What Is Faith, Really? Why the Greek Word Pistis Changes Everything

Hey, everybody. Welcome to Vine Abiders with me, Chris White. You can search for Vine Abiders

on YouTube. You can also find us wherever you get your audio podcast, which is what I hope

to be putting out more of these audio podcasts on a fairly regular basis as I have time.

I am doing research for a much broader project. And so I hopefully will be learning things

along the way and doing podcasts about them. And that's the case in this particular episode,

where I'm talking about a pretty important subject, which is faith. What is faith? And it also

sort of includes the idea of what is the gospel. Like we all think that we know what faith is

and what the gospel is. But there's a pretty good chance that like me, I didn't really have a

full understanding of what that meant. So this particular episode is inspired by a couple books

from Matthew Bates, who wrote a book called Gospel Allegiance and a book called Salvation

by Allegiance alone. I think Salvation by Allegiance alone was his first book. Gospel Allegiance

was his second book, which is one that I read. It's also an audio book form. Also Scott McKnight,

who is a person I've interviewed before and read his book in preparation for that interview.

He wrote a book called The King Jesus Gospel, which essentially has the same premise that Matthew

Bates does in terms of what the gospel is. But Matthew Bates's contribution here is to go a little

further in terms of what does faith mean. And you can probably guess based on the title of his

book Salvation by Allegiance alone, that he is going to propose that the word pistis in the Greek

in the context of salvation means faithfulness or obedience or allegiance, basically like bending

the knee. That's what pistis means in the context of salvation when used by the New Testament authors

in that way. And so I'll go through some of that. But I think before we do, we need to understand

what these guys are proposing that the gospel is. And they would both point out, which I think

the early church would agree with. And they make that point here too, that the gospel is the

objective facts concerning the career in total of Jesus as Messiah, his pre-existence, his

incarnation, his death for sins, yes, but also his burial, his resurrection, his appearances,

and crucially his enthronement, the sending of the spirit and even his future return are all part

of the gospel. That's why they're called gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, is that the whole

story is important to understand what the gospel is. So they would say is the story of his royal

career. They would argue that the New Testament authors specifically Paul in 1 Corinthians 15

and Romans 1, 1 through 4, the crucial gospel passages, define the gospel as the narrated story

of how Jesus became the Christ, became the Messiah, the anointed one, the king. I think of it as

you're trying to convince someone that this guy is the king of the universe, like that's the gospel.

And part of that, especially in the first century, if you're talking to a Jew, they already know

that a king is coming, the Messiah. So convincing them that Jesus was the Messiah is a really important

part of that story. You've got to convince them that their king was Jesus. So that's why some

of the gospel start off with a genealogy. It's like this guy fulfills the prophecies that he

was going to come from the line of David and he did all the fulfills all these other prophecies

in the Old Testament. But you could go on to say, his death and resurrection, we could go on,

and they do talk about how all those things that are pointed out by Paul, for example,

in 1 Corinthians 15, the resurrection, the appearances, all the stuff is important to that story.

But it does make sense. And one thing the gospel is not is all the various things that different

sort of groups say that the gospel is. You know, some people just say it's justification by faith,

which is the idea that you just need to believe that there's nothing that you can do and

that Jesus did at all. And essentially, that's the gospel, like the idea that you can't do anything

that faith alone is the gospel. Some, like I used to believe, was a version of that, but really

focused in on the atonement theory aspect of it. So atonement theory is kind of the question about,

well, how did Jesus die for our sins? Now, it's important that a part of the gospel is that

Jesus died for our sins, right? There in 1 Corinthians 15, Jesus died for our sins. That's all

it says about it, that he died for a sins. It does not tell you how he died for our sins,

much to my chagrin. I really wish it did. But it just goes on and he appeared to the, you know,

and rose again and all the other parts that Paul does consider important, well, also important

to the gospel. So died for our sins is a part of it, but it's certainly not it's a minor part of it.

You could say it's like one tenth of the gospel, but getting back to the main point, what is the

gospel? The gospel is the facts of Jesus's life, specifically those facts that convince you that

not only is he the promised Messiah to the Jews, but that he is the king of the universe. He is

the son of the God, the rightful God has given him all power and authority. He is it. He is the

king of kings and Lord of lords and the facts of his story, including his pre-existence that he

was with God in the beginning, his resurrection, his appearances, you know, that his enthronement,

his soon return, all this stuff, including his death for sins and burial, all of those things

are the gospel. Anything that can convince you that he is your rightful king and that you

ought to submit to him is the gospel. Okay, so I hope you've made it this far and this podcast,

because now I'm getting to the main point. The reason I wanted to do this podcast is to talk about

Matthew Bates's particular emphasis, which is on the word faith, because what is the response

to the gospel? We know what the gospel is now, but what do you do once you hear that? You have faith.

So how do you get saved? You have faith. And again, the Greek word is pistis. You got different

forms of it, pistio and different things. But we sometimes, you know, translate that as a belief,

intellectual belief, something that happens in your head. Some people will try to get, you know,

real deep and say, actually, it means trust. But really, that's just the same kind of thing.

Trust is another thing that just happens in your head, basically. It's not that much different

than belief, but that's how I've heard it preached many times. But what Matthew Bates brings out

and is that the word belief has a much broader meaning. And especially with regard to salvation

language, it means faithfulness. It means allegiance, as he's chosen his main word to define it as.

But what I want to bring out first is what this solves. This is kind of like a rosetta stone,

a key that unlocks a lot of the New Testament, and just makes it all make sense. It certainly

resolves a lot of problems that different people have with regard to the question of

satireology. How do you get saved? So for example, the free grazers. These are the people that

insist that, you know, they take it to, it's just most extreme that they'll point to John 3, 16. It

says, whoever believes in him should not perish in that word believes there is like Pistillo,

which is a form of Pistus. Whoever believes in him, and they just take that modern English word and

say, I believe in Jesus. And then they, they might define what it is that they need to believe in.

The fact that he existed, some of them won't go quite that loosey goosey. They'll say, well,

you need to believe in his crucifixion or believe that he died for you. And there's nothing that you

could do, whatever, they'll come up with a reason what you need to specifically believe in the facts

of. They may even go so far as to say, it believes means trust. And you need to trust him that he

died for your sins or something like that. But basically, it's an intellectual event. And they

say, all you have to do is do that intellectual exercise. And you're saved. I don't want to hear

anything else about it. But the problem is, of course, that you might have the church of Christ

people come up and say, well, what about Acts 238? It says, then Peter said to them, repent and

be baptized every one of you. I mean, you can't go to a church of Christ without hearing about

that because they'll, their big thing is everybody's got to be, you cannot be saved unless you're

baptized. And so, you know, how do you deal with that for graces? It says right there, repent and

be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the remissions of sins. And you shall

receive the gift of the Holy Ghost or Luke 13 says repentance. I tell you, nay, but accept ye

repent. You shall all likewise perish. So now we've got, wait a second, are we believing or re-repenting?

And now we've got public confession in on it, Romans 10, 9, that if you shall confess with thy

mouth, the Lord Jesus and shall believe in thy heart. So now we've got the believe, the pistis

and confessing with our mouth. So we now, we've got sort of a bunch of responses to the gospel.

We could go even further, Matthew 24 says that we have to endure to the end the same shall be saved.

So in addition to believing and repenting and baptizing and confessing, we also need to endure

to the end in order to be saved. And to just pile on, we have verses like James 2, 24 and Romans 2,

13 that says that you have to have works. You see that how many by thy works a man is justified

and not by faith only. So you're justified by your works and specifically not by faith only.

So all of this is resolved by understanding that the word pistis or faith, your response to the

gospel is, and we'll go into the technical stuff that people like Matthew bates go into. But first,

let me just say it for my own words. So faith, pistis means, in at least in the context of salvation,

it means allegiance, bending the knee, agreeing that this guy, you know, he says he's the son of God,

he says he is the king of kings. And if I hear this news that we have a king here,

I'm going to bend the knee and say, look, that's it. You're my king, you're my Lord. And so what's next,

you know, in the same way that if you were in the feudal system in the middle ages or whatever,

if you bent your knee to a feudal Lord, a king or whatever, and you said, look, you're the king,

what you say goes, that's the same kind of thing. There was no works involved there. You didn't have

to get circumcised to do it. You didn't need to do anything. The bending of the knee is essentially

in your heart. It's a mental thing that you do, a deciding to do it. It goes in line with other

places in the Bible that says what you need to do to be saved is repentance towards God. What does

that mean? Repentance, of course, means metanoia or a change of mind. Meta means a change as in

metamorphosis. And noia means mind. You change your mind. You change your mind about God. Repentance

towards God means that you've decided that God was not your God before, but you're going to go

180 degrees, change your mind about God. He is now your king. He's now your Lord. The way that

you resolve all these different things that says, well, you got to get baptized or, you know,

Jesus says, if you love me, you'll keep my commandments. If you, who hears my words and doesn't do

them is like a man who built his house on the sand and great is the fall of that house.

My point here is this, if you believe that if you hear this and you say, goodness gracious,

it sounds like Jesus is the Messiah. You mean he's like the promised king and like he's coming

and later and he's got this other kingdom and I can be a part of it and I can, you know, be freed

from sin and all this other stuff and you agree to that and say goodness, well, he's my Lord

then. Well, that implied not just then, but it should now that you'd be like, well, okay,

he's my Lord. What now? Well, I'm going to read the things that he says and he says, get baptized

and he says, do this and don't do that. And so the idea of having faith or faithfulness in Jesus

is to do what he says because he's your Lord. If you look at the Gospels and you're reading what

Jesus says because you think he's your king and you're Lord and you're like, okay, I got a Lord

now. I better go figure out what he wants and you don't do it. Well, you don't have pistis. You

don't have faithfulness. You're, that's why all this language in the New Testament about, look,

you say you got faith, but you don't have works. Obviously, you're not, you're not, you don't have

faith because you're not doing what he said. You call him Lord, Lord, but you're not doing the

things that he said. And in that context, Lord means somebody, a master. You know, I often think

of it is like if how easily we would follow some yogi or something who said, look, I'm your master.

You want to learn how to levitate when you cross your legs and stuff. You got to follow me and

be my disciple and do everything that I said. And if you don't do everything that I said, I'm not

going to teach you how to levitate or whatever. Well, you go follow that guy and do everything that

he said. And he would be your master. And we don't even give Jesus the King of kings and Lord

of lords who's been given all power and authority in heaven who's coming to judge the world. According

to their deeds, we don't even give him that the, the, the, the, if we call him Lord, then do the

things that he says. And I think that's the big story here is that he's got this whole thing about

what he says. And we have structurally as a church, mostly because of Martin Luther disarmed

ourselves from doing that because Martin Luther's greatest contribution to Christianity was to say

that we don't have to do the things that Jesus said. In other words, Martin Luther taught us that

Jesus said all this real hard stuff, but he was really kind of winking at us and saying, look,

I'm going to tell you to do this stuff. But what I really am trying to get you to believe is that

you don't have to do this stuff. And in fact, I'm just saying all this stuff so that you'll know

that it's really too hard for you to do anyway. And so it's kind of like a wink, wink, nod, nod. I'm

going to say this stuff. I'm going to say you need to do them. I'm going to say that you need to

teach people to obey my commandments and to, but I really don't want you to. In fact,

Luther would go so far as to say to even teach his commandments in a, in the sense that you need to

do them is the sin. Alright, let's move on to what Bates would say about this term faith and how

essentially faith means allegiance or faith means faithfulness. So again, the Greek word is

pistis. It's got a verbal form. Pisteo, probably pronouncing that wrong. But basically it's

undergone a very narrowing thing in modern English to the effect that we might just say it means

belief, which is a really not very hard thing to do in modern English to believe something,

or even to trust something, you know, if we think that that's all it is. But Bates suggests that

the New Testament speaks of pistis as constancy, reliability, fidelity. He would also say that

rather than faith being a one-time passive acceptance of a gift, it's an active state of being

faithful to have pistis is to be a faithful subject of the king. In other words, faithfulness.

He agrees that pistis and pisteo can mean what we think of as belief. So for example, in the New

Testament, it does seem to mean belief in certain contexts such as having faith that Jesus can do

miracles. A lot of the healing stuff uses faith in that way. So it's not that faith doesn't mean that.

It's not that everybody was wrong and that faith never meant or can't mean anything like what we

think of as belief or faith. But it's just like pretty much every other word in any language,

it can have multiple meanings. But what he does is shows that when it is used in terms of salvation,

it's used in this royal sense. When a king announces his reign, the required pistis from his subjects

was not merely a belief that he existed or a belief that he was the king, but it was a public

declaration of loyalty expressed through obedience. He gives evidence. One interesting one is from

the Jewish historian Josephus. Remember, Josephus existed and wrote in Greek around the same time,

not much longer than when Jesus was on the earth. He says, evidence from Jewish historians,

Josephus is particularly instructive in his autobiography Josephus recounts commanding a rebel leader

to repent and believe in me. And he quotes the Greek basically pistis and whatever. The analysis

suggests that Josephus was not asking for a religious conversion or a mental agreement with

his propositions, but for the rebel to turn away from his present course of action and become a loyal

to Josephus as his leader. He also goes through the Bible, lots of different places, Romans 1, 5,

Romans 16, 26, talking about terms like the obedience of faith, which he argues is, you know,

a legent obedience, the obedience that comes from allegiance. It's obvious, isn't it? If you declare

that you're going to be a legent to Jesus, that's the one thing you got to do. You've got to go from

the kingdom of darkness to the kingdom of light. Now Matthew Bates doesn't do this, but I kept

thinking the whole time because I'm also trying to study the atonement here and what exactly

a Satan's role in all this. And I'm really starting to understand that we have this free will

allegiance to his kingdom and that God's not breaking that rule. Like what we need to do is give

our allegiance to another with our own free will. And anyway, I won't go into that right now,

but I will say that does bring up a big point here, which is why do people like a Calvinist?

Why do they hate this so much? For example, if you get excited about this and you go and tell

your pastor, hey, I've heard that faith was like faithfulness and that we need to sort of like,

you know, bend the knee to Jesus and then do the things that he said and you're going to get

come down on like you believe in heresy. And I want to explain why they would have such a strong

reaction to this, especially if they have kind of reformed a tradition. And it really does come

down to the belief in free will. So remember, Luther absolutely did not break both, well, it's

Augustine is really the problem. But Luther was an Augustinian monk. He followed Augustine as if

he was a saint. And one of the and Augustine taught that we didn't have free will. Augustine is

where we get total depravity from, which is a derivative of the free will argument or you can

look at it both ways. Maybe the lack of free will is a derivative of total depravity. But nevertheless,

you know, Luther said free will is a mere lie. Of course, we all know that Calvinist and Calvin

did, you know, expressly did not believe in free will. And if you don't believe that we have the

free will to choose God, right? So they would say they don't like to say this. But if you press them,

they will say that that salvation comes before repentance or anything else, that God has to

independently of anything that you do, certainly not you bending the knee or anything like that.

Just out of nowhere, essentially, for reasons that you will never know and have nothing to do with

his foresight of what you will do or anything for, in other words, for random reasons, God saves

you out of nowhere. And then you can have obedience and bend the knee and baptize or whatever.

So what comes before salvation or salvation comes before faith is another way to say it. You can't have

faith on your own because you don't have free will to have that. You have to be saved first,

and then you can have faith. So to them, the idea that you're saying that you can hear the gospel

and bend the knee, choose to have faith and then be saved is structurally impossible.

Now they probably wouldn't think of it that way. Most of them would just be thinking of it as saying

something to the effect of you believe in a work salvation. I mean, they're not even thinking about

total depravity or whatever. They just hear this as works. Oh, you need to continue to be faithful

to Christ in order to be saved. Well, that really comes down to once saved always saved, doesn't it?

And so if you believe in one saved always saved, then everything that I'm saying here just can't work

because it implies that you could cease to be saved. You could cease to be faithful that you could

really have been saved and then cease to be saved. And of course, really, that comes down also to

the free will argument. I could talk about that, but it's basically total depravity. I won't go

into all that right now. But what you need to know is that you can be cut off. You can be spit out.

You can abide in the vine. You can have seeds and begin to grow and the cares of this world and

the deceitfulness of riches. And you can wither on the vine. You can die. You can't, I mean, there's

a million ways to say in the New Testament. I was thinking about this the other day. When I actually

I had a moment that was like the the prodigal son, I was totally saved. Absolutely. The Holy Spirit,

the whole thing. Then I went through once I learned about one saved always saved. I did go back

to my sin for about 10 years. I don't know how exactly how long. And during that time, I I was

completely, you know, given over back to my sin. But I totally believed I was saved because I

believed that I totally had been saved before. And if one saved always saved was true, that's what I

would point to. Am I going to heaven? Yes, because I totally was saved back then. But once I was

convicted and the whole point of this story is to say that that initial conviction that got me

to the prodigal son moment was not doctrine. In fact, I think if somebody came to me and said,

look, once I've always saved isn't true. Here's all these 50 plus verses that say explicitly in

the Bible that once I've always saved isn't true, I couldn't believe it. And this is part of my

story. I just couldn't. I don't think I could have heard that no matter what anybody did. And it was

just this conviction that I had to stop drinking alcohol or I was going to hell. I couldn't shake it.

It was so strong that I just did it. I just quit. And I knew that I had to quit forever because

like if I didn't, I was going to go to hell. And it was only then when I woke up the next morning,

I was like, oh, this is, I have that same freedom, that same power, that same, you know, supernatural

change that I remember from the 10 years ago when I initially repented from my sins and was given

that same power. And so it was only after that that in that month or so after that the scales

literally fell for my eyes. And I talked to my wife about this the other day because in my head,

it was the same thing with her. Like I, it was like, I knew all the passages about that you could

lose your salvation. I knew of them all. I mean, you can't read the Bible and not see them. They're

on like every page. But I just couldn't see them at the same time. It was like I had scales for

my eyes. Like I was literally spiritually blinded. And it was like they just fell for my eyes. It was

almost like a day. And I talked to Connie about it. I was like, did that happen to you too? And she's

like, yeah, that was exactly what happened to me. It just was like I was spiritually blind. And then

just, no, I didn't need somebody to teach me the passages about one. They've always saved it. It's

just like they were all there because I read the Bible. And so I do think that spiritual blindness,

you know, it says that Satan blinds the minds of the unbelievers. And I think that that's part

in part what's happening because we refuse to repent, because we refuse to give our allegiance.

And we know that allegiance would mean obedience. If you believe what Jesus says, then you're

going to have to be like, well, I guess I'm going to have to quit drinking or whatever your favorite

sin is, is on the chopping block. And that's really what salvation is. That's why repentance

is so tied to salvation. Because if you're going to say that Jesus is your Lord, well, you're

going to have to give up that thing that you love more than Jesus. And it's not negotiable. It's

not like, and it's only then after repentance, it says then the refreshing comes from the Holy

Spirit after repentance and acts. So you can't get the refreshing, you know, you're asking for

God to give you freedom from the desires of it. Well, you got to repent first. And I feel like

repentance is helped by the idea that you're going to go to hell. And hell isn't a good place.

It's not something that you can get used to like a hot tub. Go watch hell testimonies on YouTube.

That really, and this again wasn't something I did before. I got to say it was only after. But

it has helped me sense to be like, oh, wow. Yeah, you can't, you can't go there. That's

that absolute non-negotiable. I will absolutely do whatever is needed. And I think people hear this

when they think of it as white nucleine, you know, that they must be really hard to be me to not live,

you know, and do all these sins. And first of all, I'm not talking about sinless perfection,

but I am talking about those big sins. They're gone. The, the sins that Jesus says you're going to go

to hell if you do them. I don't do them anymore. I just don't do them anymore. But that doesn't

mean I don't have other sins that I'm worried about and working on. And it's hard. Whatever I'm

on right now is what I, it's hard. And eventually, I'm going to get to a place where I repent from

that sin altogether too. Now that sin right now for me, I've said it before is kind of like,

you know, getting high from eating carbs, like I'm getting there. I'm very, very close. But I

call it getting high. It's basically just eating carbs or any kind of refined carbohydrate gives you

boost in dopamine, right? And so I finally realize that's like, that's why I like carbs is because

I'm essentially getting high from it. And so I'm there. You know, I'm, you know, working on it.

It's not, and I know it's sin now. I mean, it's, it's, it, it, if eating carbs isn't to sin,

then smoking isn't to sin because it's just as bad as smoking. You know what I mean? And you'll

say, well, smoking isn't sin. Okay, maybe not. But I guess what I'm saying is I'm now in the realm

of things that you could argue. I mean, they're not specifically said in the Bible, you know,

that you can't eat carbs. Or here's another one that is in the Bible, which is anger and unforgiveness

and stuff. So we're going through a hard time right now with, you know, medical stuff. And if you've

been in the medical world a lot, people do terrible things. People always talk about you got to be your

own advocate and all this stuff. And they're really doing things that are like worthy of me

ruminating about them and be like, I can't believe they did that. I mean, that they were, you know,

whatever. And it's a battle that I've got to fight every day. But I'm absolutely unrelenting

about it. Like if this thing happens where they do something that's terrible and worthy of being

mad at them about, like I'm battling out that because I have a, I have absolutely no unforgiveness

policy in my life. I know a no anger policy. I do not let the sun go down in my anger. I am battling

it. If something's bad happening, I'm forgiving. I'm praying for that person. I'm getting rid of it.

So it's not that I don't have that temptation to sin or even sometimes the sinning within

those kinds of things. I'm reminded of a story that David Burso said in one of his recent

audios. He was talking about how he views this whole thing, you know, examine yourself to see whether

or not you're in the faith. Am I in the faith? Am I going to have an yes? Am I looking at myself

saying, if I die right now, I'm going to have an I finally have assurance of salvation not because

of I did one thing one time, but because I can do like Paul said, examine myself to see whether

or not I'm in the faith. Oh, yeah, I'm definitely in the faith. There's a Holy Spirit. I'm feeling good.

I feel like, you know, I know that I'm in the faith. I'm not deceiving myself. You know,

don't deceive yourself. Those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God. I can look at

those passages and be like, yeah, that's not me. I'm not doing those things. So, but it's not hard.

Again, one of the things I wanted to say was that this is freedom. This is what you want.

It's not like I'm burdened by the desire to do all these things. The desire's lesson that what

you want is the lesson of the desire. And that only comes once you decide to never do them again

and to start battling. Start with the big sin that you love more than anything. If you're not

willing to repent from that one, well, you can't start this journey. You got to start with the one

that has its hooks in you so deeply that you would literally think about going to hell for it.

Like, that's the one that you need to worry about. Don't worry about the small things. First,

that's what if you can't, it won't start until you get rid of that one. It won't start.

Jesus says, you know, who has the plan heading to the plow and looks back isn't worthy of me.

You know, let the dead go bury the dead, et cetera, et cetera. So, don't even try it unless you're

willing to give up that one. But as soon as you recognize that you're going to either go to hell or

you're going to keep or you're going to get rid of that thing, well, then you can start this

journey of bending the needy Christ. And it's easier and he's gracious and he does give you time

to work on the next thing. And you're sitting there and he doesn't give it to you all in one

sitting, you know? He doesn't say, okay, you got rid of that. Now, here's 50 other things that

you're sitting. He usually just points to another really big one and says, okay, now this one,

let's let's work on this. And that's what sanctification looks like in my life anyway.

And I hope that's what it looks like in your life as long as you've been the need. I finished

with a story from David Burso. He said, when he was in college, he got this test from his professor

and he was sort of like, you know, really gung ho, always the guy who raised his hands like you

with the right answer. Nobody else was even trying to raise her hand, but he was very serious and

wanted to get it done. And he was right in his hand. He got all the right answers. And one test,

he actually got the answer right, but he got it marked wrong on the test. And he went to the

professor and said, hey, look, you marked this wrong, but it's actually right. And the professor

was like, oh, you know, actually, you're right. I guess my answer key was wrong and you were right.

And so, but he didn't change the grade. And David Burso was like, what do you mean you're not going

to change the grade? I was I was right and you were wrong. He's like, yeah, but if I change your

grade, I have to go back and change everybody else's grade. And we're just not going to do that.

You're just going to get the whatever the C or the B that was on the test. And he was like, well,

that's not fair at all. I mean, you know, I, you know, whatever, because he's trying to,

you know, get this really great grade and stuff like that. And he said, the professor looked at him

and said, don't sweat it, Burso. You're going to pass the class. And I think that was helpful,

because the idea is, look, I am I might seem to you as if I am like, you know, white knuckle in this

situation and completely worried that I'm going to go to hell. And I do think that we do need a

healthy fear of God in order to endure the various temptations that we're going to get throughout our

lives. Um, but I'm on the narrow road and I'm safely on it. And I can examine myself. I'm in the

faith and I there is grace plenty of grace in this road, but you have to have faithfulness. You

need to be a faithful, a legend servant to the gospel. What's the gospel? Jesus is the king of

the universe. And he is the only king. Every knee shall bow to him. You can only serve one master.

This is a situation you cannot fail. And here he is with his arm outstretched saying, will you follow

me? Will you be my disciple? And will you bow the knee to me? And what that means is that you have

free will to do that, to make that decision. And what that means is you go find out what he wants.

Read the gospels for the first time and understand that you can do that. Not by your own power,

but through the Holy Spirit that he gives you once he cleanses you with his blood and gives you

that freedom, that cleansing of your for completely forgiving and forgotten, all those previous sins,

all those different failings, even if you once experienced salvation, but you didn't now. I mean,

you've obviously been off the road. You're in the pigstie right now. Well, he's got his hand

out to you too. As long as you got life in you and breath in your lungs, he's got that hand out

and saying, come on, let's try this again. But this time, let's be an actual disciple. Okay,

that's it for me. Go to vineabiders.com. That'll take you to the sub stack. Subscribe to the

audio podcast. You can also check us out on YouTube, Vineabiders. See you next time.