Welcome to Bible Believers Fellowship, where we love you enough to tell you the truth. On these programs, you will be able to follow our expository study of the authorized King James Version as we read verse by verse through books and occasionally tackle important topics for the purpose of helping Bible believers gain a thorough and accurate understanding of God's Word. We now invite you to join us in our study. So verse 1 in Romans 10 picks us up where we left off. We've been in chapter 9 talking about Israel and how that Paul He began chapter 9. He said in verse 3, For I could wish that myself were accursed from Christ for my brethren, my kinsmen according to the flesh, verse 4, who are Israelites. So Paul is sharing his burden about his blood brothers, the Israelites. And we know Paul was a Pharisee of Pharisees. He was an Israelite, first and foremost. Saul. But then on the road to Damascus, in Acts chapter 9, God struck him down and got his attention. He was a believer from that point. Immediately he said, Lord. He knew who he was dealing with. And God saved him and renamed him Paul. And from this point on, we know him as the Apostle Paul. But he still is, fleshly speaking, an Israelite. And he still loves his people. He wants to see the Israelites saved. And again, after going through this whole discourse in chapter 9, now we've come to verse 1 of chapter 10, and he basically repeats this and says it again. Go ahead and read just verse 1, Mike. Brethren, my heart's desire and prayer to God for Israel is that they might be saved. Now that's how you can identify if you have any loved one that you know is unsaved. You can identify with Paul here. But we have talked about in even in our time of prayer this morning, we talked in terms of America. And it breaks your heart to look at your nation. And to see they're going wholesale into wickedness, totally going into the abominations that that word means it makes God want to vomit the word abomination. And these things that our nation are now endorsing and promoting make God sick. But we're thumbing our nose at God and just going into complete wickedness. The churches are going into apostasy. There was a day when someone like me would be teaching the Word and would only be able to refer to maybe the Roman Catholic Church itself as apostate. There was a time when you would talk about the United Methodists, and you may not like some of the things about that denomination, but they still preached the gospel. And there was a time when the Presbyterian church down the road, you could count on one thing, and that they would preach the gospel. And all the Baptist churches, you just could count on hearing the gospel. Those days are long gone. Now, you can count on most churches not preaching the gospel. You can count on apostasy. And you look at it and you see it, especially as you study history, and you see where this nation comes from, and where we've fallen from, and it breaks your heart. Well, you see, Paul, he understands that Israel was the chosen, given the law of God, Through the seed of Israel, the tribe of Judah, came the Messiah Himself. And yet, as a nation, by and large, totally throwing Him off, only a remnant believed. From that point to this, only a remnant has believed. And he says, his heart's desire and prayer to God was that Israel would be saved. So you can see you're kind of getting to know the heart of Paul. But I think Paul is expressing the heart of God. We studied in Exodus that the priest would have the children of Israel, their names on the breastplate, and would carry the names of Israel on his heart at all times. And that was a picture of the heart of Messiah. Our high priest, on his heart, is Israel. And he really loves Israel. But he also chastens those whom he loves. And Israel has been unfaithful. And Israel, as a nation, as a people by and large, have been under chastening for almost 2,000 years now. And Paul was seeing the very beginning of it here. And he says something in verse 2 that's very interesting in relation to this. Read verse 2 now, Mike. For I bear them record that they have a zeal of God, but not according to knowledge. Now, how many people do we know? I've told folks that I know of, we've had four people come to this front door. knocking on the door to talk to me about God. One was a Mormon. One was a Jehovah's Witness. Thankfully, the other two were fundamental Baptists who were truly preaching the gospel. But that's not a very good ratio in a county where there are hundreds of churches whose statement of faith is that they believe the gospel. Even these apostate churches I just mentioned, if you go read their statement of faith, it says that they believe that men are sinners and that Christ died to pay for their sin, was buried and rose again, and that we need to preach the gospel to every creature. It's in their statements of faith. You can look it up on the internet. And yet, they're not doing it. But who is doing it? These people who are zealous without knowledge. The Mormons follow a fictional book called the Book of Mormon. It's total fiction. They follow a false prophet named Joseph Smith who used the same techniques that he used to supposedly come up with the Book of Mormon he used before that to swindle people. He was shot because he was thrown in jail as a criminal and they call him a martyr. He came up with this new religion. One of the reasons was because he was a sex pervert and he wanted multiple wives. One of them being a 12-year-old little girl. And so that's the Mormon gospel, doctrine, and foundation, and history. But they don't know that. These people come to your door, they don't know these things, and they don't want to know. If you try to tell them the truth about it, they just totally cut you off and run. Zealous, but without knowledge. Same thing with Jehovah's Witnesses. I've had Jehovah's Witnesses come up, and I've actually asked if I could see their Bible. They use what's called a New World Translation. And I'll show them in their Bible, in Hebrews 1.8, for example, where the Father calls Jesus, the Son, God. He says, Thy throne, O God. Talking to Jesus. It's in their Bible, and yet they reject Jesus as being the son of God, the second person of Trinity, God manifest in the flesh. They don't believe that. They believe he's Michael the archangel who came for a little while as Jesus. And now he's Michael again. That's what they believe. And they've totally falsely prophesied the second coming of Christ on numerous occasions. But most of their people either don't know it or they willfully are blind. And if you try to tell them those things, they run. Well, the same thing's true of Jews. The same thing's true of Israel. Paul was going to the Jews first. Paul would go into the synagogues, open Isaiah 53, and open Psalm 22, and he would show them that Jesus fulfilled the Messianic prophecies. And sometimes there would be people who would believe and be saved, but a lot of times they took him out and tried to kill him, stone him. They rejected the truth of their own Scriptures. But they were zealous to the point of Even Paul himself, before being saved, hunted down Stephen. We read the story in Acts 7 about Stephen being killed. And when he preached the truth to them, they became so angry, they actually ripped and tore at his flesh with their teeth. I mean, think about how enraged with hatred for the message of Jesus Christ you have to be to actually reach out, grab somebody, and begin to rip at them with your teeth. That's the rage and anger, zealousness. They were zealous. That's zealous with a capital Z, man. But not after knowledge. And God said in Hosea 4.6, My people, Israel at the time, He's talking about Hosea 4.6, My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge. He didn't say lack of zeal. Never accused them of being low on energy. Never accused them of being apathetic toward what they considered the important things of God. But Jesus looked at them and said, by your traditions, you have made the Word of God no effect. And that's what we say to these folks in these churches around us. By your tradition, you have made the Word of God of none effect. It is your tradition that tells you that you must be saved through the church. The Bible never says that. It is tradition that says that you're saved by baptism or that, you know, this infant baptism. There's no such thing in the Scripture. It's tradition that has made the Word of God in none effect. Man-made traditions. So our objective and the reason we study the Bible, the reason why when you come in here, you don't hear Greg's word. And I don't stand up here and give you a four point message on what I think you should do. The reason why we open the Bible and just read it, read it, read it and discuss it is because you don't need my word, you need God's word. And you don't need to be just zealous after some man-made program, church growth program or whatever. You need to be zealous according to knowledge. And then God the Holy Ghost will take you as you fill yourself with His Word, and He will guide you in the ministry He wants for you. He'll lead you to do the things He wants you to do. And that's the alternative to this worldly religion that calls itself Christianity today. It's a very fleshly, unbiblical, worldly religion. Not even the churches who aren't wholesale denying the gospel, and yet they deny it by their actions because they don't preach it, they don't believe in the power of the gospel. And so they come up with all these programs to help change people. And you can look at some of these church websites, and they've got a program for everything. Program for Overeaters Anonymous. I could be the president, I guess. And then you have for children of divorced parents. And then a program for alcoholics. A program for victims of child abuse. And programs for the... The Bible says that there's a program for every one of those things. But it's... It's in built into being born again, having the Holy Spirit in you and being a part of a body, a fellowship where we pray for each other and support each other. And you can come to the pastor and he'll talk with you and pray with you. But to have a special program for every little hang up all of us have is not God's way of doing things. And I'll tell you what, it's actually counterproductive. You come into these programs and you talk so much about yourself. and what's going on inside your mind that it actually is destructive. You need to become less inward torn and outward in your thinking. You need to think like Jesus says, love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, soul and strength. Some people are so inward torn that they can't think about God. They're too busy thinking about me. And then Jesus said, the second commandment is to love your neighbor as yourself. These people don't have time to deal with helping other people because I've got my own problems. And that's what is being zealous without knowledge, another example of it. They think they're doing a good thing because they're bringing people in and we're touching and feeling and caring and sharing. What they're doing is destroying people. And that's just so funny when people go off the deep end into anything like that. We've talked about the environmental movement. environmentalists. It's an admirable thing to want to care for God's creation. I have no problem with that. But what they're doing is killing it. Solar panels, for example. The way they make solar panels actually is worse for the environment than if they didn't make solar panels at all. Because while you can buy one and get off the power grid and all that, in making the solar panels they're throwing a gas into the air that is 70,000 times worse than what they had previously used, but Kyoto, the Kyoto Protocol had banned. So here you have environmentalists who are zealous, but without knowledge. And in the process of making things they say are going to save the environment, they're actually doing damage to it. I believe in the thing that's going on called chemtrailing. And what that is, the government is putting things into the fuel of the airplanes, especially the military planes. And as they fly across, when you see those trails in the sky, you'll notice if you are old enough to remember back when you're a kid, how long those lingered up there. They stay a lot longer than they used to. The reason is because they're actually putting things into the fuel that are supposed to help cool the earth. See, they put things up there that'll actually block certain sun rays before they come into our atmosphere, so it causes a cooling of the Earth, therefore defeating global warming, right? That's the theory. The problem with that is we're on cycles. And now we're getting ready to go into a global cooling cycle. So now they've just contributed to make the Earth even colder than it should be. So now you're going to start hearing more about climate change and the coming ice age. Just mark it down somewhere. That's what you're going to hear in the next few years. More about climate change and the coming ice age. And they're going to scare you to death about the ice age. Over the last 10 years, it's been scaring you to death about burning up. That's just zealous without knowledge. All over the place, you can see this, where people go off the deep end. I've told, I think, all of you about Penn and Teller going out and asking people if they want to ban, what was it again? Dihydrous oxide. Dihydrous oxide, which is the chemical name for water. And people said, oh yeah, that's horrible, that's banned, dihydros, dihydros-oxide. And I said, it's not the fact that they don't know what it is, because obviously I don't know the chemical name for oxygen. I mean, that's how they make their money, is they make everything difficult and use Latin. But the problem was, they didn't ask. None of them looked at the lady they had hired with a camera and said, so what is that? They just said, oh, this stuff, it's in our water. People are dying every year. They said so many people die from this. What's drowning? I mean, yeah, they do. They die. But it's not because of the water. And people are like, that's terrible. We need to ban this. And they were signing a petition. Thankfully, it was fictitious, but they were signing a petition to ban water. Why? Because they're zealous, zealous, zealous, without knowledge. We as Christians have got to be very careful. We don't go off the deep end into every new thing that comes down the pike, the new versions of the new, you know, and purpose-driven, and everybody went up for that. And then Joel Osteen's Best Life Now, everybody's gone for that. And before that, there was the prayer of Jabez. Everybody was into the prayer of Jabez. You know, it's always something new, and everybody goes off the deep end about it. And I'm thinking, how many times are you going to go into those, get involved in these gimmicks, and it doesn't do anything? But then the next one comes along and you're ready to just dump in the deep end with, you know, anything but a simple study of God's word. Anything but we've had Bible studies and it ends up being purpose driven book studies. What is they call it? Bible study. You go there and everybody's got the purpose driven book. Where's your Bibles? Well, we're just reading from this. Well, then that's not a Bible study. Right. Well, look at all the different Bibles they sell. But not just I'm trying to translate. I know what you mean. A Bible for an addict and a Bible for... Where does Peter tell you how to straighten out that swing? Israel, their motive was wrong, and Paul explains it there in verse 3. For they being ignorant of God's righteousness, and going about to establish their own righteousness, have not submitted themselves unto the righteousness of God. the New Baptist Covenant or something like that, where they brought Southern Baptists, American Baptists, all the liberal Baptists. They call themselves Baptists, but they're not. And they deny the fundamentals, they deny the historic Baptist tenets. But it was Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Tony Campolo, Jimmy Carter, all these guys came together for this thing. And you listen... You didn't, and I don't even recommend you do, but I actually listened to see what they had to say. They did not preach the righteousness of God the entire time, but what they did preach the entire time was the righteousness of man. the righteousness of man. And Tony Campolo, who's been idolized by the evangelical youth movement for years, he's a total apostate. He preaches a false gospel. He's pushing homosexual marriage, as he's calling it. And he got up and preached a message that you knew this is a man who knows the truth. This is a man who knows the truth and is purposely turning the words around to preach the righteousness of man. And it was all about how wonderful man is, and how wonderful man, you know, what we can do together. And if we just pull together, we tear down the walls and... That's not the message of Christ. It's not the message of God's righteousness. And when Jesus came, Jesus said things like, there's no one that's good. Jesus said that you're all sinners, unless you repent, you shall likewise perish. I'm pointing at her not because I'm telling her to repent, but because she has a nice bumper sticker there that says so. And they said, we are righteous. We're Abraham's children. We're the offspring of Abraham. They had bought the lie of the righteousness of man, and in doing so, lost the reality that they need the righteousness of God. That's what's so strange. When you hear people mock Christianity, they're not really mocking Christianity. I hear them mocking something that isn't Christianity. They'll say, oh, you Christians, you just think you're holier than thou. Well, wait a minute. No, our message is we're all sinners on our way to hell. Ain't no holiness here except that. The righteousness of Christ is mined by faith in the gospel. They've all believed that, like we talked about before, that first lie of Satan coming out. Ye shall be as gods. Yeah, that's the original lie they believed. The original lie, that ye shall be as gods. That Satan said to Eve. Yeah, establishing your own righteousness. False Christianity or the other world religions, it's either that you can reach God on your own. I think I mentioned that in the pastor's post there in the back of the bulletin. The other religions are you can reach Godhood directly going to that lie of Satan. But either way, you are establishing your own righteousness instead of establishing your own sinfulness and repenting by believing in the gospel and being saved. And that's when you put on the righteousness of Christ. And the Jews, all of Israel, except for a remnant, has never been willing to do that from the time they crucified Jesus Christ and cried out, His blood be upon our heads and upon our children. From that point until now, all but a remnant of Israel rejects the righteousness of God, the righteousness of Christ. Now, he goes on to explain this in a little detail. Read a few verses there, Mike. We're going to read a few verses, verses 4 through 11. For Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone that believeth. For Moses describeth the righteousness which is of the law, that the man which doeth those things shall live by them. But the righteousness which is of faith speaketh on this wise, say not in thine heart who shall ascend into heaven, What, that is, to bring Christ down from above? Or who shall descend into the deep, that is, to bring up Christ again from the dead? But what sayeth it? The word is nigh thee, even in thy mouth and in thy heart, that is, the word of faith which we preach, that if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved. For with the heart man believeth unto righteousness, and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation. For the scripture saith, Whosoever believeth on him shall not be ashamed." So he says, listen, it's not your righteousness, it's the righteousness which has been established by Christ. For those who are still saying Messiah hasn't come yet, he says he's already come. And for those who say he's still dead, we crucified him, he's dead. No, he rose from the dead. And so what then in verse 8? What saith it? The word is nigh thee, even in thy mouth and in thy heart. And that's why in verse 9, if you've ever wondered why, that's why he says that if Thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus." You are saying that He is the Messiah, that He came, that He died, that He was buried, that He rose again and ascended into heaven. When you call Him the Lord Jesus, Jews understand what that means. A lot of these Gentiles out here don't understand what that means, but you're talking to a Jew and you call Jesus the Lord. That was what the confession of a Jew was. The Lord our God is one Lord. So if you were calling Jesus Lord, you were saying He's God. The Jews understood that and they refused to receive Him as Lord and threw Him off, had Him crucified and went about to establish their own righteousness. But if you will confess, the Lord Jesus, and believe in your heart that God has raised Him from the dead, you shall be saved. And it explains why in verse 10, because with the heart man believeth under righteousness, and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation. It takes place in the heart, but it plays out with your confession. You won't confess it if you don't believe it. But if you believe it, you will confess it. You're not saved by confessing. But the fact that you believe, you will confess it. It's just as simple as, you drink water, you're hydrated. It's the water that hydrates you, not the hydration itself. Same thing with, you believe, you confess. And then in verse 11 it says, for the scripture saith, whosoever believeth on him shall not be ashamed. And that's why we go preaching the gospel, and trying to open people's eyes to the gospel because we know we've got the message that if we simply preach the gospel, that's our part. God is the one who comes to that person, convicts them, and saves them. And it's between that person and God whether or not they believe and respond to the message. Be sure to visit our website at kjvbiblebelievers.com where you can find the latest video messages posted on the front page and links to free downloads of our messages in mp3 format. That's kjvbiblebelievers.com. This program is brought to you by Bible Believers Fellowship. Thank you for listening.