One out of 10 will say, 'Yes'

“I must have gotten six emails today telling me, ‘We don’t have a local church where we are,’ ” says Jordan. “You know what I’d do if I didn’t have a local church? I’d say, ‘You know, I need to get out and start one.’

“You say, ‘Well, Brother Rick, you’re a preacher.’ I’d do it if I was a preacher or not. How do you start one? First thing, get some people saved. If I don’t have somebody to teach, I don’t worry about trying to steal some sheep out of some barn down the road. Why would I want to go around in all that sheep ‘sty’?

“Go out here on the street corner. See some people get saved. In life, share the gospel with them. I learned how to do that. I’d specialize in that. I’d work at it. I had somebody tell me just this past week that they were trying to figure out what to do and they ran an ad in the newspaper. Five people called them from one classified ad in a weekly newspaper in a small community.

“You say, ‘What’d they say?’ It said: ‘Want to have home Bible study? Anybody interested, call me.’ You say, ‘Well, who were they?’ One of them was a JW. But you know what, you’ve got an answer for them.

“The other people were just looking for somebody to study with. You know what they’re doing? Well, they just filled up the couch in their living room. You say, ‘Well, I don’t know how to teach them.’ Well, then get somebody’s DVD or CD and put it on and let them watch it for 30 minutes. Point is, get somebody saved.

*****

“I was in the prison in Avondale, Florida, the other week. There’s a man there that about five years ago wrote me a letter saying, ‘I’m so confused. I don’t know what to do. People tell me you got to do this to get saved. People tell me you got to do that to be saved. Can you help me? Send me something with the truth in it.’

“We say on our radio program, the way we end it is we say, ‘If you don’t know you have eternal life and your sins forgiven, if you write us we’ll send you some literature to show you the way.’ He sent away for the literature.

“I wrote back, ‘You know what you need to do? You need to sit down and about 40 times read through the first five chapters of the Book of Romans. Throw all the rest of that (commentary) stuff out and just read those chapters because they’re written especially for you.’

“Some months later, he wrote me, ‘I just want you to know I read through the chapters 27 times and on the 27^th time I got it!’

“You know why he got it? Well, that’s what they’re for! To get to him! Now he’s teaching the stuff!

“Quit trying to give somebody beefsteak over here when they can’t even drink milk yet! When they get saved, as newborn babes, they’ll desire that sincere milk of the Word and you can begin to teach them.

“ If you quit focusing on all these hard-headed, rebellious, uninterested, so-called Christians, and focus on some people looking for truth . . . you ask 10 people those (salvation) crunch questions, you’ll get somebody who will tell you ‘yes.’ And you’ve got an answer for them!

*****

“II Timothy 2: 15-16 says, 'Study to shew thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth.
[16] But shun profane and vain babblings: for they will increase unto more ungodliness.'

“We usually think of profanity as somebody cussing, right? Notice he’s calling something profanity that has nothing to do with cussing; it has to do with things that go on in Bible teaching. You know there are a lot of people teaching the Bible today who are cursing, cussing, using more profanity than a 40-year sailor out on a toot?!

“You get all bent out of shape about the sins of the flesh and God doesn’t really. He’s not excusing them; He just paid for them. The ones that really get the Lord all stirred up are the sins of the spirit because what have we learned about the sins of the flesh? Where do they come from? They come from inside.

“The sins of the flesh are simply the outward expression of a spiritual lie inside. ‘As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he.’ ‘Out of the abundance of the heart a man speaketh.’ Jesus said ‘out of the heart come the things that defile a man.’

“So God’s focus isn’t on the outward stuff that people are doing first; it’s on where it came from because if you change where it came from, you change what it’s doing.

“You get the idea that if I just lock somebody up in a room somewhere and put them in some handcuffs, I can stop sin. You don’t stop anything; you just change the ability of them to do it but it’s still in their heart!

“That verse (II Tim. 2:16) nails what goes on in religion. Good, godly, fundamental evangelical churches today doing what that verse says. They wouldn’t go down to the tavern on Saturday night and get soused up, but they would go down to the church building on Sunday morning and get soused up.

*****

“Verse 17 says, ‘And their word will eat as doth a canker: of whom is Hymenaeus and Philetus.’ Slowly destroying from within.

“The next verse says, ‘Who concerning the truth have erred, saying that the resurrection is past already; and overthrow the faith of some.’

"If you’re to rightly divide the word and then you err, what did you do? You wrongly divided it. Well, how did they do it? They didn’t say there’s no resurrection. People at Corinth were saying that.

“These guys didn’t deny the resurrection; they just said it was past already. You know what they’re doing? They’re messing up the timeline. When Paul talks about rightly dividing the Word, he’s talking about it in the context of not getting things placed in the proper place on the timeline.

“Well, what is the timeline? That’s what Ephesians 2 is talking about. Time past, but now, ages to come. You see how brilliant that is? Past, present, future. That’s a timeline and that’s all dispensational Bible study is. It’s just taking the timeline God’s Word lays out and then put things in the proper place on that timeline.

“Somebody says, ‘Well, but don’t you know Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today and forever and that He’s always the same and never changes?’ I know that God Himself never changes in His character and in His person, but you need to understand that His dealings with man change because man changes.

“Somebody says, ‘The same sun that melts the ice hardens the clay.’ What’s the difference? It’s not the sun; it’s the difference between ice and clay.

“I Cor. 12: 4-6 says, 4] Now there are diversities of gifts, but the same Spirit.
[5] And there are differences of administrations, but the same Lord.
[6] And there are diversities of operations, but it is the same God which worketh all in all.’

“God would give different gifts to different individuals but it’s one God. Can’t He make up His mind? Shouldn’t everybody get the same one? Why does He do that?

“That word ‘administration’—we talk about the Obama administration, the Bush administration, the Clinton administration. That word is really functionally the same concept as the idea of a dispensation.

“People argue about the political view. People talk about Reaganomics and its transformation. Why? There’s a thinking process that went along in there that identifies a set of instructions we’re going to operate by.

“They talk about ObamaCare. There’s a thinking process. It covers a period and then it’s over with, but the period of time isn’t really the issue. It’s what goes on during it. There’s one Lord but He functions in different administrations through here.

*****

“All of the separation of nations according to languages and borders and families you didn’t have until after the Tower of Babel. That’s when God fixed it so there can’t be a global one-world situation.

“There really have been only two times in the history of the world--that is at least what I’m familiar with--that there’s been a universal language. One was the Greek language when Alexander the Great conquered the world and made Greek the universal language. He worked very diligently at making Greek a language which is said to be very precise.

“The more precise you try to get with language, the more difficult it is and the more confusing it becomes. If you don’t understand that, try to parse the meanings of prepositions like ‘for’ and ‘because’ and that kind of thing, and you say, ‘This can be that way or this way,’ and it's emphasis differences that can be very difficult.

“That’s why Greek has so many different verb tenses and so forth, so you can nail it down. You know, somebody did something in the past. Well, if they did it in the past, is it over with and never to be repeated and something like when George Washington chopped down the cherry tree? That happened in the past but does it affect you today? No, except if you want to read it in somebody’s book.

“But there’s some other things that happened in the past, like when they wrote the Constitution. That happened in the past and its effects continue until today, at least they are supposed to. So you have a different kind of past tense.

“Alexander was very precise in that. Because of the precision of that language, when the Roman Empire came in, their language was basically Latin, but Latin didn’t take over. The Greek language that your New Testament’s written in--Paul and the people there mostly ministered in it--was a universal language they could go most anywhere with.

“You come to the 18^th and 19^th Century before you find that happen again. The British Empire took over the whole planet and spread around the world using English. English became the universal language, and when Britain fell off the scene and America took over, the universal language today in commerce and politics, anywhere you go, is English.

*****

“Matthew 3:11 says, ‘I indeed baptize you with water unto repentance: but he that cometh after me is mightier than I, whose shoes I am not worthy to bear: he shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost, and with fire.’

“I love this verse. There’s three baptisms in one verse and they’re all different. Now how do you take that verse and put Ephesians 4:5 (‘One Lord, one faith, one baptism’) with that one and make them stick when he says there’s one baptism? He’s not saying there’s only one baptism in the Bible because there’s three right there and there’s at least 8-9 more that aren’t in that verse.

“So what’s he talking about when he says there’s only ‘one lord, one faith, one baptism’? Well, he isn’t talking about that there’s only one in the Bible. But see that’s what people do.

“Somebody told me today about people getting mad at him because he said there’s more than one gospel in the Bible. He actually got kicked out of a preaching place.

“You got to be blind in one eye and can’t see out the other to say there’s only one gospel in the Bible! What they meant to say is, ‘There’s only one gospel today.’ That’s true, but if you don’t know how to rightly divide the Bible, and you think all the Bible is ‘today,’ what do you do? Well, you live in confusion and you trouble people.”