Many years ago, when I was still active in the churches, I found a way to get fellow churchgoers to think about forsaking all and living by faith. It was done more or less like parlor magic, where I would just say, anyone want to see a trick? It was especially good at socials or picnics, where discussion was informal, and where announcing that I was going to conduct a Bible study would have been too confrontational. This was usually in churches, where I was already being watched as suspiciously different. A friend who later joined our community asked me, soon after he moved in, can you teach me how to do that trick? I'm going to do that for you now in this video. But first, I will describe the trick in general terms. See, I would get people to pick a chapter from the Bible, any chapter, much like magicians do with cards. And then, I would show them how the chapter which they picked preaches forsaking all and or living by faith in obedience to Jesus. My friend had watched me do this many times, and I don't think the trick ever failed. So, how did I do it? There were some classic magician deceptions, which I'll admit to now. But more than anything, it was based on just the opposite, which was a transparent and sincere desire to understand exactly what the Bible is saying. Nevertheless, there were some tricks. The first deception is what a magician calls a force. I knew some of the chapters of the Bible were simply not going to work, either because they were written before Jesus was born, or because they did not contain teachings, like the last few chapters of each of the Gospels. They just tell about the death, burial, and resurrection of Christ. So I would simply leave those out. My first question was, pick between Gospels and Epistles. That eliminated the Old Testament altogether. Then, if they picked a gospel, I would specify the chapters. For example, if someone picked Matthew, I would just say, Now pick a number between 4 and 25 That eliminated all the chapters that had little or no teaching in them Another ploy which magicians use is that they do not tell the audience ahead of time what they are going to do That way, the audience does not know what to look for in spotting a flaw, and the magician is free to change his plan if circumstances change. As it happened, I was always able to preach forsaking all and or living by faith from any chapter of the epistles or from any of the teaching chapters in the gospels. That part was not a trick. I had not researched every chapter in the New Testament to be sure I could do this. If a chapter was selected that I had never researched before, I would just pray that God would help me to see exactly what it was saying and share that. You see, I had not promised that I would preach forsaking all, even though most of the people taking part in this little game knew that I was fanatical about forsaking all and living by faith. At worst, we would have a Bible study about something less sensational, and that would be the end of it. Okay, so that is the magician's side of the trick. I didn't tell them ahead of time what I was going to do, and I left out the Old Testament and some non-teaching chapters from each of the four Gospels. But let's focus on how this was not a trick. even though people were amazed at what came out of the chapter that they selected. How did I do that? Some chapters, of course, had powerful verses that came straight out and said things like, You can't work for God and money at the same time. You need to sell everything you own to be a Christian. Everyone in the world worries about food and clothing, while citizens in the kingdom of heaven let their king take care of those needs. The kingdom of heaven is like a merchant man who sells everything he owns in order to get something that is so valuable. My Bible was color-coded, and I used the color yellow to mark verses that related to our attitude toward money. Because of that, I could often just turn to the chapter they had selected and go straight to a verse or two from that chapter and start preaching living by faith in God, rather than living by faith in money. That was obviously impressive for most people, who had been told all their lives that the only time the subject of giving up everything for God ever came up was in a badly misunderstood exchange between Jesus and a rich young ruler These same people thought that I was the one who needed to twist verses to make them support this most frequent of all Jesus teachings But what about the chapters that were not so blatant? How could I make them support forsaking all and living by faith? If you were to go through the New Testament and circle the words faith, believe, and obey, plus all variations of those words each time that they occurred, you would see just how much of the New Testament is built firmly on the assumption that the readers have heard what it is that Jesus actually did teach. It may not be spelled out right there in the same chapter, but the obvious truism is that you cannot believe Jesus without first listening to what he has told you to do. So when a chapter included those words, faith, believe, or obey, I would challenge my audience to tell me half a dozen things that Jesus told his followers to do. They would be stumped. Why? Because they had never been taught to obey anything that Jesus said. In one way or another, what Jesus said was always skipped over. To them, faith in Jesus never really means faith in Jesus. No. It means faith in your pastor, or faith in your denomination. So that left me free to point out that virtually the first thing anyone had to do if they wanted to become a disciple of Jesus was to leave their home, their family, their job, and start traveling around with Him, learning from Him, and even doing a bit of preaching themselves. On this channel, I have done this with many of the favorite so-called proof texts for do-nothing faith. I have a video on Ephesians 2 verses 8 and 9, which teaches living by faith. I have a video on the 10th chapter of Romans, teaching obedience to Jesus. And I have a video on two of the parables of Jesus that teach forsaking all. I even have a video on John 3 16 which teaches living by faith. There are links to some of these videos in the description below. I do much the same with the book of Acts the Gospel of Mark and with John 14 verse 6 the verse about Jesus being the way the truth and the life So every time faith believe or obey came up we would talk about whether we are really going to listen to Jesus, whether we are really going to let him make the rules, or whether we are going to replace it with religious double talk using smoke and mirrors. You see, the real deception goes on in churches all over the world, week after week, where you are literally paying to be entertained with smoke and mirrors, sleight of hand and religious double-talk, which has the overall effect of blinding you to everything that Jesus said. My little bit of deception took the form of tricking do-nothing Christians into opening their Bibles and listening to what is really being said there, especially through Jesus in the four Gospels, but in the epistles as well. People everywhere have been conned into not listening, not listening to Jesus, but also not listening to Paul, and Peter, and James, and John. They think they are listening, but they are not. Whereas I see the teachings of Jesus everywhere I look in the New Testament, all they see is go to church, pay your tithes, get water baptized, recite the various creeds, and be respectable. Lukewarm counterfeits, all of it. Lying signs and wonders, evil magic and trickery from start to finish. So there you have it. Go ahead, pick a chapter, any chapter, and then do something you may not have done for a very long time. Listen! Get the sincere milk of the Word, suck out the marrow from what you read, and start putting it into practice in your own life today. If you'd like to be put in touch with others who have done the same thing, please write to me, sharing something about your own faith and letting me know what country you live in. And if you'd like to hear more about what Jesus actually taught, please click on any of the links in the description below, or click on the link on the screen right now, which will take you to a video called, The Elephant in the Bible. Thank you for listening. God bless you.
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