Am I Listening to Him?

We have just finished the Festival of Unleavened Bread and are now marching through a period of seven weeks leading up to the Feast of the Harvest of the First Fruits that happens on the fiftieth day. Our life is about producing the fruit for that harvest. It's such an important harvest to God. He is so excited. He is so dedicated and involved in producing character within you and me that is like His own. It is important that we follow our Lord and Savior on the way down this difficult, challenging path that many will try and fuel make, according to His words, and that we are successful at the end.

The only way we can do that is to follow the One who is the way, the truth, and who will give us the life. When you're trying to follow someone, what if you can't really hear Him? Have you ever listened to AM radio at night? If you turn on AM radio, AM stands for amplitude modulation as opposed to FM, which is frequency modulation. And amplitude modulation goes out around the surface of the earth and they put like 50,000 watts or some stations or even 250,000 watts to really push this signal. Well, something happens at sunset.

The sun's interference ceases and this power would just roar if it weren't controlled. AM radio at night goes, well, if you painted a circle, let's say, around KFI in Los Angeles, 50,000 watts in the daytime, you can barely get KFI when you get over to Palm Springs. And that's a 50,000 watt super stage. The same with WLS Chicago. If you take WLS Chicago's signal, it goes out in the greater Chicago area and a bit further.

But at night, that signal can cover most of the U.S. And so if AM radio stations are all on, at night it's just a cacophonomy of noise. And so the FAA regulated what's called clear channels. KFI, KMO, WLS Chicago. These are clear channels. In other words, on their frequency, no other radio station can be on. In Canada, Mexico, or the United States, in a clear channel. With a few exceptions, there's a station in New York and a station in L.A. that have the same frequency and they can both transmit at night.

That's why so many stations go off the air. There is another requirement. You can drop from your maybe 20,000 watts to 5 watts or 50 watts or some ridiculous low and you can still transmit around town at night. But my point is, at night you can tune on AM radio and get two stations at once. I don't know if you've ever done this, but here you've got two people talking.

They're both talking about the same frequency because your local station is maybe 500 watts and the distant one is 50,000 watts, but they're just about the same level where you are. And both people are talking. And it's kind of chatter. It's kind of babble, isn't it? People are talking and you're hearing some words and you kind of think, well, all of them people are talking. What if you wanted to hear one of those two voices? You are a member of God's church and you are constantly being bombarded with two people talking.

Two people talking at the same time, with the same intensity, with a very similar message. And it's very difficult to differentiate between the two. The mind, however, can do a unique thing. You can actually hear two things at the same time and you can choose if you strain your mind to only hear one.

Back in the days when the world tomorrow was out there, it would play right alongside something else. And you could, if you really wanted to, you could pick out Mr. Armstrong's voice and hear it while the other person was still talking to you.

But you have to want to. And which one you listen to is your choice. Maybe you don't want to hear that one. Maybe you want to hear the other one. Well, my purpose today is to distinguish between two individuals who are talking to you at the same time. They both have the same name. They both have a similar message. They both have the same intensity and the same passion.

I want to help warn you of the need that you and I have to listen to one of those individuals. Not simply not bother, but it's actually a need, a strong, powerful urgency that there's a message there that you and I need right now at this time in our life. It is crucial for your salvation. Now in order to accomplish this, of being able to separate two people with the same name and clarify one for the other and help us to understand the need to hear this one message clearly, I want to mess with you just a little bit.

And then I'll return you back to where we were when we're done. First, I have to tell you a story. There was once a guy who lived in the region of Mesopotamia in Ur. His name was Nemerod. Nemerod had a real powerful wife, and he was pretty powerful.

He became a mighty hunter before the Lord. There's lots and lots of legends and interpretations. Some of it's hard to really nail down. But essentially you had a person who organized people in that region of the Fertile Crescent to build a ziggurat, as they're called today, a temple tower of which there's some 300 around the landscape in that part of the world today.

But they want to build a big one that reached all the way up to heaven in sort of a defiance of God, as it were. And so God, as you know the story of the Tower of Babel, came down and broke that up. This individual began the first city-states that... Well, we'll just say the first ones. History can argue who started the first ones. But in the Bible we see he built this town and that town. And in time, his fame, his legend, and his wife's promotion got him to be pretty big.

There's a legend that says righteous Seth killed him. Ouch! Just took him out. Well, his mother, Semiramis... I'm sorry, his wife Semiramis began to concoct the death of a great, a great one, a God, this legendary God. He was the great one and he's died. But, we can just have him died, she had another baby. And he was miraculously reborn. It was a virgin birth. And this newborn is the rebirth of her son. And so the legend goes on.

And now she is the mother, the queen mother, and he is the son. Now, after they died, these things transferred into she became the sun goddess. He became the moon god or the moon boy. He is celebrated at the dark winter solstice. His old self, the old eulog is put in and burned and next day he comes out as the fresh new green tree bringing gifts to mankind, man the branch.

And later, at the spring solstice, his mother, who history says actually married him, if you can believe that, is now the queen mother, the goddess of fertility, named in various forms. They were Isis and Horus. They were in various terms like that. And so the legend grows about these two. And when you get to the time of Ezekiel and Judah is going into captivity, you can read how even at the temple, God takes Ezekiel to the temple in Jerusalem in a vision.

And he says, look, look at here, people are turning their back on me at the temple and are worshipping the rising sun. They are baking cakes to the, you know, the queen mother, as it were. Now Babylon picked up on all of that culture, and they developed it into a system of worship whereby this one who died was represented by the sun.

These things twist and turn down through time. And so a round solar wafer depicting the sun is eaten and it is transubstantiated. The substance changes into the God. And so there's a, all of these things were pre-done by Satan as counterfeits of what would happen later. The term Kana-bail comes from eating Kana and bail God. Okay? You've got your God and you're eating your God. And they believe that their God actually came alive in their mouth. Now Babylon fell, Persia redressed the gods, Persia fell, Greece came along with a very polytheistic culture, Rome adopted that, and we see through a process of Gnostic teaching, what they call Hellenization, all these pagan gods who come up to the time of Jesus Christ and the apostles in the first century.

And we see Rome and its leaders are worshiping many different gods, Mars and Pluto and all these gods and goddesses. But some of the chief among them were still Isis and Horus, referring back to those original two. You had the Madonna, you had the Child, you had the Cross, you had all of this stuff. But Rome loved this. They had holiday in the wintertime called the Festival of Bacchus.

And for about a week they would sort of dethrone the Caesar and they'd put a fool on the throne. And everybody just got drunk for a week. It was a five-day celebration. Everybody just got drunk and let the fool run the country. And that was their big celebration. And then they had the spring celebration of the cult of Isis and the fertility worship and lots of other temples. Well, at some point you have a lot of pressure on Rome. They've been killing off the Christians and you get, I'm just encapsulating this and just really breaking it down small, you get Constantine.

Now Constantine is just a pagan guy, just as pagan as they come. He worshiped lots of gods, but his favorite one was Apollo. When he died, his favorite god was Apollo. But somehow Constantine gets the leaders in Rome and the religious leaders in Rome together in 425 of the Council of Nicaea and they say, look, we've got to get this Roman religion sorted out to where everybody can be united here under one religion. And so what we'll do, we will keep our moon boy, we'll keep our gal, we'll keep this, we'll keep that, we'll keep the festival of Bacchus, we'll rename it, we'll repackage all of these things and we're going to use the name Jesus Christ.

Because my mother is really into that. And she's always over at the Holy Land, you know, figuring out and deciding where all the sites in the Bible were. And so there's a lot of pressure on him. But they formed this church and some of the articles of the church that were passed in 425 were, nothing can be according to the Bible. For instance, the day of worship will be Sunday but it will never touch Sabbath.

It will always have a six-hour gap between sunset and midnight when Sunday begins. Passover can never touch Easter. If the two ever come within a day of each other then Easter has to be postponed a week. But we're going to use all the names and the terminology. So now you come down through time and everybody rides out on the Crusades and now you have, you must, be part of this religion or we'll slay you under the Crusades. We're going to go around and kill you if you don't.

First they're killing you if you are a Christian. Now they've got their version of Christianity and they're killing you if you're not. So coming down through time until today, now we have this explosion of breakouts from that church and everybody's talking about Jesus Christ and they're using the Bible and here you and I are and we are hearing this bombardment about Jesus Christ.

Jesus Christ, the Madonna and child, Jesus Christ, the boy wonder who died and the Yule log came back, the gifts, the whole thing. This is the Jesus and his Queen Mother in heaven and on and on. So this is Jesus Christ. And also we have some stories from the Bible to add to that and when you have a discussion with somebody about Jesus Christ it's going to be, well, you got most of it but you're missing the Sabbath, you're missing the Holy Days.

If we could just tweak your little church a little bit there, you'd be good to go. Not realizing that that Jesus Christ is one individual and that Jesus Christ is talking and you're hearing it. It's in the music, it's in the radio, it's people knocking on your door. It's the concepts that come out of something that Jesus Christ will return and crush, something he calls Babylon the Great, Mother of Harlots. That's Jesus Christ. That's one. Now let me give you a little bit of background as to how he got his name.

Jesus Christ is an invented name, by the way. When the translators of the Bible translated in the various editions, let's take the English Bible for instance. King James in 1611 had this Bible commissioned and he gave direction as to which other translations could or couldn't be involved and it was all very complex and they finally got the Bible.

They translated it all in English except for the name Jesus and the name Christ. For some reason they didn't change that into English. Rather, they kind of made up a different name. For instance, the letter J was first used for the very first time in the mid-1400s by someone in Germany. It wasn't until a century later in the mid-1500s that the letter J was beginning to be used as kind of a yah sound.

It was picked up in the 1600s. The first time the letter J was ever even published in English was in about 1648. So the letter J, if you want to think that the name Jesus is the only name by which a man can be saved, you've got a problem right there with the first letter. The rest of it, you can go on to Wikipedia, you can go back into a worldwide literature and you'll find it's a derived, constructed name from Rome, from the Vatican, from the language of Rome, Latin.

It's not Latin. It's certainly not Greek. It's a constructed name. It's the only thing that wasn't translated. I don't know why. Why didn't they just translate what was in the Bible as his name and make it in English? Instead they came up with this kind of unique name, I guess, that nobody else had. Maybe that was the point. Let's go to the book of Joshua in the Old Testament. If you have a new King James Version, I'd like you to turn there. If not, maybe you can look on with somebody who does have a King James Version. The new King James in the heading of the book of Joshua, this is the header up there, not the actually written word.

This is from the authors. In the second paragraph, let's read this together. Joshua, page 190, second paragraph. The title of this book is appropriately named after its central figure, Joshua. His original name is Hoshai, means salvation. But Moses evidently changes it to Yahashua. Now look at this. Yahweh is salvation. Yahashua. So his name is in English, Joseph. In Hebrew, it's Yahashua, and it means God is salvation. Pretty cool name, isn't it? Who does that really refer to? And what if the one it refers to also had that name? Going on. Dropping down a sentence, this is the Hebrew equivalent of the Greek name, Iesus, Jesus.

Thus the Greek title given to the book and the Septuagint is Iesus Naos, which means Joshua, the son of none. So in the Greek, Iesus, if you translate that to English, is Joshua. My whole point here is that if you translate the Bible into English, all the words, you get Joshua. And then you get the Greek word Christos, Christos, Christ today. That's another word that's kind of, I don't know, they invented that.

It's not Christos from the Greek, it's not from the Latin either. It's kind of a made-up name to Christ. They took off the OS, and I don't know if they did anything else to it, but so you get Jesus Christ, a wholly invented name or a just name. So what I'm going to do, since Yahashua or Iesus means Joshua, if you translate it to English, and Christos, if you translate English, means the anointed or the anointed one. To differentiate between these two people, just for a few minutes, I'm going to refer to another individual who's trying to talk to you as Joshua the anointed one. So we just heard the story down through Babylon of the one people are calling Jesus Christ, and they named him that.

Now we're going to hear the story about Joshua the anointed one.

Joshua the anointed one is just what I'm going to use to differentiate between the two here for a minute, because otherwise it's very, very complicated. They both use the Bible. They both use salvation. They talk about grace. We tend to see some similarities. We'd love it if they would not keep the traditional holidays, but keep the biblical holy days and things like that. And yet, Jesus said, I'm going to utterly destroy this great system when I return. And so the two are diametrically different and opposite. And yet they're both speaking to us at the same time.

So now that we have the clarity and the ability to focus, what is Joshua saying to you and to me?

The title of the sermon today is, Am I Listening to Him? Am I Listening to Him?

Am I Listening? What? Is he talking to me? He stopped talking long ago. He stopped talking in the Gospels. He hasn't said anything since he told the disciples to wait around in Pentecost.

You know, in Jerusalem until Pentecost got there. What could he possibly be saying to me?

Actually, he's been yelling at us. But if we're not careful, our ears will be dull.

And right here in our own Bible, he is yelling with a loud voice at you and me long after the time of the Gospels. And he wants us to listen for our own good. It's crucial that he directs us. He said, the difficult path that many seek few will find. You've got to listen.

But what were the most recent words of Joshua, the Anointed One?

Not the Gospels. You have to go 60 years later in the Bible.

See, the Gospels were written to carnal men. There was not a single person with God's Holy Spirit. Jesus Christ gave some overviews. Joshua the Anointed One gave overviews there.

But now you have the Holy Spirit comes, and there's an opportunity for him to speak to his church, who now understands and has the Holy Spirit. This time he comes and he speaks to his body, to the saints, to the temple of the Holy Spirit. Now, why don't we know that? I mean, you probably do at some level, but why don't we know that? Why isn't that just right on the top of a... If you want to hear from Joshua the Anointed One, why don't you just turn right there and every day just get infused? I think to a degree the church has done us a disfavor in one sense.

And I want to apologize that for a bit. It's not that there's anything wrong. It's just our focus has been a little bit off. You know, when you think about the seven churches in Revelation, what comes to mind? Well, two things typically. I'm talking with people. Number one is the history of seven churches on a mail route. And you kind of get rusty about the history, but that was a long time ago. The second thing that comes up is church eras. There were eras that the church went through in history. Now, both of those things are history, aren't they? It's pretty much just historical stuff and we don't need historical stuff. So that's unfortunately what we've done every time we raise this and we start talking about what was going on in this group or that. It's kind of history or what happened down through time. It's history. It doesn't really have any relevance.

And yet, we are not listening to this one who is the true Joshua the Anointed One who is speaking boldly to you and me. And the result is who's listening to the head of the church. My opinion, nobody. Isn't that amazing? The head of the church and nobody's listening because somehow we kind of relegate that off to something. I'd like you to come with me to Revelation 1. Revelation 1. The number seven is a number of completeness and we have seven weeks between the waving of the first fruits, the sheaf there, and between there and the harvest, a festival of the first fruits. Seven times seven days. That's an important. That's talking to me. That's the total of your life and mine. That's the complete period in which you and I make our travel. We produce our fruit. You know, the unleavened bread theme shifts from being unleavened now to producing fruit for a harvest. We could look at these steps as being crucial and vital. Let's just look here. If you have a Bible, you'll notice that there's red words. You think, well, where do these come from?

You know, the red words were up in the Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, but here's some red words. Well, John begins to say here in verse 1, the revelation of Joshua the anointed one. That's how it would read if they translated into English. I'm not trying to make anything of this, believe me, and we're going right back to Jesus Christ at the end of the sermon, so don't worry.

It's not a sacred name thing or something. But I'm just going to differentiate here. So the voices that are coming in, you can sort of select. The revelation of Joshua the anointed one, which God gave him to show his servants, things which must shortly take place.

Verse 3, blessed is he who reads and those who hear the words of this teaching and those who keep the things which are written in it. Oh, how supremely blessed are you if you hear and do what is about to be said. And yet, how often do you turn here? How often do I turn here? Where's the focus on this?

John, to the seven churches which are in Asia, Grace to you and peace from him who is and who was and who is to come, and from the seven spirits which are before his throne. This is a new living dynamic head of the church. This Joshua the anointed is powerful. He was, he is, he's there. He's got seven spirits in front of his throne. And from Joshua the anointed, the faithful witness, the firstborn from the dead and the ruler over the kings of the earth. Wow! This is not something small. This is huge! To him who loved us and washed us from our sins in his own blood and has made us, it says, kings. But it should say, as your margin says, a kingdom of priests to his God and Father.

To him be glory and dominion forever and ever. Verse 8, here Joshua the anointed one says, I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end.

Who is I am? And who was and who is to come? The Almighty. I'm a powerful individual.

And I, John, both your brother and companion in the tribulation and kingdom and perseverance of Joshua the anointed one was on the island that's called Pacmos for the word of God and for the testimony of Joshua the anointed one. And I was in the spirit on the day of the Lord in this time, this end time, when the end of Satan's age, the six-day age of Satan ends and the day of the Lord or the thousand year reign of the Lord begins. And I heard behind me, bah! You know, the voice of a loud trumpet. If you can imagine, you know, you're looking around, boom! And all you the only way you can describe it is anything that loud is a loud trumpet. Sorry, to the baby.

Woke up the grandkid, I guess. But, and he said, I am the Alpha and the Mega, the first and the last, and what you see right in a book and send it to the seven churches which are in Asia. Two, Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamos, Thyatira, Sardis, Philadelphia, and Laodicea. We've only heard of one of those churches before. These are fairly insignificant churches. In fact, the towns through there were about 300. The number of churches, Jerusalem's not mentioned, Rome isn't mentioned. What about some of the bigger churches? They're not even mentioned. But why is he writing to seven a complete number in a certain area? And this is to be written to them. And then why is it, say, in verse three, blessed is he who reads and those who hear if he's not speaking to you. You know, John was in prison. John was secluded on an island out in the Mediterranean. There's no indication that these words ever went to these seven literal churches. How would he get them there? You know, the mail boat didn't sort of come by and say, you know, where do you want to send your stuff? Maybe they did. Who knows? But we're going to see, this was written to the church, not to insignificant people back in time or to eras of the church, which is a theory. Then I turned to see the voice that spoke with me, and having turned, I saw seven golden lampstands in the midst of the seven lampstands, one like the son of man clothed with a garment down to the feet, and girded about the chest with golden band. And his hair and head were quite like wool as white as snow, and his eyes were like a flame of fire. This one was just bright as light. He is the light, and he is the way, and he shines and shows the way. His head and hair were white as snow. His eyes were like a flame of fire. His feet were like fine brass as it was refined in a furnace, and his voice was like the sound of Niagara Falls.

That's how that translates. Many waters. I don't know how else to translate. It's deafening.

His voice was deafening. That's why I said, well, ago, Joshua the Anointed One is yelling at us. A loud voice. This is important stuff. Are we listening?

He had in his right hand seven stars out of his mouth when a two-edged sword and his countenance was like the sun shining in its strength. And when I saw him, I fell at his feet as dead.

That is your and my living head of this church. He is the Savior, the leader, the head of this body. He is alive. He is dynamic. He is powerful.

But he laid his hand on me, saying, do not be afraid. I am the first and the last. I am your source, and I am your finality. I am he who lives and was dead. This is a long time after he died. I live, and behold, I am alive forevermore. And I have the keys of Hades, meaning the unseen realm is how the margin describes that. The unseen realm is simply the spirit world and of death.

You've got this, you know, it's either going to be life or death. Hades can mean the grave. It can mean all kinds of things. Here it says it's the unseen realm. One or the other is what we end up with. Write the things which you have seen and the things which are and the things which will take place after this. Now he defines these things. The mystery of the seven stars, which you saw in my right hand, and the seven lampstands. The seven stars are the angels. Note the margin. They're the messengers of the seven churches, and the seven lampstands, which you saw, are the seven churches.

You know, this complete number, Jesus, the one that we call Jesus, this Joshua the anointed one, is the head of his church. And let's just notice something. Let's notice how involved he is. Let's notice how encouraging, how directing he is. He says in chapter 2 in verse 1, 2, the messenger of the church at Ephesus writes, These things says he who holds the seven stars, those are the messengers, those are the messengers, and his right hand who walks in the midst of the golden lampstands, and those are the seven churches. He is walking in the middle of his church. He's not stuck off somewhere uninvolved. This powerful individual is walking among you and me. He's very active, and he is coming with the keys of life or death. And he says, I know your works. Ah, get some credit there. Now here's what he's saying to you and to me. Now we could take these seven churches over seven weeks between now and the festival of the harvest of the firstfruits. These are about us, seven distinct examples from seven existing congregations, and we could take one a week and they could help guide us during our life or even during this seven-week period.

But this is broken down into, again, the number seven. I know your works. Ah. We're all about the work, aren't we? We use that term like it really is a huge merit. If you do the work, well, that's it. It's all the work, the work, the work, the work, the work. And he says, I know your works. I know your labor. I know your perseverance, and that you cannot bear those who are evil. Does that not describe you and me? We're busy. We're doing the work. We're keeping the commandments. And we can't even bear those who don't keep the commandments. I mean, pasha, pasha.

We'll just run you out the door if you just can't keep the commandments. That's just, that's the worst. I mean, we stand for right, don't we? We know the laws. Don't you dare eat that shrimp.

Don't you have that unleavened bread. Don't, whatever. Don't you, whatever. We're all over the law. We know the commandments. And that, we know the commandments. And we do the work. And we're good to go. Right? And we persevere. And you have tested those who say they are apostles and are not, and have found them liars. You're also spiritually intelligent.

And you have persevered and have patience and have labored for my namesake and have not become weary.

You are good to go. Well, he didn't say that. I added that. Nevertheless, verse 4, I have this against you that you left your first love.

All you have to do is look above chapter 2. And what does it say? The loveless church.

You can do all of that and miss out on the kingdom. That's lesson number one.

That's the lesson that he gives us in the first message to the first church.

You've left your first love. It's the loveless church. You're all about law. You're all about deeds. You're all about this. You're all about that. But love God with all your heart, soul, and might. Where is our mentality? We here in the God family are waiting for you to develop this mentality that we can harvest. Why are you the one that's going to have to come up to me in the end? And we say, but Lord, Lord, we prophesied in your name. We did the work and we did all these things and we didn't like people who broke the law. And they say, I don't know you, you who didn't love like the family of God loves. You see, right here there's no replacement for developing godly character. And the godly character is love. God is love. His command is to love. Jesus' command to us, the new command is love. Others as I have loved you. There is no replacement.

Remember, therefore, from where you have fallen and repent and do the first works. What's the first works? Back up to the verse 4. Love. Repent of whatever it is you've gotten going in your life and this religion or whatever it is you've done. And do what I've told you to do. It's a huge lesson. Now, notice what he follows it up with in the middle of verse 5. Or else, I will come to you quickly and remove your lampstand from its place unless you repent.

That is a group or a person, me. I'll just take the credit right here. That is me. When I get involved in doing the work and whatever all the work is and there's lots of work to do, you'll be very busy about the work. That's me. When I'm doing all those things and really about the truth and all this stuff. And yet, where's the love? Oh, I kind of got busy doing the work. Do you ever see that in your life? And we're on the verge at that point of having him come quickly and take us out of the church. Turn that Holy Spirit off.

That's good to know, isn't it? On this difficult path to the kingdom of God.

But this thing you have that you hate the deeds of the Nicolaitans, which I also hate.

There's a lot of discussion, let's say, among commentators as to who the Nicolaitans were.

And you can get a lot of stories. I got my own story. One of theirs. It's basically that Nicholas was probably a very good member of the church and a very somewhat wealthy member. In other words, he had enough means by which he could serve and help a lot of people. And so, Nicholas became known for being a very loving, helpful individual more than anyone else.

And people esteemed him as being very spiritual. Now, there's a following called the Nicolaitans, who evidently saw that these deeds of benevolence to others were higher than just doing what God commanded. Just keeping the Sabbath, or just keeping the Holy Days, or just loving your neighbors yourself, and things like that. These actually were greater expressions of benevolence. And so, they're developed a mentality of you need to go beyond the commandments. We've had this in our church culture in the past, where somebody came and says, you know, if you just do what you're told, you know, if you just do what you're told, that doesn't really show what's in your heart. What you need to do is not do what you're told and come up with some other things, like worship on a different day, come up with your own little holy days, and you know, kick the sacraments anytime you want. You know, this is just, come on, let's really maybe jump around and praise more. You know, come on, show it. Come up with your own stuff.

And so, you go above and beyond. In fact, what that is, is lack of submission to God's authority. In other words, disobedience. Not doing what you told me, but I'm doing something better.

And so, the Nicolaitans were associated with those who broke the law but actually did better.

And Jesus said, that thing which I also hate, because He can't have anyone who is not submissive to the authority of the God family. Now, in verse 7, it says, He who has an ear. Now, if you have an ear, I don't know. I can't give you an ear. I can't open a mind. You can't either. So, that's up between you and God. Most of the time, God said, we have given them a spirit of dull hearing so that seeing they cannot see and hearing they cannot hear. Most people are not able to hear. And so, He says, He who has an ear. He who the Father has opened up with the Holy Spirit to be able to understand. He who has an ear, let Him hear what the Spirit says to the churches. This is not to the people in Ephesus or Smyrna or any of the other ones. It's to those who have ears to hear, to the converted, the called. If you have an ear to hear, let Him hear what the Spirit says to all the churches.

Don't pick a favorite and associate with that message. It's all of them. They are all seven wonderful lessons. And He says, to Him who overcomes, yes, we are on this difficult journey, this path of life. He who is victorious is what the word overcomes me. He was victorious in this quest and gets to the door. He says, I personally will give Him to eat of the tree of life, which is in the midst of the paradise of God. Now, just to show that this has really nothing to do with the Church of Ephesians, other than to use something that was understandable within that group, or as an example of that group, he just saw that he who overcomes, I'll give to eat from the tree of life, which is in everybody in Revelation 22 gets to eat from the tree of life, okay, and the paradise of God. The next one, he'll say, I'll give you this. Everybody gets that. You go out to Philadelphia. They're going to get his name written on him. Everybody gets the name written on him. You'll find in Revelation 19. He's talking in seven lessons to the Church. In conclusion, has God given you ears to hear? That's between you and God. My purpose today is to say, if you do have ears to hear, listen to what Joshua the Anointed One is saying to the Church.

And actually, Jesus Christ is saying to the Church. And you say, but I'm not sure about that name now.

Well, remember, he's the one who said, many will come in my name, saying I'm the Christ, and will deceive many? And what name do they use? Jesus Christ. And he called it his name. So he's okay with it. And there's nothing at all wrong with that. So the question is, are you hearing what Jesus Christ is saying to his Church? In Hebrews 12, I'd like to conclude by reading some verses beginning in verse 25. Because it puts this all together, Hebrews 12 and verse 25. And if you will focus on listening to Jesus Christ speak to you, and be able to clarify the clutter of all the messages out there, and realize one uses the name Jesus Christ, and the other one is Joshua the Anointed One. These are two different individuals with two different messages, and it's vitally important that you listen. And if you have ears to hear, you need to be doing that.

You really need to be doing that on a regular basis. Hebrews 12 verse 25, "...see that you do not refuse him who speaks." I've been refusing him, have you? I've relegated those words that he's been saying to the Church to incidental stuff, just kind of writing it off. And yet, see that you don't refuse him who speaks, that powerful individual that walks among his Church, that slices and dices and knows us, and can separate every marrow and join in our mind, in our heart, in our character.

We need him, brethren, if we're going to make this journey a success. So don't refuse him who speaks. For if they did not escape who refused him who spoke on earth..." Remember when he was up on Mount Sinai, and he spoke so loud, and the brave people said, no, we don't want to hear him. Well, now John is there, and he's speaking so loud, like a trumpet, like waterfalls, it's just crushing. We said, well, I think I'd rather turn to the Gospels and hear some parables. Nothing wrong with parables. They're good. But here's a direct admonition and correction for those of us who have God's Holy Spirit. "...much more shall we not escape if we turn away from him who speaks from heaven. Therefore," verse 28, "...since we are receiving a kingdom which cannot be shaken, let us have..." The Greek word here means possession with alarm.

"...let us have possession of something with great alarm, urgency, the grace God's favor, cherist God's favor." We need to possess God's favor with urgency, because Jesus Christ is judging you and me. And we need to be paying attention and repenting to what he's saying. "...by which we may serve God acceptably with reverence and godly fear. For our God is a consuming fire." In other words, grow in righteousness or burn. And it carries right over into the next verse. There's no chapter break. "...let brotherly love continue." So we need to listen. If we have ears to hear, we need to pay attention. And the most important thing that we've seen in lesson number one is love. That mentality of God. We must have that love. Otherwise, there's nothing for him to harvest. So, brethren, are you listening to him?