Next 3 years decides who you'll be

“We’re living today, 2017, in the most impactful decade of the life of anybody alive,” reminded Pastor Richard Jordan in a Sunday study the other week that happened to coincide with Super Bowl 51 and Lady Gaga’s satanic ritual halftime show in which she’s said to have “channeled Lucifer” and all.

“I don’t care how old you are--you can be my age or you can be as young as my grandchildren--this decade RIGHT NOW is going to be the decade that sets the course for the next 80-100 years afterward. That has to do with the cycle of nations that God set up in Genesis 8-10. We just happen to be in that cycle right now.

“How you come out of this wintertime into the spring is up for grabs. It’s up for grabs during the winter.

“When trouble, testing, difficulties come, what they test is ‘tribulation works patience,’ and having this information (in II Timothy)--having it erected in your inner man, having that edifice built up--will give you the capacity to handle whatever comes.

“They test whether you will be patient and stick with the truth of God’s Word, and evaluate the things (going to happen) based on what His Word says about them, or whether you’re going to go off in the vanity of your own mind; your own resources and thinking where you start thinking like lost people think.

“If you don’t have that sound understanding, then the Word of God will be of very little benefit to you. If you don’t know how to rightly divide the Word . . . Paul says in II Timothy 2, ‘Consider what I say; and the Lord give thee understanding in all things.
[8] Remember that Jesus Christ of the seed of David was raised from the dead according to my gospel.’

“The understanding comes through thinking the way God thinks. In Ephesians 4:17, Paul writes, [17] This I say therefore, and testify in the Lord, that ye henceforth walk not as other Gentiles walk, in the vanity of their mind,
[18] Having the understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God through the ignorance that is in them, because of the blindness of their heart:
[19] Who being past feeling have given themselves over unto lasciviousness, to work all uncleanness with greediness.
[20] But ye have not so learned Christ;
[21] If so be that ye have heard him, and have been taught by him, as the truth is in Jesus:

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“So the way you avoid that completely self-oriented, self-fixed, arrogant life of sinful pursuit, described in verse 19, is by learning Christ; hearing Him.

“Now, notice he writes in verse 17, ‘This I say therefore, and testify in the Lord.’ Paul’s saying, ‘I’m telling you this, and this is part of the message God gave ME!’

“Look at what he says in verse 20. How were they taught by Christ? They didn’t see Jesus in His earthly ministry. They heard Christ speaking to them through Paul. They were taught by Christ THROUGH Paul. Now, my point is, you can’t have a life that’s going to produce victory over your old sinful life except you hear what Paul teaches.

“You go back to what Moses taught, or what Christ in His earthly ministry taught, and it won’t produce victory; it won’t produce a successful Christian life.

“When I think about that, listen, if you don’t take what God through Paul gives to us, the way He gives it to us, you might as well hang up your cleats and go fishing. Because you’re going to make void the Word of God. You’re going to follow the commandments of men and in vain you’re going to seek to serve the Lord.”

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As Keith Blades writes in his book, Satan and His Plan of Evil, “Satan seeks most of all to drown the ‘hidden wisdom of God’ in a quagmire of doctrinal confusion, chaos and uncertainty . . .

“When he is able to produce among Christ’s members such ignorance of His ‘manifold wisdom,’ and such contrariness in their own conduct to the program God’s actually administering in this dispensation, Satan is able to convincingly slander, ridicule and defame the ‘new creation’ in the heavenly places.

“In this Satan gloats and exults. He is able in all of this to display both to himself, and his own cohorts in the heavenly places, his manipulative powers. He shows them that he is able to successfully deceive and lead about the members of Christ’s own body, as effectively as if they were still his own. Upon doing this his wounded pride comforts itself . . .

“Only by keeping Christians from knowing the very thing they need to know, and rejoice in so as to make that designed impact, is Satan able to hinder any such impact from being made at all.

"That he is clearly engaged in keeping Christians ignorant of what they ought to know is described by Paul, for example, in Ephesians 4:14: ‘That we henceforth be no more children, tossed to and fro, and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the sleight of men, and cunning craftiness, whereby they lie in wait to deceive.’ ”