Take Your Place - Part 2

Today on Bold Steps Weekend with Mark Jobe, you'll learn how to be victorious in your walk with Christ. The message is called Take Your Place and if you take your Bible in hand, Mark is going to be showing you that When You Believe, Everything Changes from the book of Ephesians.

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Episode Transcript

S1 (00:00):
Today on Bold Steps Weekend with Mark Jobe. We're learning
how to be victorious in our walk with Christ.

S2 (00:06):
What God does is he fills our spiritual tool belt
with the tools that we're going to need to be successful.
God does not call you to be a follower of
his without giving you everything you need to succeed.

S1 (00:33):
Welcome to Bold Steps Weekend with Mark Jobe, president of
Moody Bible Institute and senior pastor of New Life Community
Church in Chicago. I'm Wayne Shepherd. Well, going against the
crowd or the cultural norms of any given society can
be difficult to do. But it's nothing new, as we'll see. Today,
it's something that even the apostles had to deal with
and work through. Our message is called Take Your Place,

(00:56):
and if you have your Bible handy, flip to the
book of Ephesians, because Mark is going to be showing
us that when you believe, everything changes.

S2 (01:05):
Hey, you come to Christ, men. There may need to
be a bonfire while you pull out those Playboy magazines
and other such things and get rid of it. Because
what you start realizing is that this is incompatible with
my new life in Christ. There are certain things that
when Christ comes in, you leave behind that. That's called conversion.

(01:29):
And they had this huge bonfire experience, and God began
to work in such miraculous ways that it was at
this time that the Bible tells us that even the
handkerchief that came from Paul and touched people was healing
people from physical diseases, such as the anointing and the
power of God upon Ephesus at that time. There are

(01:50):
times when God works in some miraculous, powerful way, supernatural
that we cannot explain when God is seeking to do something.
It is also at that time that there was a
major riot, because anytime the church progresses, there will always
be opposition. Count on it. When God begins to do something,

(02:13):
there will always be opposition to what God is seeking
to do. This time, the opposition came via the unions
of the city of Ephesus. Making idols and pagan gods
was a big business. In the days of Ephesus, there

(02:35):
were hundreds of gods that existed. There was the god
of fertility, and there was the god of vengeance. There
was the god of the shoemakers and the god of
the sailors. There was the god of the farmers, and
the god of the are a multitude of things of gods.
And every person. If you went into their house in

(02:56):
those days in Ephesus, everybody would have their little statues,
the gods that they would pray to, and they were
sort of their sponsoring gods, so to speak. And if
you walk down the streets of Ephesus, there were statues
of different gods that would line the streets of Ephesus.
And and the tradesmen made much of their money by

(03:18):
building these statues out of wood and and out of
rock and out of iron. And they would build these statues,
and it was a big money business, and people would
buy their statues and dedicate their statues. When people started
coming to Christ, the union trades workers began to realize

(03:39):
Christianity has no God statues. They have an invisible God
that they worship, an invisible God that they worship, that
claims that he rules heaven and earth. And they began
to realize that if Christianity spreads, we will lose our business.

(04:01):
No one will buy statues anymore. We'll lose tens of
thousands of dollars and go out of business. So they
organized a riot. How many of you know that? Sometimes
the opposition of Christianity is not just on religious views.
Sometimes it can be political, racist and economic. Hello. Don't

(04:28):
be naive into thinking that opposition will just come out
of spiritual opposition. When we went to buy this church
building here that you're in right now, this was a factory,
84,000 square foot factory. And we decided that we were

(04:50):
going to buy this building and convert this building into
a church ministry center, and we're super excited about it.
We were challenged by raising the money for this because
it's a lot of money. It was $2 million to
buy this building. 2 million? Thank you. Jesus. There's a

(05:15):
lot of money. That's a whole nother story. How God
provided that and how people sacrificed. But when we went
to get this building, uh, the building in Chicago, you
have to zone a building for something. This building was
zoned for manufacturing. For what? Factories are zoned for. And

(05:37):
we need to rezone it for a church use. And
in order to zone it for a church use, you
have to get approval downtown at City Hall. And in
order to get approval downtown at City Hall, you have
to go through the alderman's office here. And in this case,
to go through the alderman's office here. He had a
zoning board that we had to come before, and the

(05:58):
zoning board had to approve it in order to change
the status so that we could get a church here.
And I thought, no problem, no big deal. They're going
to love us because we do a lot of good
for the community. We'll help out, we'll bless, we'll open
up the doors, and we will do anything that we

(06:19):
can to help the community. And when we went down
to try to get the zoning, most of the people
on the zoning board were favorable. Happy for us. But
there was a few people that were belligerently opposed to
us starting a church here. Aggressively opposed, like door to door.

(06:43):
Say no. Oppose it. Get against it. And I didn't
understand why they said it would be parking congestion. And
they said it would be hard. But when it all
came down to it, what I heard behind the doors
is there was two issues with us having a church here. Year.
Number one. Number one. There were too many Hispanics. Straight out.

(07:13):
Blatant bigotry. Sometimes that's how the devil opposes things. It's
not always theological. Sometimes it's blatant prejudice and bigotry. And
number two, it was religious. We were an evangelical church.

(07:40):
And there was opposition behind thank God. Praise God that
God is the opener of the doors. And God can
go before us, and God can open and God can
close doors. God fights our battles. God rises up. God
does things when things are opposed. But but it doesn't
mean we didn't work on it. And so I want
you to understand that that sometimes opposition will arise on

(08:01):
a lot of different ways to the progress and spread
of the gospel. It doesn't always come just out of
theological persecution. It can rise up out of economic and
racial bigotry that that that rises up to try to
put the stop to the gospel of Jesus Christ. Well,
in this case, it was economic. Christianity did not make

(08:26):
statues and the early Christians did not have other gods.
I oftentimes run into people that walk into this auditorium
coming from different backgrounds, and they look around at this
bland auditorium. And they think to themselves, this must be

(08:47):
a poor church. They can't even afford statues. I mean,
where are the images of statues of Jesus and Mary
and the Saints. And. Poor, poor church. Well, let me

(09:10):
just say this. That there's a reason that we don't
have statues. And I know some of you grew up
in traditions where you would walk into a church and
there would be many images, um, of different saints and
images of Christ and Mary and many other religious images.
But I want you to understand that we deliberately have

(09:32):
no Jesus on a cross here. We deliberately have no
statues of Saint Paul or Jude or Peter or the
Virgin Mary. We deliberately have no statues. Why? We have
no statues. Because one of the Ten Commandments is. Thou
shalt have no graven images before me. One of the

(09:57):
Ten Commandments is that we will make no graven images
that we worship and pray to. And I've been around
way too many places where people would go up to
an image of stone and touch it and pray to it.
And even though they know it's not Jesus, you look
to an image of Jesus and you begin to think
that it's sacred. And I've been to too many places

(10:20):
where people are making pilgrimages to touch a statue, be
blessed by a statue, pray to a statue. The Bible
calls that idolatry. And the very thing that you think
is going to help you pray is actually angers the
heart of God. Therefore, we have no statues in this place.

(10:45):
When you worship Jesus, I want you to envision and
pray to a Jesus that's risen, alive, reigns on high
over the earth. A living Jesus, not a Jesus on
a cross. When you approach Jesus, I don't want you
to approach a statue and touch a statue and ask
for blessing from a statue. I want you to go

(11:07):
in prayer and look to the heavens and say, Jesus,
you are alive in spirit and in truth, and I
come to you as a living being, asking you to
touch me, bless me, answer my prayers. That's the living
Jesus that we follow and worship. And you say, pastor, well,

(11:28):
what about the images that I have in my home?
I don't want to be harsh or critical of anybody
if you have images or statues in your home, but
if it were me, I would get rid of them.
There's too much danger in making these images something sacred,
something holy and beginning to put your confidence in something.

(11:53):
An image made in the image of God rather than
in God Himself. There is no nothing made out of wood, stone,
marble that can help you. It's the spirit of the
living God that has power to help you. It's he
that saves you. And we must be very careful not
to fall into idolatry. This huge riot that broke out

(12:20):
in Ephesus broke out because they were afraid that Christianity
was building no statues anymore. I've been in the amphitheater
in Ephesus. That amphitheater, said to be 490ft in diameter,

(12:42):
63 rows of seats that provide seating for an audience
of close to 24,000 people. 24,000. How many does the
United Center seat? 20 Has the capacity to seat as
many people or more than the United Center, in my estimation.

(13:07):
I've been in that theater. I was there in Turkey,
and I knelt on the stage of that platform, and
I envisioned a crowd of 20,000 people. That was anti
Paul and the church. And I remember kneeling there and
I prayed, Oh God, give me the boldness that Paul
had to be able to stand up in front of

(13:29):
a crowd, of be willing to stand up in front
of a crowd of 20,000 angry mob that would have
killed him. Yet he was so desirous to preach the
gospel that they had to hold them back for him
not to go in there and preach the gospel of Jesus. God,
give us that boldness.

S3 (13:54):
You're listening to.

S1 (13:54):
Bold Steps Weekend with Mark Jobe, who will continue his
lesson in just a moment. If you haven't been to
our website yet, we really encourage you to visit and
see all the faith building resources, opportunities, and sermon series
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sure to catch up on any message you might have
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(14:17):
subscribing to the Bold Steps Weekend Podcast. Open up your
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You can send a message online to us at Bold Steps.
Org or even give us a call and leave your

(14:39):
message on a recorded line by dialing 3123292011312329. 2011 now
back into God's Word. Here once again is Mark Jobe.

S2 (14:58):
Four years later, Paul was in prison in Rome, and
it was from that prison in Rome that Paul wrote
to the church that he loved. He wrote a letter
to the Ephesians, Ephesians chapter one, verse one. It says. Paul,

(15:21):
the apostle of Jesus Christ, by the will of God
to the saints in Ephesus, the faithful in Christ Jesus.
Now let me ask you a question. When he says,
I'm writing to the saints in Ephesus, to whom is
he referring? Who? Christians. Now, I'm going to shock some

(15:46):
of you with this, because some of you, when you
think of a saint, you think of someone that lived
a very, very good life, did a lot of very,
very good things, died, did a couple of miracles. And
then years after they died, the church votes on it
and decides to make them a saint. And then we

(16:07):
see pictures of them with a halo. And we believe
that they are the saints. But I'm going to destroy
your image of that when he says, like in the
book of Romans, it says to the saints and the
book of First Corinthians it says to the saints, when
he says to the saints in Ephesus, he's talking. He's

(16:29):
talking to everyone that's a believer and follower of Jesus
Christ in the Bible is considered a saint. Well, I
know that shocks some of you. But if you are
a believer in Jesus Christ, washed by the blood of
Jesus with the Holy Spirit inside of you, you are

(16:49):
a legitimate saint before the eyes of God. So just
to break down that mentality a little bit, let's just
practice for a moment. Say, Saint. And now put your
name behind the word saint. Go ahead. Saint. For some

(17:10):
of you, it's really like. Whoa, this is hard to do,
Saint Mark. I like the sound of that. And from
a biblical perspective, that's the way God sees you. You
are considered a saint. Not because what you have done
or not done, but because of what Christ has done

(17:31):
for you and in you. The word saint comes from
the word holy. The word holy means set apart unto something.
So any person that has been set apart unto God
for the work of God is considered a saint in
the Bible. So when the Apostle Paul says to the
saints that are in Ephesus, he's saying to the church
that is in Ephesus, the called out believers, the ones

(17:55):
that know Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior To the
to the saints in Ephesus, the faithful in Christ Jesus.
Grace and peace to you from God our father and
our Lord Jesus Christ. And now Paul begins to explain.
And for the first verses that you see in verse

(18:16):
three through verse 13, he begins to talk to them
about what they have and who they are in God.
Or another way of saying it is what they have
in their spiritual tool belt. Oftentimes what God does is

(18:38):
he fills our spiritual tool belt with the tools that
we're going to need to be successful. God does not
call you to be a follower of his without giving
you everything you need to succeed. God knows that in
the future you may encounter a wall that needs nails
in it, so he gives you a hammer. God realizes

(19:02):
that in the future you may encounter something difficult to
take out. So he gives you pliers. God fills your
tool belt, your spiritual tool belt, in order for you
to succeed in life and in Christ. And he has
filled your spiritual tool belts with all the tools that
you need to live victorious in Christ Jesus, all the

(19:24):
way victorious. And so in Ephesians, what he starts telling
us is he starts telling us what is in our
spiritual tool belt. And I'm going to show you for
a second what he's placed in your spiritual toolbox. If
you're taking notes this morning, write it down. Number one,
you are blessed. So one of the things that's in

(19:45):
your tool belt is your position in Christ. Notice what
it says in verse three. Praise be to God and
the father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed
us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ.
Praise be to God in our father, our Lord Jesus Christ,

(20:07):
who has blessed us in spiritual realms. With what? With
every spiritual blessing. Not just some. Every spiritual blessing. And
so you and I live constantly in two worlds. We
live in the world of the spirit, and we live
in the world of the body.

S1 (20:37):
This is Bold Steps weekend. You're listening to the Bible
teaching of Mark Jobe. Today's message is titled Take Your Place. Remember,
you can always revisit these daily messages on our website.
Bold steps.org. You can also catch Mark's bold and passionate
teaching on our popular Bold Steps podcast, or by downloading
the free Bold Steps app to your phone or mobile device. Mark,

(20:59):
we have authors with us for a moment here. The
authors of Lies Boys believe Aaron and Jason Davis, the
parents of four boys, and they've written this book. Now,
they say that they wish every boy who reads this
book could come spend a day on their farm. He
could pick an apple from their orchard, scramble up some
eggs straight from the chicken coop. Catch a jar full
of lightning bugs. Uh, Aaron and Jason. Is that offer

(21:21):
open to men as well as boys? I think I'd
like to sign up for that.

S4 (21:26):
Come on, everybody, come.

S1 (21:28):
Aaron, you both have written this wonderful book. What's the
difference between boys and girls when it comes to these
lies that we're talking about?

S4 (21:36):
You know, even that statement shouldn't be. But it is
countercultural that boys and girls are different. Uh, God made
us different. And our boys are growing up in a
culture where that's really, really confusing and we're trying to
erase all of those lines. And so one of the
things we address in the book is that God made
boys and girls different, and that those differences are good. Now,

(21:58):
all of us are prone to deception, unfortunately. We all
are prone to sin and the enemy lies to all
of us. So lies are for all of us. Big
or small, boy or girl. But I think just some
of the ways that God designed boys from the beginning,
that desire to lead, that desire to matter, that desire
to shepherd. Those are all God given desires. But the

(22:19):
enemy slithers in, as he did in the garden, and
he can tend to warp those desires. And so we
tried to help boys think about, yeah, you're different than
your sister. You're different than your mom. And that's good.
We celebrate that. But how do you need to be
on guard as a boy and in the future, as
a man?

S2 (22:37):
Yeah. That's so good, Aaron. You know, I raised two
boys and one daughter, and I didn't have to teach them.
They just naturally gravitated towards just different things. Uh, my
boys always were. They wanted to be the warriors and
sword fighters and my daughters brave. But she wasn't that

(22:58):
attracted to sword fighting that much. He had other interests and.
And it's a beautiful thing that God has created us differently. Jason,
as you raise your boys, as you speak into your
boys lives, uh, especially at this age, and you have teenagers,
but this this book is from 6 to 12. What

(23:18):
what is the truth? That you feel like? This is
the main truth I want to impart to them to
combat these lies.

S5 (23:26):
Well, there are a lot of truths that combat these lies,
but one of the main ones is that we all
often feel like we're isolated and alone, and that we
can't communicate about our struggles, uh, with the people around us,
because they wouldn't understand. But the truth is, we all struggle.

(23:49):
We all have faced sin. We need to live in
community where we can be open and honest about our
struggles so that we can help each other and and
grow in Christ likeness together. And so that isolation that
a lot of times, uh, Satan wants us to live
in and feel like we're the only ones that are

(24:10):
struggling with this, or we're the only ones that are
involved and that nobody would understand where we're coming from.
It's a lie. And we live better, and we live
more complete. When we live in community and we're open
with the people around us.

S1 (24:27):
Well, we are offering this bookmark to our listeners. Lies,
boys believe. I can't think of a better thing to
put in the hands of parents and grandparents can.

S2 (24:34):
You know, this is a great resource tool. Thank you
for writing it. And I think there's a lot of
parents that will be excited about getting this book.

S1 (24:45):
If you would like a copy of Lies Boys Believe,
when you make a donation of any amount to support
bold steps, just call us at 800 Moody. That's [phone]
or give online at bird-stamps.org. You can also send your
gift through the mail by writing to us at 820

(25:06):
North LaSalle Boulevard, Chicago, Illinois 606. Ten. Be sure to
tell us you want a copy of lies, Boys Believe
when you write. By the way, we'd love to hear
from you and get you connected with our growing online
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for Bold Steps Radio and be sure to subscribe or

(25:28):
follow when you get to our page. I'm Wayne Shepard
on behalf of the entire Bold Steps team, thanks for
being with us today. Be sure to join us again
next weekend when Mark concludes this discussion on learning to
take your place. This message comes from our series when
you believe everything changes and we invite you to hear
it next time here on Bold Steps Weekend with Mark Jones.

(25:50):
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