Destined for Victory

Paul Sheppard: We got a generation of Christians who have candy store fixation. They just think God is a cosmic Santa Claus and he has come to just give you everything you want, and you got folk trying to claim promises and leave off the condition.

Guest (Male): God will always keep his promises, but more often than not, there is a condition attached. Hello and thanks for stopping by for today's Destined for Victory, where we feature the preaching ministry of Pastor Paul Sheppard.

The revelation of Jesus Christ tells us more about who he is than it does about when he might return. He is the King of Kings, the Alpha and Omega, the one who dies so that all of us, including his murderers, might live. So we should be encouraged to not only worship him but to trust him and take him at his word. But as you'll see today, when God makes you a promise, it almost always comes with a condition or two. As always, you're invited to come see us at pastorpaul.net where you can listen to any recent message on demand, including today's. That's pastorpaul.net. So let's listen closely to Pastor Paul's Destined for Victory message, "Jesus in High Definition."

Paul Sheppard: You remember when Moses saw a bush burning and it wasn't consumed? You would expect a fire eventually to go out since it wasn't among all these other bushes. It was a standalone bush that was burning and burning and burning, and God did that to attract Moses' attention. Moses said, "Let me go turn aside and see what in the world is going on with this bush." You know he ran into God, had to take his shoes off, and God began to describe himself to him and told him, "I've called you to go, and you're to go to Pharaoh and tell him, 'Let my people go.'"

He was shocked by all of that, but at a certain point, Moses said, "Now, if I go to Pharaoh, I know Pharaoh. Pharaoh is a bad boy." That's the Paul Sheppard version of the Bible. He's a bad boy. I've been there. I was raised in the palace. I know Pharaoh up close and personal. If I go to somebody like him and tell him somebody told me to tell you to let my people go, he's going to have a problem. So he asked the Lord, "Who shall I say sent me?" What did the Lord tell him? He said, "I AM that I AM. Tell him the I AM sent you."

Get it? Don't tell him the "I was" sent you. Don't tell him the "I will be," "You just wait, you just wait." Tell him the I AM, the eternally present one, the one who was here before Pharaoh was in the eye and in the heart and in the mind of his parents. I AM. God is the eternally present one.

We're accustomed to thinking of things that run a course. We're accustomed to things that have a beginning and have a middle, a prime, and then they're on the downside, and eventually they die. That's all we know. We live in a finite world, and everything we are familiar with has a beginning, a middle, a peak, and an end. But not our God. God didn't have a prime where you could say about God, "Man, I tell you, back in the day, boy, God was something. Back in the day, boy, God would tear things up." No, when you're talking about God, he is the eternally present one.

You're the one getting older. We're getting older. We're the ones who live in this locked-in space called time. We have a beginning and we grow up and at some point, you hit your prime and you're as good as you're going to get in some ways. All of us have a time when you look the best you're going to look on the planet. That's it.

I tell young folk, when you think you are as fine as you're going to get, take your pictures then. That's the time to take your pictures so later on, when folk don't believe you used to be the bomb, you can whip them out and show them. Look at that, that was me.

We're the ones that are in this progression. We're in this time that is causing swift transition to take place. So we're the ones trying to hold on. Older folk, I'm in my middle ages and I now know what that's like, where you just think back to times you were stronger and you were younger and you were more virile and you had more energy and you could do more things.

That's fine. Go on and look back and if you're a grandparent, brag to your grandkids. Pull out your old pictures and let them see you leaning against an old car, looking all sharp, got your suit on and hat and everything, looking all sharp. "Grandpa, that was you?" "Yeah, that was me." It's fine to do all of that.

But you've got to understand, that's why the Bible says teach us to number our days that we may apply our hearts to wisdom. Why? Because as you move on, you've got to learn to be wiser because you're not always going to be as strong as you once were. You're not always going to be as handsome or beautiful as you once were, but you ought to have more wisdom as you move along.

Come on, you might as well be honest. Back when you were in your prime, and some of you young folk are just heading to yours now, and some of you are right there, but listen, when you're in that state, you might be physically in the best shape of your life, but there's a lot more you have yet to learn about how to live life. Some of us who have come through that season and we're in the second half of our life, in the third quarter of our life, and some of us are in the fourth quarter of our life, and some of us are in the final two minutes, the two-minute warning has come.

If you're not familiar with football, when you get to the end of the game, there's what they call the two-minute warning, and you take an automatic timeout. Whatever else you're going to do, you've got two minutes to do it. Some of us are in the two-minute warning. But wherever you are, when we look back, we realize that there are some things we learned along the way that we wish we had known earlier.

Because some of us, when we were looking our best and strong and young and pretty and cute, had your little figure, all that stuff, some of those days you were jacked up in your head. You weren't as smart, weren't as wise as you are now. Some of us look back and see some of the mistakes we made and said, "Lord, if I could get that time back." Because some of us were young and cute and dumb. Come on, you might as well be. Not about everything, but some areas of your life, you were just dumb.

You just thought you knew more than you knew and you thought you could get away with more than you could get away with and you thought things would be different, and you have learned in many cases the hard way. So even when you're moving on later in years, the Bible says teach us, Lord, to number our days that we may apply our hearts to wisdom. Lord, teach me that the worst fool is an old fool. You've had time to learn something by now. You've had time to gain some wisdom by now. What you doing old and still stupid?

You ought to know something by now. My grandmother used to say, "Boy, you better listen to me, I'm coming back from where you're going." You ought to know some things by now. You ought to decide there's a better way to get your life lived. You don't want to try to count on being young and being strong. Sometimes wisdom is much better than strength because wisdom will help you to live the way God wants you to live your life.

But my point is that we are used to that. We're locked into that kind of understanding. We're used to thinking of things having a beginning and a middle and an end. So wherever you are in life, number your days. God, make me wiser as I live my life. Don't ask God to make you cuter. Do the best you can. Stay cute as long as you can. Do your best. Even if you're in your middle years and what have you, hopefully you got a little more money now, you can put together your outfits just right and compensate. When you were young, you could throw on anything and still look halfway good. Young folk just can look crazy and look good sometimes. But those of us who are moving on along, we've got to coordinate.

We've got to take some time to get this together. You've got to get it together. You've got to make sure that you're just working it out just right. You have some options now in this day that will help you. You can go to the store and get some vitamins to help you with your energy. You can pop the right pills and God has blessed the pharmacist to learn the wisdom of what is here in the earth that can be used to help you, and you can get stronger and have the energy to do what God wants you to do.

Because of all the modern things we have now, if you are losing your hair and want some more, you can go buy some. Buy some if you want to. When mine started going years ago, I was frustrated. "Lord have mercy," because I used to have a big head of hair. In fact, back in the day, I had an Afro. Had an Afro, big beautiful Afro back in the day when we would braid it up at night.

Let me just tell you about my culture. You think back to yours. Back in my culture, we would braid it up because Afros were in at a certain point, the Jackson 5 and all of them. We were in, and I'm the age of Michael, so Michael and I both had our big Afros. Those were the days when you would put the grease in there to make it shine. You either got Afro-Sheen or Ultra-Sheen.

Now, you from other cultures, you'll have to tell me what you did, but we did Afro-Sheen and Ultra-Sheen, and we would put that in there, and then you would braid it at night and sleep on it like that. Then you'd wake up in the morning, get your pick and pick it out. If you did it right, then you would make sure you go to the barber and he couldn't cut it off, he just trimmed it so it had a nice, round shape to it. All boy, when you got it right and it was glistening in the sun and it was shaped just right, we'd go out and the women would just have to pray.

Because we were looking good, we knew we were looking good. But I lived long enough to find a hole developing in my Afro. After a while, when somebody said once I was losing my hair, they said, "You going to go buy some? You get one of these hairpieces or something, go to the men's hair club?" I said, "No, I read the Bible and it helped me." It said, "The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. Blessed be the name of the Lord." I got my pictures from when I had it, that's good enough for me.

You're messing up my message. Where am I? Teach us to number our days that we may apply our hearts to wisdom. But with the God we serve, the HD view of God is he doesn't have a prime when he's at his best and after that it's downhill. God is eternally who he always was and who he always will be. He is eternally is-ness. He is the eternal I AM.

I took a little sampling when I was studying and putting this message together. I sampled some "God is" passages. Let me just throw one at you. "God is not a man that he should lie, nor a son of man that he should repent." That's in Numbers 23:19. Talking about what God is, this one tells you what God is not. He is not like you.

He is not a person, meaning a person, not the gender, but humankind. He is not a person that he should lie, or the son of man that he should repent. In other words, God doesn't make mistakes. God doesn't deceive. God doesn't speak what he does not follow up on. The eternally present God is full of holiness and righteousness and integrity. So he has no ability to lie. He is not a person that he should lie.

That means when God says a thing, he's not trying to make it happen, he's not hoping it will happen. "Well, you know, if everything goes right, I'm working on something right now and if I can pull it all together." No, that's your uncle. That's your uncle, that's not God. That's your uncle back when you were a kid, your uncle, "I'm going to come by and pick you all up, I'm going to take you to the amusement park." You stand by the door, you don't know whether Unc going to show up or not. Then later on he calls, "Something came up. Tell the kids I'm sorry."

God is not a man that he should lie. He's not the son of man that he should repent. If God says it, he's going to bring it to pass. If God promised it, it is so. God is so much who he is that God can speak in the future about things that haven't even happened yet. God can talk about something like it happened already, and in fact, in this world, it hasn't yet come to pass. Because God, when he speaks it is so. We serve the same one who stepped out into nothing and said, "Let there be," and there was. God is able to talk about things that have not yet manifested as if they have already manifested because when it is in the mouth of God, when it is in the mind of God, it is so.

Now, here's the problem we have serving a God like that. We serve the infinite God but we're finite people, so when God speaks, we put it often in our terms and first of all we're concerned about the scheduling of it. But if you notice, if you walk with God for any amount of time, God has a way of telling you, giving you a promise in his word or giving you a promise in your time of prayer and devotion, and he'll speak something to you and you hide it away in your heart and you believe it. But you've got to understand you're dealing with the eternally present one, and time is not an issue with God.

God doesn't operate by time, he operates by purpose. He operates in the counsel of his own will according to his own purpose. Here's the problem, you and I don't have his schedule. We don't know. The Bible says things like "in the fullness of time." In the fullness of time, and you don't know when the time has filled up. Which is why your Bible tells you you must walk by faith and not by sight. You've got to walk by faith, not by your calendar. You've got to walk by faith, not by your feelings. You've got to walk by faith, not by anything else other than the word of God. If God said it, he'll bring it to pass.

We have to walk by faith and obedience. One of the things you've got to realize when God makes you a promise, if there are conditions attached to the promise, make sure to pay attention to the conditions. Because we got a generation of Christians who have candy store fixation. They just think God is a cosmic Santa Claus and he has come to just give you everything you want, and you got folk trying to claim promises and leave off the condition.

You can't do that. I've heard people over the years, "Well, you know, the Lord said he'll give me the desire of my heart." Well, he did, but back up first and read what he said leading up to "and I'll give you the desires of your heart." Here's what he said, I've already read it. John chapter 15, "If you abide in me." That means live in me, dwell. It's the word for domicile, where you live, your residence. If your residence is in me, if you live in me and my words live in you, then you can ask what you will and it'll be done. Why? Because you are so rooted in the word of God, which is the will of God, until you're immersed in, "God, I don't want my way, I want your way." If you abide in him and his words abide in you, you can ask what you will, and that promise is true.

Some people say, "Well, the Bible said the Lord will give me the desires of my heart." Back up. Delight yourself in the Lord and he will give you the desires of your heart. Same principle is in John 15. If you delight yourself, if you immerse yourself in who God is, if you're excited not just about what he gives, but who he is. If you delight yourself in who God is, "Lord, I just love you for you," then he will give you the desires of your heart. When you love on God, when you immerse yourself in him, when you flatter God, when you compliment him, "Lord, you're just wonderful, I just can't get enough of you," you make God give you the desires of your heart. He loves to be acknowledged for who he is, and he'll give you the desires of your heart.

I've heard people say, "Well, you know, the Bible said I don't have to worry about anything in my life because the Bible says a thousand will fall at my side and ten thousand in my right hand, but it will not come nigh me." I read that, Psalm 91, but back up. "He that dwelleth in the secret place of the Most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty. I will say of the Lord, 'He is my refuge, my God, in him will I trust.'"

See, if you're not abiding in the secret place, a whole lot of things will hit you. It won't just fall at your side, it'll fall on you too, because you're not abiding in that secret place where nothing can harm you because I am hidden with Christ in God.

So you have to understand, we serve the eternally present one. I want you to know that our God is not a man that he should lie. He is not the son of man that he should repent. You can trust God. You can trust God more than you can trust anything or anybody else. You can trust God. You can put your hope and your trust and your faith in him because he is the eternally present one.

Guest (Male): You know, the reason the Lord is not returned is because he loves the world so much that he wants to give everyone time to repent, to profess their faith in him so that he can take as many people to heaven with him as he can. That's what we want to do here at Destined for Victory. The last thing Jesus told us to do was to make disciples of all nations.

So today, before we let you go, we want to share with you a conversation I once had with Pastor Paul Sheppard, one that will really help you understand what our mission at Destined for Victory is and what it always will be.

Paul Sheppard: Well, you know, when I think of victorious, my mind goes back, I'm a kid growing up watching TV in the 60s, so my mind goes back to the Wide World of Sports. There was an announcer named James McKay, Jim McKay, something like that. He had this classic line where he talked about the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat.

I love just thinking about how thrilling it is to be victorious. I love in any game I'm playing, I want to be victorious. I tell people, I don't care whether it's Monopoly or something really serious, I want to win. In life, we can win in Christ, and that's what the Bible tells us, that we are victorious in him.

Victorious means that we're following his lead, that we're letting the Holy Spirit take us where he wants us to go in life. We're saved by his grace, and then we're simply following his direction. And of course, the Word of God is so key to following God's direction because the Word is a lamp to our feet and a light to our pathway. And so those who tune in to broadcasts like Destined for Victory are really supposed to be receiving guidance so that we can walk in and live in victory. And that's what I pray is happening as people tune in day by day.

We say it every day: in Christ, you are destined for victory. Our prayer is that you will live the victorious Christian life today and every day, and you'll help us share that message with those who need to hear it. When you financially support the ministry, we've got a great thank you gift to share with you. It's our latest booklet based on Colossians 3:12-15. It's called *Clothed in Love*, and it will challenge you to direct your best selves toward the ones who matter most.

Pastor Paul Sheppard points you to seven virtues: compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, patience, forbearance, and forgiveness, and about how giving these gifts away can transform your most important relationships. That's *Clothed in Love: Seven Gifts for the Ones Who Matter Most*, our gift to you today by request for your generous gift to Destined for Victory.

You can give by phone by calling 855-339-5500. That's 855-339-5500, or visit pastorpaul.net to make a safe and secure donation right there online. You can also mail your gift to Destined for Victory, Post Office Box 1767, Fremont, California, 94538.

Paul Sheppard: In Deuteronomy chapter 4, you will find another indication of who our God is. There you will find in verse 24 that our God is a consuming fire and a jealous God. And then in that same passage, in verse 31, you will find that he is a merciful God.

Guest (Male): That's tomorrow in our continuing message, "Jesus in High Definition." Until then, remember, he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion. In Christ, you are destined for victory.