The Plain Truth is so Happy That You Have Been Enjoying Bob’s Broadcasts.
2000 years ago, a newscaster that we know of as Jesus Christ warned us about false Christianity. The warning was not against the devil but against false Christianity…about people who come in His name and deceive many.
CLICK HERE TO WATCH THE PLAIN TRUTH TODAY VIDEO BROADCAST: You too can become God’s Best Friend
You too can become God’s Best Friend
Hi, this is Bob Barney with the Plain Truth Today broadcast. Yesterday I was talking about how I came to believe what I believe and left off some details because this broadcast is not about me, it’s about God, it’s about the news of today and it’s about what’s best for those people that come to the Plain Truth and want to know what’s really going on in the world and why it’s going on. But I had a few emails and one of the things I think that many people who are struggling to find God have in their life is they think that those people who know God and those people who believe in God and seem to be blessed by God are different somehow than they are.And I’m here to tell you, reluctantly, but I’m here to tell you that at least when it comes to me and I think any sincere person who believes in the real God, which is the God of the Bible, which is the God that is made of what we call the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ, those two are God, they are made up of the Holy Spirit, that I think a lot of people who are struggling and they don’t believe in God but they want to believe in God or they don’t know what they believe, or worse yet, I think there are people out there who think they’re such sinners, they have done such horrible things in their life, there’s no way that God could ever forgive them and there’s no way that they could ever be a good person. And unfortunately, we think that most people who are so-called, quote, religious are good people and that’s simply not necessarily the truth. You try to be good and you’re supposed to try to be good but the Bible makes it clear in John’s letters that it says if we say we do not sin, we’re a liar and we are calling God a liar because God says all have sinned and all continue to sin.But if we confess our sins, he said, then God will forgive those sins and that is the key. The key is that you have to admit what you’re doing is wrong. When you read the Bible for yourself and you read that you’re supposed to do this, this, and this, and you’re supposed to not do this, this, and this, and if you’re honest with yourself when you’re reading and you say, well, I do do this, this, this, and this and I’m not supposed to, then if you’re honest, then you have to, in prayer to God, when you talk to God in prayer, then you have to admit that you need the strength to try to do or not do what God tells you to do and not do as many Christians do, make up excuses why they don’t have to follow it by the laws have been done away with or it doesn’t matter.God loves everyone. You always hear that God loves everyone. Well, if that’s true, why is there a lake of fire and why are people going to be thrown into the lake of fire to be burned up forever, ever gone? They don’t suffer forever, but they’re burned up and they’re forever gone.So obviously God doesn’t love sinners. God can forgive sinners and that’s the key, but you have to go to God first and you got to ask for forgiveness. But going back to my own experience with God, I think because most people just hear my voice and they assume they know me or they assume they believe they know how I come to believe what I believe or why I am what I am, that people think that I’m different.Well, I’m no different than you out there. I am a sinner like you are out there. I have bad thoughts to this day like you do.I’ve gone through miserable times in my relationship with God. I’ve gone through times when I am positive God has forsaken me, left me. I’ve gone through times of torment.I’ve gone through times of misery and doubt. I’ve gone through times thinking God can’t forgive me and yet I continue to know that God does listen to me and God is my best friend and God cares about me and God will move mountains for me. But it takes a long, long travel with God, a long walk.It takes many years before you really do see the changes that God will do with you. And so don’t lose hope when you’re searching. I said it yesterday and I said it the day before, those, God says, those who seek me diligently will find me and that is the key.You have to really want to find God and if you really want to find God and study God’s word and pray to God, God will listen and God will forgive any sin that you could have ever done. There is no such thing as the unpardonable sin of a repentant heart. The unpardonable sin happens with an unrepentant heart.And so I thought it was a brief summary today for this week of talking about how we should look at God and how we should depend upon God. All the news that we read, God has something to do with it. Either he’s got his hands off and allowing things to happen because he’s allowing us to go our own way or once in a while God does move his hand to save the people that he is protecting.You know, it’s very comforting to me in my times of doubt. It’s always been comforting to me when I read these words, when God who says he was a friend of Abraham and Abraham was his friend. Can you imagine having God say about you that, you know, whatever your name is, is my best friend? Well, God said that about Abraham and I want God to say that about me and I think you should want God to say that about you and God can become your best friend.He can be to you what they were to Abraham, honestly. And to Abraham, God said to him in a I will bless those who bless you and I will curse those who curse you. I don’t know how many peoplehave heard that in their church sessions, but God curses people.God likes people who love him. God likes his best friends and God’s willing to do whatever he can do, or really in this case, whatever they can do because there’s two gods, to protect their friends. And so when you have a relationship with God and you do wrong, I mean, who did more wrong really in life than David? David committed adultery, he murdered a man who was that he lusted after his wife, and but God yet says David was a man after his own heart.And the reason for that is David never let his fame and his power go to his head when it came to God. He always was willing to bend his knee and admit he was a sinner to God. And God saw that his willingness to lose his ego when it came to God was a blessing.And it was David’s blessing. And it’s what made David the apple of God’s eye. So you can be not the person you should be, and God will still love you.And I think that’s very important in these days when people are searching for God and they’re searching for their own perfection. And I want to tell you, you’re never going to be perfect. You’re never going to be able to get near perfect.You’re never going to be able to deserve any of the blessings that you get. You’re going to get those blessings because God is going to become your friend. And so you have to want God to be your friend first.And once that happens, then God will bless those who bless you, and God will curse those who curse you. It’s that simple. And as hard it is to believe to unbelievers, God has a friendship with people.Abraham, we see in the Bible, or David, or in the New Testament, certain people. And in our lifetime, I believe me, and I believe a lot of other people like me, have a relationship now with God, even though we continue to do wrong, we continue to have evil thoughts, we continue not to make to mark. I always tell people, don’t copy me, copy Jesus.Don’t think that I’m right about everything, or I’m a know-it-all, because I’m not. There’s a lot of things I don’t know. There’s a lot of things that, in prayer to God, I tell God, you know, why do children have to suffer? Nothing bothers me more than watching these TV commercials, where you see kids with cancer, or just awful diseases, and through no fault of their own, and they’re suffering.And you think, why would God allow it? God allows it because this is not His world. We don’t want to live in His world. We want to believe our own person.And so, innocent people suffer for our decisions, and that’s the plain truth. But, going back to what I was going to say is, God wants to protect you once He becomes your friend, and God will move mountains, and He will blow up mountains for you. He will kill people for you.That’s an unchristian thing people will say, but it’s the truth. God will defend those who love Him against those who are trying to do them harm. Now, that’s not a reason that you should want tobecome a friend of God, because you can get even with your enemies, because that ain’t going towork either.But what I’m trying to say is, if you think you have to be perfect in order for God to become your friend, then you’re never going to succeed, and you’re going to stay in your doubts, you’re going to stay in your depression, and you’re going to stay in a state of limbo, where you never become a real believer. Through my life, I’ve gone through good times. I’ve gone through hard times.I’ve gone through times when I was down broke and wondering where the next paycheck was coming from. There were times, even in the last 15 years, when I worked to death to try to stay afloat, and prayed to God over and over and over again, and it didn’t seem God was even listening to me. But eventually, I’ve been becoming, being blessed.I may lose everything that I worked for tomorrow, but I know God gave it to me, and God can take it away from me. God is now, in my life, my friend, and he can be your friend. Invite him in.Read his word. Don’t listen to other people tell you about God. Learn about God.Read the Bible, and read what God says, and think that God is actually saying this to you, because he is saying this to you. It’s written for you. It’s written for every single human being that reads it.God has the ability to write one sentence for eight billion people. God’s mind can handle all of that, all of that confusion that you can’t even comprehend, but God’s Bible is a love letter to his children, and you are his children, and God wants to protect you. God wants to reward you.God wants to be good to you, and God wants to mostly be your friend. God said, again, like I said about Abraham, Israel, you are not consumed or destroyed because of my promise to Abraham, who was my friend. God allowed people, he allowed the nation of Israel to go and turn their back on him time and time and time again, and he did not destroy them as a nation because of a promise he made to Abraham, his friend.And my friends, that can be the relationship you have with God. God can become your friend, and you do so by opening up the Bible and start reading it, and I always suggest to start reading an easy-to-read Bible. I like the plain truths Bible that we have, but you get the New Living Testament or the New Century Version or the Good News Bible, they’re going to give you the message, and you read it and understand it, and you will get to know better than if you’re reading like the King James and you really can’t understand all the words, so it’s better to get to a Bible that you can understand.But the other thing I do, and if you go to the plain truths Bible, you will see that the very first chapter of the plain truth Bible is not, in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth,because that is not the beginning of the Bible. The real beginning of the Bible is found actually in the book of John, chapter 1. It’s the second place we read, in the beginning, but unlike Genesis 1, where it says, in the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth, billions of years earlier, God was still in existence and doing other things, but in the book of John, chapter 1, we read, in the beginning was the Word, and that’s Jesus Christ, and the Word was with God, God the Father, and the Word was God, Jesus and the Father make up the Godhead. And it goes on to say, the Word dwelt amongst us, we did not recognize Him, and John the Baptist came preaching about Him, and so if you read the first chapter of John before you start reading the Old Testament, then the Old Testament will be totally different than you ever read it before, because when you read the Old Testament the way the churches want you by starting with Genesis 1 instead of reading John 1, you do not know the identity of the God of Genesis, of Exodus, of Leviticus, or of the Old Testament.You see, the God of the Old Testament, the God who was the personal friend of Abraham, was none other than the being that we know today as Jesus Christ. God the Father is not found very often in the Old Testament. God the Father is hinted to in the Old Testament, but Jesus is Yahweh, the Lord of the Old Testament.Jesus is the person who created everything that was created. You read that in John, chapter 1. You do not read that in Genesis, chapter 1. Jesus is the God that made the universe, the angels, and you and I, and this world that we live in. And so when you read that first and you understand from then on, every time you see the word Lord in capital letters in the Old Testament, you’re realizing that person is Jesus Christ, or that being, because he’s more than a person, it’s Jesus Christ.And so when you read stories when the Lord is angry and is ready to destroy men, women, and children, that is the one that became Jesus Christ, that everybody mistakenly believes is this effeminate man who forgives every sin of everyone without them even asking for it, that he accepts homosexuals. I won’t ever call them gay. There’s nothing gay about being a homosexual.In fact, most of them are very un-gay or very depressed people. But God doesn’t accept them. God doesn’t love them.This idea God loves the person, the sin, but not the sinner. It’s not true. Here’s a phrase from the Old Testament, and the God speaking here is the Lord Jesus Christ is the Lord of the Old Testament.It says, Jacob I love, Esau I hated. Did you ever read that in the Bible? Did anybody ever tell youthat God hated a person? The twin brother of Jacob, that’s what’s in the Bible. When you read the Bible for yourself and you don’t let some holy roller tell you what’s in there, you will find thingsthat you never thought you were going to find.And you’re going to find a different God than you think you have, that you have believed in. And you’re going to find a more personal God. You’re going to find a God who thinks like you do, who cares like you do, who grieves over tragedy like you do, who wants to be your friend like you want him to be your friend, who has the same thoughts, even though it does say in the Bible my thoughts are not your thoughts, but Jesus became a man and understood the thoughts of mankind.And he understands your thoughts and your cares and your concerns, and they’re his cares and his concerns. You have a God, unlike the Father God, who became a man who lived a perfect sinless life and understood the temptation that we’re under. And because he was God and had the spirit unmeasured in his being, he did not sin.But God does not expect you not to sin, because you are going to sin. And that’s what John saysin his epistles, that if we say we do not sin, we make God a liar. But if we confess our sins, God is true to forgive us.And I want to tell you today, and we’re going to change the subject, I matter all next week, back to the news and what’s going on in the world, but I think it’s important for many people out there that are searching for God to stop looking to a man, stop looking for someone to bring them God. They need to ask God into their life, it’s very simple to do, open up the pages of a simple to read Bible and start reading, start with the first chapter of John, read who God is, what God did, and then go and start reading from Genesis on. And in the plain truth Bible, you will actually read the Bible in the order that the Bible was actually supposed to be read in.The order of the King James Bible is not right. And if you go to the plain truth Bible, you will see that the Bible has the number of books that are supposed to have, you know, there is not a one and two Kings, there is only Kings in the original Bible that Jesus read. And the Bible that the apostles read, by the way, in the Old Testament, was not in the order that it is today.And that is what the plain truths Bible has done, is it’s put it in the right order of how the Bible is supposed to be read, except for we did what, of course, there was no New Testament with the apostles. We took the first chapter of John, and we put it into in front of the first chapter of Genesis, so then people could read and understand the notes that I wrote, explaining just who God is, what God is, and what your purpose on life is, and it’s so far superior than you ever thought. You can become God’s best friend, and God’s talking to you, I think through me today, to tell you there’s nothing that you have ever done that someone of God hasn’t done worse.Most people out there wouldn’t have done many of the things that God’s heroes did. God gives you examples of the most terrible sins that people did, like David, like the apostle Peter who denied Christ three times, but God expected it from them. God understands human nature, God understands your frailty, God can forgive you of anything.There is nothing, nothing that you can do that God can’t forgive if you ask him to sincerely, and you repent of those sins means you try to stop doing those sins. There are some sins that people have a hard time, and it takes a lifetime to overcome, but if you struggle, and keep struggling, and search diligently, you will find God, and God will find you, and you will live a life of a blessing, and you will have the most powerful two beings in the universe that created everything, calling you their best friend, and they will move heaven and earth, and do anything they have to do to help protect you. I’m not teaching here protectionism, that you won’t be turned into a martyr when the bad times come, because you may, but one thing you will have when you become God’s friend, you will have eternal life and the life to come.You will have made it, and you don’t have that now if you don’t have the real God. So this is Bob Barney in a little shorter Plain Truth Today version for a Friday, saying goodbye, and I hope you open up your Bible, start reading it, and make God your friend, because God will become yours. Thank you very much for listening.