Join us in this thought-provoking episode of Classic Christianity Radio. Bob George delves into the profound differences between the Old and New Covenants, emphasizing the liberty and grace found in the latter. As traditions grip many believers, Bob encourages a shift towards understanding and embracing the true freedom in Christ, free from the legalistic traditions that often bind us. Through a deep dive into the teachings of Paul, the episode explores common misconceptions about tithing and the nature of giving under the New Covenant, urging listeners to give from the heart rather than from obligation.
00:00:12 Introduction to Classic Christianity Radio
Welcome to Classic Christianity Radio with Bob George. Bob’s clear, timeless teachings on the complete forgiveness and unconditional love of Jesus Christ will transform your life as you learn about God’s amazing grace. Let’s join Bob as he teaches us from God’s Word.
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Let’s open up your Bible to 1 Thessalonians chapter 3. In verse 11, we’ve been, and through this time, we’ve been talking about Paul and how that he wanted to get back to the church in Thessalonica and was prohibited from doing so, and talked about the fact that in this world, if you’re going to go out and be a Enemies, and you’re going to have people who do not like what you’re saying, especially if it interferes with the tradition that you have been taught or interferes basically with teaching many times that you have been taught that absolutely has no bearing at all in regard to what the Scripture has to say. And we hang on to the traditions instead of the truth of the Word of God. An example of that is something we have talked about. It shouldn’t even be an issue, but you’ve heard us talk about it for years and years in regard to tithing. Now, when you look into the New Testament in which we live today, and if you understand that we live under a new covenant, it’s called the covenant of grace. And we realize that when you live under this new covenant, that the new covenant says that the old one is old and obsolete and should soon disappear. The old covenant was the covenant of the law. It was the covenant of the Levitical priesthood. It was a covenant of all of the traditions of the Jewish people. The Old Testament is basically around the lives of the Jewish people. of their disobedience and of the faithfulness of god in the midst of their disobedience and so you have a new covenant that’s what we’re studying about for their wednesday bible study right now the difference between the old covenant and the new covenant the old covenant the covenant of law it says it’s been replaced by something greater and that’s the new covenant of grace The covenant where it says there’s sins and lawless acts, I will remember no more. And where these have been forgiven, not will be forgiven, have been forgiven, there is no longer any sacrifice for sins. Now to the Jew who had been going to the Day of Atonement and sacrificing the blood of a bull and a goat for the hundreds and hundreds of years, the tradition of doing so, and hearing that that is no longer in effect. would be no different than a Catholic saying the confession booth is no longer in effect. What do you mean it’s no longer in effect? I’ve been going to the confession booth for years and years and years. I know it’s no longer in effect. It’s been replaced by Christ Jesus. That’s not good news to someone who wants to hang on to tradition, is it? And neither is it good news to people who want to hang on to the traditional teachings that you see in Christianity today. And especially when it comes to giving and to tithing. Now, I don’t know why people are so hung up on tithing when they don’t do it. And, you know, I just tell anybody that claims to be a tither, let me see your tax records. But that’s the way it is. Oh, yeah, I tie, tie. Do you tie? No, I don’t tie, but you’re supposed to tie. And so because of that, it causes, when you want to teach what truth is, and you want to teach out of Corinthians where the giving is to be free will, where you’re supposed to give out of your heart, not out of obligation, but out of your heart, and to give joyfully. It gives about nine principles of giving in those two chapters, to give joyfully. To give without compulsion. To excel in the grace of giving. To give in accordance to what you do have, not in accordance to what you don’t have. All of those are truths about how to give. Now, why would Paul have spent two chapters telling us how to give if we’re supposed to be tithing? Just say, tithe, buddy. You know, here’s your tithing envelope. You’re saved, aren’t you? Here’s your envelope. Now go tithe. Now why would you do that if that’s the method of giving today? Tithing was for the support of the Levitical priesthood. And it was not money. It was foodstuff. It was to support the Levitical priesthood. You had the other tribes of Israel who were to give 10% of their foodstuff. You bring it to the priests. They put it in barns. That’s why they call it a storehouse. And so it was to feed them, the priesthood. And therefore, everybody has contributed 10%. And there is money left over for the poor. So if you really want to be a tither, you ought to come in here with a bushel of wheat and dump it in the front of the altar. Because that’s what tithing was. It didn’t have a thing to do with money. And this church is not the storehouse. It’s in the barn. But you have people who want to hang on to that. And how deep does that get? Well, I’ll tell you how deep it gets. It gets so deep they just got a layer of the dead from getting kicked off the radio station again here in Dallas. You know why? Tithing. Because you’re messing up our church. So you can’t give unless you tithe. Is that what it is? Unless you tithe, your building’s going to fall down to what it should. And you ought to fall down with it if you’re teaching error and claiming it to be truth. If you don’t know the difference between the old covenant and the new, you’re either commingling or you’re totally a legalist. And guys, I not only would not give a dime to a legalistic church, I’m not going to pay for someone to build a better jail for me to live in. I wouldn’t give a dime to it. You hear people talking about tithing, I say it isn’t how much you give, it’s to whom you give. Because if you’re supporting a legalistic church, you’re supporting, quite frankly, the work of the devil because Christ came to free us from legalism, not to put us under it. Paul wasn’t real receptive to this kind of stuff. He was not, like we would say, politically correct. He was not sitting there trying to be tolerant. He said in Galatians, you foolish, idiotic, moronic Galatians. Now that’s a little amplification, but that’s what it means. You foolish, idiotic Dalasites. Who’s hypnotized you? and cast an evil spell upon you. I want to ask you a question, he said. Did you receive the Spirit of God by believing what you heard or by obeying the law? Which is it? By believing what you heard. Well, he said, after starting in the Spirit, why are you now trying to perfect yourself by human effort? The do’s, the don’ts. He said, are you foolish? Have you gone mad? Well, you see, to me, that’s pretty harsh. But we say, oh, no, a little bit of law isn’t going to hurt anybody. I remember when I first started teaching law and grace, one of the persons who was down at the church with us, and that was her comment. Well, Bob, you know, a little law doesn’t hurt anybody. According to Paul, it did. As a matter of fact, he said, if a speck of the leaven will spoil the whole loaf. That’s why I’m not going to compromise a Spec 11. Period. I’m not going to compromise it. I don’t care how many radio stations we get kicked off of by people who obviously don’t know what they’re talking about. I don’t care how many we go on because it’s not our business anyway. That’s God’s business. And if you don’t get on a radio station, you can listen to the Internet. But people aren’t limited to a radio station to hear the gospel. All they have to have is an open heart. And when they do, they hear the message and their hearts are changed by it. But guys, we have enemies. Do we understand that? We have enemies. We’ve talked about this, that God has set us apart. And when you’re set apart, that means there’s people who are for you and people who are against you, as we used to say in Indiana. And you have to realize that the people who are against you are people who are against truth. They want to hang on to tradition, hang on to my teaching, hang on to what it means to be a Baptist or a Presbyterian or a Catholic, whatever it might be. And God didn’t form any one of those religions. Jesus did not come to form a religion. He came for a relationship with people. And there aren’t going to be any Catholics and Baptists and Presbyterians in Kevin. Just people like you and me who have by faith come to know Christ Jesus as our Lord and Savior. It doesn’t matter where they park their body on Sunday or Saturday. It’s what’s in your heart. And so we have to understand the truth of this, my friends, that we have enemies in the Christian camp. We have enemies of truth. We have people who do not want to follow truth. When we talk about forgiveness, they don’t want to go to the scripture to find out, is there any passage in here that tells somebody to ask God to forgive him? Anybody know one? Say, oh yeah, I know one. Lord’s Prayer. Well, number one, the Lord’s Prayer doesn’t even say that. But the Lord’s Prayer was given for the purpose of everything else that Jesus taught was to bury us. And is it noticeable how we put periods where periods don’t belong? Because as you read through what is called the so-called Lord’s Prayer, which isn’t the Lord’s Prayer anyway, it was Jesus teaching them how to pray. He wasn’t teaching them a prayer. He was teaching them how to pray. As a matter of fact, he said, when you pray, don’t pray like the heathen do that take a prayer and pray it over and over and over again. Remember that? So what do we do? Take the prayer and like the heathen, pray it over and over and over again. That’s tradition. But you see, by doing that, guys, and what I’m saying ain’t going to be very popular to some people. But what that has done is I’ve gotten everyone to memorize something that keeps you from ever finalizing the cross. Two verses of scripture that almost everybody memorizes. Lord’s Prayer, 1 John 1.9. When you’re dealing with these things, you’re dealing with the truth of what Jesus said. And after he told them, that if you are to forgive your brother and to forgive one another, he says, for if you do not forgive your brother here on earth that you can see, your father in heaven will not forgive you. Now, how many of you memorize that part? You see, we go down to the period and we stop. And we stop. And he says, no, keep reading. Now, you know, you can see our Father in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Check, Lord, I like that. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Check, Lord, I like that one. Give us our bread, our daily bread. I like that better than all. And forgive us our debts as we forgive others. And you’re sitting there hating people. And you’re saying, uh-oh. And then he goes ahead, which we don’t go on. We just put the period. And it says, if you don’t forgive your brother here on earth, your father in heaven will not forgive you.
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Is that good news to people? If you’ve got people that you hate, was that good news to the Jews that absolutely hated Jesus? The people who were not Jewish and obviously didn’t even like their own. Jesus was a Jew. Doesn’t appear to me they liked him too well. But we forget that one. Now I ask people, you try to bring together and harmonize. If you don’t forgive your brother here on earth, your father in heaven will not forgive you. With, on the other side of the cross, that God was in Christ reconciling the world unto himself, not counting your sins against you. You bring those two together. Anybody able to do it? They’re a contradiction. A total contradiction. If you don’t forgive your brother, your father will not forgive you. And over here, God was in Christ reconciling the whole world unto himself, not counting your sins against him. That’s a contradiction, isn’t it? Unless you know something. The difference between the Old Covenant and the New Covenant. When did the New Covenant go into effect? At the death of Christ. So what did he teach under the Old Covenant or the New Covenant? The old covenant. Didn’t he like the new? No, he didn’t have it yet. He proclaimed it, but it wasn’t into effect until Jesus died. Are we together on that? So he taught under the old covenant. Under the old covenant, it was a covenant of the law. And under the old covenant, forgiveness was conditional. That’s why you had to go kill a bull and goat. That if you want forgiven, you’re going to have to kill a bull and goat. You’re going to have to shed blood. Is that true under the new covenant? Uh-uh. That’s why they’re in a more sacrificial system. Not because they understood this, but because Titus went in and destroyed the temple. And so we picked it up. And so instead of having bulls and goats, we came up with confession booths, 1 John 1, 9’s, Keep short accounts with God. And no one is resting in the fact that God took away your sins and what it cost him to do so. His life. Suffering. Ridicule. Coming into his own people and his own receiving him not. His own people. But to as many as did receive him. He gave the right to become what? A child of a living God. Both Jew and Gentile, slave and free. A child of the living God. That’s truth. People don’t want to hear truth. They get mad at you if you teach it. We’ve been called everything under the sun. Because I want to tell you something, folks. When we started teaching this, we were one of the few teaching it. And we were the only ones in media, I’ll guarantee you that, the only ones in media that were teaching this. And we were called heretics. So that’s a shame, isn’t it, that the definition of a heretic is one who believes Jesus meant what he said when he said it’s finished. The definition of a heretic is one who believes in truth. That’s what’s called today in the Christian world a heretic. Isn’t that something? So it has not been easy. And it remains not easy. And every step of the way, you’ve got somebody nipping at you, wanting to try to take ministry away because they can’t stand what they hear and they do not have enough biblical knowledge to argue with you. So the best way to do is just get rid of you. I’ve asked people, why don’t you come and discuss it with me? If you know so much, come and discuss it. Because if I’m wrong, I’ll tell you there’s one thing about teaching, guys, is this. Both of us could be wrong, but both of us couldn’t be right. And so it seems to me that if you’ve got a discussion on right and wrong, you ought to come and discuss it. Doesn’t it to you? But if you’re afraid because you know you can’t win, Then you do what they did with Jesus and the apostles and everybody else. Get rid of them. Kill them if you could. Get away with it. Why? Because of people who would rather believe lies than they would to believe truth. Fearful of teaching truth for fear you’re going to lose some money. And if I teach that tithing is not the means of New Testament giving, people aren’t going to give. Well, if they don’t give, you probably don’t deserve to have a church. And so we live in a day and age and it’s getting worse where we have to become stronger. As Bob said, we can’t We can’t sit around with just ho-hum. We’ve run into, in January and February of this year, the worst deficit we’ve had in this ministry in a long time. We’re about $60,000, $70,000, $80,000 in deficit in two months. We’ve never had that before. January is normally low. February normally picks it up. And so we’ve gone onto the radio and told people that, and God will take care of it. But again, he’s going to have to take care of it with people who have been giving a pittance who decide, I’m going to go step out and step up to the plate and just see how much I can give and see how much God replaces. We’re going to have to have people doing that if we’re going to continue. Now, again, if we don’t continue, why, that’s God’s business. Especially when you get as old as me, I’m not going to continue very long anyway. But the ministry is going to continue. And so if we want this message, because that’s all we’re talking about is a message. We want this message to get out and to continue to get out to people, then it’s going to have to be supported. Now, that’s all I’m going to say to you and to the listening audience. That’s all I’m going to say. Is that just in your hands? It isn’t that you guys are supposed to tithe. It isn’t, well, we’re in trouble. Let’s start teaching tithing. But it’s the fact that, yeah, we’re in trouble, so let’s teach people what truth is. Number one, we are in financial difficulty. We’ve been in it before. God always has pulled out, and he’ll do so again. But he’s going to do so through impressing the hearts of people. And so we’ve never changed on that, have we? We’ve never been badgered from this pulpit in regard to tithing or anything else. Why? It isn’t true. That’s why. It’s not true. It’s not that it’s not advantageous. You can put a bunch of people on guilt trips. You can squeeze all kinds of things out of people. But I want you guys to be free. God set you free. It’s for freedom that I set you free. And I want you to be free. I want you to be free to be led by the Spirit individually. To have the Spirit of God living in you active in your life. Not depending on what the group is doing. but dependent upon what God wants you to do, not the group. That’s going to be one of the hardest jobs that Richard has, is to keep that message yet at the same time to have things for the group to do, not out of obligation, but out of a heart. And that’s my heart’s desire, and it’s been my heart’s desire for this group ever since we started. Pray for us that the last time this happened here at Dallas, we went back to the national headquarters and immediately got that reversed. As a matter of fact, remember, I went back there and we ended up on 400 and some stations. I don’t think they have 400 more, so that ain’t going to happen again. But pray for us that as we do go back to the leadership there, that something will be done again. But I’m of the feeling that this would not have come out had it not been discussed or Else there’s a power play someplace. We don’t know for sure. But either whether we’re here or whether we’re not, we’ll get along, won’t we? And that’s what we have to understand. Thank God for the Internet. You know, that’s going to eliminate a lot of this kind of stuff taking place. So, you know, thank God that God gave me the wisdom to get into the Internet. If you believe that. I thank God for his staff and our guys that were up on those things because I certainly wouldn’t have been. But, you know, that’s all a part of what leadership is, is to surround yourself with people smarter than you and let them do what they want to do. So I’m very smart in this stuff, not because I am, but I’m surrounded by people who are. So that’s really good. Thank you, Richard and Bob and all you guys. But… We didn’t get into the lesson, but I sure got off my heart what I wanted to get off. So thanks for letting me vent my joy of the Lord with you this morning. Well, Bob, you almost predicted this. I didn’t get to the lesson this morning, but next week we will. And so you guys come back and we’ll take up with what we’re going to take up with. He’s talking about in verse 11, May our God, the Father himself, our Lord Jesus Christ, clear the way for us to come to you. And may the Lord make your love increase and overflow for each other and for everyone else just as ours does for you. May he strengthen your hearts so that you’ll be blameless and holy in the presence of our God and Father when our Lord Jesus Christ comes with all of his holy ones. And that is basically what we’re going to kick off on tomorrow of Jesus coming back with all of his holy ones. Which is going to be pretty difficult to do if the holy ones are not already in his presence. and so we’re going to discuss that next week and see if we can pull some things together to be interesting for you. Well, again, thank you for allowing me to admit my frustration to a degree, but in so doing, I think we just learned deeper and deeper what truth is, and we ought to be very appreciative of the fact that we’ve got a Bible in our hands that we can go to to find out what truth is. I’m grateful for that, aren’t you? Well, let’s pray together. Father, we want to thank you for again, the opportunity that you’ve given us to have the ability through your spirit to open up the word of God and to interpret what truth is and what tradition is and to know the difference between the two. We thank you, Father, that as we do open up the word of God and we do depend upon the spirit of God to reveal truth to us, that that truth sets us free. It sets us free from tradition. It sets us free from error and enables us to walk in that freedom that you called us to in Christ Jesus. And it’s in his name we pray and thank you. Amen.
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Until next time, walk in faith, be good to one another, and praise the Lord. Amen. Put Jesus first in your life and turn your
