First of all, I would especially like to welcome the eighth graders who are with us this morning. I think it is very much of the Lord that you are here.
I want to tell you a story. I mentioned this when we were meeting this past week about that conference coming up—Willow Lawn. That is the only way I can remember Will LeBron.
When I was in eighth grade, I went with an organization up to Lake Saranac in New York, and I really, really met the Lord for the first time. Before that time, I knew the Bible stories. I had heard with the hearing of the ear, you know. But for the first time, I knew that Jesus had died for me personally.
I could live to be 110 and never forget the theme of the messages that I heard. But here is where I am heading with this: I came back from that time, and as we were riding back from New York, I had every intention to leave everything else behind and follow the Lord.
And that lasted for about a week or two. I started off spending personal time with the Lord and all that, but it fizzled out.
I am hoping that, as I share this morning, the things I am going to be sharing are lessons that, if I had learned them long ago—if I had learned them at that time—they would have saved me so much misery. They would have saved me so many years of being out of gas, basically.
So I do not think it is an accident that you are here this morning. It is a real privilege to have you with us.
Let us read first from Matthew 6, starting in verse 9.
Pray then in this way:
Our Father who art in heaven,
Hallowed be Thy name.
Thy kingdom come.
Thy will be done,
On earth as it is in heaven.
Now, John 3:1-5.
Now there was a man of the Pharisees, named Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews:
the same came unto Him by night, and said to Him, Rabbi, we know that Thou art a teacher come from God; for no one can do these signs that Thou doest, except God be with him.
Jesus answered and said unto him, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except one be born anew, he cannot see the kingdom of God.
Nicodemus saith unto Him, How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter a second time into his mother’s womb, and be born?
Jesus answered, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except one be born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God.
And the last passage, 1 Corinthians 3, starting in verse 11.
For other foundation can no man lay than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ.
But if any man buildeth on the foundation gold, silver, costly stones, wood, hay, stubble;
each man’s work shall be made manifest: for the day shall declare it, because it is revealed in fire; and the fire itself shall prove each man’s work of what sort it is.
If any man’s work shall abide which he built thereon, he shall receive a reward.
If any man’s work shall be burned, he shall suffer loss: but he himself shall be saved; yet so as through fire.
Let us pray.
Father, we come before You this morning. Lord, we are cast upon You. So many of these words that will be spoken and heard this morning have been heard before. Lord, we pray that You would have mercy, that You would anoint Your Word.
Lord, Your Word says that the Word of God is sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the dividing of soul and spirit. Lord, everything is laid bare before Your sight.
Lord, we pray that Your Word would be effective. Lord, that the seed that I believe You placed on my heart, that You would anoint the speaking and the hearing. Lord, that I would be able to convey clearly the things that You placed on my heart; that there would not be interference as it goes between my mouth and their ears. Lord, let there be clear reception. Let Your Word be effective.
Thank You, Lord. In Jesus’ name, amen.
As we start off, this is going to sound like another one of those promotions for that prayer book, is it not? But over our past weeks of praying, one of the things that really touched my heart was one of the sections in that wonderful book on prayer: Three Heart Desires Toward God.
It is those three phrases that we read from Matthew 6: “Hallowed be Thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done.”
I believe that, as we have been praying along these lines and touching on this matter of the kingdom, the Lord has started to do some really powerful things in our midst. I feel like He has begun to draw hearts to Himself.
One of the things that became clearer to us as we were looking at this passage, “Thy kingdom come,” is that each one of these desires is God’s desire: that His kingdom would come and that His will would be done.
By His great mercy, He plants these same seeds in our hearts and calls us to agree with Him and pray that His will would be done and that His kingdom would come.
We have this big word here that confronts us right at the beginning: kingdom. What is a kingdom? We think of gates and pearly gates and that type of thing, but what is meant by His kingdom?
It is where He is absolute King, where His will is done, where He is acknowledged as all in all, where the angels never cease to cry:
Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord God, the Almighty.
This was the state of affairs in eternity past. It is the state of affairs in the heavenlies now. We lose sight of that because everything else is worshiped here in this realm, in this world that we are in.
We lose sight that this is natural; this is normal, because He is the exalted One.
Brother Sparks, I hope, broke it down in this way: the kingdom of God is simply the kingship of God—that He would have absolute sway.
God, in Christ, has exalted His Son as Head over all, and everything aligns with God’s purpose that His Son would have first place in everything.
It will be the state of affairs in the kingdom age and in the ages to come, and it is our prayer that it would come quickly.
When we pray, “Thy kingdom come,” in one sense we are praying that the kingdom of God would come temporally—that the consummation of the ages would come and that His kingdom would come.
But there is another sense in which we pray, “Thy kingdom come.” It is in a geographical sense, so to speak.
In this geographical sense, this prayer is for each of us individually and corporately. This prayer is that His body would allow the mind and will of God to prevail, and for His will and purpose to be done on earth as it is in heaven.
In other words, it is that the kingdom of God would gain territory in our hearts and in our midst; that what is expressed through us individually, and what is expressed through the local expression of His body, would be Him—the absolute kingship of our glorious King.
Some might say, “Why do we need to pray this prayer? Is He not the Almighty? What resists His will?”
To give context to this, we need to look back at the beginning for just a moment. You do not need to turn there: Genesis 1:26.
And God said, Let Us make man in Our image, after Our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the heavens, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.
When God created man, He was not interested in creating a robot. He was not interested in creating a parakeet. He made man with a free will. He made man as a creature with a free will to love God freely, to be in relationship with God freely and in love.
Man was also created to have dominion over all the earth, so that man and the earth itself would display the glory of God, the beauty of His majesty.
But man yielded the authority he had been given to the devil when he fell. That is why they call Satan the prince of this world. Man, who had been given authority over the earth, yielded that authority. God told man to have dominion over all the things He had made, but man yielded that dominion.
Since that time, the whole world lies in the power of the evil one. We need to remember that as we touch things, as exciting things come along, as things that appeal to the senses come along. We need to remember who the prince of this world is—the usurper of this realm. Origin determines destiny.
A passage that comes to mind is when the Lord Jesus was being tempted:
And he led Him up, and showed Him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time.
And the devil said unto Him, To Thee will I give all this authority, and the glory of them: for it hath been delivered unto me; and to whomsoever I will I give it.
If Thou therefore wilt worship before me, it shall all be Thine.
In a sense, what Satan said was true in this: the domain and the glory had been handed over to him. We can get caught up and excited about something going on in this earth. I will be the first to admit that we can get excited about politics. We can get excited about the direction this country is going, and there is moving and shaking over here, and we are building democracy, or whatever.
But there is not a single invention of man, nor a single thought that has originated in the heart of man, that has not, in the end, turned into something man has used to destroy himself. Man has made governments to bring himself freedom, and this freedom is turned to lasciviousness. Man has built technological wonders that, in the long run, he uses to destroy other men.
So we need to remember: this land that we are walking through as pilgrims is not our friend.
When man fell, two things happened. This is just by way of background, just to give context. When man sinned, two things happened.
First, he became guilty before God. He became judicially guilty before God. The Word of God says that the one who sins must die. God told Adam, “In the day that thou eatest thereof, thou shalt surely die.”
Prior to the fall, man was alive in spirit-relationship with God. After the fall, man’s spirit died, and he fell from that relationship with God. He became dead to God. Although his body lasted a lot longer beyond that, he was dead to God. His primary function in being created—to be in relationship with God—was lost.
But more than that, man became constitutionally other than what God intended. Not only did man become separated from God, but man’s nature was poisoned. He became a man of the flesh.
In Isaiah, and in a parallel passage in Ezekiel, when Lucifer fell, it speaks of the expressions of the heart of Satan himself:
I will ascend above the heights of the clouds;
I will make myself like the Most High.
“I, I, I; me, me, me.” Who does that sound like?
When man fell, not only did he become judicially accountable before God, but he became a natural man. He was poisoned by sin.
Through the centuries, man would attempt again and again to reach God, having fragments of the work of the law written on his heart, knowing there was such a thing as right and wrong, having vague sensings from his conscience that there was something more, though he knew not what.
Yet man fell short of the glory of God and ended up worshiping himself and the things he had or had built. Even the Jews, who had been given the law of God through Moses, saw it not as God’s righteous judgment on themselves, but as God’s approval of them to sit as judges. They misunderstood the fundamental purpose of the law, which was to reveal us as sinners.
They honored Him with their lips, but their hearts were far from Him. Again and again, God would send deliverers and great deliverances. But once the danger had passed, each man would return to his own vineyard, his own business, his own family, and his own affairs.
Is that not us? God moves mightily on our behalf financially. God moves mightily on our behalf physically. We experience the grace of God; we experience the nearness of God. But then afterward, it becomes something from yesterday.
By nature, the heart of the natural man inclines away from God and seeks his own desire.
Getting back to my eighth-grade story, that is what happened. I did not realize that the problem was not simply information that I needed. The solution to my problem was not something I could do for myself.
My problem was not merely that I needed to be forgiven for my sins, even though that was the first issue. I needed to be delivered from sin. Apart from that work, my heart naturally reverts back to my own things.
Any time we live by the natural man—by who we are in and of ourselves—we depend upon something different. Is it the Myers-Briggs thing? Anyway, each one of us depends on something different.
For some of us, it is our will. “I might not feel it, but I am determined. I can do it by my will.” For some, it is our intellect. “As long as God explains it to me in my mind, I will have it, because I have a great, great job.” For others, it is our feelings. “You can explain it to me in words, but it does not mean anything to me. Once I feel it, then I need to feel it.”
Brothers and sisters even congregate around those things. There are groups that get together who are the feeling people. There are groups that get together who are the intellect people. There are groups that get together who are the will people—charging on, and nothing is going to get in our way.
The problem is, if you are going in the wrong direction, it does not matter how fast you are going. It does not matter how motivated you are. It does not matter how good it feels.
Pride, self-justification, independence, and self-deception characterize the natural man.
The passage that I touched on about Nicodemus—Jesus told him two things. Jesus told him, “Unless you are born of the Spirit, you cannot see the kingdom of God.”
What He meant by that is that only that which is alive can sense the presence of God. Only that which is alive can behold God.
I found a passage written in my Bible several years ago. You look across a lot of slush in commentaries, but every once in a while you run across something that makes you go, “Ooh.” This was a great encouragement to me:
That which is truly dead shivers no more in its own cold.
When the enemy comes and says, “You are so far away. You have done this and this and this and this. You do not even know God,” that is his master stroke—to try to cut off that lifeline. But that which is truly dead shivers no more in its own cold.
Jesus said, “Unless you are born again, you cannot see the kingdom of God.” But He went beyond that. He said, “Unless you are born of water and the Spirit, you cannot enter the kingdom of God.” That is where we are heading, brothers and sisters, in our time together this morning. I want us to consider this matter.
This comes back to the problem of the old man. That is what the water has to do with. You can scratch your head and say, “Born of water and the Spirit? Are we talking obstetrics here? What is this all about?”
Remember that when John the Baptist came, he came in the wilderness baptizing and preaching, “Repent ye; for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” When Jesus came, He came preaching, “Repent ye; for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.”
Nicodemus was a Pharisee. One of the Gospels says that, when John the Baptist was baptizing in the wilderness, the Pharisees and Sadducees came to him. They knew he was the latest and greatest. So I do not think it was unclear to Nicodemus what water signified. This is a matter of baptism.
God, by the death of His Son on the cross, brought us justification and reconciliation with God. He delivered us from the penalty of sin.
But without deliverance from who we are, along with deliverance from what we have done, then we just die again. We may be in relationship with God, but we walk around like dead people. It is like a car that is out of gas.
We can get excited and motivated a little bit. We can even make it a habit: “I know that by the time I get to such-and-such, I will be out of gas again, so I am going to go and do this, and I will get all charged up.” Or, “It is good that there are only so many weeks between this conference and that conference to keep my heart warm.”
But the Lord has a greater solution.
Without God’s intervention, our lives are a circle of sinning, repenting, and returning to sin; conceiving of ways to serve God, only to have them turned to futility, bitterness, pride, and self-seeking.
“I, us, me, my.” Kenny was sharing—I am not going to leave that alone yet. I will be back on that.
This “I” life, this “me” life, not only defiles us personally; we bring it into our assembly life, and it defiles our assembly life. It brings mixture and corruption.
There is one heavenly pattern for the church, and it is Christ—not “I” and “my,” but Him, and with all the saints.
There is only one life that fully satisfies the heart of God, and that is the life of His Son. The church and the kingdom consist exclusively of this one material: the life of His Son. If we do not walk by this life, we cannot enter the kingdom or participate in this building. Period.
Not only this, but this issue goes before us to the judgment seat of Christ. The passage that we read in Corinthians says that there is no other foundation that can be laid except that which has been laid, which is Christ. But he who builds needs to be careful about the material he uses to build on it: gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, or stubble.
It is not just a matter of here and now. It is a matter of eternal reward. We had better know that we are running in the right direction. We had better know what life this is that we are walking in. We had better know that the building we are building is according to the heavenly pattern.
In and of ourselves, this is hopeless, because the theme song for ourselves is “I, me, my.”
Seeing and entering are two different things. Even activity for God does not mean entering. Uzzah was very active in the service of God. He even reached out to give Him a hand.
Now let us talk about God’s solution. I just wanted to lay that background, and please, I am not intending this to be a morbid “woe is us,” although we have grounds for “woe is us.” But the Lord is gracious and has given us a way of freedom.
Just as we were powerless to save ourselves from the penalty of sin, so we are powerless to deliver ourselves from the power of sin. The only solution for our guilt before God was the death of His Son. The only solution for the power of sin is the death of our little self.
Romans 6:4 says:
We were buried therefore with Him through baptism into death: that like as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we also might walk in newness of life.
The old nature, the natural man, is not going to get better. We cannot have marks on the doorframe showing that the old man is getting taller. The old man does not get better.
The object is not like pouring concrete into a form to make it look good on the outside. The old man does not get better.
The Word says that those who are in the flesh cannot please God. If we try to serve God and overlook this, we end up in Romans 7. What I mean by that, brothers and sisters, is that it is not God’s intention for our natural lives to be the source of our service to God.
He has given us a new life, and we will never, ever be able to participate; we will never be able to enter in apart from that new life.
If we try to serve God and overlook this, we end up right in the middle of Romans 7. It is almost as though God’s intention was that we move from Romans 6, which says, “I have been crucified with Christ,” to Romans 8, which says, “There is therefore now no condemnation.”
If we do not grasp the finality of, “I have been crucified with Christ; nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me,” and living by the faith of the Son of God—yes, that is Galatians; it is the parallel passage to Romans 6—if we lose sight of that and still seek to do things for God, we find ourselves in Romans 7.
Because we are born again, we see the building work. We see that God’s intention is a bride. We see that God’s intention is that His Son would have first place in everything.
But if we try to step in and participate in this work by our natural life, what we find is that we are in the middle of Romans 7:
The good which I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I practice.
O wretched man that I am! Who shall deliver me out of the body of this death?
Romans 7 gives a clue as to what the problem was. Between Romans 7:7 and Romans 7:25—I counted this twice; you can check up on me later if you want—Paul uses the words “I,” “me,” and “my” forty-eight times in nineteen verses.
For you basketball fanatics and statisticians, that is 2.5 times per verse.
Why could he not enter in? Was it because he did not want to? No. It says that he did want to. It says that he joyfully concurred with the law of God, that it was good. He said, “That which I would do, I did not do. But that which I would not do, that I did.”
It was the law of sin and death in his members. It was that poison that I was talking about, that came into man, that came into the soul-life of man at the fall.
It was eye trouble.
Romans 8:6-7 says that the mind set on the flesh cannot submit to God’s law. It cannot do it. Determination will not get there. Feeling will not get there. Conferences will not get there. Inspiring music will not get there. The mind of the flesh cannot submit to God’s law.
Trying to deal with the flesh is kind of like whack-a-mole at the fair. Every time you get it in one spot, it comes up in another. You get it on that side, and it comes up somewhere else.
God has provided a way. The Word says, as I mentioned before, that we were crucified with Him in order that the body of sin might be rendered powerless, that we should no longer be slaves to sin.
When it says, “There is therefore now no condemnation,” the word condemnation has two interpretations, and both are confirmed in the verses that follow. So whichever interpretation you go with, you are right.
One interpretation is that there is no condemnation—that there is no judicial judgment. That is true. For those who are in Christ Jesus, we pass from death to life.
At the same time, there is another meaning of condemnation: hindrance, or that which keeps something from occurring. It says:
There is therefore now no condemnation to them that are in Christ Jesus.
For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus made me free from the law of sin and of death.
In other words, this life is different. It is a different law. When we are set free from the one law, we live by a life that has a whole other law.
Instead of “I, me, my,” which is the natural life, the new life is the things that are in Christ’s heart. It is Him.
I know that each one of us has experienced those times when—oh my goodness, it is five minutes to twelve! Lord, I need to get through this. I do not want to stand up here again.
I do not know which is worse. I was telling somebody the other day that getting ready to share is kind of like a combination of being ten months pregnant and getting ready for your own execution. Wanting to give birth so badly and wanting to see life, basically.
You do not have to turn there now. I am going to read a couple of verses that are on the subject. Just listen.
Or are ye ignorant, brethren (for I speak to men who know the law), that the law hath dominion over a man for so long time as he liveth?
For the woman that hath a husband is bound by law to the husband while he liveth; but if the husband die, she is discharged from the law of the husband.
So then if, while the husband liveth, she be joined to another man, she shall be called an adulteress: but if the husband die, she is free from the law, so that she is no adulteress, though she be joined to another man.
Wherefore, my brethren, ye also were made dead to the law through the body of Christ; that ye might be joined to another, even to Him who was raised from the dead, that we might bring forth fruit unto God.
It is interesting here. There is a little transition between verse 3 and verse 4. Verse 3 talks about the husband dying, and verse 4 talks about, “You also were made to die to the law.”
In other words, the problem was not the law. The problem was the “I.” The problem was the natural life. It does not say, “You are having a problem with the law, so we have canceled the law, and everything will be okay now.”
It says that we were made to die to the law through the body of Christ, that we might be joined to another, that we might bear fruit to God. This touches on abiding in Christ and bearing fruit.
What God took out of the way was not the law, not the righteous requirements of God. On the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus said, basically, woe to the person who teaches that people do not need to fulfill God’s righteous requirements. Not a jot or a tittle will pass away from the law until all is fulfilled.
Does this mean that we need to have the feasts, the sacrifices, the tassels, and all of that kind of thing? No, it goes far beyond that.
One of the scribes came to Jesus and asked Him about the greatest commandment in the law. He said:
Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength.
Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.
On these two commandments the whole law hangeth, and the prophets.
That law does not pass away. The thing that passed away, praise God, was the old man—the sin. God judged sin in the flesh, that we might be free from the law of sin.
There are things that we need to know. There are things that we need to have as foundations of our lives.
First, Romans 7:18: “Nothing good dwelleth in me, that is, in my flesh.”
Second, Romans 6:6-7:
Our old man was crucified with Him, that the body of sin might be done away, that so we should no longer be in bondage to sin;
for he that hath died is justified from sin.
The second part is putting this truth into action. It is reckoning. Basically, when we confront a situation, we reckon the fact to be a fact. The Word says, knowing that you have died to sin, reckon it to be so. Reckon yourselves to be dead indeed unto sin.
I am not going to go into the pronunciation of the Greek term; you will be happy about that. But the word deals with reality. If I reckon that my bank book has twenty-five dollars in it, then it has twenty-five dollars in it. Otherwise, I am deceiving myself. This word refers to facts, not suppositions.
Brothers and sisters, this is not sinless perfection. This is not instant sinless perfection, like I think it was the Wesleyans, where they would sin and say, “Oh no, it must not have taken the first time,” so they would go back and be baptized again. Then they would sin again: “Oh no, it must not have taken the first time.”
What this is, is the salvation of the soul. It brings the new life God has placed in our spirits to gain ground in our souls.
As Derek was sharing this morning, I was scared to death that he was going to share my message in his opening. I thought, “Oh boy.” I really feel for Brother Stephen, having to share with other brothers as they step on his verses from one message to another and use them up.
Romans 7 says:
But now we have been discharged from the law, having died to that wherein we were held; so that we serve in newness of the Spirit, and not in oldness of the letter.
Brothers and sisters, when we are confronted with temptation—when we are confronted with sensation—what is our response? If our response is, “Well, the Word says, ‘Thou shalt not,’” I am sorry, that has no gas. There is no strength in that. The law brings death.
The thing that will enable us to overcome is not the fact that we should or should not be doing something. That is eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. That is another thought.
The thing that enables us to overcome is this new life that He has placed in us. The law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set us free from the law of sin and death.
Another passage says, “Set your hope perfectly on the grace that is to be brought unto you.” That would be my encouragement to all of us, but particularly to those who are discouraged and feel, “Maybe I was not called to run this race. Maybe this race is not for me. I run out of gas too many times, and everybody around me seems to be getting it, but I keep having to take this class over and over again. I have been in this seat for a pretty long time.”
Set your hope fully on the grace to be revealed. It is His life that overcomes, not ours.
On one hand, we have the objective cross—that day on Calvary’s cross, we were crucified with Him.
But, as I mentioned, one of the characteristics of the old man is self-deception. What I mean by that is, we do something right and start thinking, “Hey, I have got this stuff. Yeah, I have got the hang of this. I have got this down.”
So God, in His mercy, instead of letting us walk around in our ignorance and self-satisfaction, sends the cross into our experience.
Basically, what I mean by the cross is something that crosses our will—where His will crosses our will.
It is a process where God reveals things to us that we need to surrender to Him.
I hope this is an encouragement. It is only by the grace of God that we see that we need to surrender our hearts to the Lord. In our natural selves, we are totally and utterly self-satisfied.
Apart from the Lord speaking into our hearts and revealing sin, we would not see it, because we are self-deceived. But we can know that, in the same way that it is only by the grace of God that He reveals sin, when He does that, He also gives grace by the resurrection life He has given us to say, “Yes, Lord.”
If your first response, when confronted with that situation, is not “Yes, Lord,” then for goodness’ sake, do not do it simply because you think you are supposed to. Say, “Lord, I do not want to do it.”
And I am telling you, if you belong to Christ, He will change your heart. Like I said, He does not want robots. He does not want people who say, “Okay, I am going to do it because this is what God wants me to do.”
He wants us to level with Him and say, “Lord, I do not want to.” But, Lord, walk in the garden of my heart.
If we will let Him in, He changes our want-to. It is not an outside thing. He changes our want-to so that we serve Him because we want to.
It is a critical issue how we respond. The Old Testament response, when there would be a command from God, was, “All that Thou sayest we will do.” Every time they said that, the noose got tighter and tighter and tighter. They brought judgment on themselves because they could not do it.
They made vows. They swore curses on themselves. You think we are good at trying to pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps? They had assemblies where they commanded curses on themselves if they did not follow the law from then on.
The New Testament response is, by grace through faith, to yield to God—to invite Him into the garden of your heart.
When we, by faith, step into this new life and say, “Not I, but Christ; not my will”—and, like I said, it is not, “Okay, God, I will not do my will this time. You can have Yours.” It is not a tit-for-tat arrangement.
He changes our hearts.
Words cannot express how tangible and real this resurrection life is. When confronted with something that crosses our will, if we allow the Lord to walk in the garden of our hearts, He will change our hearts.
The life that He has given us is more tangible than the floor and the chairs that we are standing and sitting on. It is a different kind of life. It is not subject to the law of sin and death.
It is a life that serves because its nature is, “I delight to do Thy will, O God,” because it is not our life; it is His life.
When we, by faith, step into that life, there is a separation of soul and spirit, and we are liberated in that area to walk by the Spirit and resurrection life.
We can then stand with God against our old man, because it is no longer I, but Christ who lives in me. This is not soul suppression, but walking in newness of life.
By the Spirit, putting to death the deeds of the body—as Brother Jerry has been sharing about sonship—Romans 8:13 says:
If by the Spirit ye put to death the deeds of the body, ye shall live.
For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, these are sons of God.
The nature of sonship is living by this life, not trying to make our flesh look better on the outside; not trying to determine that this time we will follow the rules better, but living by this life.
As I touched on earlier, this is not abandoning the law. It is fulfilling the requirements of God. This is not a mechanical formula. It can come across as mechanical, but it is not. It is abiding in Christ.
Jesus said:
Abide in Me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, except it abide in the vine; so neither can ye, except ye abide in Me.
The passage that we read talked about bearing fruit to God. Once again, it talks about bearing fruit. That is, we allow Him to walk in the garden of our hearts, and He bears fruit to God.
It is not artificial fruit. It is not, “Okay, I am going to take a class on how to be more patient. I am going to take a class on how to be submissive.” It is an expression of His life.
That is why Jesus could say:
Come unto Me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.
Take My yoke upon you, and learn of Me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls.
For My yoke is easy, and My burden is light.
To our life, the yoke is impossible. To the old man, the mind set on the flesh cannot submit to the law of God. But the new life He has placed in us has the nature of loving God and loving one another. That is the life that can enter into the kingdom.
So what do we do, now that we know we have this freedom and this life that God has given us—not only this resurrection life, but that He has crucified the old man with Christ? What do we do when we see another brother or sister who looks as though they might need help with this particular area of sin in their lives?
It is unfortunate that we take external sins to be so much more grave than internal ones. We see someone who has fallen in a certain area of sin, or someone who struggles in a certain area, and we say, “Oh, they are not progressing in the Lord as they should.”
But internal sins are just as bad, if not far worse. I think it was C. S. Lewis who said that a cold, self-righteous prig is often far nearer hell than a prostitute.
Some of us can hide our sin on the inside. We walk in judgment of one another. We walk in superiority. We think that we are here to take the church’s temperature, that it is our job to make sure everything is as spiritual as it is supposed to be.
There is no difference before God. Sin is sin.
Unless we are willing to prefer one another, we will get nowhere.
Matthew 5, the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount, says:
Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
That is such a potential stumbling block for us. The Lord does something. We see an opportunity where we used to walk in rebellion against our boss, going around and building a little coalition to overthrow him, you know.
But the Lord gives us grace. We step into walking in this new life—not taking obedience classes, okay, but stepping into this new life.
The easiest thing in the world to do at that point is to put on a spirituality badge and say, “Oh, this is great. I have got all this stuff together.” Then all of a sudden, we are back where we started.
Jesus said, “Blessed are the poor in spirit.” Blessed are those who know that it is not them; it is Christ. It is not the natural life, and the natural life cannot get there.
This is such a critical issue in our lives together. As I started, we have been praying, “Thy kingdom come.”
There is nothing that can enter that kingdom other than the life of Christ. There is nothing that can enter; there is nothing that can be built into the church other than the life of Christ.
As we are coming together, I believe that the Lord is moving mightily in our midst, stirring the hearts of brothers and sisters to come together.
But if we do not prefer one another in love, if we do not submit to one another in the fear of Christ, then this whole thing is going to jump the rails.
The only way that we can do that is by the life of Christ. The life of the natural man exalts itself; only the life of Christ humbles itself.
We are so cast upon the Lord. No brother has the whole revelation. As somebody has said before, we all have feet of clay.
But if we will humble ourselves before one another and prefer one another, when we come together, if we will recognize no man according to the flesh—not saying, “Oh, there is so-and-so. He used to be a such-and-such, so I do not need to listen to his counsel”—if we will recognize no man according to the flesh, then there is hope.
If any man is in Christ, he is a new creature. Recognize that new life in one another. Be prepared to receive from one another.
If we will do that, the Lord can enlarge this ground.
All right, let us pray.
Father, we come to You in Jesus’ name. Lord, forgive me for the things that I left out that I should have put in, and the things that I put in that I should have left out. Thank You for my brothers’ and sisters’ patience with me this morning.
Lord, I thank You for Your Word. I thank You for Your life that You placed in us. Lord, I thank You for crucifying the old man, that we should no longer be slaves to sin, that we can bear fruit to God. Hallelujah.
Lord, we thank You for calling us to abide in You, for making a way that we can, and for changing our want-to.
Lord, I thank You that we do not need to be like those ones who were invited to the wedding feast, who came up with excuses to go back and live their lives on their own and miss the feast.
Lord, we acknowledge that it is by Your life, because by ourselves we will do that every time.
Lord, we thank You for stirring us by Your Spirit over these past weeks and months. We acknowledge that it is You—You having mercy on Your people.
Lord, teach us to walk in the Spirit. Lord, put no confidence in the flesh.
Thank You, Lord. In Jesus’ name, amen.