic son your sins forgiven. Now some of the scribes were sitting there, questioning in their hearts why does this man speak like that? He is blaspheming. Who can forgive sins but God alone? And immediately Jesus, perceiving in his spirit that they thus question within themselves. And they said to them why do you question these things in your heart, which is easier to say to the paralytic your sins are forgiven, or to say rise, take up your bed and walk, but that you may know that the son of man has authority on earth to forgive sin. He said to the paralytic I say to you, rise, pick up your bed and go home. And he rose and immediately picked up his bed and went out before them all, so that they were all amazed and glorified God, saying we never saw anything like this.

Speaker 2: 2:07

All right, when God's hand moves in a mighty way, which attitude do you take? There were two types of observers here to this miracle of Christ. One group of guys looked at him and said you're not doing this right. Who do you think you are? Another group of people looked at God in amazement and worship and said we never saw anything like this. Now listen, man, I might be reading my own mail here, because I pastor a church and God's hand has always been on it, or, you know, since we started 13 years ago, and one of the things that just really fires me up is the number of people that fall into this pharisaical kind of attitude. They're always trying to poke holes in what God is doing.

Speaker 2: 2:49

Another place I see it is when Jesus heals this man on a mat by the pool of Bethesda. And what the Pharisees see. Jesus looks at this man and says do you want to be healed? We'll talk about this at some point. Jesus heals the man and he says pick up your mat and walk. And you may say well, why in the world would Jesus tell the guy to pick up his mat? Because crippled people don't need mats. And the reason is because people would identify that man by his mat, and God often uses the biggest messes in our life to preach the gospel message to the glory of God. But when the Pharisees saw this man carrying the mat, because he did it on the Sabbath, they didn't see the in a place that you didn't expect it.

Speaker 2: 3:31

Do you see the miracle or do you always look for there to be some kind of place where somebody messed up? Are you the kind of person that is critical in your heart? By the way, if and when you do that, you are not playing for team Jesus. Now listen, I am all for protecting sound doctrine. There is no doubt about it. The Bible says that we are to test every spirit. There is no doubt about it. The Bible says that we are to test every spirit. There is no doubt about it. But there's one thing to test the spirit the moment you realize that if this spirit points to the person and work of Jesus, if this spirit aligns with the scriptures, if this spirit makes much of Christ, then you better get on team Jesus, because if not, you're playing for another team and you're playing for the enemy.

Speaker 2: 4:10

Some people say, well, I'm just being the devil's advocate, the devil does not need an advocate, the devil is our enemy and surely the devil does not want Jesus to get the glory that he deserves. So when a thing happens I mean I can't tell you the number of times we will here at our church we will celebrate over a hundred people coming to Christ at a service and I have some skeptics go. How do you really know if that person actually got saved? And I always tell them listen, man, do you want them to be saved? Because it sounds like you're more critical of what Jesus is doing than hopeful for what Jesus can do.

Speaker 2: 4:43

And the last thing in the world we want in our church is some kind of easy believism where people think, well, all I've got to do is this yeah, all you've got to do is surrender your life to the lordship of Jesus Christ. All I've got to do is this yeah, all you got to do is surrender your life to the lordship of Jesus Christ. And so, men, how about, instead of raising up an army of men with critical hearts, we rose up an army of men that were just looking to celebrate the work of God. That maybe we could give some people some grace and some mercy, especially if it's in a different kind of church, or maybe they didn't do it the way you would do it but that we would be so aligned with the spirit of God that, when God moved, we could sense it, we could smell it and, most importantly, we could celebrate it, and we would be the kind of men that would say we never saw anything like this. Let's be those kind of men.

Speaker 1: 5:31

Amen. Thank you for listening to today's episode Before you go. If you want to help equip other men for the fight, share this podcast around and leave us a five-star rating and review. Stay sharp.