What You Know Will Change You - Part 2

Today on Bold Steps Weekend, Pastor Mark helps you understand God's transformative power. People are often in search of three things; riches, power and hope. As Mark moves forward in this series called When You Believe, Everything Changes, he is going to show you how you can find these three things.

Become a Bold Partner Today: https://www.moodyradio.org/donateto/boldsteps-weekend

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

S1 (00:00):
Today on Bold Steps weekend. Mark Jobe helps us understand
God's transformative power.

S2 (00:06):
So don't tell me you can't quit a habit. Don't
tell me you can't have victory over this. Don't tell
me you can't forgive. Because the same power that rose
Jesus from the dead is there to give you power
to do whatever God has called you to do. It's
already there. The power of God.

S1 (00:35):
Welcome to Bold Steps Weekend with Mark Jobe. Mark is
president of Moody Bible Institute and the senior pastor of
New Life Community Church in Chicago. I'm Wayne Shepherd. People
are often in search of three things riches, power, and hope.
And today, as we move forward in our series, when
you Believe everything Changes, Mark is going to show us
how we can find those three things and so much more.

(00:58):
We're in the book of Ephesians, chapter one. Our message
is titled what you know will change You.

S2 (01:05):
You can be a believer and have the Holy Spirit
inside of you, and you decide. One day I just
want to walk away from God. I'm so sick and
tired of Christians and all their stuff, trying to live
for God and not being able to do it and
all this. I'm just going to go back to what
I was before. There is something incredibly different than what

(01:29):
you were before. It's the seal and the mark of
the Holy Spirit. Because listen. You cannot check the Holy
Spirit at the door. He's with you. You cannot go
to that seedy corner and make out with that seedy
girl that used to hang out with and say, hey,

(01:50):
Holy Spirit, could you wait outside of the other room
because I'm doing this? No, no, no, the Holy Spirit
is inside of you, and you can do what you
want to do. Play like you want to play. Act
like you want to act, but you will never be
who you used to be because you are sealed with
the Holy Spirit until the day of redemption. And you
can try to be who you were, but you will

(02:10):
never be that again. Let me tell you something. The
Holy Spirit is a party pooper. He'll mess up your
party because inside there will be something that will be
telling you that's not who you are. You're bought. You're different.

(02:32):
You belong to me. That's the old you, not the
new me. That's not who you are. Or you can
try to drown that voice. But there's this nagging voice
within your spirit reminding you that is not who you are.
That is not your destiny. That's not who I called
you to be. That's not who I created. You are different.

(02:53):
You have a new name. You have a new destiny.
You have a new future. You have a new identity.
Now live in it. Walk in it. Be what I've
called you to be. To the praise of the glory
of God. So then Paul says, for this reason. For

(03:18):
what reason? Because you're chosen and predestined. Because you're sealed,
and because it is a deposit within your spirit. For
this reason, ever since I heard about your faith in
the Lord Jesus and your love for all the saints,
I haven't stopped giving thanks for you. Now let me

(03:39):
clarify two things one. When you have faith in the
Lord Jesus, you're going to love the saints. You say, well, pastor,
I thought you didn't pray to saints. No, no, I'm
not talking about those saints. You're not talking about Saint
Jude and Saint Paul and Saint Peter. And I'm not
talking about those saints. You know who are the saints?

(04:02):
We talked about it last week. You're the saint. Anybody
that's been washed and cleansed in the deposit of the
Holy Spirit. Inside of them. We are the saints of God.
We are the saints. He's writing to the saints. The
beginning of the of Ephesians. He says to the saints
in Ephesus, to all the believers in Ephesus. We, friends,

(04:26):
are the saints. Saints means to be set apart unto
God called out ones. We are the called out ones.
We are the people of God. When you have faith
in God, you will love the people of God. You
cannot have faith in God and hate the things that
God loves. Once in a while I'll run into someone
that says, well, I love God and me and me

(04:48):
and the man upstairs. We got a thing going on.
But you know what? I don't like church. And I
don't like organized religion. I always tell them, hey, don't worry,
join us. We're disorganized religion. You may like us. But.
But here's the point. You cannot love God and worship
God and hate the church because God has put you

(05:09):
in the. It's the family of God. It's the people
of God. Oh, you can be aggravated with them. You
can be irritated with them, but you cannot hate what
God loves. You will be a part of the church.
You will be integrated in it. You will grow in it. Why?
Because as you have faith in God, you will also
love the people of God, or the family of God,

(05:31):
or the church of the Living God. And then he
goes on and he says, listen, I haven't stopped giving
thanks for you. I mean, every time I think about you,
I give thanks for you remembering you in my prayers.
I love that Paul has a heart of a of
a pastor, of a shepherd. I think the way it
should be. I've been the pastor here for a long time.

(05:56):
I love pastoring this church. Oh, sometimes it aggravates me. Oh,
sometimes you frustrate me. Oh, sometimes I'm like. But you
know what? To be honest with you. When I think
of this church, when I think of Chicago, when I
think of what God has called us to do more
than anything, what comes to my mind is gratitude. I say,

(06:19):
thank you, God, because my joy is to see you grow.
And so Paul says, listen, because God has done all
this for you. This is what I want to remind
you of, and I keep praying for you. Paul says,
every time I think of you, I thank God for you.
But I pray this for you because I don't want
you to get stagnant. I don't want you to stop growing.

(06:39):
Here's what I pray. Verse 17 I keep asking that
the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the glorious father,
may give you the spirit of wisdom and revelation. Why?
One version says in the knowledge of him, and Ivy

(07:01):
says so that you may know him better. The spirit
of wisdom and revelation. Wisdom is applied knowledge. Revelation is
the unveiling of things that you did not know before.
I pray that God gives you the spirit of wisdom
so that you can apply the knowledge that you know
so that you can navigate the things of God, but

(07:23):
also of revelation, because there are things right now that
you do not know, that when God reveals them to
you will change your life. Revelation. And I'm not talking
simply about a new truth that you write in a notebook,

(07:44):
but sometimes that revelation has to be spiritual revelation, that
that your eyes have to be open spiritually to see it,
that you never saw it before. And suddenly the revelation
of God comes forth and you realize something that you
never knew before that literally changes the course and destiny
of your life. Spiritual revelation. But listen, that spiritual revelation

(08:10):
can come to you and maybe you cannot receive it.
So Paul prays. The second thing he says in verse 18,
I pray also that the eyes of your heart may
be enlightened in order that you may know. Sometimes God
can be giving wisdom and revelation, but if our heart
is hardened and darkened, then we will not receive what

(08:31):
God has given to us. Hello. Did you realize that
your heart has eyes? It says that the eyes of
your heart will be enlightened. Do you know you can
be in the same service? And the Word of God
comes and someone else? Someone walks out of this place thinking, whoa,
I got so much. God spoke to me so much.

(08:53):
And you're like. Really? I felt like the seats were
a little too hard. A little warm in there. Was
it me or did he go long? Man, am I hungry.
Where's Giordano's again? I mean, were you in the same service?

(09:20):
Absolutely same service. The problem is that although wisdom and
revelation was going out, one person's eyes or their heart
were open and receptive and hungry, and the other had
was not. And so you get what you're willing to receive.

(09:40):
You receive what you're willing to get and what expectation
you come with. And when your heart is soft and
sensitive to God, there is wisdom and revelation that will
come your way more than you can handle. But when
you harden your heart, then you receive less and less
wisdom and revelation, less and less truth that can change
your life. And after a while it's just the humdrum

(10:02):
of some talking head that doesn't make very much sense
to you as your mind wanders in some other direction.
That's an issue of the heart. So Paul prays, hey,
I want you to grow in wisdom and revelation. And
so he prays for three things in their life. I

(10:26):
pray that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened
in order that you may a no hope, no riches,
and no power. Three things. I pray that you know
the hope to which he has called you. Oh, if
you if you're spirit could understand the hope that's in

(10:51):
your calling. What is hope? Hope is the expectation of
a better future. Hope is the knowledge that there is
good coming to you from the future. The only way
we can have hope is if we trust in the
God who holds the future, whose sovereign and omnipotent. And

(11:13):
because we know that he works all things together for
his good purposes, we have hope. And because we know
that he has written the final chapter of the story.
We have hope. And because we know that what he started,
he is faithful to continue. We have hope. We are
a people of hope. Listen, one of the things that

(11:37):
characterizes us is this sense of positive expectation about the future. Why?
Not because we're engaged in some mindless, just positive thinking.
But our positive thinking is rooted in the positive character
of the God that we serve. So therefore, we have hope.
Hope that God is in control. Hope that God is

(12:00):
doing a work, hope that he has begun what he's
going to finish, and that we have. We haven't seen
the best days yet because God is taking us from
glory to glory, to glory, to glory, to glory, to glory.
That's our hope.

S1 (12:21):
Learning to be sensitive to the things of God. You're
listening to the Bible teaching of Mark job, and this
is Bold Steps weekend. We'll take a deeper look at
the hope and power we have in Christ when we
return to today's message. In just a moment. First, let
me direct you to our website where you'll find more
tools and faith building resources at Bold Steps. Org. In fact,

(12:41):
one of our most popular resources, Mark, is the weekly
email devotional called The Bold Stepper Weekly.

S3 (12:47):
Yeah, so a growing number of people are subscribing and
this is our way of staying in touch with you.
In this week's Bold Stepper Weekly, I talk a little
bit of my time in Spain. You know, my mother
recently has visited us and she's been a missionary for
over 60 years.

S1 (13:05):
Must have been so special to have her visit back here, huh?

S3 (13:07):
It was. And she was able to meet her great
grandson for the first time. Wow. And actually came to
Moody Chapel and received a standing ovation from the students.
She's 86 years old.

S1 (13:20):
That's great. I love it.

S3 (13:22):
So you hear some updates like that along with some
just devotionals from the Word of God. Our goal is
just to inspire you, keep you going, and remind you
at the beginning of your week that God is sovereign
and in control.

S1 (13:34):
See what you're missing. If you haven't signed up for
The Bold Stepper Weekly, do that today at Bold Steps
Radio.com and to sample it, of course, you can read
it on our website Bold Steps Radio.com. But we'd love
for you to subscribe and receive it automatically each Monday morning.
Now back to our message today with Mark Jobe called
what You know Will Change You.

S2 (14:02):
There's something very devastating. When people lose hope, you lose hope.
You fall into depression. You lose hope. You no longer
look for solutions. You lose hope. You become cynical. You
lose hope. You lose energy. You lose hope. You just

(14:23):
hang on. There is no sense of a future. When
people lose hope. Secondly, not only that, you may know
the hope of your calling, but that you may know
the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints, that
you may know the riches of the glorious inheritance in

(14:49):
the saints. Oh, that you may know what God has
in store for you, what is coming your way. All
the riches that God possesses and wants to grant you,
because they're his first of all, and he can give
it to whomever he well pleases to give it. If

(15:11):
you knew the riches that God has, if you knew
the the wealth of his mercy and grace and goodness,
if you knew the resources that God has and his
willingness to give him to you, and what is coming
your way, what is your inheritance? If you knew that,
it would change the way you live? If you understood it,

(15:33):
the depth of it, the power of it, the greatness
of it. If we don't understand eternity. And we don't
understand what's waiting for us on the other side of
this life, then we will live a life in which
we seek to be fully fulfilled just here on earth.

(15:56):
And we become consumers, not God followers. Listen, if your desire,
if you think that all of your payment, all of
your fulfillment will come just in the 60 years that
you live, or 70 years that you live, then you
live for yourself. But if you understand that life is more.

(16:16):
If you understand what the Bible teaches, the Bible teaches
that everyone, everyone will live eternally. Your body will die,
but your spirit and your soul continues into the next round.
Some will live eternally, some will die eternally according to Scripture.
Those that have put their trust in Jesus and are

(16:39):
following him and are walking in him. There's this incredible
wealth that God that that is coming our way. And
we need to understand that we live our life has
eternal consequences, that it's not all over when our obituary
is read, but that the beginning of our eternity has
just begun. Amen. Need to understand that it's huge. The

(17:04):
older I get, the more I think about it. And lastly,
so our call is about the hope of our call
is about our past. The riches of our glorious inheritance
is about our future. This is about the present. And
he says in verse 19, and his incomparably great power

(17:25):
for us who believe. The word power there is the
word dunamis, which is where we get the word dynamite from,
and the incredible dynamite power at work within us who believe.
What is this power? Oh, this is power that you
already have. A power that is latent within you because

(17:47):
the Holy Spirit lives inside of you, and this power
is already in your being. You possess it already. Once
in a while, you run into someone that just feels
like they have no power. Living defeated. It's kind of
like going in the house of someone, and their lamps
and lights are unplugged. And you walk in the house

(18:10):
and you say, and they walk in the house and
they say, I have no lights. And they change the
light bulb and they rattle the lamp, and then they
pull out their candles, and they start lighting candles and
putting candles all over the house, and they're kind of
dark and, and someone walks in and they say, what's wrong?
And they say, I have no power. Oh, there's no power. No,

(18:36):
I have to live by candles and just kind of
try to survive on candlelight. And your neighbor walks in
and says, well, why don't you plug the lamp in,
plug the lamp in, the light turns on. A lot
of us Christians are living in candlelight when we have power.

(18:57):
It's not that we have no power, It's that we
haven't plugged into the power that we have. The power
is there. The power is available. The power is at
our disposal, but the power has to be plugged into
in order to access it. It's the same with the
power of the Holy Spirit inside of us. The power. Listen.

(19:18):
What kind of power is it? Listen. It's the power.
Verse 20, which God exerted when he raised Christ from
the dead and seated him at the right hand of
the heavenly realm. Far above all rule and authority, power
and dominion, and every title that can be given not
only in this present age, but also in the one

(19:39):
to come. And God placed all things under his feet,
and appointed him to be head over everything for the church,
which is his body, the fullness of him who fills
everything in every way. That same power is yours. The
power that raised Jesus from the dead is inside of you.
The power that raised Jesus to the right hand of

(20:01):
the father is in you. The Bible says that you
are seated with Christ in heavenly places. The power that
has dominion and authority over the demonic and sickness and disease.
That same power is available in your life as well.
That same power that exercises authority, that is your power.

(20:21):
Not an outside power, not a distant power, but a
power that lives within you. It's the power of the
Holy Spirit. It's already there. You say, well, pastor, pray
for me. This is really hard to get up on
Sunday morning. I mean, I just barely make it to

(20:43):
the 12:00 service. Are you kidding me? You have the
power that raised Jesus from the dead, and you can't
get out of bed. Seriously? And we have a serious
disconnect in accessing that power. Because it should be more

(21:06):
than just getting out of bed. Hello.

S1 (21:14):
A reminder about the power of God that is living
inside us through the Holy Spirit. This is the Bible
teaching program of Bold Steps Weekend with Mark Jobe. And
thank you so much for joining us today. This program
is not possible without your faithful support. And when you
give a gift of any amount to Bold Steps weekend,
you'll receive a copy of this month's Bold Step gift.
It's a book called Envy by Pastor Mike Fabares, who

(21:37):
joins us now. Mark.

S3 (21:38):
Well, you know, there's some sins that are easy to
spot in our lives, but others, they're like hidden snipers
taking shots at our spiritual health, and we don't even
notice it. Right?

S1 (21:49):
That's right.

S3 (21:50):
Yeah. And pastor Mike Fabares, your book.

S2 (21:54):
Envy, tackles one of these stealth sins. You call it
actually a diabolical sin that's at the root of many
of our problems. Tell me, pastor Mike, why this is
so dangerous?

S4 (22:08):
Well, it's dangerous because it can do a lot of damage.
If you think about the church, I'm not the first
in church history to call it a diabolical sin. It
has been a foundational sin, a cardinal sin, a, you know,
a root of all kinds of other sins. And yet
in our generation, I just I had never read a

(22:28):
book on it. I had never heard a sermon on it.
And I realized as I went through my ministry, I
see this problem springing up with a ton of different symptoms.
But the core problem is that we are envious of
other people's success.

S5 (22:43):
The subtitle of the book is A Big Problem You
Didn't Know You had. And I was thinking about that.
Most people that I talked to, I don't know if
I've ever heard of someone say, you know, my problem
is I'm envious. No one ever says that. That I
I remember. Like, my problem is I have envy. Tell
us why it's hard to self-diagnose.

S4 (23:05):
Well, because I think we often justify the fact that,
you know, I'm just trying to move forward in life.
And I'd sure like to have what he has. Or
some gal saying, I'd like to look like she looks,
or I'd like to have the influence that he has.
And we think, okay, well, that's just part of our
ambitious desire to do well in life. And we don't
realize that it's starting to color the way we make decisions,

(23:29):
how we view other people, how we talk about other
people behind their backs. And it really starts to just
disrupt our relationships. It can ruin a small group and
it can split churches. It is really an explosive sin,
and we don't often identify it like we ought to.

S1 (23:45):
Mike, you know, when you read scripture with this in mind,
suddenly it pops up everywhere, doesn't it?

S4 (23:50):
Yeah. It does. Yeah. From the very beginning in Genesis,
we don't get out of the first family until we
see Cain rising up to kill Abel because he was
envious of him all the way to the New Testament Gospels.
It's interesting that Pilate immediately looks at this scene of
the Sanhedrin and the Pharisees delivering Jesus over to be crucified,
and he diagnoses the problem and he says, you guys

(24:11):
are envious of this man. It really is true that
it's everywhere, and it is the fountainhead of all kinds
of problems in our lives.

S1 (24:19):
Well, let's talk more about that in the days to come.
As we continue to talk with pastor Mike Fabares about
his book, envy a Big problem you didn't know you
had or a bold step gift. Mike, thank you so much,
and we'll be happy to send you a copy of
this book. Just send us your financial gift and request
envy by Mike Fabares. You can do that through the
mail when you write to us at Bold steps. 820

(24:39):
North LaSalle Boulevard, Chicago, Illinois 606 ten. But if it's
even more convenient, you can give and request the book
by calling 800 D.L. Moody. Again, that's [phone] or donate
online and request the book at bold steps. Slash give.

(25:00):
When you commit to giving a monthly gift of any amount,
we'll add your name to our growing list of bold partners.
When you do, we'll send some special bonuses like a
signed copy of Mark's book, unstuck. There's access to our
Bold Partner post and a series of video messages from
Mark designed to equip and encourage you each month. It's
easy to become a bold partner, and if your gift

(25:21):
is $30 or more each month, you'll also receive a 50%
discount off any item in the Moody Publishers online store.
So sign up today online at Bold Steps. Well, today's
message was a great reminder the hope, riches and power
we have through Christ. And next weekend we'll continue this
study from the book of Ephesians with a message called

(25:42):
Made Alive. So be sure to join us then. That's
all for today here on Bold Steps Weekend with Mark Jones.
Bold steps is a production of Moody Radio, a ministry
of Moody Bible Institute.