Counterfeit Christians

TS Wright

What does it truly mean to be a believer in today's world? This episode of the Kingdom Crossroads podcast dives deep into this pressing question, exploring how Jesus defined a true believer and how that definition applies in our current social climate. Pastor Bob Thibodeau is joined by Scott Wright, author of the God Centered Concepts, as they discuss the critical role of surrendering one's life to Christ, emphasizing that belief goes beyond mere acknowledgment to a complete transformation of the heart. They also examine the challenges of identifying counterfeit believers and the importance of discerning true faith through the lens of Scripture and the guidance of the Holy Spirit. As they navigate these profound topics, listeners are encouraged to reflect on their own faith journeys and the significance of the cross in their lives.

Takeaways:

• Pastor Bob Thibodeau emphasizes the importance of understanding what it truly means to be a believer in today's world.
• Scott Wright discusses how Jesus’ conversation with Nicodemus defines the necessity of being spiritually born again.
• The central issue facing humanity is sin, not merely societal problems or political issues.
• Counterfeit beliefs can be identified by examining whether they diminish the significance of the cross.
• To be a believer, one must surrender their life completely to Christ’s authority and teachings.
• The podcast highlights that true believers must live under the authority of Christ, rejecting the notion of personal freedom.

CONTACT INFORMATION:

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Book: “God Centered Concept Journal: Making God’s Word My Ways.”  - on Amazon 

Podcast: The God Centered Concept

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Welcome to the Kingdom Crossroads podcast with Pastor Bob Thibodeau.

Pastor Bob conducts personal interviews with Christian influencers from around the globe, helping Christian authors, recording artists, CEOs, entrepreneurs, non profit leaders, and yes, pastors and ministry leaders to get the word out about what they are doing to impact the world with the gospel.

Our podcast has been rated in the top 1/2% of all podcasts in the world by ListenNotes.com so you know your message will be heard.

Now here is your host with today's interview, Pastor Bob Thibodeau.

Hello everyone everywhere.

Pastor Bob Thibodeau here.

Welcome to the Kingdom Crossroads podcast.

Today.

We're so blessed you're joining us.

So happy new Year, New Year to to you and yours and I appreciate you starting your year off with us today.

Praise God.

As we get started, I want to share that this podcast, this podcast today is sponsored by Podcasters for Christ.

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That's where Podcasts for Christ can help you to get the word out about what you're doing.

Now, we're currently offering a free podcast interview for pastors, church leaders, ministry leaders to share about everything that you're doing.

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Amen.

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Now today we're going to be doing a deep dive into a question that just plagues a lot of Christians today.

And that is, what does it mean to be a believer?

I mean, this is especially important in the day and time and social climate that we currently find ourselves in today.

Amen.

To dive into this topic, we have back with us today our good friend T.S.

wright, author of the God Center Concepts.

Together we're going to explore how Jesus defined a true believer, what it looks like to live out that faith in today's world, how to recognize counterfeit beliefs, and how all of this connects to the last stage of the church.

So get ready for an insightful and thought provoking discussion today.

Hey, Praise God.

With that being said, help me welcome to the program, our good friend, Scott Wright.

Scott, it's a blessing to have you back on the program.

Happy new Year to you and yours.

Well, happy New Year to you, and I'm just grateful to be back here and ready for another fun and fruitful discussion.

Amen.

Amen.

Well, I guess we're going to start with a question.

How did Jesus define a believer?

Oh, wow.

You know, it's funny when, When Jesus is talking to Nicodemus in John 3, John chapter 3, I, I've always, I, I have sat, even when I was a new believer, just pondering what did that really.

What was that conversation really about?

You know, what, what spurred the conversation?

Why were they having it?

What was really going on?

And, and I feel like that what was happening was, is there were so many people that had so many ideas of what just how the nation of Israel was supposed to, you know, who they thought the Messiah was going to be.

They were just struggling with that.

It was.

There was, you know, they thought it was going to be a political king.

So many of them and, you know, know, some of them just, so many of them lost hope.

But had they really paid attention to the word of God as it was written, not putting their own spin on it, they would have realized that this was an eternal kingdom and that an eternal kingdom would have brought an internal, eternal Messiah.

Eternal Messiah would mean one that takes care of their real issue.

And the real issue was not the Romans.

It was sin.

Sin is the issue.

I will tell you, to be a believer, you have to first recognize that sin is the issue.

It is the.

It's not just the issue of the day, which it feels like in this day and age, everything's about, you know, what is the.

What is the thing of today or the message of today, or, you know, it seems like it changes every week, right?

Amen.

But this message has not changed.

It has been the same since the very beginning of human history.

It is going to be the same all the way through the end times and everything in between.

And the issue is sin.

Sin is the issue.

So how does that connect us to being a believer in Christ?

Jesus says we must be born again.

We must not.

And, you know, and that doesn't mean we're going to be physically born again, but we must be spiritually born again.

Well, that confused Nicodemus too, right?

Of course.

I mean, he's like, how can I go back in the womb?

I mean, holy cow.

I mean, that's, you know, and so, you know, but, you know, flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Spirit gives birth to the spirit.

Well, if the spur, if the Holy Spirit is the one that works within us to make us a believer in Christ, that means obviously the Holy Spirit plays a massive role in this.

And the Holy Spirit has to work inside of us to shape our hearts to understand this message.

And then we, we, our job is.

We have to surrender to that.

That's the key.

Notice I use the word surrender and not believe because the problem is, is that the word belief in the English language is not the same as the word belief would have been in that day and age.

It wouldn't have.

It wouldn't have.

The word belief today does not have the same power, so to speak, because it just means, really, the way we think of belief and in the English language is just acknowledgment.

You cannot just acknowledge this.

Okay, yeah, surrender means a wholehearted surrender.

It means a giving up of oneself too.

So for instance, if you, you been, you went, you were in the military.

All right?

When you're in the military, you're giving up your life to serve in the military.

You are, you belong to them.

Well, it's no different when you become.

If you're going to surrender to Christ, you're surrendering your life to be a soldier for Christ.

You are.

It's a wholehearted, throwing yourself into.

Every aspect of you belongs to Christ.

You're giving it all to him.

That's what being a believer really is.

It's, it's a wholesale change.

You're saying, I can't do this anymore.

I'm not going to do this anymore.

This belongs to Christ.

And now I'm going to turn it all over to him.

And he gives a lot of speeches, a lot of sermons, a lot of teachings.

After that, after, you know, after that.

John 3:16.

Of course, I know some of the sequence sequences in which John puts things is not in sequence, but he gives a lot of other messages that really help give you the grounding for that.

One of the ones that comes to mind is Luke, chapter 14.

And he.

I tell people envision Jesus walking in a crowd with a crowd.

He's been doing miracles.

He's put the Pharisees and Sadducees in their place.

Nobody can stand up to this guy.

And his teachings and everything that he's been doing is literally perfect.

And you're like, okay.

I mean, you're like, you're excited.

This guy, I mean, he's helping us.

He's doing all this and he turns around and he looks at you and he goes, if you do not hate your mother, your brother, your father, your son, your friends, your, even your own life, you are not worthy to be my disciple.

Deny yourself, Take up your cross and follow me.

I would imagine, I don't care where they were at.

You could probably heard a pin drop after that.

I've just envisioned and walking on him, just turning, saying that to all of them after they've seen all these things and experience a lot of these things.

And they're like, I mean, yeah, remember.

There was that point when, you know, he was saying something and then everybody left.

Yeah.

And then he turned to the disciples, said, you want to go too?

Go ahead.

Yeah, leave, you know.

Yeah, I'm not forcing anybody to stay.

No, they gotta want to stay.

So, yeah.

And I opened with the question, you know, what does a believer look like, especially in this social climate that we live in today?

So how can you define what a believer looks like today?

Again, what do you, how do you determine to what you're going to live up to?

You know, well, you surrender to Christ now, you have to live under his authority.

See, the key is that right there.

So, and, and I would say even as much as at any time in history, I would say even today, because nobody in our society, we are geared.

Everything in our, in our psyche, in our training and in our culture is all about personal freedom.

Everything is geared towards personal freedom.

Nobody.

It is, it is completely looked down upon in every way, shape and form to put yourself under the authority of anything except what you think, how you should live.

That's just way we're trained.

That's what Americans and Western society has become.

That idea has transformed the world in many ways.

However, what Jesus is saying is, you're putting yourself under my authority.

That's what Jesus is saying.

He's.

He's telling us to put ourselves under his authority.

That is the key.

Are you willing, would you be willing to give up all your freedom and everything else for Christ?

That means nothing is off the table.

There's not a thing in your life that is off the table when it comes to putting it under the authority of Christ.

That means Christ has the first and last say in everything.

And honestly, that's what the whole idea of the God center concept is, is that God is the center and that he is the ultimate authority and that we put ourselves under his authority.

It's exactly what you said, Bob.

You talked about that right there.

You said he looked at those disciples after everybody else had left.

You want to leave too.

He gave them a choice.

It wasn't like he was forcing him.

He gives us the same choice.

So I tell people, you don't really have rights, you don't really have freedom.

You have a choice.

There are two kingdoms.

You're going to serve one of them.

Which kingdom are you going to serve?

And put yourself under the authority of making no decision and trying to stay in that middle ground.

And that neutral ground is making a decision.

There is no middle ground.

Amen.

And that takes any of your soul wants you to be neutral.

He wants that neutrality because that's the perfect spot for him.

Yeah.

And like I said, that takes me to my next question.

Because we know there are those who proclaim to be believers, but let's just say their lifestyles leave some questions about how true that may actually be.

And thankfully the final decision isn't left to us as mere mortals.

But how can we identify counterfeit believers?

Is that even possible for us to identify counterfeit believers?

So Jesus talked about this very thing in Matthew chapter 13 when he talked about the parable of the taris and the wheat.

Now, in your Bibles it's just say weeds and wheat, but I want you to replace the word wheat or excuse me, weeds with taris.

What ataris is, is a certain type of weed that actually looks like wheat until it's fully grown, until it's fully mature.

And what it is is that a lot of things are going to look exactly like what they should look like up until full maturity.

That's why you got to test them by their fruits.

So here's what I say, and it's very simple.

I have two filters.

And both of these filters matter.

The first filter is the Word of God.

If something is not in line in alignment with the Word of God, then it is not alignment with Christ.

And people can say what they want.

But Christ made the Word of God a centerpiece of every, all of his teaching.

He reverts back to the Old Testament many, many times.

He reverts back to different books of the Old Testament many, many times.

So we have to realize that he is already uplifting the Word of God.

And don't think of the Word of God as, as just the Bible, like words written on paper.

Think of those as God breathing life into a subject.

It's a living.

The Word is a living organism because it is born from the Holy Spirit.

The other filter is the Holy Spirit because the whole.

Not everything in life is going to be in a perfect.

Like there's some things that are like, it's just, it feels like there's this gray area with stuff.

Yeah.

Because it's not exactly spelled out in the Bible.

That's where the Holy Spirit comes in.

And that's where us being committed to the Holy Spirit and following the spiritual disciplines help us to be able to root through those.

But I will say this, and this is an easy way when it's in those gray areas, anything in your life that diminishes the work of the cross in any way is counterfeit.

If you go back and you look at, and we were to study all the heresies that Paul, even Paul was dealing with, I mean, he dealt with a lot of them.

Okay.

These disciples were dealing, especially Paul, establishing all these different churches and the churches and all the counterfeits and all the schisms and all the things that we've seen over the ages.

Even, you know, even the primary church of the time got off course and started forming their own counterfeit things and adding their man made beliefs, which is part of what led to the, the whole Protestant Reformation and the English Reformation.

And there was, I mean, you guys can study that.

And I will actually be talking about that some on my podcast if you ever want to get more depth into that.

But, and in some of my writings, the, the real key is still this.

Anything that diminishes the work of the cross is counterfeit.

Yeah.

Amen.

We, anytime we try to diminish that.

So every time you have that discussion, no matter where that discussion will start, it will always end up in a place of how serious do you take your sin?

How serious does God look at your sin?

And how does the work of the cross take care of that?

It will always end up in that place.

No matter where you start, no matter what the subject is, every answer always filters.

When we funnel it down, it will funnel down to that very fundamental.

Again, ask yourself, is what I believe what I'm promoting, what I'm doing, is it diminishing the work of the cross in any way?

That would be a question that I would ask.

And we always wrap our discussion around the end days and the last stage of the church.

And how does all this fit into the end times?

And as I said, the last day, last age of the church.

Well, Revelation, chapter 3, verse, verses 18 through 21 are really important because that is coming out of the message that was delivered for the last stage of the church, the church of Laodicea.

Jesus is talking about how to connect with him.

If you go to the very start of verse 18 he says, Buy from me.

Gold refined by fire.

Gold represents the truth.

Refined by fire is the working it out into, and working it into your.

Into your being.

So it becomes faith.

But gold represents that truth.

Who does Jesus tell us to buy it from?

Him.

That means he is the only truth.

It goes in.

And that all ties right back in when he said, I'm the way, the truth and the life.

No one comes to the Father except through me.

Truth begins and ends with the Word of God.

Jesus is the Word and made flesh.

It begins and ends with his work at the cross.

Everything.

It is no different.

And so in this age, what we have now, instead of having a society that represses knowledge, or the gaining of it, I should say, the knowledge was there, it was just for so long.

Society was designed to suppress knowledge.

And then the printing press will start to change all that.

But as we, as we get to now with social media, it is so easy to.

We can type something in and we can find out all kinds of truth.

Quote truths, right?

Yeah.

But the truth about life begins and ends with, with the cross.

It truly does.

Your life begins and ends with the cross.

All judgment will be funneled through your surrendering or not surrendering to the cross.

The work in the cross, I mean, that's just truth.

And that's what Jesus is trying to tell people.

You've abandoned the truth.

This is what the Church of Laodicea is.

He's really telling them.

You've abandoned the truth because you were completely deceived.

You, you think you have it all, but you go back to verse 17 and 16, you'll kind of get a.

You'll think you have all this, but yet you're rich, wretched, pitiful, poor, blind and naked.

All of a sudden you, you start thinking about that.

What does that really mean?

That means you no longer understand the truth at all.

You don't even have it.

You've completely abandoned it, which means you probably have all these other truths that you're buying into.

But there's only one truth, and that is through Christ.

And that is done at the work of the cross.

I'm going to tell you this, I have to say this, and, and I think this completely defines this age.

There's always the next best thing to make your life either better or make you feel better or making you do better.

But I'm going to tell you, no matter what you do, you're still going to face the grave.

Oh yeah, that's right.

You're still going to face the grave.

You, you can do all the cosmetic surgery, you can do all the stuff, make yourself look all whatever and look all great.

And you can get, you know, you can put all the money in and you can get the next trophy wife or you can be the next trophy wife or, or have all the money in the world and all that stuff.

But you're still going to face the grave.

Yeah.

No matter what, no matter who you are, it is going to happen.

And it all filters right back to the same place, which is exactly what Jesus is trying to tell you, only by the truth from Christ.

Because in the end, it's the only one that's going to be the eternal truth that matters.

The rest of that stuff's going to fade.

None of it's going to matter.

Matthew, chapter 24.

Heaven and Earth will pass away, but my words will never pass away.

That's exactly what Jesus said.

That's right.

That's right.

It is so important that in this age that we do not lose focus on the real truth and on the ultimate truth.

And that is the truth that Jesus died for our sins.

How serious our sin separates us from God and how serious our sin is, how his work on the cross takes care of it and that we surrender to that as an act of our will.

Amen.

Amen.

Well, Scott, as usual, this has been so interesting.

How can someone reach out to you with questions or they want to get more information or maybe invite you to an interview like this?

How can someone get in touch with you?

We'll be glad to do interviews.

We, we're actually now launching our own YouTube podcast on you.

Our podcast on YouTube as we've had one on Spotify and Apple.

But we're going to launch this thing on YouTube now and we're redone.

The show recordings are already in progress and we're actually going to start doing interviews.

So if you know you're, you're somebody that is part of a podcast broad, you know, wanting to get in or in that network.

We also do interviews ourselves.

So we're going to be doing interviews.

And hey, for all you listeners out there, Pastor Bob's going to be on one of our podcasts here pretty soon as well.

So.

Amen.

And you cannot miss that episode.

Episode for sure.

Okay.

But we're going to be, we're working on putting out our writings and doing all the pieces.

This ministry is already starting to grow and we've, we've, we've Already taken a lot of steps now to, to get the ball rolling here in the direction that we want this ministry to roll.

Amen.

Amen.

I'll put all this information in the links down below.

Folks, I can't emphasize enough how important it is for you to realize we are living right now in the actual last of the last days.

Okay?

The days that have been prophesied as the end times.

They're here at the doorstep right now.

Just drop down the show notes, reach out to Scott Wright, get in touch with him, subscribe to his podcast, be sure to purchase his journal, start learning all about the God centered concepts that he specializes in.

Amen.

I mean, well, we just scratched the surface on stuff today.

Praise God and do it right now before you forget about it.

You don't want to give the devil a chance to distract you and then make you forget all about getting something.

So important is getting in touch with Scott right, right now.

Just drop down the show notes, click the links.

They're right there.

Scott, I appreciate you taking time to join us today and sharing all this information.

And I can't wait till the next one.

Hey, looking forward to another one, Bob.

And all I can say to everybody is Happy New Year.

Amen.

Amen, folks.

That's all the time we have for today for Scott Wright, myself, Pastor Bob, reminding you to be blessed in all that you do.

Thank you for listening to today's episode of the Kingdom Crossroads podcast.

Please subscribe to our podcast so you can be notified when another episode is published.

To share their messages with the world, please visit our website@www.podcastersforchrist.com.

that web address again is www.podcastersforchrist.Com.

for more information, until next time, be blessed in all that you do.

Ra.