The Anointing of Hope | Biblical Benedictions From the New Testament Season 2

Rabbi K.A. Schneider: God has something good he's bringing us into. God has a purpose for our lives and the greatest hope of all, what the scripture calls the blessed hope is the return of King Jesus, the Messiah. A biblical benediction is a declaration from the word of God of blessing. So we're going to go through several biblical benedictions today. We're going to take them apart and what I think it will do for us is uncover the way the Lord feels about us. I believe that going through these portions of scripture in which we find God's will to bless us will soften our hearts, encourage us, strengthen us, and open us up to live in greater victory and an awareness of the love of God. So Father, in Yeshua's name, right now, I ask you through the the Holy Spirit that as the word goes forth today, that you would pierce our hearts because we declare that your word is living and active and sharper than a two-edged sword, able to divide a division between the soul and the spirit. So we ask you, King Yeshua, to open our hearts today to receive your word, to be strengthened by it, and to be filled by your spirit in the process. I love that Yeshua said that the words that he spoke are spirit and life. So there's spirit in the word. Remember Jesus said, the words that I speak, they are spirit and they are life. So the very word of God carries with it an impregnation of the Holy Ghost, of the Holy Spirit. And so Father God, once again, we open our hearts, strengthen us, I pray today, in the word of God by your spirit. We're going to begin by going to the book of Romans chapter 15 verse number 13. The grass withers and the flowers fade, but beloved one, the word of God abides forever. Once again, a biblical benediction is a declaration of blessing, of the way that God wants to work in our lives. Before I begin and launch right into Romans 15:13, I'm thinking of a story that might help illustrate this concept of receiving these words, knowing that these words contain the heart of God for you and I. Do you remember the story in the Torah where Moses said to the Lord, he said, show me your glory. The Lord had called Moses to lead Israel out of Egypt towards the promised land, and Moses was really insecure. He really felt very vulnerable. He needed to know that God was with him. So he kept on saying to the Lord, Lord, if I found favor in your sight, he kept on looking for reassurances. And finally, Moses says after asking for several reassurances, it culminates with Moses asking the Father, show me your glory. Show me your glory, God, that I'll know that you're with me and that your grace will be sufficient. So the Lord responds back to Moshe, his Hebrew name, it says, Moses, you can't see the fullness of who I am and live, but I want you to go, Moses, over to the cleft in that rock and call upon my name. And the name that the Lord was referring to there was his sacred memorial name composed of the four Hebrew letters yud hey vav hey. It's known as the tetragrammaton, and most Semitic scholars believe it's pronounced a breathy Yahweh, continual present action. The word of God is the great I am. Yahweh carries with it the idea of I am, the living God who's always present, always moving. So Moses goes in the cleft of the rock. He calls upon the name Yahweh. And as he does, what happens? Moses again, remember he asked the Lord to show him his glory, but the Lord says, go in the cleft of the rock, call upon my name, and when you call upon my name, you're not going to see my face, but you'll see my back, Moses, and I'm going to make get this now, all my goodness. All my goodness will pass before you. And so when Moses asked to see God's glory, God said, I'm going to show you my glory by showing you my goodness. And so what we're going to find in these biblical benedictions, beloved ones, is the goodness of God towards you and towards me. Romans 15:13, hear the word of God. Now may the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing so that you will abound in hope by the power of the or the Holy Spirit. Ruach, breath of God or spirit, Kodesh, holy, the Holy Spirit. So I want to focus in on the key words in this pronouncement of God's favor and blessing, the revelation of his good purpose towards you and I. Listen what the Lord is saying through Paul. Now may the God of hope. So what's the first thing? The God, beloved, that you and I serve, the one that has called us by his own grace through Messiah Yeshua. He is the God of hope. Do you know that now more than ever in my lifetime humanity needs hope. And I know that I'm preaching to the choir now. I shared on another broadcast an incident that happened to me several years ago in the middle of the night in relationship to this concept of hope. And in this vision of the night, I found myself in a church gathering. It was an old-fashioned church. There was about 200 worshippers in the sanctuary. I was just one of the worshippers, and we were all completely united together singing unto the Lord and asking him. We were worshipping him and praising him. All of our hearts towards heaven, our eyes towards heaven, our hands all lifted towards heaven. And as we sung and praised the Lord in this simple old little church, we were asking Jesus to return. The whole body together unified, calling about him fervently to return. And I realized that the reason that there was such a fervency in this body of believers asking for Messiah to return is because the world had become such a difficult, hard place to live. Now in this vision of the night, at the same time that I was in the church worshipping with the others, I could also see beloved ones outside the church. I could see what was happening in the streets. I could observe humanity outside the church building. And what I observed was the oppression that was on mankind and the desperation that they were feeling and the lack of hope that they had. And then the spirit of the Lord communicated to me this. He said, the anointing that you carry. And when he said you to me, it wasn't just me, but it was the 200 of us that were gathered in that church building calling upon Jesus to return. It represented the body of believers, you and I together. And the Lord said to me, the anointing that you carry that has the power to transform those that are on the outside living under oppression, the anointing that you have to transform them is the anointing of hope. People need hope today. They're lost. They're confused. I mean, people don't know which way to turn. I was just talking to a relative of mine who teaches high school. And he came home from school one day and he was so discouraged because the kids had become so apathetic, like they're blank. They have like zero desire to learn, maybe zero is too strong of a word, but like little desire to learn. They sit there completely uninterested, un- ambitious, no initiative. They don't have a passion for living. They don't have a goal in life. And I think that coming out of COVID, which is behind us now, I think, but I think it broke a lot of people down and they just confused people and so many things shifted and changed in society. I think it accelerated hopelessness in people. People just they don't know which way's up and which way's down. They don't know if they're a boy or a girl. They don't know right from wrong. There's all this division, all this hatred. People are struggling and they need hope. But you know what? The one that's called us is a God of hope. Our hope is in him.
Guest (Male): This is Discovering the Jewish Jesus with Rabbi Schneider, and he'll continue today's lesson shortly, but first a special announcement.
Rabbi K.A. Schneider: We are lifting up Yeshua, Jesus of Nazareth, to the Jewish community in New York City through massive billboards all over the city. In fact, close to 25% of Jewish people in the United States live right here, and we're doing it. For those of you that are helping us, God bless you. This is a move and an act of God.
Guest (Male): These billboards point to Jews.com. It's an effective tool for impactful evangelism, and Jews.com explains Messianic prophecy and challenges them with the gospel of Jesus. We've got over 300,000 site views and we're not done because 99% of Jewish people reject Jesus. So I want to encourage you, visit the site and consider supporting us. Give at Discovering the Jewish Jesus.com and now back to today's lesson.
Rabbi K.A. Schneider: Paul starts out this biblical benediction. Now may the God of hope. So we have hope, right? We've got hope that the Lord is presently working in our life today. He is. Even if you're going through a hard time, it's not wasted. God is always working in the lives of his beloved ones. Remember Job? Job was called the most righteous man in all the East. I mean, the suffering and the struggle, the sickness and the death and the misery and the loss of possessions that Job experienced, it wasn't because he was such a terrible sinner. The contrary. The book of Job opens up by calling Job the most righteous man in all the East. No, the suffering came upon him because God was going to do something for him as a result of going through the suffering. So at the end of Job's struggle, at the very end of the book of Job, after he had been going through such tremendous, horrendous pain and difficulty, Job got through it all and he said this, Father God, before I had heard about you, I knew you in my mind, but now he said that I've been through all this with you. He said, now I know you. What's the point? The hope that we have is that regardless of whether we're going through a season in life where we're feeling refreshed and blessed or whether we're going through a season in life where we're discouraged because we're challenged with relationships or loved ones or our work or whatever it might be, regardless of whether you're going through a season where you're enjoying life or whether you're going through a season where life is difficult, the hope that we have is that the God of hope is working in our lives in all ways and at all times. And the promises that God causes what? All things to work together for good. Everything that you and I go through, God is going to cause and is causing to work together for good. Doesn't that give you hope? We have hope. God's doing something good. We can rejoice by an act of our will because we know that our God is a good God, that he loves us, that he's doing something good right now and, beloved, because we know things are going to get better. Things are going to get better. God's purpose is to bring us into the promised land. He said to Israel when they were in the wilderness going through the trials there, the serpents bit them there. They struggled in the wilderness 40 years struggling under the heat. And then the Lord said to them, the reason that I did this for you in the book of Deuteronomy in the Torah was to prepare you for the good thing that I'm bringing you into. The same is true for you and I. God has something good he's bringing us into. God has a purpose for our lives and the greatest hope of all, what the scripture calls the blessed hope is the return of King Jesus, the Messiah, at which time he will wipe every tear from our eyes. No more sorrow, suffering or pain. We're going to be transported and translated into a place called paradise. And so I want you to be encouraged today. Yeah, it might be hard today. Might be a tough day today, but you know what? I want to shake you up to exercise faith in the call on your life and where you going. We have a God of hope. Paul says, now may the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing. So how do we get filled with hope, joy and peace? We have to believe. So listen again. Now may the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing. If we don't believe, we don't have hope. If we don't believe, we won't have joy. If we don't believe, we won't have peace. So we need to recognize that we need to exert our will, come into agreement with the truth. And beloved one, when we come into agreement with the truth that 's contained in the written word of God, which I've been proclaiming to you today, when we come into agreement with God's word, hope, joy, and peace, amen, fills our heart. We say yes, Lord. I might be going through a bad time today, but hallelujah, God, you love me. You're doing something. There's a purpose in this. You're bringing me into something good. You're bringing me into something so much better that nothing could be compared with the temporary trial that I 'm going through because of the good thing that you're bringing me into. There's no comparison. It's like Paul said that he considered everything that he lost in his life for following Christ. He said he considered it all rubbish in light of what he was gaining. So we reach out in faith. We bless the Lord today, and in doing that we have peace and joy. Now it's interesting and I think it is important for us to consider that joy and peace are not something that are always, first of all, of an emotional nature. In other words, if we want to have joy, we don't necessarily wait to feel joyful, but rather we make a decision to rejoice. See, the scripture commands us, rejoice always. Again, I say rejoice. How do I rejoice? By reminding myself, by stirring myself up in the love of God, by coming into agreement with the word of God. I might feel discouraged, I might feel down, I might feel tired, but by reminding myself of even the truths that I'm proclaiming today, all of a sudden joy fills my heart. I begin to rejoice and I'm happy in God. The scripture says that David encouraged himself in the Lord. He didn't wait for an emotion to hit him. He didn't wait for someone to come over and pray for him. He didn't wait for his circumstances to change. He was in a really difficult circumstance, but he responded to the difficulty by taking initiative in his will and encouraging himself, the scripture says, in the Lord. And so Paul, once again, now may the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing. So we want to choose to come into agreement with the truths that we're declaring today. And then he says, so that you will abound in hope by the power of the Ruach HaKodesh, of the Holy Spirit. So I want to focus on that word power. Paul says, when you come into agreement with the word of God through the hope that you have in him because he's the God of hope, joy and peace will fill your heart, not first because you feel something, but because you'd rather come into an agreement with the truth. And when this happens, he says, you're going to be strengthened by the power of the Holy Spirit. You see, the Holy Spirit flows through the word of God. Jesus said, the words that I speak, they are spirit and they are life. So when we come into agreement with the word of God, the power of God fills us. So the question is today, what will you and I focus on? Where will we allow our attention to drift? Will we be passive and let the enemy direct our mind to this distraction, to that distraction, to this negative thing, to that negative thing? Or will we take possession of our thoughts by faith and by the word of God, bringing our thoughts into captivity with the truth, making a decision to seize God's word, to not let the enemy in? And in seizing God's word and keeping the enemy out, we begin to rejoice in hope. And then joy and peace fills our heart and we move out then in the power of the Ruach HaKodesh. So beloved ones, I hope today that you're getting a sense that this is something that is God's desire for you, that you would have joy, that you'd have peace, that you'd walk in power, that you'd have hope. But to experience this, you and I have to do what David did. We have to stir ourselves up in the Lord, shake off the darkness, get in God's word, read God's word, spend time in God's word every day, feed yourself on God's word every day because what you feed will grow and what you choke will die. So let's choke the enemy out of our lives. Let's feed on God's word. And as we do, we're going to be filled with hope, joy, peace, and power in the Holy Spirit. I want to ask you to think about something carefully with me. That which is born, this is what Yeshua said. He said, that which is born of flesh is flesh and that which is born of spirit is spirit. Paul in his writings goes on to talk about the difference between the nature of the flesh versus the nature of the spirit. Now one of the natures of the flesh is that the flesh, beloved ones, I think we can all identify, is selfish. I mean, for example, when we eat food, do we eat for ourselves or somebody else? The flesh is by nature selfish, whereas the spirit is by nature generous and giving. And if we're not careful, sometimes we can operate as takers in the flesh and not be a blessing to other people. I just want to simply say to you, beloved, we depend on you to continue to reach the world with the gospel. If this ministry is being a blessing to you, I want to ask you to open up your heart in the spirit. Be generous and sow financially into the ministry because we're to support those ministries that are doing good and blessing us.
Guest (Male): Amen. And you can give today by visiting Discovering the Jewish Jesus.com. You can also call to give. Our number is 800-777-7835 or you can mail your gift to Discovering the Jewish Jesus, P.O. Box 777 Blissfield, Michigan 49228. Your generosity helps Discovering the Jewish Jesus continue taking the gospel to people all around the world, including Jewish people in Israel and Jewish communities around the globe. When you give, you're helping Rabbi Schneider share biblical truths through television, radio, digital outreach, and ministry opportunities that bring the message of Jesus to people everywhere. One of the most impactful ways that you can support our ministry is by becoming a monthly partner. And when you sign up as a monthly partner, we'd like to thank you with a beautifully handcrafted shofar made in Israel. Throughout scripture, the sound of the shofar called God's people to attention, and it marked significant moments in Israel's history. So we hope that this shofar gives you a connection to the land of Israel, and it also serves as a significant moment and reminder in your home of God's faithfulness to you. To become a monthly partner and request your shofar, visit Discovering the Jewish Jesus.com. Thank you so much for choosing generosity and helping Rabbi continue reaching people with the good news. Your gift helps put this teaching in front of people who are searching for truth, and it carries the gospel to places where it needs to be heard. Now here's Rabbi with the ironic blessing.
Rabbi K.A. Schneider: What I love about the ironic blessing is that it did not originate with man. The words actually proceeded from the very essence of God himself. The blessing comes from the book of Numbers chapter 6. So listen to these words and receive the blessing of the Lord into your life today. The Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord make his face shine on you and be gracious to you. The Lord lift you up with his countenance and the Lord give you, beloved one, his peace. And now in Hebrew. God bless you.