This is like looking into a clown’s nose.
Good morning. I just want to let you know that I can fit in the beds, just in case you were wondering, okay? I don’t even have to be sideways; I can fit in there. But you have to pop me out.
Let’s go ahead and read a couple of Scriptures, all right? Turn to one of our theme verses, John 18:38. After Jesus has spoken of His kingdom and said that everyone who is of the truth hears His voice, Pilate asks Him, “What is truth?”
Pilate saith unto Him, What is truth?
Then go back to John 17:17. In His high-priestly prayer, Jesus prays to His Father for His disciples and for all those who will come after, believing in Him:
Sanctify them in the truth: Thy word is truth.
And one other verse from the Gospel of John: John 8:31-32.
Jesus therefore said to those Jews that had believed Him, If ye abide in My word, then are ye truly My disciples;
and ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.
Father, we want to thank You that this morning, as we come to You, we are free. We have been made free by the blood of Christ to come to You. There is nothing in our way, and so that is what we do.
We stand in the very place You have given us, Jesus Christ, and stand in Him before You. As we have been singing, Lord, we want to tell You that we love You. We are glad that You have opened the door to us and opened our eyes so that we can actually see You and behold You in our spirits.
That is what we want to do this morning as we come to Your Word. We want You to reveal Yourself to us in all that You are for us. We want to know You as the One who sets us free from all that we are, sets us free from this world, and enables us to have that eternal life we were meant to have from the beginning.
We thank You that You have won this for us all. You have purchased this for us all in Jesus Christ, and You have given us the Holy Spirit to show us what is ours.
So we are relying on You, Holy Spirit, to open the Word to us today and to make it understandable to us, so that we can really hear what You are saying and respond to You.
Lord, we thank You again for giving us Your Word. You have not left us in the dark, so to speak, but You have given us Your Word to show us Who You are. We come to it and ask You to open it, in Jesus’ name. Amen.
There we go. Tastes like water.
In these words today, you notice two of the Scriptures are the same ones I used yesterday. I have kind of sandwiched them around the main one. The one I really have a burden for is the idea that Thy word is truth.
I want to talk again about Thy Word today, but we want to look at it in a different way. Yesterday, we looked at it as ultimate truth. We are not going to look at it as anything different from ultimate truth, but we considered Pilate’s question: “What is truth?”
Pilate was saying, “I look at my world—the world I live in, the world I grew up in, the world I am a part of—and I see no ultimate truth. I am not even looking for it, because I do not believe there is one.” So he went on in a very cynical way.
But in John 8, we find a whole different audience. This is not an audience that is cynical. This is an audience of believers. It says, “To the Jews who believed.”
When we think about these Jews who believed, they were in a critical place. Jesus is arguing with the Pharisees after the woman caught in adultery. He is speaking about witness, and they say, “You are witnessing about Yourself. There is no corroboration.” But He says, “The Father bears witness of Me too. There are two witnesses.” He even spoke of John the Baptist, who bore witness of Him.
So you had this group of Jewish believers who were being swayed. They were coming to a place of really believing, but it was like they were looking at Jesus from the outside. They saw this Man before them, but they did not know how deep they wanted to go.
Alfred Edersheim, a Jewish believer who lived in the 1800s, said that these Jews who were believing were in a critical place. They were on the fence. They could either return to what they had always known—the Jewish religion and its familiar practices—or say, “I really want to throw in my lot with You.”
They had a religion. And it is not just the Jews, okay? We as Christians can have the same thing. Our religion can be a surface religion. It can all be on the surface.
What I mean is that we have a familiarity with God because we have been brought up in this religious culture. The culmination of that religion is that we do things. We do things because they are the things we think are right, because we think, “Well, this is what God wants us to do.”
Think about Fiddler on the Roof. You have Tevye and all the traditions. In the opening scene, they are all getting ready for Shabbat—for the Sabbath. They are out in the world, and then they come in and all of a sudden they get holy. They move everything around, get the candles ready, and prepare everything. They are doing things because they think, “This is what pleases God.”
This can become the culmination of our whole religious life. We do the things we think God wants us to do, and then we leave it at that and go on with the rest of our lives.
For us, it may not be preparing for Shabbat. We have our quiet time—whatever that means. Usually, we read a little of the Word and pray, but we do it religiously. We go to meetings. We do not call it church, because we are the church, but we go to the meetings twice a week. We go to a prayer meeting or Bible study, and then we go to the Sunday meeting.
We do the things, but that is not the culmination. That is not all we have. These Jews were faced with this question: “Here is our religion that we have always known. We have the surface thing. And then we have this Man here who is showing us something different. Am I going to give my lot to Him? Am I going to say, ‘I am throwing it all in with You’?”
The question is, am I okay with just the surface? Because if you are okay with the surface, you will just continue on the surface. You say, “I do not see anything wrong with it. This is as far as I want to go.”
It is like getting into a swimming pool or going to the beach. On the East Coast, the water can be warm. But on the West Coast, the water comes down from Alaska. On a good day, the water is about 68 degrees. It is cold.
When we were kids, we would go body surfing near Camp Pendleton. You would see guys from Nebraska or the East Coast look at the water and say, “Oh yeah, we are going right into that.” They would run in as hard as they could, hit the water, and as soon as their chest hit it, you would hear them scream. It was shock.
Some people put a toe in first, then go to their ankles, and then finally say, “It is just too cold. I am not going in there. I came to the beach for the sand.”
But that is the whole thing: are we satisfied with the surface, or do we want truth in a more intimate way? Do we want it in a deeper way, where it affects us? On the surface, truth does not necessarily affect you. But when it goes deep, it has an effect on your life.
Jesus looks at these Jews who are believing, and this is His persuasion for them on the fence:
If ye abide in My word, then are ye truly My disciples;
and ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.
“Abide in My words.” Here we have this word abide. We want to look at the Word, but first we want to look at what He says we are to do with the Word. He says that we are to abide in it.
That means to dwell in it. Dwell. Stay the course in the Word. Do not get out of it. You want to be in this place because you are saying, “This is going to be my home. This is where I want to live from.”
We live out from our home. When I leave Toronto, I am going to go home. But when I came to Toronto, I came out of my home to come here and do what I have been asked to do. Then I am going back to my home. I am not going to say, “Gee whiz, I like Toronto. I am going to leave my wife and kids and just live here now.” No, I have a home.
My home is my base. It is the base from which my whole life comes. Every day, after I go to work, I come back to it. There I find acceptance, life, and love.
Jesus is saying, “If you abide—if you make My Word your base camp—you are going to know the truth. And if you know the truth, the truth is going to set you free.”
That is where we want to look today. We want to know about the truth and how it sets us free. This is not just a to-do kind of thing. It is a way of looking at the Word.
Yesterday, I talked about the Word as light. I want to touch on that again toward the end. But I want to look at three properties of the Word: the Word as food, the Word as life, and the Word as light.
The Scriptures speak about the Word in these ways. In 1 Peter 2, it speaks about longing for the pure milk of the Word. Milk is food, right? In Hebrews 5:12-14 and 1 Corinthians 3, it speaks of solid food and meat. These are all types of food.
Milk is probably food in its simplest form. It is so simple and easy to digest that infants can feed on it. That is how simple a food it is.
Even when we grow up, we never entirely get away from milk. Some of you had milk at breakfast. You put it in cereal, oatmeal, and coffee. You never get away from milk as the simple thing.
When you look at the Word, what is the milk of the Word? The milk of the Word is the love of God being shown to us. When you look into Scripture and find the love of God, that is the simplest form of spiritual food.
You find it in what I call the easy books of the Bible. There are easy books and hard books of the Bible. The storybooks are wonderful books. If you are reading the Bible, you probably do not want to start with Leviticus, because it is not a storybook; it is technical in what it is saying. That is a different type of food.
But in the stories, you see the whole story of how humanity began, what God did, and how He began His redemptive process. You see how God deals with people, and in all these things you see the love of God.
God may correct you, but He does it out of love because His purpose for you is bigger than what you see. He is trying to bring you into that purpose because He loves you.
The Old Testament historical books—Genesis, the first part of Exodus, parts of Numbers, Joshua, Judges, 1 Samuel, 2 Samuel, Kings, Chronicles after those first twelve chapters of names, Ezra—and then the Gospels and the book of Acts, are like picture books to us. God made simple.
He gives us Himself in His simplest form: God is love. That is what we said last night. God is love.
When you look at these things, you find that God loves the lost sinner. He does not just love good people. You see that in the Man Jesus as He walks through the Gospels. He has compassion on His people and compassion on their condition.
When the leper comes to Him and says, “If Thou wilt, Thou canst make me clean,” Jesus does not say, “Well, I do not know.” He says:
I will; be thou made clean.
That is the love of God. It is not a formula. He is saying, “I love you. I want to release you from this sickness. I want to make you whole.” That is what the love of God does.
You see it all through the Bible. It is the simplest type of food, and it is the one from which we should never, never, ever get away. This is the basic food of everything: the love of God for us.
How does knowing God loves us free us? First of all, it assures us that we are loved. Is it not wonderful to know that you are loved?
I remember when I was dating my wife and getting serious with her. The first time I put my arm around her, she just stiffened up. Oh man, do you know what I felt like? First, I was embarrassed. Then I went home and had the worst night ever.
I thought, “This is the one,” but maybe she did not feel the same way. So I had a sleepless night, tossing and turning, until I pressed the question: “Hey, where is this going?”
Then she assured me. Once she assured me, the relationship took off. That is just about love. When you are assured that God loves you, and you do not have to worry about that, then you are free to worship.
Being free to worship means that you are free to worship without bringing all the baggage of how unworthy you are. How many times do we come to the Lord’s table and begin to pray, “Oh Lord, I am so unworthy,” and on and on?
But now we can come without those suitcases, because He nailed all that baggage to the cross. It no longer hinders you from worshiping. He says, “That is gone. That is done away with.”
Now you can come in gladness of heart to thank Him, praise Him, and bless Him, because you stand with God. You are free. You are free to worship.
You are free to say, “I see You now for Who You are,” instead of only seeing yourself in the light of Who He is. You come thinking, “Oh, I see all the things wrong with me,” and the Lord says, “Yes, I saw them too, and I nailed them to the cross. Now you can come free.”
That is a liberating thing. You see the things nailed to the cross, and then you are led to see the beauty of the love of Christ—the love of God in Christ.
In His light, we see light. In His light, all of a sudden we see our unworthiness, but in that same light we say, “Oh, He has made provision for me.” Hallelujah. This is what it is all about. I am now free because God loves me.
And He says, “I do not stop loving you.” Is that not wonderful? “I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee,” because I love you.
I am so glad my wife took a vow that she would love me forever—or until I die. I can rest. I know she is not going to leave me. It is a wonderful thing.
The love of God also makes us free to serve Him. We are no longer saying, “I cannot serve You because of this,” or, “I cannot serve You because of that.” Now that we are free, we are free to serve Him.
Think about the demoniac of the Gadarenes in Mark 5. He had a legion of demons, and the Lord came and cast them out. The man wanted to follow Jesus, but the Lord said:
Go to thy house unto thy friends, and tell them how great things the Lord hath done for thee, and how He had mercy on thee.
That was his service. The Lord was saying, “Yes, I know you want to follow Me, but I have something for you to do. Go back to your house and tell the people there what great things I have done for you.”
Or consider Isaiah in Isaiah 6. He sees the Lord high and lifted up, and the train of His robe fills the temple. Isaiah sees himself and says, “Woe is me! For I am undone; because I am a man of unclean lips.”
Then a seraph comes, takes a coal from the altar, and touches his lips. His iniquity is taken away. Then the Lord says, “Whom shall I send?” The man who had just said, “I am so unclean,” responds, “Here am I; send me.”
That is freedom to serve. All that stuff has been taken care of. Now I am free to serve God. I am free to be in His will.
Food is very instrumental in what you become. There was a saying in the 1960s: “You are what you eat.” It is true, because what you eat becomes right here. You can tell what I eat just by looking at me, and it is not very healthy, is it? But that is okay. God loves me.
I love sweets. I love sweets and salt. That is okay.
But no Christian should be lactose intolerant. Do you understand that? No Christian should be lactose intolerant.
There are those who would bring in legalism and say that it is not the love of God that brings you into things, but what you do to please God. That is wrong. That is wrong teaching. That is wrong understanding. It is the love of God, and we should embrace that love.
Secondly, we talked about solid food. The storybooks are like milk, but books like Leviticus, Deuteronomy, and the Epistles of Paul are more like solid food.
What solid food does is allow you to grow in a different way. There are foods that help your eyesight and foods that help build your muscles so you can stand, walk, and do things. That is what solid food is for.
Solid food allows you to begin to see God’s purpose for redeeming you. It is not just that He loves you, forgives you, and brings you to Himself. He has a purpose for you.
He is not going to keep you in the dark about His purpose. He will show you that He loves you, what He has done for you, and the purpose He has for you.
When you read the Epistles of Paul, that is what he is talking about. He says there is a bigger purpose than what you see, and your eyes need to be opened to it. You need to eat that Word of God and find out, with the help of the Holy Spirit, what God is really after and the methods He uses to bring you into His purpose.
Think about The Karate Kid—the old one, not the new one. The old ones are always better, right? The kid wants to learn karate because people are beating him up. He finds Mr. Miyagi and comes ready to learn.
But Mr. Miyagi says, “Wash my car.” And when you wash it, do it this way and that way: “Wax on, wax off.” Then he has him paint the fence in a particular motion.
After a few weeks, the kid thinks, “This guy is taking me for a ride. He just wants the fence painted and the car waxed.” We can have that same idea about God: “You cannot trust God.”
But when you begin to eat this Word and see the purpose of God, you begin to see how God dealt with things in Scripture to obtain a result. Your eyes begin to open. Then circumstances come into your life, and you say, “This is what I saw in the Bible. This is God.”
Then you give yourself to the training. Just like in the movie, the boy finally sees that the movements were training him. It dawns on him.
The Word of God frees you from distrusting Him. You can trust Him in what He is doing and in the purpose He has for you.
Even in the Garden of Eden, the enemy brought distrust to Eve about the fruit. “You will not surely die. God knows that when you eat it, you will be like Him. He just does not want you out of His power.” All of a sudden, she distrusted the Lord.
But the Word takes away that distrust. It replaces distrust with trust, faith, and obedience that comes out of faith. Then you begin to see the truth, and you find that His will is good, acceptable, and perfect.
You are freed from distrust and enabled to trust Him. When you begin to trust Him, you are able to come in.
It is like Coach Sims said yesterday: “Trust me. You just have to trust me. Do what I say and trust me.” We grumbled because we did not understand. He had us do leg lifts, and I hated leg lifts.
Your legs are together, then they go out, then back together, and then down. He would count, “One, two,” and you would think, “Oh, is this going to help me?”
But by the next year, when conditioning started, you said, “I understand. I understand now. I can do it.” You might grumble about it and not like it, but you know the fruit that comes out of it. That is what you are after. You find that it is the good, acceptable, and perfect will of God.
Then there is life in the Word. In Luke 8:5-11, in the parable of the sower, Luke explains what the seed is:
The seed is the word of God.
What is in a seed? In a seed is condensed life. It is all packed in there.
It is like taking an orange tree and getting it down into a seed. You say, “There is an orange tree in here.” Then you put the seed in the ground and care for it, and life comes out of it. Years later, you have an orange tree, and it produces another orange with another seed in it.
You have life in a seed. And this life that we have is Jesus. It is Jesus. We have the life of Christ.
The Word shows me the life I have been given by God. I find my life in the Word. I may not see it in myself, but I see it in here. This is the life that is mine.
There is a Man in the glory Whose life is for me. I find my life in the Word—the life meant for me, the new life given to me by God, the new life that is now in me.
This is the very life I am to be trained in and maintain with the help of the Holy Spirit. Notice that: with the help of the Holy Spirit.
The life of Jesus is revealed to me not merely as something objective. I look at the life of Jesus and say, “This is this Man. I see what He is.” But it is not merely an objective observation of Jesus.
We find out that it is the very life given to us when we were born again. This life is mine. This is the real meat of the Word.
Tozer said that this is probably the most misunderstood and least studied thing in Christian theology. People talk about being saved and all kinds of things, but they do not talk about the life of Christ being in you.
Christ is in you. That is the hope of glory. It is not, “Oh, if I could just do this.” No, it is the life of Christ in you.
Here the Holy Spirit becomes more than an illuminator—more than Someone who merely sheds light on a subject. Now He becomes your trainer. He is the trainer in this new life.
He is saying, “I am in charge of taking this Word and taking this life and conforming you to it. I am going to show you how it is done.”
If we try to do it ourselves, we get all messed up. It is like trying to operate on ourselves. Can you imagine filling your own tooth? Getting the mirror up there, getting the drill—can you imagine what you would look like afterward?
When I was a kid, I was so afraid of needles. I did not have Novocain. Can you imagine my poor dentist trying not to hit a nerve? But the whole thing is that it is impossible.
So the Holy Spirit says, “I am in charge. I will take care of this. You do not worry about it. You do not need to say, ‘I need to do this.’ No, I know what to do. I know the machines to put you on.”
You may look at one machine and think that is the machine you want, but He says, “That is not for you yet. This is the one we are going through right now.”
The Word in His hands means that He is your trainer. This is what becomes the sharp two-edged sword. It says, “That is the way you think it should be, but this is the way the life wants to go.”
It says, “This is the thing you think is right, but the life says, ‘No, this is the way that is right.’” So it divides soul and spirit. It shows you the different ways.
This is the place in our life with the Word where we become like Jacob and begin to wrestle with God. We have our natural life, our sinful nature, saying, “I want to go this way,” while we see something different in God.
We wrestle with God until He finally touches our hip. He is faithful to touch the hip and say, “You need to go this way.”
This is where we learn to walk in newness of life. We see the life, commit the Word to the Holy Spirit, and say, “Work it into me.”
We learn to submit—not merely to the Scriptures, but to the life that is in us, the life to which the Scriptures point.
When we do this, we find that we are free from the law of sin and death. We find freedom from the flesh life, the carnal life, and the natural man. This is the freedom we find in this.
You do not even have to know all the terminology. Some of us say, “I do not really understand this terminology.” You do not have to. Just let God take you there. Let the Holy Spirit take you there.
He shows you something in the Word. You do not have to say, “Oh, this is the flesh life,” or, “This is the life of the Spirit.” No. Just obey the Holy Spirit. If the Spirit convicts you of something—bam—you will find that you come into this life.
It is not like the Gnostics, where you must go through thirty-two levels of knowledge before you come to the truth. No. The Holy Spirit shows you the truth. You can be a novice, and He will bring you into it.
He is on His own timetable. You do not put Him on a timetable. Brother Kong is always known to say, “God is never late.”
This life becomes ours not simply by knowing truth. Knowing truth does not make this life. But we begin to experience the life we were meant to have because the Holy Spirit brings us into it.
In closing, I want to revisit the idea of light. Yesterday we talked about light as the illuminator that tells us who God is—the ultimate truth of Who God is, who man is, who Christ is, what God wants of us, and the redemptive story.
But light comes in a spectrum. You have white light, and if you put a prism to it, you see that it can be broken down into many facets. There are many facets of light.
The light of the Word not only shows us God; all of a sudden, we are shown the reality of eternity.
Not merely eternity as a definition—“You live forever”—but we become aware of it. It becomes clearer and clearer because we are reading the Word and the Holy Spirit is illuminating things and helping us in this life.
It becomes clearer that this physical, material world in which we live is not the final reality.
For some of us, we do not even know that yet because we are so alive in this world that we have not seen that there is anything more. I am not saying that as a put-down. I am simply saying that for some of us, that is the reality. It is not a judgment.
The reason we do not see this is because the world deceives us. The enemy deceives us. It places things before us and says, “This is what is real. This is what it is all about.”
Satan did this to Jesus when he showed Him all the kingdoms of the world, their riches, and their glory. He said, “It is all Yours if You just bow down to me.” He showed Him the material world and said, “It is all Yours.”
But Jesus knew that was not all there is. That is not the summation of God’s creation. It is not summed up in the material world.
Consider 2 Timothy 4:10. This is Paul’s last letter. He is going to be martyred very soon, and he knows his time is up. He says that he has run the race and finished the course.
In the end, as he sends greetings and instructions, there is this little comment about Demas:
For Demas forsook me, having loved this present world.
I want to deal with this idea of “this present world.” It is not merely the physical world. It is the world system under the enemy. We read last night that the whole world lies under the influence of the evil one.
When we hear that Demas forsook Paul because he loved this present world, we may have a wrong idea about Demas. We think he went wild—that he became involved in illicit sex, got drunk, robbed cars, or killed people. We think that is what loving the world means.
That could happen down the road, but that is not necessarily what it means. The loving of this world—the deception of this world—is the way the world is presented to us.
Eve saw that the fruit was good to look at and supposed to be good for her. She was deceived into doing this.
In 1 John 2:15-17, it says not to love the world. If you love the world, the love of the Father is not in you. All that is in the world is the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life.
The lust of the eyes is like this: I see what other people have. I see what people who are not Christians have, and some who are Christians too. I see what they have and what they are getting by going their way, and I desire it.
I say, “I will go this way because I want what they have. It looks like they have a good thing. I want to be successful. I want a good-paying job. I want to go to a good college. I want these things. I want a pretty wife or a pretty husband.”
We see it and say, “That looks good.” These people look satisfied. I am not saying happy; I am saying satisfied. They look satisfied with what they have.
It is like the Israelites coming into the land in Numbers. After defeating Sihon and Og, two and a half tribes come to the river and say, “It is really neat here. We see the fields, and they are good for everything we want to do. Can we just stay here?”
That is the lust of the eyes. It is not necessarily some sexual thing. It is the idea that I want what I see. It is pleasing to my eyes.
It is like Lot. When Abraham asked him which way he wanted to go, he looked toward Sodom and saw that it was well watered and had everything he wanted. He said, “That is the good place. That is where I want to go. That looks good. That can satisfy me.”
Then there is the lust of the flesh. Again, we often think of it as a very sensual thing, but here is the deception of it for us today: “I want to live in comfort.”
That is the lust of the flesh. “I want to have that big home. I do not want a push lawnmower. I want a tractor lawnmower that I can ride on and read a book while mowing the lawn.”
“I want a nice SUV where I can sit up high over traffic. I want the Bluetooth phone, SiriusXM, and seats that warm up in the winter.” Aren’t those seats addicting? It is hard to get out of the car. You turn off the engine and wait a couple more minutes until you do not feel it anymore.
I love diminishing returns. Okay? I will do the things I need to do to live in comfort. That is the lust of the flesh. That is what the flesh wants. That is what the carnal man wants: “I just want to live in comfort.”
It is not necessarily saying, “I want nothing to do with God.” It is saying, “I want to live in comfort.”
Then there is the pride of life. When you follow the path of the lust of the eyes and the lust of the flesh, you come to a point where you say, “Look how good I have it. There is nothing I need.”
Is that not what the church at Laodicea said? “Look at what I have. There is nothing I do not need.” Which includes Whom? “I do not even need God anymore.”
It is not saying, “I do not have God.” It is saying, “I do not need Him.”
You may say, “I go to a nice church. They preach the Word. I may not go to the prayer meeting anymore, but I listen to that preacher, and he has great messages. I can say amen to almost everything he says.”
But what effect does it have in my life? “I do not need anything. It is great stuff. That is great knowledge. I was thinking that too.” But that is as far as it goes, because it is on the surface.
All that is surface. The truth does not go any deeper than that.
Jesus gave a parable about the rich man who said, “I have become so rich that I need to build new barns.” He spent all his time building bigger barns and filling them. Then the Lord said:
Thou foolish one, this night is thy soul required of thee.
There is nothing worse than being called a fool. We may feel foolish, but when we understand that we have been fooled, that is humbling. “My gosh, I have been fooled. I have been punked.” Is that what they call it today? You forfeit your soul.
There is a song—not a hymn—that came out in the 1940s or 1950s: “If I gained the world and lost the Savior.” The whole thing is this: if I gain the world and lose the Savior, I may not find it out until something happens and God opens my eyes.
Then I say, “My gosh, I forfeited something. I forfeited what was really true.” In the end, I come to realize that everything is mine in Jesus. All the things I really want are mine in Jesus.
Demas had been a fellow worker. But this was the closing word about him: he had forsaken Paul, having loved this present world.
So these Jewish believers sitting on the fence had to decide: “Do I want to go on with the surface stuff, or do I want to throw in with Jesus and let the truth really affect my life?”
Jesus gives them this word in John 8:31. His first word is: if.
“If.” It is a question. But who is it a question to? It is a question to you. It is a question to these believers.
He is saying, “I am putting the ball in your court. Everything I have been saying is true and real. Here is the ball, and I am putting it in your court. Now what are you going to do with it?”
It is up to you. He is not going to twist your arm. He is not going to put sugar on it so that it draws you to it. He simply says, “This is it. What are you going to do with it?”
You can say, “I am satisfied with the surface life.” And you know something? That does not mean you are not saved. You can go on like that.
But it is not what God intended for you. It is not the full package God has for you. It is nice. It is a clean life. It is a respectable life.
But if you are going to live in the wilderness—remember yesterday, when we looked at the Word as being like a wilderness?—you have to dig wells. You have to dig wells because you have to find the water that is there.
So the question is right before you: Do you want this?
If ye abide in My word, then are ye truly My disciples;
and ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.
The proof comes only by picking up the ball. The proof that what Jesus says is true really comes by your picking up the ball. You will never know it otherwise. It will just be good teaching.
You may say, “Yes, that is what the Bible says. That is what Jim says. That is what Dana says. Good teaching.” But you will never know the depth of what God really wants to say to you and what God really wants for you in His purpose if you do not pick up the ball.
Here you are sitting on the fence. The ball is in your court. That is where I leave it. Let’s pray.
Heavenly Father, we want to thank You that You come to all kinds of people. We have been talking about how You show Your love to sinners and do all these things. But You are also saying to us, “Do you believe that I can satisfy your life? Do you believe that what I have for you is the best?”
Lord, we have to make a decision. You have given us evidence, but we need faith to go with that evidence.
I ask, Lord, that those who are sitting on the fence would come to that decision and say, “I want to throw in my lot with You. I just want to throw it in with You.”
“I see these things that I want, and I know I can have them by going after all these other things. But Lord, when I look at others, I see that people are bankrupt because of it. They are bankrupt in their soul. They have forfeited their soul.”
Lord, I do not want to forfeit my soul. I want my soul saved. I want to be what I am supposed to be. I want to know You as the One Who really satisfies.
So, Lord, I pray that You would help these as they are confronted with Your truth. Bring them to wrestling. Do not let them simply say, “Yeah, I am just going to let it roll off my back.”
I pray that by Your Spirit You would bring them to that wrestling match. I pray that they would allow You to touch their hip and bring them to the place of saying, “I am Yours,” so that they become worshipers.
Thank You for all the things You give us that free us from so much. But, Lord, I pray especially that You would free us from the deception of the world, so that we would see that the world is not the ultimate reality.
Oh Lord, only You can show us that. I pray that You would open up eternity to us, that we could see that eternity is the real, that the spiritual is the real, and that it is not the temporal world that counts. There is something beyond.
Only You can illuminate that to us. That is what I ask for this whole congregation here, including myself, in Jesus’ name.