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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, we've made it to the end of the week. I appreciate y'all being here. This week we have been using John Eldridge's book Beautiful Outlaw to help us get to know the personality of Jesus better. And before preparing the episodes, I asked John which chapters of the book really encapsulate what he was going for. That's chapters 2, 3, 4, 5, and 7. And we discussed that in order to truly understand Jesus, we have to realize that and internalize that he was indeed fully God and fully man. And as a man he had to have a real life personality. And we also can't get caught reading the Bible as if Jesus was some sort of, you know, deistic, floating automaton or something like that. Within his personality it is a virtual certainty that Jesus was playful and also fiercely intent, as we've covered this week and today we're going to be looking at chapter seven of the book, honesty. And I'll just tell you, a lot of us we really don't like this. We don't really like disruptive honesty. We like honesty whenever it's, you know, pointed at other people, but we don't really like when brutal honesty is pointed towards us. You know, we really like it the other way around, because we don't want it to make us uncomfortable, but we're okay with it making other people uncomfortable.

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Right and Eldridge begins this chapter by reminding us of an interaction between Jesus and a Pharisee. That we see recorded in Luke 11, verses 37 through 39. So I'll read that here. When Jesus was speaking, a Pharisee asked him to dine with him. So he went in and reclined at a table. The Pharisee was astonished to see that he did not first wash before dinner. And the Lord said to him now you, pharisees, cleanse the outside of the cup and of the dish, but inside you are full of greed and wickedness. And so for a lot of us we'll read you know a line like that. We'll be like, yeah, you tell him Jesus, go get them. But again, as I said earlier, we don't really like it when the brutal honesty is coming our direction. So let's go back to beautiful outlaw here. We love it when he goes gunning for the Pharisees.

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Hypocrites. You travel over land and sea to win a single convert, and when he becomes one, you make him twice as much a son of hell as you are. That's Matthew 23, 15. Holy cow, did you know Jesus uses expressions like son of hell? That gets you kicked out of most churches. But if it weren't for his brutal honesty, we would still be laboring under the weight of all the crushing religious nonsense. If Jesus didn't shoot straight with them, we would be disappointed. It would be hard to respect him. It's when he turns his sights on us that we begin to squirm, and well we should.

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Matthew 7, verses 13 and 14. Enter through the narrow gate, for wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But large is the gate and narrow is the road that leads to life, and only a few find it. Matthew 7, 21-23. Not everyone who says to me, lord, lord, will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only he who does the will of my Father, who is in heaven. Many will say to me on that day Lord, lord, did we not prophesy in your name and in your name, drive out demons and perform many miracles. Then I, and perform many miracles. Then I will tell them plainly I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers. Then, john 14, 6,. I am the way, the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. This is without question the great offense of Jesus Christ, his exclusivity. To make sure we understand this, what he is saying is that he alone is the means to heaven. No one comes to the one true God except through him.

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Offensive as the claim may be, I want to just say that last part again from Eldridge. Either it is arrogant or it is true. And here's the reality. Guys, we have to reckon with the reality of the gospel. Guys, we have to reckon with the reality of the gospel. We have to reckon with our sin debt that we owe to a holy and just God.

Speaker 2: 3:50

Because I've heard every form of this. You know God doesn't exist and all that. It's like okay, well, one day you will be disabused of that notion. But I've also heard from a lot of people like, hey, you know what I believe in God and I've been baptized when I was a kid, so that's good enough, so you can leave all this Jesus stuff out there. But even the demons believe in God, but they tremble right.

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And so the reality is is we have a debt that we owe that we also cannot pay. So God sent his only son here to this planet to die in our place to provide a propitiation of our sin debt, to pay in full the debt that we owe to a holy and just father that pays for our past sins, our current sins and the sins that we haven't even thought up yet. And what we have to do is we have to put our faith in that reality and we have to repent of our sins and turn away from our lives of sin. Guys, if you have not done that up to this point, I compel you to do so, and if you have done that, I compel you to stop sitting on your laurels and tell someone about the good news that you know. Thanks for being here this week.

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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.