Section 1:
Participants136
Sorry, Video Not Available.
Deliverance from This Body of Death
Romans 7:24b
Sermon Transcript by Rev. Ernest O’Neill
For about a year now, we have been studying each Sunday morning, the greatest problem that human beings face, and have faced, down through the centuries. It is undoubtedly the source of every other problem that they have. And it’s outlined, if you would like to look at it, in Romans 7:22-23. “For I delight in the law of God, in my inmost self, but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin which dwells in my members.” Maybe the classic expression is in verse 15, back a few verses. Romans 7:15, “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.”
If you’ve been here during the whole of the past year, you might think, “Oh let’s get away from it. I don’t want to deal with this any longer, talking Sunday after Sunday after Sunday about this schizophrenic hypocrisy in me. I want to forget it. Let’s get on to something else.”
But have you licked the problem? Because you see, loved ones, what has killed the Christian church down through the centuries, have been happy bands of superficial Christians that kept walking round this problem every time they came to it. And how many sons and daughters have said, “But Mom, if the church people could see you now, what would they think of you?” And their mom has replied, “Well God forgives me. That’s the main thing.”
How many of us have had that experience? How much of society has been put off the real answer, and the real explanation of reality, simply because we have not been able to deal with this perversity inside us that makes us do the things that we don’t want to do.
So loved ones it’s dangerous to keep thinking to yourself, “Well, no I haven’t licked the problem but let’s get on to something else. I am sure it will take care of itself.” It won’t, dear ones. It doesn’t matter how clearly you understand this intellectually. If you haven’t licked the thing, you may as well have heard nothing. That’s why it’s very important to deal with it.
Believe me; the incredible thing is that there is an old self inside each one of us that is trying to get away from facing the problem head on. Really! It urges all kinds of things. And it says, “Look, you’ve talked about this for a year. There must be something else in the gospel besides this. Now let’s get on to something else.” And the old self will give you all kinds of specious reasons for getting away from this subject. But loved ones, if you have not been delivered from that old self, then all you’re doing is listening to it and listening to Satan’s deception.
And that’s, of course, what people down through the centuries have done. So they’ve all ended up in the same position that Paul did, you remember, in this verse that we’re dealing with today, Romans 7:24. They’ve all ended up overcome by their anger and their jealousy and their resentment or their impurity, unable to do anything with it. And they’ve all ended up crying out, as he did, “Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?”
That’s why so many of us have wondered around saying, “Yeah, that’s it. That’s the only reality we can know in this present life,” in spite of the fact that Paul obviously indicates there is an answer. If you go back one chapter, he refers to these strong feelings inside us that we cannot
control as sin. He says in Romans 6:14, “For sin will have no dominion over you, since you are not under law but under grace.”
And yet thousands of us have said, “‘Who shall deliver me from this body of death?’ Yeah, well I know he says, ‘Sin will have no more dominion over me.’ And I frankly can’t see what he is getting at, if he says that back in 6, and says this in 7. But there it is. Well, I’ll get on and I’ll talk about God’s grace.”
Loved ones, really what we need to see is that Paul says there is an answer, in Romans 7:25. “Thanks be to God, through Jesus Christ, our Lord!” He says there is an answer. We’ll deal next week with the very last half of that verse, but this week, all I want to get over is that Paul believes there is an answer. It is possible to be delivered from this body of death.
This body of death is just the strong desires that we cannot control. We want to be patient, but bad temper flairs up inside us. We want to be clean and pure with our girlfriend or our boyfriend, but strong unclean promiscuous thoughts and passions come up from inside, that we cannot control. We want to be kind to the person who is our competitor or our rival, but strong jealousy and envy come up inside us. And we cannot hold them down. That’s the body of death.
And Paul is saying, “Who shall deliver me from this body of death? I am a wretched person. It’s destroying my life”. That’s what we are talking about, dear ones.
In order to see it, once more and to see what is the answer, will you look with me a little more closely at that verse? [Romans 7:24] “Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?” So many of us are apt to say, “That’s it. That’s the old Christian answer. The body, the body, the body is it. Who’ll deliver me from the body? You’re taking us back into Gnostics and the mystics and the Manicheans, all the people who said, ‘The body is evil.’ That’s what you’re going to say. That’s why the churches oppose sex and nice clothes and people who look good, because it opposes the body. Yeah, the body.”
I think a lot of us have interpreted it that way. We say, “Oh yes, it’s the physical body. Now, when you go to summer camp, remember the length of the shorts, not too short, not too…okay.” And we’ve got ourselves ridiculously off God’s will in regard to our bodies, because of course, loved ones, God does not take that attitude to the body at all. He says to us, “Look, your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit. It’s a beautiful thing. Look, when Adam and Eve had no clothes on in the Garden of Eden, they were utterly innocent and utterly free, and they regarded their bodies as beautiful. The body is something that you ought to take care of.”
He says that you remember, when God talks about marriage in — I believe it’s in Ephesians 5 — he says, “The man ought to look after the woman as his own body, for no man hates his own body but cherishes it and cares for it.” God doesn’t think the body is evil. He isn’t saying here, that the trouble is with the body. God always says, “Your body itself is a neutral instrument. It’s like a car without a driver in it. If it has a good driver in it, it’s going to go well. If it has a bad driver in it, it’s going to go badly.”
But, loved ones, let’s see first of all Paul is not saying, “Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body?” And, dear ones, all of us who have tried to find the answer in cold showers and plenty of exercise, have found that that is not the answer, because the problem is not the body. The problem is somewhere deeper than the body.
Maybe we should see that. It’s wrong to think of the body as evil. God doesn’t think of the body as evil. Jesus spent His whole life making bodies whole and well. So he doesn’t think the body is evil.
Now what does it mean ‘the body of death’? Well, it really just means the same as ‘the top of the pen’. So that’s the top of the pen. [Shows the cover of a ball point pen.] So when you talk about the ‘body of death’, it’s the body of death. It’s the body that belongs to death. Or, if you like to put it this way, this is the top of this pen, use it. That’s why we say it’s the top of the pen. So, the ‘body of death’ is a body that this death uses. And when we say, “Who shall deliver me from this body of death?” we’re just saying, “Who shall deliver me from this body that this death is constantly using.” It’s the body that belongs to death.
What death? Well, the death that each of us died to God, soon after we came to the age of thinking for ourselves. So there was a time, loved ones, after we stopped praying prayers at our mom’s knee. There was a time, somewhere around there, in our lives, when we began to think for ourselves, that we experienced a death to the Creator of the universe.
That is, we separated ourselves from Him. That’s what death is. Life is defined in Webster as ‘interaction with your environment’. Death is the cessation of that life. We ceased to interact with the great Creator who put us in this universe. That is, with regard to the vital concerns of our life, we no longer took Him into consideration.
For instance, in regard to our vocation, or our goals in life, or our aim in our life, we didn’t freely trust our Creator to show us why He had put us here. We didn’t relax and say, “Now Lord God, we know that you put the flowers here for certain purpose, the birds here for a certain purpose. Now Lord God, You put me here and I know you’re going to show me that.” We didn’t, loved ones. We separated ourselves from God as far as our careers and our goal in life was concerned.
You know we did. Early on in our lives, we started to consult everybody else. We asked our mom, what the pastor does, apart from some Sundays. And she said, “Nothing.” So we said, “Ah, I wouldn’t mind being a pastor.” Or we said, “Ah, how does a doctor have that big car?” “Oh well, he earns…” “Oh I’d like to be a doctor!” But we consulted all kinds of people, even more than listened, perhaps — or not even as selfishly as that. But we began to look to all kinds of people to guide us about our vocation in life.
In fact, we really took the attitude — without ever making it explicit — we really took the attitude, “Well we’re here. And the Creator probably doesn’t know we’re here, or if he does, he probably doesn’t care too much. He is so busy looking after the big movements in history. So I’d better start hacking out some career for myself.” And isn’t it true loved ones, that more of us did that than began to relax and trust that the Creator knew why He had put us here? More of us began to think, “Well, I am not really sure if he knows I am here. And I’d better assume He doesn’t. And so it’s up to me to find some reason for being here, and to work out something to do while I am here.”
And loved ones, immediately we separated ourselves from God in regard to our careers, and went to the ‘ATT test’ and the ‘SAT test’ and all the other counselors instead — immediately that happened, we lost any sense of His reassuring, reinforcing approval. We just lost that. We lost any sense of his reassuring, reinforcing approval on our life.
It’s a little bit like going down to California, because somebody has setup a job for you; the job falls through and suddenly you find yourself, “Now what can I do? I have no job. I don’t know where I am. I don’t know whether I should have come here at all.” And many of us found ourselves in that kind of death.
So we started to pick careers. And we followed our dad into his career, or our mom into her career, or we listened to our counselor at college. And they said, “You’ve mechanical aptitude.” So we had to go and be an auto mechanic. Or, “You have artistic abilities.” So we ought to draw and paint. And we tended to go in the direction that other people told us we were suited to go in, rather than any great sense that there was some mind behind the whole universe who had carefully designed us to do particularly one thing for him, and that he could let us know what that one thing was.
As a result of that of course, we lost all the enjoyment that we would automatically have had, from doing what we were made to do. Does a racehorse enjoy itself? Well, we think that they do seem to have great satisfaction in doing what they were created to do. It seems that animals get a lot of satisfaction from doing even what they were made to do.
Loved ones, there’s an enjoyment — believe it or not — that does not need to come from buying things or from doing things that give you a break in the old routine. There is an enjoyment that comes from doing what you were made to do. We lost all that enjoyment. Immediately we began to separate ourselves from God and His idea of what we might do and began to slip into other people’s ideas, we had a great sense of ‘a lack of enjoyment’ in our lives.
Some of us were doing things, maybe, that God wanted us to do. Most of us were not. Most of us didn’t know if we were or not. And so we lost the enjoyment that comes from that. And then of course, we began to enter into a great sense of doubt as to whether we would have the wherewithal to keep life going.
God plans the whole thing. He doesn’t throw us all into space and let us fend for ourselves. He had it all planned. So if we did exactly what he wanted us to do, he would have made sure that we weren’t short of clothes or food or shelter. Immediately we got off his plan, it was like finding ourselves in California without the job. “Where do we get the food and the shelter now?” That was the death that we experienced, loved ones.
Now what does it mean ‘the body of death’? Well, just this, that we lacked those things in our lives. And so we had to get them, somehow or other. And we began to use the body to get them. That’s it. That’s why we call it ‘the body of death’. All those things, like approval, and enjoyment, and physical needs that we have in our life — all those we tried to fill through the body. That’s why we call it ‘the body of death’. It’s the body that belongs to the death that we died to God.
So we started to look around for approval. And ever from we first played our first game of football, ever from we first did sports, in order to gain the approval and the recognition of some authoritarian figure, right up until we started to do various jobs, and tried to do our typing well, or tried to do our administering well — not for the sake of the job itself, but to gain approval and recognition from other people. We were beginning to use our body to gain the attention and approval that God would have given us if we had done what He put us here to do.
It was the same with the enjoyment. You know we lacked the enjoyment. So we began to use our body to get some of the exhilaration and the excitement that we would have got from our own job. That’s why
it’s so pathetic and pitiful, you can see, to see dear ones going home and pass old McCarthy’s [bar in Minneapolis] — an ‘attitude adjustment time’. “Oh ‘attitude adjustment time’, I need adjustment somehow. I need to relax from that miserable job I was doing all day.” So we slug the old alcohol in, and try to get the body to affect the emotions to give us some relaxation. Loved ones, it was God’s plan that we’d experience that in our ordinary jobs day after day.
You know how we’re desperate after the day is over. “Let me gamble. Let me play cards. Let me do anything to forget that miserable job that I spent eight hours at.” Loved ones, it wasn’t God’s plan, but you see what we do. We use the body to try to meet the need of the ‘death’ that exists inside us.
And it is the same then, because the physical needs began to dominate. And you know it. Loved ones, if I ask you what you spend so much of your time thinking of. Well, apart from those of us who have maybe arrived at a position in our jobs — though it’s hard for anybody to be secure today, isn’t it? But anyone who has arrived in a fair position of security — most of us are concerned, “Well, will I have enough to pay the bills at the end of the month? Will I have enough to pay the debts that I have? Will I be able to get a winter coat this year? Will I be able to move into another apartment?”
Loved ones, it’s incredible isn’t it? How all of us are not terribly much above our little dogs. “Will I have enough to eat today, and enough shelter, and will I have a warm coat to put on?” It’s incredible that this ‘body of death’ seems to have got us all preoccupied with those things. So that, of course, the body has begun to dominate. The needs of the body: “Has it enough to put on? Has it enough food inside it to keep it going? Has it enough shelter to keep the rain and the snow off it? The body begins to dominate our whole lives.
That’s why Paul says, “Wretched man that I am! Who shall deliver me from this ‘body of death,’ this body that now dominates me with its needs, its physical needs?” And, loved ones, most of us answer, “Who will deliver me? I will deliver myself. I will deliver myself.”
And so we try to do it. You know that. We try to deliver ourselves by self-denial. “Maybe if we got rid of all the debts, pay out the credit cards, that’s the answer.” “Get rid of the credit cards!” Or, “Get rid of the debt.” “Maybe if I give up my pride in clothes, maybe if I deny myself, maybe if I pray more, maybe if I make New Year resolutions… Maybe, maybe, maybe.” And we keep trying to repress all this, and change it, and turn it.
Now, loved ones, when we ask the question, “Wretched man that I am! Who shall deliver me from this body of death?” we answer, “I will. I will by dying to myself. I will deliver myself from this body of death.” Now dear ones, here’s the problem. You’re trying to deliver yourself and it’s you that are the problem.
The problem is that the whole personality is contorted and perverted. [Shows 3 concentric rectangle diagram of the personality. The inner rectangle is labeled ‘spirit’, the next ‘soul’ and the outer ‘body’] Instead of receiving everything from God, approval and enjoyment and food and shelter and clothing as he would give them to us, or enable us to receive them [On diagram shows arrow to the spirit, the innermost rectangle] — instead of doing that and giving that out to the rest of the world, [On diagram shows arrow out from spirit, through the soul and out through the body to the world] we’re working in that way. [Shows arrows from the world in to the body and then into the soul] We’re dragging approval from people. We’re dragging enjoyment from people.
And many of us have spoiled our relationships with our wives through trying to drag enjoyment from them, or our girlfriends or our boyfriends. How many of us have broken up beautiful relationships because we had to get joy from the person? We weren’t content to be without it. We had to get it from them — the physical needs.
But dear ones, do you see that is the ‘I’. [Points at the diagram of drawing in from the world] That’s the ‘I’. It’s the ‘I’ that is perverted, and you’re trying to say, “This perverted ‘I’ can deliver me from the perverted ‘I’.” It’s impossible. It is impossible.
It’s impossible to do it. It’s a logical contradiction. It’s a psychological impossibility. But that’s how we’re answering. We’re saying, “Well, yeah I know, I know that I’ve got so used to this kind of in-turned personality that it has got a grip on me. But still, still, it’s not got too big a grip on me. I can still do something about it.”
You can’t, that’s the problem. That’s why you get irritable when somebody seems to be gaining approval over you. It’s your very lifeblood. That’s why you get envious of them. It’s not just, loved ones, that it’s something that you can do without. That has become your very lifeblood — ‘approval from other people’, that whole ‘receiving from others’, ‘receiving from the world’ — that’s the way you operate now. That’s the way the ‘I’ is. The ‘I’ cannot deliver itself from that thing.
That’s why when Paul says, “Who shall deliver me from this ‘body of death’?” he says, “Thanks be to God, through Jesus Christ, our Lord!” God has already delivered you. The only thing to do with a mess like that [Indicates diagram of wrong-working personality] is to wipe the whole thing out, to crucify it, destroy it and create it anew. [Draws a cross through the personality diagram] And that’s what God has done in Jesus. Your whole personality is so contorted and so perverted; it’s working so much in reverse that you cannot change it. But God put you into Jesus and destroyed that old personality, that old self, in him. And he can do that in you this morning.
Now loved ones, it’s plainly stated if you look at it. It’s Romans 6:6. I know many of you will know it off by heart, but some of us don’t. “We know that our old self was crucified with Him,” why? “So that the sinful body,” the ‘body of sin’ or the ‘body of death’, “Might be destroyed”.
What is the word ‘destroyed’? It’s ‘rendered inoperative’, ‘left without anything to do’. “And we might no longer be enslaved to sin.” That’s the way God changes you.
He destroys that old, reversed personality that is always trying to get everything from the world, and that has become so engrained that you cannot change it. He destroyed that in Jesus, so that you are delivered from the body of death, from sin. And the ‘body of death’ is left with nothing to do.
In other words, once you really do accept, “Lord, I am willing to die with Jesus to the approval and acknowledgment of other people.” Once you really accept that deep down and say, “Father, I know you destroyed me in Jesus. I know I am dead as far as you’re concerned. I know, therefore, there’s no point in getting an old corpse a lot of praise, and acknowledgment, and recognition. So Lord, I am willing to accept that death.” as soon as you do that, God begins to give you a great sense of His own approval and His own acknowledgment and His own recognition. And the body is left with nothing to do, as far as approval and recognition are concerned. The body is left without any job to do. It’s rendered inoperative.
But brothers and sisters, it can only happen if you accept what God has done to your whole personality, which is destroy that whole wrong direction that it has taken.
Now if you say to me, “How to enter in?” It’s very plain. You need to be willing for that to take place in you. Now God has already made it take place in history. But it can only be real in you if you’re willing for it. And that’s what you need to do.
See, it’s possible for a fact to be there all the time and you, not to let it affect you. It’s possible for this book to be here and it’s a fact it’s there but if I don’t read it, it doesn’t affect me at all.
Now it’s possible for you to have been crucified with Christ 1900 years ago. It’s possible for that whole mess of a personality that is yours, to have been destroyed in Jesus. But if you won’t let that affect you, then it won’t affect you. If you won’t recognize it, then you’ll constantly live in the lie that you’ve been living in for years, that you’re here to fend for yourself, to make yourself recognized and looked up to by other people, and to make your own way through life.
So it’s really up to you whether you’re ready to let that fact affect you or not. Are you willing really to live as if you’ve been crucified with Jesus? As if you haven’t a future to ensure, as if you haven’t people whom you have to try to persuade to respect you? Are you prepared to live as if you’re really dead? Are you prepared to live as if you’ve died with Jesus an ignominious death, as if your ‘friend approval’ no longer counts, because you’re dead? Are you prepared to live that way?
Brothers and sisters, the moment you are, that moment Jesus will fill you with His Spirit of life and will change the whole direction of your personality from an outward moving inward to an inward moving outward. And you will find you have all the approval and recognition that you need, that you have all the enjoyment that you need and you’ll find yourself able to give to others, and able to feel that you want to love them inside. But dear ones, it only takes place when you stop trying to deliver yourself.
“Who shall deliver me from this body of death?” Not you. You’ve tried, and it’s just a mess. God has already delivered. If you say to me, “Well, how make it real?” Ask him, “Lord God, why can you not make this real in me?” He’ll answer, “Because you keep on wanting to retaliate to your roommate every time she slights you, or every time he criticizes you. That’s why. Are you willing not to retaliate and let ‘vengeance be mine’?”
You say, “No, no, I mean they’d walk over me. They might even kill me.”
“Oh, they might kill you. Well, would you be content with my Son to trust me to raise you up if they kill you?”
Loved ones, that’s the kind of thing. It’s that.
Any questions dear ones, because it’s better to be practical and down-to-earth about it.
Question from audience:
We say it is impossible to change ourselves. Yet how do you account for some of the successes of
self-psychology or autosuggestion perhaps or the AA program, the Alcoholics Anonymous?
Reply from Pastor O’Neil:
There is — and this is taking a step further and some brothers and sisters might be prepared to take here who do not regard the bible as God’s word. If you don’t, then you’ll have trouble believing in Satan. And so you’ll have real difficulty with what I am about to say.
But if you do believe that the bible is God’s word, and that there is such a person as Satan, and that the bible is really serious when it talks about the elemental spirits of the universe, then do you see that there is a real power of Satan in the world? And he has many spirits that work on his behalf. And he is very happy to bring about a certain amount of apparent victory, as long as it’s only apparent.
So he is very prepared to lend his support to say Alcoholics Anonymous, if all it does is deliver the person from drink and from alcoholism. As long as it delivers a person from alcoholism and delivers them then into the power of the group, which is one of the beliefs that they have, then Satan is happy because they’ll still want to be conformed to the image of this world. I am not saying it isn’t good. But do you see it’s only — it’s good up to a point.
So it’s Satan’s power. Plus the other thing is, don’t you believe loved ones, that after the fall of mankind, we did retain some powers within us? And we do have psychic powers which we then can use in opposition to God’s power. And we do this ‘autosuggestion’. It’s the use of a psychic power that God has given that we are meant to use under the direction of the Holy Spirit. We don’t. We use it in competition with the Holy Spirit. And so we use autosuggestion to get a certain amount of ‘Stop Worrying and Start Living’ as Dale Carnegie would have said, or the power of positive thinking.
So there are other rival powers that Satan uses to give us a certain amount of deliverance but not total deliverance.
Question from audience:
Wouldn’t it be possible that Jesus can manifest himself through the partial movement of AA or the ‘power of positive thinking’?
Reply from Pastor O’Neil:
It seems to me, yes. But it’s more possible for Satan to get hold of a person in those sessions. And it’s the case that a little bit of the truth is worse than the whole truth. It can get a grip on you. And I think there are many of us who could not see what was wrong with the ‘power of positive thinking’. And we’ve used it a lot in our own lives. And we have developed a very powerful psyche. And then when we come to deal with the Spirit of Jesus, we have real difficulties there.
I do think loved ones, some of us have real problem with coming into a death to self, because we’re still trying to bring it about ourselves. We don’t see that it’s a question of accepting what God has done in Jesus. And so we keep trying to die to ourselves by the power of autosuggestion, because we’ve been so used to psychological gimmicks all through our lives.
Question from audience:
You keep saying “Are you willing to die with Jesus?” Where does that willingness come? Does it just come from faith?
Reply from Pastor O’Neil:
It seems to me that most of us, when we ask ourselves, “Am I willing to die with Jesus?” are dealing with the general academic, philosophical statement, rather than getting down to business with God’s Spirit and saying, “Holy Spirit, can you show me in what way I am not willing to die with Jesus?” At least I think that way. I only began to get somewhere when I began to go to the Holy Spirit and say, “Holy Spirit, I cannot introspect deeper than my old self. So will you show me in what way I am not willing to die with Jesus?” Then I began to get revelations about myself that I had never had before.
Question from audience:
Then when you find you aren’t willing, can you trust God to change that?
Reply from Pastor O’Neil:
It seems to me, yes, if you’re willing to be changed.
The Holy Spirit shows you bad temper in regard to your roommate or the children in your home. You say, “Well, Holy Spirit, I want to be willing to change this.”
He says, “Well I can change it. Are you willing to face the consequences if I change it?”
And we say, “Oh yeah, yeah. You mean…”
“What if the children hang on the ceiling?”
“Well, yeah, I mean…”
“Well, what if your roommate does not stop criticizing you?”
“Well, well I’ll think about that.”
You need to be willing to face the consequences of him changing you. You’d have to say, “Holy Spirit, I’ll trust you to give me Jesus’ strong discipline for the children when you want to give it to me. I’ll trust you to give me the forbearance and the long suffering to put up with my roommate’s constant bickering and criticizing.” But you have to be willing to do that.
Oh, I can remember, brothers and sisters, he asked me, “Would you be willing to be a failure for me?”
And the old self rises up and says, “A failure? But what good, what great things could I do for God if I were a failure?”
And you know we’re so subtle, aren’t we? We try to link ourselves up with God, because we reckon,
well, the Holy Spirit won’t work against God. But really it’s just a trick.
“Would you be willing to be a failure?”
And we say, “Oh you couldn’t ask me to be… I mean, how could you glorify yourself by that?”
“Well, I did pretty well in Jesus, didn’t I?”
“Yes, yes, that is right,” because Jesus was an apparent failure on the Cross.
So it’s those. Loved ones, it’s all tied together, you see. It makes sense. Where Satan catches us is, he suggests to us that it’s just a mess. It’s not, loved ones. There’s sense in it. There’s a reason why you are filled with envy for somebody else. There’s a reason why jealousy rises inside you. There’s a reason for those things. And the Holy Spirit can show you, and can show you what you need to be willing to do, if He is going to deliver you from it.
So the final work is a miracle but you can understand an awful lot of it up to the point of the miracle. I think too many of us step back and say, “Oh, we can’t understand it Lord. Do the job in me. Anesthetize me and do it, because that’s the only way it’s going to happen”.
No, “Holy Spirit, why? Why can you not make this real in me? You’ve destroyed me in Jesus. Why am I not willing to experience that?” And then He gets to work on you and you see why.
Now remember this, not all of you will come in. Loved ones, you won’t. A lot of you sit there and say, “Oh well I am bound to want that, you know. I am bound to want that.” Dear ones, some of us will go to hell. Now that’s — I mean it’s hard to say that. But some of us will go to hell, because some of us will say, “We do not want this.” And the old self in some of us will say, “We do not want it.”
And, dear ones, I say it lovingly to you, some of you even who travel together with us all for 40, 50 years. Some of us — the old self loves religion, loves the good community spirit — and some of us will go to hell because we give in to that old self. And we refuse the crucifixion. I think we ought to be sensible and just see that — not be foolish and utopian about the thing — thinking that the whole 800 of us are going to come. Some of us will stand against this stuff and just will not put up with it. So it is important to see that, that we have a choice.
But I say this, you won’t be under anger or envy or jealousy unless you want to be. You really won’t. There’s no need for you to be, because God has already done everything to deliver you from it. The only people who will continue under those things are those of us who want it.
Responses