How Do I Know I’m Ready?

Real Life presents the Jack Kibs podcast with intention and boldness to proclaim truth, equip the saints, and impact our culture. Hey you guys, we are gonna take a little bit of time about 20 minutes coming up. We're gonna be talking about what does it look like to be ready. The question is, how do I get ready? We looked at that last time. The next good question is, how do I know if I'm ready? Great question. We're gonna answer that and we're gonna answer some questions. You can get the outlines of this podcast by going to jackkibs.com slash podcast. Today, if this podcast lifts you up and encourages you to live a more fulfilled life in Christ, then make sure you leave us one of those five star ratings. To us, that's like saying amen or yes, then that rating will encourage others to listen. Now open your hearts to what God's word has to say to you. Here is Jack Kibs. Hey guys, welcome back to our podcast right here. The Jack Kibs podcast and listen, we're gonna be blitzing through one more right here right now together. Last time I looked at the question that came to us is, how do I get ready? In light of the conversation about the Lord coming back, so how do I get ready? Here's the second question that prevailed. The second question is, how do you know you're ready? That's a great question because if I say, and the Bible does say, by the way, you need to get ready, well, you just asked a great qualifying question. You've asked a diagnostic question, which is brilliant. The Bible says to examine yourself, not other people, examine yourself to see whether you are in the faith or not. Do you know that? You don't go around and look at other people and try to examine and determine if they're in the faith or not. That's something later. That's called really, really fruit inspection to see if that's really a true person. Number one is you to look to yourself to see, am I really ready? So how do you know? Great question. Number one, read Galatians chapter five. Read Galatians chapter five and here's what you're gonna want to do. You're gonna want to look at the works of the flesh that are listed and then the fruit of the spirit, which are listed. And you wanna take Galatians five and you wanna judge your life in light of those assessments and in light of those descriptions, ask yourself, how are you doing in that? You wanna ask yourself this if you want to know if you're ready or not, is does anyone depend upon my Christianity? Does anyone depend upon me being obedient and faithful to Jesus? In other words, if I'm living for the Lord after I've given my heart to Christ, does my life make a difference? Now this is a very stinging point. I know, well I'll just speak for the church I pastor. If you put Sundays and Wednesdays together, over 20,000 people a week come to church anywhere from 18 to 20,000 people or all of them Christians, I don't know. It's not for me to know, but they come. They are challenged and they are invited to examine their own lives. How many of them, listen, are still doing church on Tuesday? See, I'll go to church on Sunday. I'm not so much interested in that. Are you doing church on Thursday at 2 o'clock? What about Friday at 6am? What about Saturday night at 11pm? Are you still doing church? What do you mean doing church? Are you still longing to be more like Jesus at 2am on Monday morning driving to the office? That's what time you have to get up here in LA area. You get to your office by 7. I left it to you. Listen, is Christ a constant presence? Are you the awareness of God? Is it constant in your life? That's how you'll know. Listen, I'll sum it up by this. Can you just keep doing sins and not get stung by the Holy Spirit? If you can, then you're not only not ready. You're not hearing the Holy Spirit, which means Jesus is the Spirit of God will convict you. That means if you're not hearing Him, that means you don't belong to Him. You might belong to a church, and to that I would say, good luck. Church membership is not getting you into heaven. A personal interaction, you know what Charles Spurgeon said? Charles Spurgeon said that true biblical faith is intercourse with God. Wow. Personality to personality. You are a personality. God is a personality, which is why you're a personality. You've been created in his image. Do you have that relationship with him? So how do you know you're ready? You need to apply the word of God to your life as you read it. I'm so grateful for your question because it's deep. It's so simple, right? It's so deep because that question is going to reveal evidence. You're like a detective, and now you're asking the right question. How do I know I'm ready? Do you want Jesus to come back today? I know. You're saying yes, but my dad's not saved. Oh, I don't want Jesus to come back today because my sister is still lost. I know. I have that too. I mean, my brother saved. That's not the point. I'm saying if he watches this podcast, my point is this is that God knows all that stuff. He'll mitigate all that. He knows what's happened in time. Do you want Christ to come back today? How about this? If you die today, are you confident and comfortable about meeting Jesus? Is it well with your soul as the old him goes? So that's vitally important that you understand that. Do you have a hunger for the Bible? Do you want to be more like Jesus? Do you find the Bible when you read it speaking to you? You need to slow down and read it. Be sure it's slowed down. Well, I read the one-year Bible. What? In 10 minutes? Slow down. By the way, good, good. Keep reading the one-year Bible. We're big fans of the one-year Bible, audibly or reading it. By the way, here's a little hint. Get ready. Get ready. I have my time with God. I have my Bible reading on my own. But usually when I jump in the car, I go to Google and I write in audio Bible, one-year audio Bible commentary, one-year audio Bible commentary. And what pops up is a free post there and it's narrated by Tom Dooley. Now Tom Dooley is in heaven now. Tom Dooley is the voice and it's awesome. It's wonderful. It's in the New King James Version. It's Tom Dooley, narration. And in about 15 minutes on the highway, you're going to get the one-year Bible. It's glorious. It's wonderful. But I like it because I can pause it and think, wow, that's deep or wow. That's incredible. Wow. I got to write that down. Okay. So, that's that. All right. Questions, you guys? Questions? Allison. Allison, you wrote and you asked this question. What happens to those who died during the millennium? In fact, I'm going to do this. Look at it. Allison and Ellie, both of you, I'm going to read both your questions because they're very much the same. What happens to those who died during the millennium, that's the thousand-year reign of Christ, that's dealing with mortals, which ties into Ellie's question. If Jesus is in Jerusalem for a thousand years, yes, he will be. What happens to the believers born during the time of the millennium who die? Do they go to heaven or Jerusalem? The Bible says that their spirit, right, to be absent from the bodies, to be present with the Lord. And we know that there'll be some state of them dwelling in eternity in heaven that would be with the Father. You see, what not with the Son? The Son is ruling and reigning for a thousand years on earth. Their spirit will be in heaven and God's abode in the place where God is. When will they be resurrected? Their physical bodies will be resurrected at the end of the millennium. They don't drop dead and then pop back up during the millennium. Those mortals who believe in Christ, Isaiah says, when a man dies at the age of a hundred who believes a believer, dies at the age of a hundred, it will be as a baby died. Why? Because longevity is going to increase during the millennium. And so I hope that kind of answers your question on that. But it's a, those combined are two great questions. Again, as always, I want to encourage you. As far as I know, we're not getting any kudos from, I don't, I think it's Zondervin. I'm not sure who published John Woolford's publication of, it was previously titled 1000 Bible prophecies or 1000 prophecies of the Bible. I think now it's called the, the, the Bible prophecy handbook by Dr. John Woolford. I think it's like a thousand pages. It's ginormous. It's awesome. It's about that big. And it's good stuff because it covers from Genesis to Revelation, the prophetic scriptures of every chapter of the Bible. It's a great reference book. Everybody listening, you should get that book. John Woolford, my wife pointed out last time I spelled his name wrong. So I want to make sure I get it right. And I don't want to do him in injustice. I love, I loved this guy. He's with the Lord now, wall, W-A-L-V-O-O-R-D. Guys, can you check? Make sure that's right. John Woolford, a professor, former, until going to heaven, professor, president, dean, everything of Dallas Theological Seminary. Just an epic theologian, especially, got a thumbs up on the spelling. What about the title of the book? That's what we have. Let's get in the title of the book. So anyway, I hope that helps. I know that this is a quickie. This is a short one. But could it be every prophecy of the Bible, if it is, that's a new title? John Woolford, Madison, it might be every prophecy of the Bible. It's a good title. I don't recognize that title. But it used to be called the Prophecy Knowledge Handbook. Yeah, check it out. Yeah, it's 20 bucks, you guys, at Christianbooks.com. It's a lot of money. It's so cheap when you consider what's in it. Because you would have to buy libraries, seriously. So Brian has said it's major Bible prophecies. John Woolford, get the biggest book John Woolford ever wrote. That's how you'll do it. It's a whopper. So you guys, listen, if any of this makes sense to you, if you like this stuff, please share it with others. That is the greatest thing that you can do for us. You guys, notice we're not asking you for money. You understand that? We're asking you that if you are hearing truth, and you are, if you want to share with other people, the greatest thing you can do is take this, highlight the link, and send it to maybe 10 people, whoever, you know, send it to your email family that you have. Share it. Get it out there because that that tells us, keep going because I'm going to be really honest with you. You or I have the time to sit around and do this. We've got other things to do unless it's making a difference. And we want to redeem the time the Bible says because the days are evil. So if this is not a good thing, let us know. If it is a good thing, let us know. And so the greatest thing you can do is share so we can grow this podcast. That's the best thing. What else? Well, you can text on a little bit, but if you can go a little bit more, you tell the difference where you set the resurrection and then there's the resurrection and the reverb. Yeah. In fact, again, that prophecy handbook, Resurrection, if you have a good, if you have a good concordance in the back of your Bible, or if you have a good study Bible, I highly endorse, I highly recommend the Rory study Bible. If you could get that in New King James, buy it because you can't buy it anywhere right now anyway. But if you find it by it, the price of those will range. I've bought them. I've got about 22 of them. Why do I have them? Because they're hard to find. I've paid anywhere from $30 to just under $3,000 per Bible. They're so rare. They're so excellent to have. New King James, Rory study Bible, published by Moody. Look up resurrection and you will find out that resurrection, there are many resurrections in the Bible. So you're going to want to know that. There's all kinds of resurrections in Scripture. For one thing, we know that in a sense Elijah and the prophet laid on top of the sick boy who died and that boy was resurrected back to life in the Old Testament. We know that when Jesus died on the cross, when Jesus said it is finished and the ground shook, the Bible tells us that there were those who were resurrected from the dead in Jerusalem and walked into the city. That had to be amazing. And then it says in Matthew 27 that when he rose from the dead, others also rose and walked into the city. Our pre-Crucified, we would consider saints, no doubt about it, but that's why there are numerous resurrections in Scripture. So to break it all down, you want to study the resurrections of the Bible and you want to do it from a good source. Good sources again, Tim Lahay, Dr. Ed Heinssen. I highly recommend Professor Gary Habermass at Liberty University on Resurrection. You'll get a much more fuller, much in depth, a word study through the Bible on the various phases and various events of resurrection that are in the Bible. So all right, you guys, yep, hit subscribe, stay up to date, we'll notify you when something's dropping you guys. And it's our intent always because we don't want to goof around. I hope you know that. We like to say it's time for you to live out what you believe in. It's time for real life. That's our little thing, you know? That's our, that's our jingle. It's time for you to live out what you believe in. It's time for real life. Why is that important to us? Because God's Word is true and God's Word is powerful and it transforms lives. And if that was not true, if I didn't have anything to live out that has completely transformed my life, I absolutely would not be here right now. I would absolutely be back at my old job, but well, wait a minute, at my age, I would now have been retired since the age of 53. I would be vacationing. I would be laying in the hammock somewhere, probably nigh unto Kauai or Maui. And I would just be living life because you live and you die. So grab all the gusto you can, Matt, go, what's the word? You only live once, right? Yolo, if people use that anymore. But if Christ is risen from the dead, wow, that changes things. So none of us want to waste any time. We know that we're not wasting time because of this reason. Jesus Christ was God's preordained, prophesied, Old Testament recorded promise. Messiah, Savior, anointed one, atonement for our sins. The reason why I believe Jesus Christ is Messiah and Lord of Lord and King of Kings and Lord of Lords is because he's the eternal God manifested in human flesh. That's Old Testament doctrine friends. My Jewish friends, listen, I'm not even talking about New Testament. Listen, David, King David said regarding the Messiah that the Lord will not allow the anointed one, the Messiah, to see the grave nor be confined to death. David said that. That means David believed that the Messiah would come, die and be resurrected. David said that the Messiah is going to be crucified with holes through his hands and his feet, Psalm 22. Micah, the prophet said that Israel, you'll find the Messiah when he comes, he will be born in the village of Bethlehem. By the way, it says, the Bible says Bethlehem at Parfatha in the book of Isaiah or a book of Micah, why does it say that? Because there were two Bethlehem's at the birth of Christ. Bethlehem was closer and in the realm of Judah near Jerusalem, the other one wasn't. The other one did not do what the other one did. The other one where Christ was born was the Bethlehem that produced the lambs that were for temple sacrifice. That's why the Bible so specifically says Jesus had to come from the county, so to speak of Apaptha from the village of Bethlehem were all of the sheep are prepared. McDowell Eder, McDowell Eder is where the tower of the shepherds raised sheep for temple sacrifices and that's where Jesus Christ was born. That's Old Testament. The Bible says in Isaiah chapter 7 and chapter 9 that he would be the eternal God and that he would be born of a virgin, meaning there was no human intercourse needed for the Messiah to be born because the Messiah had to have human DNA, Bible says it came through Mary's line through David, but he had to be the Son of God and the Holy Spirit engineered the DNA of Jesus. He's the God man, it's absolutely epic, the God that we worship right now is the resurrected Son of God forever man for you and I. Why? Because you're going to be in heaven forever friend and you are going to have the perfect man to relate to Jesus. God had to become a man so man could be perfect and when that perfect man died on the cross, it was that perfect man who said, Father forgive them, they know not what they do and when he had finished the atonement of our sins, he said it's finished into your hands, Father I commend my spirit. The God side of him dismissed the spirit and in that instant the physical side of him died his body. Awesome. The resurrected Christ Lord and Savior, God bless you guys, until next time. This Jack Kemp's podcast as well as all the broadcast outreach opportunities are listener supported, will you consider partnering with us through a special gift? Go to jackhibs.com to learn more and stay connected.