First Love

Narrator: Welcome to First Love with Dr. Robyn Kassas and Dr. Nathan Kassas, where faith meets real life. In this weekly broadcast, you’ll discover practical and spiritual keys to reclaim God’s story in your life, deepen your relationship with Jesus, and encounter him as your first love, whether for the first time or all over again. No topic is off-limits as we make Jesus real, relevant, and relational. Stay with us. Your journey back to first love starts now.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: Hello everybody, and welcome to First Love. My name is Dr. Nathan Kassas, and I’m sitting with the wonderful Dr. Robyn Kassas, who is my mother but also my senior minister and my friend and partner in ministry. Dr. Robyn, how are you doing today?

Dr. Robyn Kassas: I’m doing great. The weather is amazing.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: Yeah, we’re really enjoying all that God’s pouring out in these warm days. I know some Americans are not used to it, but our original land is Australia and we love the heat. But we also love America and its heat.

Dr. Robyn Kassas: Bring some of that heat over here!

Dr. Nathan Kassas: I think we do that a lot, Dr. Robyn. I think we bring Australian heat, not just environmentally but also spiritually. We’ve been talking about many very important things and powerful things, exposing and expounding upon the mindsets that have crept into the church.

So last week, we started a new series about the different gates and how each gate represents a conversation that God wants to have with us in our journey to being transformed into his image. I was really empowered by that episode. I listened to it while I was at the gym because I think when you come into salvation and you come into your beginning walk with Christ, you have so many ideas, even just as a non-believer, because you’ve heard the world’s take on the gospel.

You’ve heard the gospel from the world’s perspective. So you’ve heard either a TV show or a radio broadcast or someone’s opinion. You’ve had a Bible story here or there. You might have gone to Bible school or vacation Bible school, but somewhere down the line, your image of the gospel has been built.

Dr. Robyn Kassas: And I think that just to think about the tabernacle and what we did there, we took people through the journey on that one. You can’t escape. You can’t get shortcuts. Same with this teaching that we want to share because it’s so important, the gates and how they started in Nehemiah and how they were negated today. We want to explore why, and we want to also look at a couple of scriptures that don’t really mean what we think they mean. So we should start if you could give us a little history on the last part of this one to do with the sheep gate. Very interesting, that one, because if you remove the significance of that, you’re going to remove Christ.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: Which goes back to my point. While I was saying we’ve come in, even though we might not have grown up with faith or the gospel, each of us comes in with a predisposed idea of what the salvation package and the gospel is. Because we’ve done that, some of us have, in our own understanding, shaped the journey.

According to history, when we talk about these gates of Jerusalem in Nehemiah 3, we’re actually using Nehemiah 3 as the model. It’s very scriptural. This is when Eliashib is the man that is commissioned by Nehemiah in Nehemiah 3, and he goes and he starts the rebuilding of the wall and the city and he enters into the wall and the city these gates. So you can read along in Nehemiah 3.

But what’s interesting to your point, Dr. Robyn, is that a lot of these gates were removed by Suleiman the Great when he did the conquest of Jerusalem. And so the gates that are there today are not the gates that Nehemiah set up.

Dr. Robyn Kassas: But they must have been important for God to use them and to do, because this brought it back to the original plan.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: Exactly. And so it points to a mindset that we have as believers. If I could bring it into a modern-day understanding, we do that. We remove these gates and conversations that we need to go through because a gate you have to go through. You can’t just stand at the door. You’ve got to go through it to get the transition that it’s giving you.

Just like modern history, when Suleiman the Great took over the Ottoman Empire, he removed these gates. He removed the sheep gate because the sacrifice stopped. Interesting, very spiritual point there. And the fish gate was removed, which we’re going to move into soon. But it just points to this Westernized idea that we can skip these things because all things have become new. We’re going to go there very soon on that second half. But let me just say if we could go and talk about why, because the situation is that these two gates are so important to do with the conversation with the Lord Jesus Christ.

Every gate is a conversation. And I hate to say it, but the Holy Spirit is that searchlight and the gate that you’re avoiding going through is the conversation you’re avoiding having with Jesus because that entry point is not allowed into your heart.

So let’s go into a little bit of history just to give a biblical context here. There are many, many gates mentioned in Nehemiah’s rebuild in Nehemiah 3, and I’m just going to name some of the gates. We’ll talk about these. There’s the sheep gate, the fish gate, the old gate, the dung gate, the fountain gate, the horse gate, the east gate, and the gate of inspection or the Miphkad in Hebrew.

Dr. Robyn Kassas: And the dung gate really goes with the valley gate.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: Yes, it does. And that’s another gate that Nehemiah talks about, the valley gate. Again, these are gates that were not actually present after Israel got taken over by the Ottoman Empire. So just like the church, these gates got removed and we think that we don’t need them anymore. They’re not significant. And so the power of their effect in our life we omit and we skip past.

Dr. Robyn Kassas: So that means we don’t need that sort of conversation with the Lord.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: Jesus is Lord. So again, we started last week with the sheep gate. We want to sort of finalize that because there’s still a little bit more to add to it. The sheep gate was important because, Dr. Robyn, last week we started bringing out it wasn’t just the man of God.

Dr. Robyn Kassas: It was the lamb of God. Jesus’s priesthood does not start with kingship. It starts with sacrifice. So we’ll go and maybe talk about this because it’s very significant that we talk about why.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: The sheep gate is so important because from God’s perspective, entry into his kingdom does not begin with you getting.

Dr. Robyn Kassas: No, it really begins with you allowing him to come into you.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: So we get this idea of the gospel presented in the way that it’s shaped. Well, you come to Jesus, you receive him by faith through grace. We understand that. So we do get Jesus. But when we get Jesus, the journey of beginning to give to Jesus begins.

Dr. Robyn Kassas: It’s even more than that, you see, because God’s perspective is something different. It begins with the sacrifice, not with kingship. And the way we hold on to this scripture that we’re going to take apart makes it a little bit like a kingship.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: It does, it gives us a right. So as we’re going into the break before we wrap up, I’m just coming out of Nehemiah 3:1 here. And again, remember Hebrews 4:14 to 16 talks about Jesus is our great high priest.

Dr. Robyn Kassas: So we’re talking all about the Lord. And if you negate it, take it away, where’s your conversation going to start with?

Dr. Nathan Kassas: So the first gate, the sheep gate, recalling, is to begin with sacrifice because priesthood begins with intercession and sacrifice. It doesn’t begin with authority, glory, kingship. God begins with a lamb. Before he even starts with the man, he begins like he did all the way back in the First Testament with a lamb. Let’s go to a break, let the listeners chew on that for a second, and we’ll come back and we’ll dive in deeper.

Narrator: Hi, my name is Dr. Robyn Kassas, and I’m Dr. Nathan Kassas. We’d love to invite you to join us every Monday at 9:30 PM for First Love. God is bringing us back to his original plan, a relationship with the fullness of the Godhead: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And this is the full package of salvation and it’s available through this broadcast. Join us for First Love every Monday at 9:30 PM because the one who loved you first is still loving you best.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: All right, Dr. Robyn, we’ve come back. We’ve had a break. We’ve had time to chew on what you’ve just revealed about the importance of not skipping a gate and omitting it from our journey with the Lord and our conversations with him.

I want to just throw it to you, Dr. Robyn, because you’ve had 40 plus years of experience in this ministry of the prophetic and the transformation ministry, and you have a little gripe with this scripture being misused. I know from personal experience of being your son and being all around the world with you in ministry, you like to bring clarity to this scripture because it really is a misuse of scripture in such a way that it enables a right and it is a lot of the root cause of our stinking thinking.

Dr. Robyn Kassas: Well, I think it’s translated wrong. And I know you’re going to bring more evidence to that. "Therefore, if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature." Now let’s look at the word "in Christ." So he can’t just know Christ, he’s got to be in Christ. And then old things pass away because he’s in Christ and behold, all things are becoming, not become new.

Now, if this is going to apply, there is significance that we have to be in Christ, not around him, not in front of him, not behind him. We have to go through the gate of sacrifice, which was in the tabernacle and now it is the sheep gate, which he is the lamb of God. So you have to accept his sacrifice as the lamb of God and be in that before you can be becoming new.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: And that goes to what I said. We come to Christ, we receive the fullness and the potential of new life, everything that he’s done for us. He puts it in our bank account, our credit. But it is up to us every day to cash in the credit. Otherwise, it stays in the account because otherwise, we’re just robots.

Dr. Robyn Kassas: Yeah, and we’re always being told, "I want to stand and make my own decisions." And this sounds like everything’s been done for you and all you have to do is just receive it. No, it’s more than that. You have to be in him.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: And the Lord wants us to pursue him as much as he pursues us because he kicked them out of the garden because of sin, but he didn’t want them staying under force. They obeyed him, but they didn’t trust him. And that’s the first Adam. And then you have the second Adam who comes and he puts all of his trust in his father, Jesus Christ. So this is so important because I believe that this misuse or this misunderstanding of scripture enables us to expect from God the things that we think we should have. It’s not a position of a lamb.

Dr. Robyn Kassas: No, but I can tell you the other thing that it does for us, it gives us no hope because we think if we can’t do it, we’re failing. We’re not new.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: Yeah, we’re not new. So I want to give a little theological context to this. When you actually study this scripture, and we’re coming out of 2 Corinthians 5:17, very important scripture, it’s always quoted in the salvation circle. If you actually do a little exegesis of the word study in the Greek, it’s really important. The word there for "new" comes out of the Greek word *kainos*. And *kainos* actually means new in quality. It doesn’t mean new in quantity. It means the quality of your "new."

Let’s tie it in. It is linked to the following verse that Paul mentions because he says here in 2 Corinthians 5:17 and now moving on to 18, "Now all things are of God, who has reconciled us to himself."

Dr. Robyn Kassas: So here we are, we’re seeing something working together here. But us to himself. To himself through us? No, it’s us to himself. Through the ministry of Christ Jesus. His ministry of reconciliation. But it’s his move. And we make it all about our move.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: It’s his finished work. You are not the finished work. You are becoming the finished work every single day. And the moment you think that you’ve become the finished work, you stop needing relationship with Christ. You don’t need that sheep gate anymore. You don’t need to go through the fish gate. You don’t need to go through the dung gate because I’ve got it. I’m there.

Dr. Robyn Kassas: So you don’t have the conversation that you need to have that you’ve misunderstood. And when you misunderstand something, you don’t have the conversation that you need. Why don’t you have the conversation and why do you need it? Because you need to know there’s always a second chance with the Lord.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: It’s not a conversation for correction.

Dr. Robyn Kassas: No, that to me, that scripture, I look at it all the time and I don’t get hope out of it because some people give up because they think, "Well, I’m not there. I’m not there and I’ve not become Christ. I’ve not become new. I’ve not become anything." And they don’t know it’s becoming. It gives them no hope. They give up. They say, "It’s not going to work." You see, it’s misquoted, and you please explain that now.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: The verb tense there in the Greek is actually present indicative active. So that should be "becoming," not "become." "Become" is final in its explanation. "Become" does not point to an ongoing process of transformation. This is my favorite thing to talk about, the process of transformation. So that really means that every day there is a new "becoming" in Christ that I can reach for.

From the moment I wake up to the moment I go to sleep, the situations, the circumstances of my life which were already written in his book are predestined to help me reach the "becoming" of Christ. It’s not by chance. It’s not a coincidence that those things come up because this is training for reigning. Everything is schooling for ruling. So what that’s doing is it helps me to understand, okay, there’s more to become today. There’s more to let go of.

Dr. Robyn Kassas: So this becomes a process. And look, if you look back to the Garden of Eden, when they blew it there, they were moved out of the garden, but they were given another opportunity to become in more like Christ.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: And immediately, the institution of the sacrifice is set up. They had to kill a lamb to get a covering. I love this statement that I learned in one of my courses. It was not relationship with God that was broken. It was fellowship. Because he still let them come to the edge of the gate of where the garden angel was and bring worship, bring sacrifice. Abel brought an offering. He had relationship. Fellowship, meaning being instantly in his presence. So the instant was taken because of Eden. With Jesus, it’s immediate but not with us.

Dr. Robyn Kassas: And that’s what we need to see in this scripture. It’s "becoming." It’s not immediate, and that gives hope.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: And to give hope to people, we’ve been reading in our daily scriptures. We’ve been following in the book of Numbers. We recently read in Numbers 18 and 19 where that generation that was so unbelieving and full of doubt, and they say to Moses, they come back with the spies’ report, the ninth of Ab, they come back and they say, "It’s too big, too many giants, too hard. We don’t want to do it."

And then yet the Lord says, "Okay, right, well, because of your report, you won’t go in." But yet in the next chapter, he opens the dialogue by saying, "When you come into the land that the Lord your God is giving you," and he’s talking to the generation 20 and under. So that brings a very kind of warring position. We can live in the consequences of not becoming from yesterday, but still live in the hope of becoming for tomorrow at the same time.

Dr. Robyn Kassas: Yes, but we have to understand what the scripture means, then we will live in the "becoming." All we have to do is look in the Word and you will start to see that it’s always the "becoming."

Dr. Nathan Kassas: And that’s why I love in this part where Paul says in verse 18, "Now all things are of God, who has reconciled us to himself through Jesus Christ and has given us the ministry of reconciliation." So because of Jesus Christ, we are reconciled in. That is that God was in Christ the Father reconciling the world to himself, not imputing their trespasses to them, and has committed us to the word of reconciliation. So all here Paul is talking about Christ’s finished work. If you are living in the finished work every day, then you have the potential to become new.

Dr. Robyn Kassas: And the more you live in it, the more new you get.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: But then he goes on in verse 20 to our part. "Now we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God were pleading through us. We implore you on Christ’s behalf to be reconciled to God."

Dr. Robyn Kassas: That’s the "becoming" new.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: We are the ones becoming, and because we are the ones becoming, we can show that to the world as our testimony. The "becoming" in us is what witnesses to them as well as the finished work of Christ.

Dr. Robyn Kassas: And how does your brain take that in?

Dr. Nathan Kassas: Well, the brain is very powerful here because the moment we think we’ve arrived, the brain stops growing. The moment we think we’ve got something, we stop getting curious. We stop asking the necessary questions to get that revelation deeper into our spirit. If I think I’ve arrived, then I stop growing. If I think I’ve become, then I stop needing relationship. I stop needing the questions. I stop needing the understanding. I stop needing the connection.

Dr. Robyn Kassas: And that’s the way God made your brain.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: It is. That’s why they say you’ll live longer if you’re a lifelong learner. I think that’s what it’s about. If you are always learning, not always a student, but always learning. So when we talk about these gates, Dr. Robyn, this is why it’s so important to expound on these important conversations because we have allowed the Western gospel through this misuse of scripture and through this misunderstanding of it to teach us that we don’t need that. I’m new. I’ve got it. I just got to believe it and receive it and that’s it. But that doesn’t comfort you when you’re going through depression, anxiety, you’re facing trial and tribulation, where you feel like you’re not a new person.

Dr. Robyn Kassas: But what about if you feel like you can’t do it? You’ve tried and tried and therefore the scripture’s not for you. Or maybe I was never meant to come to Christ because I’m not able to do it. There is no second chance in any of that.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: And just to throw it to you for your final words, my final statement is you said you’ve tried and tried. Yes, you’ve tried and tried and you keep trying. But the first step is dying. And you have to accept the one who died so that you can in your own will die.

Dr. Robyn Kassas: Yes, because he went to the cross. He wants us to take on the death as part of us in him, not beside him, not before him or after him. It’s in him. We were dead in him.

Narrator: Thanks for spending time with us today on First Love. If today’s message spoke to you, share it with someone. And if you’re looking for more teachings, visit www.torcc.org. That’s t-o-r-c-c dot org for more. We’ll be back next week, same time, same truth. And as you go, don’t forget: the one who loved you first is still loving you best.