Normal Christian Life

Purified by Faith Galatians 5:17-20 Sermon Transcript by Rev. Ernest O’Neill Sometimes it’s good to break from the Romans’ series and I try to do that whenever God’s Spirit seems to be guiding me to. So this morning I’d like to mention to you that some of us here this morning are what we call “Christians” and some of us aren’t Christians. I know that word means a lot of different things, but broadly speaking some of us here this morning have, at some time in our lives, confessed our sins and repented of them and received Jesus’ Spirit into us. Then again some of us here have heard about it, but we have never done that either privately or publically. While many here who have done that, and who are Christians share one thing in common with those of us who aren’t Christians; they have a dirty heart. As one man said; “I don’t know that you can help the swallows flying over your head, but you can prevent them from building nests in your hair.” In the same way, you can’t prevent all kinds of thoughts coming into your mind from the world that is around us, you can’t. For example you see a nice girl, or see a nice guy, or some thought occurs to your mind, or some moment of worry about the car, or some moment of greed or covetousness about something you saw in a window on the way to church this morning; you can’t help those half second thoughts occurring. But many of us find that our hearts rise to those and our hearts act like blotting paper; they absorb those things and they not only absorb them but they rise to them and they carry on with them. So we can’t help the half second thought that Satan or the powers of the world send into our minds, but many of us here this morning that have received Jesus as our Savior find that our hearts are still unclean in that when that half second temptation comes in we embrace it. There’s something in our heart that is not really clean and we see it when the thought gets that iron grip on us, in the way for instance that worry can. We don’t normally think of worry as a sin, but it is because God said repeatedly, “Have no anxiety about anything. Do not be anxious for anything, what you’ll eat or what you’ll put on.” Yet many of us find ourselves thinking, “Now what am I going to do about the money? What am I going to do about the car? What am I going to do about the job? What am I going to do about my children?” Worry gets an iron grip on you and you know what I mean; it just grips you and keeps gripping you. You try to break away from it but you can’t and that’s because your heart is not yet clean. You worry because you don’t fully trust God and you don’t fully trust God because you still partially trust yourself, and you still partially trust yourself because you still partially want your way. So, many of us find that an unclean heart shows itself in worry and anxiety that grips us and will not let go. Others of us find it in resentments; we have carnal fits at times; we either go all cold and run a cold war with our husband, or our wife, or run a cold war with our friend, or our colleague at work, or we just sink into ourselves in self-pity and cry ourselves to sleep. Those are some of the ways that many of us find our unclean heart shows itself in the resentment that is within us; resentment at what people are doing to us, at what the world is doing to us, at what God is doing to us. Many of us find it in covetousness and greed. It’s okay to look at a motor bike, its okay to look at a car, it’s alright to look at a house, or a coat, but many of us not only look at those things but we think about them and keep on thinking about them. Even when we’re trying not to think about them, the heart is going back to coveting and being greedy for them. Now loved ones, that’s what I mean by an unclean heart. It may not show itself outwardly at all, you see. I think I could stand up here and look very holy and still have a very unclean heart inside and that’s the case with many who have received Jesus as their Savior. They’ve turned away from the outward things; for some of us it was smoking, for some it was drinking or swearing, stealing or lying. We turned away from the outward things in our life; from the sins that had been talked about that Jesus died for, and we received his Spirit into us, but we still find within us an attitude that does not look like our outward lives at all. In other words, we find we have a heart that keeps on sending up all kinds of dirt. Now, that’s what Jesus said in Matthew 15:19. I suppose somebody was asking him,” Is it eating the right food, or drinking the right liquids that make you holy?” And he said, “No, that isn’t what makes you holy or unholy at all, those are outward things.” Matthew 15:19, “For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, fornication, theft, false witness, slander. These are what defile a man; but to eat with unwashed hands does not defile a man.” Many of us who have received Jesus into our hearts find that those things still exist within us and that’s what this book [the Bible] teaches. This book teaches that that’s the situation. Then in Galatians 5:17, “For the desires of the flesh are against the Spirit, and the desires of the Spirit are against the flesh; for these are opposed to each other, to prevent you from doing what you would.” And many of us who call ourselves Christians found that; we found that the Spirit of Jesus is within us and he makes us want to come to church, he makes us want to read the Bible, he makes us want to pray and he gives us a lot of good desires. But alongside his Spirit there seems another spirit that is working against that Spirit within us and that is the spirit that seems to pull at our hearts. Now most of us have taken the attitude, “Well, that’s life; it’s an eternal struggle between good and evil. That’s what life is about and that’s the best that God can offer us. That’s what most Christians do, they have received the Spirit of Jesus into them and then that Spirit has to fight against the spirit of carnality or the spirit of self that is within them and that’s the battle, that’s the battle of faith.” So most children of God have settled down to an eternal struggle to overcome those things. Now loved ones, that’s not the way or the answer and I think I can explain why to you. It’s in Romans 7:15 that the problem is stated and for most of us even, who have received Jesus, this is what we say. “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.” In other words, the Spirit of Jesus within me wants to do certain things but I end up doing the very thing that I hate. Verse 16, “Now if I do what I do not want, I agree that the law is good,” so there is a part of me that’s saying that is good, “So then it is no longer I that do it, but sin which dwells within me.” And loved ones, that’s the problem, its sin, now let me explain sin. Sin is living as if there’s no God and its living depending on the world and on your ability with your mind to get from the world what you need. So instead of depending on God and depending on faith in him, you depend on the world and on your ability to manipulate the world to get what you want. That’s what sin is and all the church statements of doctrine agree on this one fact. They disagree on all kinds of things, but they all agree on this one fact; that even in the regenerate man or woman, that is, in the man or woman who is born of God, there continues within them the power of sin in the form of the carnal nature. They all differ about what you can do about it, but they all do agree about that; that even in a person who is converted, who is born of God’s Spirit, who has received Jesus as their Savior, they still find within them a heart that is unclean and that is dirty; a heart that is governed by sin, which is an attitude of independence of God and dependence on the world. In other words, here’s what it’s like; do you remember ever reading Gulliver’s Travels? He found himself in a country of dwarfs in Lilliput. I remember a picture in that book where Gulliver had lain down to sleep and the Lilliputians had tied all kinds of ropes to him. Do you remember that? They tied ropes to his hair, and his ears, and all these little little people put stakes in the ground so he couldn’t get up and when he wakened he was tied completely to the earth. That’s what it’s like to have the power of sin governing your life. That’s it. It’s like being tied to the earth. “I want to be generous but I am so dependent on money for my security that I can’t bear to give it away.” Or, “I want to be free and easy whether I buy that car or not, whether I get that house or not, but I’m so dependent on owning that car or that house for what other people will think of me that I just must have it.” We’re tied through our dependence to the world and to people so that we can’t do what we know is right. And you know it; if you have the power of sin in your life even though you’re Christian, you’re probably experiencing that. You’re thinking, “The good that I would I can’t do because I’m tied in all kinds of ways. I try to move this way, I can’t. I try to move that way, I can’t. I can’t get clear.” A man freed from the power of sin is Gulliver standing up free; no ties at all, no ropes to him, they’re all broken and he’s able to move as he wants; he’s not tied to the earth at all and he’s free to depend on God alone. How do you get from here to there? What so many of us believe is, “Well, I get out my little knife and I go to work one rope at a time. I cut this one and deal with greed then have a rest for a couple of years. Then I move on to anger and I saw through the rope of anger. Then I need three years rest because I sawed through greed and anger and got them under control. Then I work on pride.” By this time we’re about sixty-seven years of age! And yet that is the attitude that most of us who are children of God have and we call it growing in grace, but it’s not growing in grace at all, we can’t even begin to grow in grace because we’re not free from the power of sin, but we’re manfully trying to saw through these things. So that’s the way most of us go about it. Loved ones, there is a “you” that has all those strings broken; that has had the power of sin broken, and that can be made real in you in a moment by faith. That’s it. Actually, you can’t do it by working at it, you can’t and that’s the tragedy; we’re told so often to pray more, to read the Bible more. You can’t get rid of those things by working at it. Maybe after 50 years you’ll only have 2,500 strings tying you to the earth instead of 2,600 but you’ll still be tied. The only way to be free of them is by faith. You remember Moses in the desert with the Israelites complaining, as always, about what they didn’t have, what God hadn’t provided for them. They said he hadn’t provided water and you remember what God said? He said to Moses, “Go to this rock that I’ll show you and strike it and water will gush forth.” Now that’s what faith achieves. Faith believes what God has said and then does what he tells you to do. That’s what faith is; it’s believing what he says and then doing what he tells you to do whether it makes sense to you or not. Many of us who are suffering as children of God under the power of sin would say, “Strike the rock? That is dumb. No, I’ll screw a faucet into this rock and then maybe we’ll get some water and I’ll lead some pipe from this spring.” Loved ones, that isn’t faith; that’s trying to use your own ingenuity to bring about something, the same as those of us who are trying to cut through the ropes all the while claiming we are growing in grace. We say, “I’m trying to overcome this power of sin within me by my will power and by reading books on positive thinking and by trying harder.” You might as well screw a faucet into the rock and start leading pipes to it. This is experienced by faith not by works. The power that is holding you is sin; that’s what prevents you doing what you know you ought. Sin is the power and there’s only one kind of person who is freed from sin and you find out who that is Romans 6:7. “For he who has died is freed from sin.” The person who has died no longer has the pull of the things in the world or the things in the earth. They no longer experience the pull to be liked by everybody because it doesn’t matter whether anybody likes them or not. A person who is dead is freed from the power of sin. But there is a way to die without dying. Look at 2 Corinthians 5:14. “For the love of Christ controls us, because we are convinced that one has died for all,” and that’s what so many of us who are children of God know, but we don’t know the next clause, “therefore all have died.” When Christ died all of us died too. How does that become real in your own life? Romans 6:11 loved ones. “So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.” That’s what faith is; faith is believing that when Jesus died you died also. When he was crucified to the world and the world was crucified to him, so were you, and then it’s doing what his Spirit tells you to do and you’re freed in a moment from the power of sin. In other words, freedom from the power of sin comes by the same means by which freedom from the guilt of sin came; it comes by faith, not by trying, but by faith. In other words, holiness comes not by self-discipline and by will power, though those all follow holiness, but holiness itself comes by faith. It comes by faith in your death with Christ and your resurrection with him and then in your being filled with his Holy Spirit. But it comes by faith loved ones. I think a lot of us here in this room are still trying to bring it about ourselves and you can’t. It comes by faith in a moment. Just as Moses heard God saying to him, “Water will come from this rock.” So you hear God saying to you, “You’re unclean, impure heart was crucified with my son. I destroyed it and there’s a clean heart for you, I have it here, on a shelf in the heavens and you can have it now.” Faith is believing that. And then you remember, God said to Moses, “Strike the rock,” and Moses didn’t say, “What has that to do with getting water?” He struck the rock. God is saying to you all kinds of things that don’t seem to you connected with the reality of your freedom from the power of sin. Do it. Whatever it is do it; it’s the Holy Spirit telling you; he’s telling you to take certain attitudes, or he’s telling you to take certain views of things, do it. Follow the Holy Spirit, do what he tells you, strike whatever rock he tells you and you’ll find water coming forth that will wash you clean. Now loved ones, it’s a miracle, and it doesn’t matter what man you look at whether it’s Moody, or Wesley, or whether it’s Finney, or whether it’s Nee; all the men and women of God who have been used powerfully by him have found that their inner impurity could only be dealt with by faith, not by human effort. That’s the miracle of it and that’s the only way you’ll ever have a completely clean heart. When you have don’t a clean heart then the opposite is happening to what Jesus said, “For out of the heart comes anger, and strife, and guilt.” Now from out of the heart comes love, joy, peace, and long suffering and then the Christian life becomes natural and not a heavy burden to carry. So will you think about it loved ones; that just as you entered into freedom from the guilt of your sins by faith that Jesus had died for you, so you enter into freedom from the power of sin by faith that you have died with Jesus. And if you say, “What are the conditions?” Just to be willing to have a clean heart, that’s it. Would you be willing to renounce all sin in your life? Would you be willing never to sin again? Would you? See, I think a lot of us sigh and say, “Ah, thank goodness I don’t have to be willing for that, you can never be free from sin.” Well actually, you can be free from sin and that’s what God wants. But the real issue is — would you be willing to be free from sin? Would you? Would you be willing never to cry yourself to sleep at night, to pity yourself, to be filled with resentment, to be filled with greed, to get your own way whatever it cost, would you? Well that’s what’s entailed in coming to a place where faith springs up in your heart to grasp Jesus. Now, is there any way I can make that plainer? It’s so true and its life and I want you to know it and I want you to have no excuse that will prevent you from entering into it, and the first step is to believe it’s possible. That’s the first step, first believe it’s possible. Does anybody want to ask anything? Don’t think that it will spoil the atmosphere if you ask. It’s better to be sensible and this is practical and God wants us to be free from unclean hearts. How do you get the faith? People think you pump it up and so a lot of people say, “I’m dead, I’m dead, I’m dead, I’m dead,” and they try auto suggestion and it’s not that, brother, you’re right. The first thing is to go to the Holy Spirit and say, “Holy Spirit, I believe that this is possible and I believe that you can do this for me. Will you show me if there’s any sin in my life that I’m really not willing to let go of? Will you show me if there’s any way in which I’m not ready to be wholly purified in Jesus on the cross? Will you show me any way in which I’m not ready to be completely recreated?” And then brother, the Holy Spirit goes to work and at least with me, it was over a period of months that he showed me more and more clearly my pride and ambition, and then it eventually gets to the self. That’s what holds all the strings attached, it’s the self. And he eventually shows you how retched and grotesque and monstrous that self is and how it appears in God’s eyes, how hateful it is and how it sets itself up as God. Then when you come to the place where you say, “Lord, I’m willing, I’m willing, there’s nothing to do with that but wipe it out, I’m willing for anything whatever it costs.” Then it’s amazing, faith is the gift of God and faith springs up in your heart. That’s the beauty of it. The baptism with the Holy Spirit comes easily; faith springs up in the heart that is fully consecrated. It’s not a matter of, “I must make myself believe.” We have been crucified with Christ. The moment we say, “Lord, I accept that,” that moment faith comes down from God, the Holy Spirit comes down in answer to faith. That’s it brother. I know it’s amazing but it does – faith springs up in a fully consecrated heart. And if you loved ones says, “Oh, I have real trouble with faith.” You don’t have trouble with faith, you have trouble with sin; you have trouble with unconfessed sin. Unconfessed sin holds faith down. Faith is the gift of God to any man or woman who is willing to enter into what God has done for us in Jesus. One last thing, “Dear Jesus thou has bled and died for me.” Think about it, your old nature, your carnal nature, your perverted personality, do you see if that had been the only perverted personality in the whole world, do you see that the only way God could destroy it was by destroying his Son? There’s a real way in which each of us has to say, “Dear Jesus, thou has bled and died for me and me only.” And loved ones, Jesus has taken the dirtiest worst there is in you and me, taken it into himself and allowed his Father to wipe it out there forever. What right has any of us to continue to live under sin? What right have we? You wouldn’t treat a dog like that, would you? You wouldn’t kick his bleeding body under the chair and say, “I’m going to live this way anyway, whatever you’ve done for me. I don’t know what you’ve done that for. I don’t know why you died. I don’t know what you bore all that for, but I’m going to live my own way anyway.” Well, you wouldn’t treat a dog like that. So there’s a deep way in which every one of us here has to say, “Dear Jesus, thou has bled and died for me and me only and now what am I going to do with you?” Loved ones, there’s no need for any of us tomorrow to have one unclean thought or feeling in our hearts, really. What do you do because work is so different? The atmosphere in the workshop or in the office is so different from home or church and it seems to influence you. Loved ones, do you see it influences us, brother, because there’s something still of that self inside us. [Question inaudible 31:18] What you find when you receive the fullness of the Holy Spirit is he gives you words to say that are right. But the problem with so many of us is we’ve got Jesus’ Spirit inside us, but we also still have this spirit of self, so Jesus gives us words but we can’t hear them for all the nose of the spirit of self. But brother, when you get rid of that once and for all, then you find yourself with Jesus’ Spirit and you find he has an immediate answer for everything. That’s so why so many of us live powerless lives; because we’re not wholly dependent on Jesus. We’re partly dependent on self so we become tongue tied when the opportunity comes to say something. I think the first thing is that we have the courage not to laugh at dirty jokes. The second step is we have the courage to say what Jesus is telling us to say, whatever the cost, even you see, if it means crucifixion. That’s the beauty about dying; they can’t do anything worse to you than death, and after you’ve gone through that it doesn’t matter and that’s what enables us to begin to obey. But brother, it can’t be without the power of the Spirit within us, and that power of the fullness of the Spirit loved ones, comes through you personally dealing with Jesus, “Lord Jesus, have you really taken this power within me that keeps making me unable to obey and have you destroyed it? Then Lord, that’s what I want.” And if you ever say, “Oh, did it really happen” look at Acts 15:9 “[God] cleansed their cleansed their hearts by faith.” It’s written in the Bible, Acts 15:9, “Cleaned their hearts by faith,” not by endless effort but by faith. Let us pray. Dear Father, I thank you for my dear friends listening so long. Lord, we would pray for each other. Father, we do know that this is exactly where many of us are living and we don’t want to live here any longer; we do want to have clean hearts so Lord, we believe this is possible. Your word says, “You shall love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and soul, and strength, and mind,” and Lord we don’t believe you give us commandments that are impossible to fulfill. So Lord, we come to you saying that we believe it is possible to have a clean heart and we ask you, Holy Spirit, to begin to reveal to us any darkness there is in our own lives. Lord, we would hunt down sin wherever we can find it and we would renounce it all until we can come to you Lord Jesus and say, “Lord, what you did for me I’m willing to accept and receive.” And then Lord, we know faith will spring up in our hearts to receive the fullness of the Holy Spirit. Lord Jesus, we commit ourselves to you to do this as long as it takes us in these coming weeks and months. And now the grace of our Lord Jesus, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit, be with each one of us now and evermore. Amen.

Jesus Sermon Transcript by Rev. Ernest O’Neill I felt I should speak on something a little different than what’s in the bulletin and that is that many of us here are very anxious to have a relationship with God. Many of you may have tried to have one and may have tried to go through the motions, and somehow nothing seems real and that’s what I’d like to speak to on the basis of the words of Jesus in John 5:39. “You search the scriptures, because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness to me; yet you refuse to come to me that you may have life.” So Jesus was saying to the Jewish scholars of that day, “You search the scriptures because you think in them you have eternal life and it is they that bear witness to me but you refuse to come to me that you may have life.” Now I’m saying to you, could it be that you read and search the books written by men like Francis Schaeffer, and Andrew Murray, and Watchman Nee, and Oswald Chambers because you think that in them you have eternal life? And yet it is they that bear witness to Jesus, but you will not come to Jesus that you might have life. Each of us would need to answer that question ourselves, because it’s obviously good to read books, we all know that, but you know what God is suggesting this morning; could it be that some of the unreality that pervades your relationship with him comes because you’re searching the books to try to find eternal life but you’re not coming to Jesus himself? Or could it be that you’re going through the motions but you’re not coming to Jesus himself? I think a lot of us come under the conviction of sin. If we come to Sundays like this where God’s word is being preached, you come under conviction of sin Many of us get annoyed with that and think, “Why am I feeling so depressed and so terrible, and why am I feeling that I’m bad?” We deal with the thing as if it’s some psychological problem that we’re having and we’re hoping that maybe the next sermon will be an uplifting one that will overwhelm us with a sense of God’s love. But do you know what conviction of sin is? It’s you saying, “My hand is so sore that I hope next day they do something that will make my hand feel better.” But there’s a dear Savior who is saying, “Your hand is sore because you’re beating me with it — that’s why it’s sore.” So I wonder; could it be that we have a tendency to think of a thing like conviction of sin as if it’s some wrong psychological experience through which we’re passing when it is simply your dear Father witnessing to you in a way that you can understand that you’re killing his son and that the soreness in your hand is nothing compared to the welts that you’re leaving on his heart. I think at times we have a tendency to think of this as if it’s some reforming psychological experience that we’re passing through, so we expect somebody should come along next week and smooth it over for us. Well, it’s really the Son of God saying to you, “These things that are in your life are killing me. They’re the things that destroyed me on Calvary and they’re killing me at this moment, this sin that is in your life.” It isn’t just some irritating depression that you’re feeling, or some wrong guilt, it isn’t. There is false guilt, but guilt about things that you know God does not want you to do, that is the human reflection of the divine pain in God’s heart. And when you’re complaining and crying about the pain in your hand, realize that there’s a Savior at the other end of things that is not complaining but is bleeding from you striking him. Some of us say, “The first step is confession. I ought to confess.” But loved ones confess to whom? I think there’s a tendency in many of us to think, “As long as I confess it, that’s what matters. So I confess it to my mother if I’ve been doing her harm, or I confess it to my wife if I’ve been hurting her, or I confess it to my employer if I’ve been dishonest in our business, or I confess it to the IRS people if I’ve been dishonest with them. But I confess.” That’s the first thing you have to do, if you confess your sins he’s faithful and just to forgive you your sins. But confess to whom? I wonder if there are any of us here who make a big thing of confession and we feel, “Oh, if there’s any problem in my relationship with God it’s because I haven’t confessed the sins that I’ve committed against different people.” Well the Psalmist said it, “Against thee and thee only have I sinned and done this wrong.” Confession loved ones, is going to our Savior, Jesus, and confessing to him. It’s saying, “Lord Jesus, I didn’t know that this was destroying you. I didn’t know this was crucifying you again. I didn’t know that every time I was sarcastic with my wife it was like a whiplash across your face. I didn’t know that. I didn’t know Lord, that when I swore, that that was like a sword in your side. I’m sorry. I confess this. I did not know it. I agree with you Lord, I see that this is what makes it impossible for you to be real in me. Every time you rise up inside me I crucify you again and destroy you. I confess to you.” Loved ones, could it be that you search conviction because you think that in that you have eternal life? Could it be that you search confession because you think that in that you have eternal life? But you will not come to him that you might have life. Confessing sins is confessing personally to Jesus, the son of God, the one by whom you were made. That’s who Jesus is; by him all things were made and without him was not anything made that was made. It’s confessing to him that you have been crucifying him again in your life. Then again, some of us talk about repentance and we say, “Oh yes, you have to repent if you’re going to be saved, or you’re going to become a Christian, or you’re going to know God — you have to repent.” So we get all caught up in this business of repentance. So you think, “Well repentance is making restitution. I have to give back everything that I’ve taken from anybody dishonestly. I have to make apologies to people that I’ve hurt or offended. I have to make things right with everybody.” That’s what repentance is. It isn’t just feeling sorry or feeling remorse its making things right. But first of all it’s taking the sword out of the side of the one who has borne it for you. That’s the first thing. Repentance is not, “Lord, I realize that my unclean actions and my unclean thoughts were a sword thrust into your side and I’m going to do my best to stop that from this time on.” That’s not repentance, that’s mockery. That’s saying, “Lord, I’m going to try and stop doing this next week if I can, I’m going to try to stop doing it.” Loved ones, repentance is saying to Jesus, “Lord Jesus, I realize that you have borne these sins in your own body and I’m not going to make you bear this one any longer. I am stopping this. I am laying my sword down today. Whatever the cost to me, it’s nothing compared with the cost to you of not laying it down.” So it’s a personal thing, you see. It’s saying it to Jesus personally; it’s you and him as persons. It’s a dear friend who has given his life for you. Repentance is telling him that you’re not going to ever do it again by his grace and then it’s receiving Jesus. So often we use some of the formula and we say, “Oh, we pray to receive Jesus” as if accepting Christ is accepting a bunch of principles or a way of life or a philosophy. But loved ones, receiving Jesus is receiving a dear person into your heart and into your life and letting him live inside you as a whole real person that you can talk to at night and in the morning. Receiving Jesus is receiving a dear person, a friend, a person who is alive. Do you realize – one thing I realized, I should have known it long ago but I only realized it in a long discussion we had in one class about five years ago, that Jesus is forever human. Have you ever thought of that? I often thought he took our humanity upon him but as soon as he leaves the earth he becomes kind of some effervescent massive spirit. But do you realize Jesus will always be recognizable? When you and I see him, he’ll be recognizable; he’ll be a real person. And when you receive him you don’t receive some vague effervescent spirit, you receive a person. He’s standing here this morning asking you to let him come into your life and he comes in as a real person. And then how many of us try to live like him after we’ve received him and we begin to come into that old, defeated life where the good that we would we cannot do and the evil we hate is the very thing we do and we want to come free of that. There’s a loved one who talked with me last weekend, I’m sure she’ll excuse me if I tell you part of the conversation because many of us, at that point say when I ask you, “Well, you’re not looking very happy” you say, “No I’m not.” I then ask, “Well, why aren’t you happy?” And you reply “Oh well, I’m trying to die to self.” Now do you know what that’s like? That’s like you’re walking along together with Jesus and he has his arm around you, because you’re his friend and you’ve received him into your life, and as you walk you trip an odd time and you pick yourself up, and you trip an odd time and then he looks at you and you have this miserable sour face on and he says, “What’s wrong?” And you say, “I’m trying to die to self.” And he says, “You’re what?” And you say, “I’m trying to die to self.” And he says, “Really? I thought I did that?” And you say, “Yes, but I’m trying to do it.” And he says, “Why do we both need to do it? I mean, I did it for you didn’t I?” And you say, “Yes, but to be real in me I have to make it real myself.” And he says, “My son, my daughter, I died to self for you. Now, come close to me, come close to me here on this cross. Just stay close to me and I’ll show you all that that involves and I’ll reveal it to you bit-by-bit in a way that you’re able to bear it. But stop trying to do it yourself. Stop trying to enter into some technique that will deliver you from the power of self. Keep your arm around me. I have my arm around you. Come up here on the cross, I’ll show you. Now, it doesn’t feel so bad does it?” “Well, it feels a wee bit sore.” “Well, it was a wee bit sore for me too but just now – there, is that alright?” Then you have a tendency to say, “Well, what about this other bit?” He says, “Forget that other bit, I’m just giving you the bits that you can take at this moment.” And that’s the way it goes loved ones. It’s not something you do or I do. The baptism — isn’t that a terrible name, “the baptism?” That’s what we call it when our dear Savior, our dear friend lays his hands upon us and gives us his own life and his feelings, we call that the baptism. It’s like “the marriage.” Are you enjoying “the marriage?” If you’re like me you hate marriage but you love living with your loved one that you love! But the marriage itself is pretty impersonal. It’s so with Jesus, the baptism, who could enter the baptism? Who could enter death to self? But can you stay with your Savior; can you stay close to him? Can you hug him to yourself in your prayer times and say, “Lord Jesus, I want to come into everything that you’ve achieved for me.” And he’ll say, “My son, my daughter, that’s what I want, so just trust me and I’ll show you bit-by-bit what it means. It will mean some little hard things, but I’ll have my arm around you so let’s go together.” Then you look up and your old sour face goes as you look into your Savior’s eyes and you walk along. He’ll show you the way, that’s it loved ones. It’s you and a dear person who has given his life for you and who loves you and knows your name, and that’s what it is. And we pitiful souls here on earth try to tell each other what he’s doing but we always mess it up. He alone really can make it all real to you and he’ll make it real as long as you continue to regard him as a dear person and a dear friend — not as an “it” that has done something for you, but as somebody who loves you, who loves each one of us here in this room. Let us pray. Dear Lord Jesus, we apologize to you for the difficulties that we create and the way we make things hard for ourselves. Lord Jesus, we see that we were put somehow into you miraculously by our Father and we’re part of you and we’re closer to you than our own breath. That has been done and that’s real and we can’t change that; all we can do is ignore it and live in misery. But Lord Jesus, we see how dumb that is. We see that if our great Creator has remade us by placing us in you, then if anyone is in Christ he is a new creation so we are new, we’re new creations, each one of us in this room this morning. We’re new because our Father has put us into you. Lord Jesus, thank you for dying for us and for allowing us to rise up with you in your resurrection. Thank you Lord, that all we need to do is draw closer to you day-by-day and talk to you as a real person and stop this silly business of practicing some Buddhist or Christian technique. Lord Jesus, we would turn from all our techniques and our systems, and we would thank you that after everything is said and done, salvation is a person, the person of Jesus; you Lord Jesus, inside us as our dear friend. Lord, we thank you that we each know you in a way that nobody else knows you because you adapt yourself to each one of us and treat us all differently and individually. So Lord Jesus, we thank you that we can each one approach you this morning as our own personal friend and our own personal Savior and we can ask you to make us more like yourself day-by-day. And now the grace of our Lord Jesus, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with each one of us now and ever more. Amen.

A Clean Heart Matthew 15:17-20 Sermon Transcript by Rev. Ernest O’Neill I’m going to swear so get ready, ok? It’s just a mild swear because I wasn’t good at swearing at all. Ok, are you ready? Damn! All right? Now, that wasn’t hard, was it? It wasn’t hard for you, but still, apart from an illustration, it’s still wrong. Doesn’t matter whether it was hard or not, it’s just as wrong as committing adultery, because Jesus said you shouldn’t swear by anything in heaven or anything on earth — and you shouldn’t commit adultery — so it’s still wrong, apart from using it as an illustration. But still why, even apart from that, did you feel “yeah, it wasn’t too bad!”? I mean why did all of us feel “well, yes, it’s kind of a surprise for you to say ‘damn’, but it didn’t seem too evil, really!” Now, why did it not seem too evil? Why? Why did it not, especially to you who didn’t even say it, why did it not seem too evil? And would you not say, “well, I mean, your heart wasn’t in it, your heart wasn’t in it! You were just saying it because you wanted to illustrate something to us, and your heart really wasn’t in it!” And that is right, isn’t it? My heart wasn’t in it and your heart wasn’t in it. Now that still doesn’t make it right, it’s still wrong, even if your heart isn’t in it, apart from using it, as we did, as an illustration, it’s still wrong! It’s still something that God has commanded us not to do! Still, it is helpful to make a distinction between temptation and sin. Because that is part of the distinction between temptation and sin. You see, just the way that word that I spoke came to you and you weren’t worked up about it at all, it just came to you — it didn’t find any response in your heart, you just heard it and you said “oh, that’s interesting! Surprising, but interesting!” –but it just came to you — so all through the day you are in situations where thoughts from the mental atmosphere around you insert themselves into your head. Where emotions, from the emotional atmosphere around you, inject themselves at times into your feelings. And as long as your response to them is as detached as your response to my ‘damn’ was, then there is no sin. You see that? As long as those thoughts can come in, or those feelings come in from outside and you are as utterly detached from them as you were to my swear this morning, then there is no sin. As long as you can say “well, that’s interesting, I’ve no interest in it but yeah, well there it is. Well, that’s a thought I know where it’s come from, but I don’t want to think it myself, I don’t want to dwell on it another second; well that’s an interesting feeling that’s passing through our office. I’m observing it academically, it has no answer in my own heart, no responsive chord in my own heart, but that’s a feeling that obviously is present in our office or in our family.” Then as long as that’s the attitude, you’re dealing with temptation and not with sin. But if I tell you, “you know the vacation you are arranging? Well, your travel agent made the reservation on the wrong date, so you can’t go on vacation”, or if I say to you, “You know your car? Well, there’s a drunk driver just totaled it a moment ago.” Or if I say to you, “You’re fired! The company is closing down” and then there’s a “damn!” rising out of your heart, then that’s sin! So, do you see, there is a distinction in the two things? A sin is what comes from the heart of a person, what comes from the very innermost being of a person, that’s what sin is. And whether we like it or not, we live in a world that is full of sin and there are all kinds of sinful acts and thoughts and words going on all around us and they may even pass for a moment through your head, they may even pass for a moment through your emotions, as long as the moment you are aware of them, you turn against them and you regard them as alien and you regard them as something that is separate from you, then it’s not sin. But when your heart rises and embraces the picture or embraces the thought or embraces the feeling, or your mind commits itself or your will commits its emotions to thinking or feeling it a second second, then that’s sin. But sin is what comes out of the heart and that’s what Jesus said. He said it isn’t actually the thoughts that come into your head from outside that are sin, it isn’t even the feelings that come in from outside that are sin, it isn’t even the food that comes in through your mouth, but it’s what comes from inside. Now, maybe you’d look at that verse because it does put it very plainly. In Matthew 15:17, “Do you not see that whatever goes into the mouth passes into the stomach, and so passes on? But what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this defiles a man. For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, fornication, theft, false witness, slander. These are what defile a man; but to eat with unwashed hands, does not defile a man.” Do you see in verse 18: “what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart and this defiles a man.” That’s it, loved ones. It’s not what you eat or even what you drink or even the thoughts that other people pass on to you that defiles you. It’s what comes out of your heart and mind. That’s what dirties us. That’s what defiles us. [Illustration: Holding up a bottle of sour milk and smelling it:] It’s – ugh! Sour! Sour milk! And the whole life is filled with it, just filled with it. And you meet Jesus and you know that it’s wrong and you repent and you pour it out in repentance and He puts fresh milk in. Except that before he put the fresh milk in, after you’d poured it out, your heart was like that (sour) – in other words you know what was still coating it: still some of that sour milk. Still some of the old spoiled rotten stuff was still in your heart, so He came in and He poured his Spirit in, in on top of that. But because that old sour milk was still there, of course it isn’t long before the new fresh Spirit of Jesus is contaminated and your life is as full of sin as it was before. That’s the situation with so many of us. We’ve received the Spirit of Jesus. In a sense, He has made us alive. He has made us aware of God. We actually even have great respect for Jesus and some acquaintance with Him. But our heart was never cleared of the sour stuff that was still at the bottom. And actually you know fine well there’s only one way to make that bottle fit to contain fresh milk and to keep it fresh for a long period of time. There’s only one way in which fresh milk can abide in that bottle without becoming contaminated and that is that I pour out the sour stuff and then I put it under a faucet and I wash it right out, and I wash all the sour stuff out from the bottom of the heart and then I bring in the fresh milk and then there is every possibility that the fresh milk will remain sweet and fresh. The tragedy with so many of us is we haven’t gone that far, you see. We received the Spirit of Christ in some sense into our hearts, but He is not able to dwell there and abide there because there is sour self spirit that has never been cleaned out of the heart, from the bottom of the heart. And so, we find that our life is like that, up and down. Every time we get a new filling of Jesus’ Spirit it kind of overwhelms the sour stuff at the bottom of the heart and we walk for a while in victory — then we begin to take another dip as the sour stuff spreads all over His Spirit and then it comes Easter time and we get another infusion of His Spirit and so we walk in victory for another little while but really our life is like that, up and down, switch back. And actually the truth is that our nature has never changed. Our nature has never really changed. Our heart — deep, deep down — is still unclean. Our heart has never been cleansed by the Holy Spirit, and we have a sense of aliveness to God and we have a sense of our sins being forgiven, but our heart is still unclean and continues to contaminate Jesus’ Spirit every time He pours it in. And so, in a way, our nature has not been changed, it’s been just overwhelmed from time to time, by Jesus’ Spirit. Loved ones, that’s why we cry that cry of despair so often, even those of us who are children of God. That cry in Roman 7:15: “I do not understand my own actions. I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.” The only mistake is this! We are confusing the issue by using “I” in both cases. In actual fact there is something deep down in your heart that DOES do what it wants! And that’s what actually produces the evil in your life and mine. It’s the unclean heart that still wants what Jesus doesn’t want and it would be better for us to say: “Well, I don’t understand MY own actions because Jesus wants to do certain things in me when He comes in, but my own heart doesn’t want to do those things.” Loved ones, that’s the situation with many of us, I’m sure, here in this room this morning. That we have in some sense been acted upon by God’s Spirit and in some sense we’re a little further on than the Jew; we are at least regenerated and we are aware of God and alive to God and we know that He has forgiven us our sins. But actually we are very like the Jew in that our nature — deep, deep down — is still unchanged and our heart is still unclean and that heart continues to send up sin as we try to walk progressively with Jesus. There is a verse, you know, in the Old Testament that I think makes it very clear and will help you to understand it if you look at it. It’s Ezekiel, and it’s a verse where God is describing the New Covenant to the Jewish people and it’s Ezekiel 36:26. God is describing the New Covenant: “A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you; and I will take out of your flesh the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.” So God will do two things, you see. He’ll give us a new heart and then He will give us a new spirit and the new heart is explained a little more in the next verse, in verse 27: “And I will put my spirit within you.” That’s how He’ll give us a new heart. He’ll make our own spirits new, He’ll put a new spirit within us, He’ll renew our spirits, He’ll regenerate our spirits and make us aware of God and aware of Jesus, so that we’ll have some acquaintance with Him. But then, He’ll put His own Spirit in us, you see — “And I will put my spirit within you,” (my Holy Spirit, He will dwell with you and stay inside you and He will create a new heart inside you) “and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to observe my ordinances.” So there are two parts to the New Covenant. One is a new spirit and many of us have entered into that. Many of us have had our spirits renewed and regenerated and that’s why we come to church here. We know that it’s true; we know that God is real, we know that Jesus died for us, we know that our sins are forgiven and our spirit is renewed. But we know also an inconsistent Christian life, an up and down life. It seems when that little renewed spirit gets its way we are in victory, but it seems there are other times when that spirit isn’t getting its way and that’s because we haven’t entered into the second part of the New Covenant, where God said: “I will put My Spirit in you, My Holy Spirit in you, to dwell in you and abide in you and He will create a new heart in you and He will enable you to walk in my statutes and observe my ordinances.” Loved ones, the fact is there are many of us who call ourselves Christians, who have entered into only one part of the New Covenant that God gave us in Jesus. And that’s the part that we find in I John 1:9, you remember, “If we confess our sins He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins.” We haven’t entered into the second part: “and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” Our hearts are still unclean, but we walk in the first part of the New Covenant: “if we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins.” So, it’ amazing — if you are a child of God, and you are in that situation, if you keep confessing and repenting day after day, and you keep getting shots of God’s Spirit from Sunday services and you keep getting encouragement from other people’s fellowship, you will be able to walk in a fair degree of obedience for awhile, but soon you will begin to see a nose dive taking place in your own life because the Holy Spirit does not dwell in you. He does not abide in you, He is not at home in your heart, He acts upon you from outside and at times is able to speak within you, but He does not dwell within you, because you have not allowed Him to prepare a dwelling place for Himself. And loved ones, the fact is the Holy Spirit cannot dwell there, He cannot dwell there! That’s why He is called the Holy Spirit. He is holy! And unless your heart becomes holy, it’s another crucifixion for Him, do you see that? It’s crucifixion all over again. It’s not just that He chooses not to do that, it’s either He lives or you live, it’s either He dies or you die. So he cannot come into a heart that is not prepared, a heart that has not been cleansed. That’s why He has to, as it were, jump in and out — act upon you, act upon you, act upon you — from outside. That’s why you are “up” when you are at service on Sunday. That’s it! Do you see that? That’s why you are up, when you are at service on Sunday, because the Holy Spirit is all around you in all kinds of different people and He’s acting upon you and He’s strengthening you and then you get away from the service and you get into the middle of the afternoon or you get into the middle of the week and you begin to feel yourself weak in your relationship to God, because the Holy Spirit is not dwelling in you and so you are not getting any shots from outside. That’s why, loved ones, as long as you’re reading your Bible, as long as you are praying, then you are in victory. But as soon as you are on your own in the middle of a workday, then suddenly you sense a lack of God’s presence. It’s because the Holy Spirit is not dwelling in your heart and that’s why, of course, so many of us are able to abstain from outward sin but not inward sin. You remember those things that Jesus spoke about that come out from the heart. Many of us are able to abstain from fornication but our heart wants to fornicate. Many of us are able to abstain from adultery, but our heart wants to commit adultery. Many of us are able to abstain from murder, but our heart wants to murder. We find a rising from within us that would do damage to a person if we possibly could. That’s why we’re often able to abstain from theft, but our heart wants to thieve. We are often able to abstain from slander, but our heart wants to slander. Now of course, the last two are what usually give away those Christians whose carnal nature is still alive inside them. That is, slander and backbiting. And that explains also why so many of us who are really carnal Christians with unclean hearts are so complacent about our state. Because most of the church is afraid of what the law can do to us or what society thinks of us. So many of us, who have become aware of God, don’t want to have a reputation spoiled by getting into trouble with the law, so we abstain from murder and theft and adultery and fornication, but there are no legal penalties for gossip and backbiting and slander. And that’s why so many of us in churches expose our unclean hearts not so much through the fornication or the adultery, but through the slander and the backbiting and the gossip — through the talking about other people behind their back. And loved ones, that’s how you can tell if you have an unclean heart. Have you ever found yourselves talking about somebody behind their back instead of going to them in love and sharing with them what you can see or what you think? If you do that, if you talk about people behind their back, then your heart is unclean and you’ll continue to allow that unclean heart to take you in an up and down Christian experience for the rest of your life — if you can last throughout the rest of your life — because increasingly that unclean heart clouds the voice of God, just as that does. It clouds the voice of God and it clouds your sight of God and the more years you walk with that unclean heart the more difficult it is to hear His voice and that’s why you’ll find as you go on in your Christian life, without having your heart cleansed, you’ll find: “I don’t think I hear Him as clearly as I used to, I see men, but as trees walking.” You haven’t been touched the second time to be able to see them clearly as real men. That’s why many of us find that we talk about people behind their back. We say things about other people who seem to be different from us. We get into those little negative complaining groups, where we point at the other people who are maybe stupid or who are not very wise, but are trying to serve Jesus — and have you ever found yourselves in one of those little negative complaining groups where everything you say it: “Oh, this is wrong, and that’s wrong and I’m complaining, because they should do this, this way.” Loved ones, if you find yourself doing that kind of thing, it’s because your heart is unclean, your heart is dirty and that heart of yours will continue to send up that kind of motivation to you as long as it remains unclean. Now, how do you get a clean heart? Loved ones, it is not by psychology and it is not by reading those “improve yourself” books. An unclean heart is something that only God can deal with. No man can deal with it and all you’re doing with these books is putting cosmetics on an old barn that doesn’t look too good and trying to make it look better. Unless you go to the heart of the problem, you’ll never be delivered from that unclean heart. How do you get a clean heart? Well, you’ll find it, loved ones, it’s gloriously simple, it’s Acts 15:8. And Peter is explaining what happened at the house of Cornelius. Acts 15:8: “And God who knows the heart bore witness to them, giving them the Holy Spirit just as he did to us; and he made no distinction between us and them, but cleansed their hearts by faith.” That’s how! You get your heart cleansed by the Holy Spirit through your faith. That’s it! It’s not a long, long series of trying to train yourself. It’s not years and years of trying to reroute the thoughts and feelings of your heart. It’s not years and years of psychoanalysis trying to track back where you got these wrong feelings or these bad feelings. It’s not trying to get a group who will treat you nice and will treat you right. It’s not that, loved ones! It’s what the Bible says: you get your heart cleansed by faith, through the Holy Spirit. Faith is belief plus obedience. When you were born of God, when the Holy Spirit acted upon you and made you aware of Jesus, and made you aware of God and of the realities of Heaven, you know what you did: obedience for you was repentance, it was turning from the things that were wrong in your life, it was stopping them, stopping them there. And then it was believing that Jesus had died for you and God was willing to forgive you. Now, it’s exactly the same for a cleansed heart. It’s faith — belief plus obedience — except that the obedience in this situation is consecration. Not repentance — not turning away from the things that are wrong, but giving everything in your life to God, consecrating it wholly and absolutely in complete and full surrender, right from the top of your head to your feet. Right the whole way down to the deepest part of your heart. It’s giving it all to God and saying: “Lord, I want the Holy Spirit to come in and to rule my heart and to do what He wants. I want Him to make His wishes my wishes; I want His will to be my will. I don’t want to even think a thought or turn an eye where He doesn’t want to do it. I want to give myself wholly to you, Holy Spirit. You take over this whole being of mine and even the thoughts that I think are harmless, if you say I have not to think them, I won’t think them.” It’s full consecration, loved ones. That’s such a deep thing because you remember what the Bible said in Genesis? It said that the heart of man is deceitfully wicked above all things. And so it is with your heart. You know the garbage that comes out of there, you know the poison that it is capable of, you know how it spews it up and you wonder “where did that come from?” Then we like to excuse ourselves, you know: “oh well, like you said, Pastor, it’s just something coming in from outside”, — except we know fine well this stuff is coming up like a fountain. This isn’t stuff that’s coming in from outside, this stuff comes up repeatedly in our lives. Loved ones, your heart is so deceitful that it is actually an enemy of God. That what’s Romans 8:7 says: “The flesh is enmity against God, it is not subject to God’s law, neither indeed can it be.” Loved ones, you keep thinking your heart is just a little astray. That’s it! That’s the error you make! You keep thinking, “Oh well, Pastor, it’s just a little in the bottom.” Loved ones, that’s bluff! While it has that little in the bottom to spread throughout the whole life anytime it cares to. The heart is deceitfully wicked above all things! It will continue to deceive you and make you think, “Put up with me, put up with me, it’s only a little bit of wrong, that won’t do you any real harm.” Loved ones, it’s poison! The Bible says it’s enmity against God, it is not subject to God’s law and indeed it cannot be. Wouldn’t you testify to that? Wouldn’t you testify that when you lose your temper, you feel “there’s something insane inside me, I can’t control it, I can’t control it! It’s like another person inside me.” And that’s what God’s Word says: It’s not subject to God’s law, neither indeed can it be. Loved ones, the first step in getting rid of it is consecrating your whole life absolutely to God and giving Him the right to run every part of it, the innermost part of your being. Do you keep that private spot for yourself? Do you? I mean, that’s what I did. I kept a private place right inside, which none of you knew about and nobody else knew about and I kept that for myself. Even from God, that was a place where I could do what I wanted to do. Have you a place like that? That’s your unclean heart, and consecration is opening even that up to God and saying: “Lord, I give what seems to be my very self. I give to you my very self, my deepest place, the place where I alone know, I give that to you, Lord, I consecrate that to you, for you to rule as you please. Run it like a cathedral if you want, run it like a nunnery if you want, run it like a monastery if you want, run it like the purest thing in the whole universe if you want. Lord, I consecrate it to you.” That’s the obedience. And then the belief is BELIEVE that all of that old heart of yours was crucified with Christ as it was. The old heart was crucified with Christ and He has already given you His clean and pure heart. In other words, faith — like that! — springs up in your heart, the moment you’ve consecrated everything to Jesus. That’s how, loved ones! And then the Holy Spirit comes in and cleanses your heart by your faith and keeps it cleansed as you continue to have faith that you were crucified with Christ and as you continue to submit to the Holy Spirit — and it’s a miracle, it’s a miracle! And it outdoes all the silly books — and all the psychological games we’re going through — and it deals with the heart of things and instead of trying to excuse your anger or justify it or justify your criticism, your sarcasm or your jealousy or trying to justify the things that you know are sin, but you try to make them out to be personality traits — instead of justifying them, you find they don’t even rise in your heart. That’s what a clean heart means. And honestly, you know, you may want to push me on this, you may want to say “brother, don’t you mean that those things still come up, but you have more power to suppress them?” No, no, no, no… No! I don’t care if you get me down here and you kick me to death, I’ll still say “no, no!” It is not suppression, it is not repression. That’s the old game that we all have been involved in. It is cleaning, cleansing – that’s the word that the Bible uses. “He cleansed their hearts by faith” — the Holy Spirit was given to them and God cleansed their hearts by faith. That means wash the stuff right out, so that it’s clean, washed it right out! Didn’t hold it down corked so that it couldn’t get out but cleansed it right out, washed it out, so that your heart is clean. So that at last, there’s nothing coming up from inside, but beauty and love and purity. Can you then see it’s your own fault then if you sin? I mean you’re just dumb if you sin then. It’s just your own fault! But you know the situation before that. You feel “well, it’s hardly even my fault”, but it is still your fault, but you feel “I can’t help it, I can’t help it, it’s coming up from inside.” But, loved ones, the full New Covenant that we have available to us is that God will cleanse our hearts. You’ve got a clean conscience? Do you want a clean heart? Because the New Covenant is a clean conscience and a clean heart. Loved ones, will you begin to ask God to show you where you stand in regard to this? And I’ll try as He gives me grace to explain it more, but would you begin to ask God to show you where you stand? And is there something rising up inside you that doesn’t like this? Is there? Is there something inside you that’s saying “Oh no, that’s not true, it’s not true, it can’t be, nobody can be like that!” That’s your unclean heart! And that unclean heart can take you all the way down to hell, if you don’t allow God to deal with it, as He promised. So, be prepared for it and be prepared for opposition inside you. There will be plenty of opposition because the enemy is within you, even though Jesus is also there — the enemy is within you — and deal with him and I would say deal with him according to this dear Word. Read Acts 15:9 and say, “now, does it mean that? Does it mean that God can cleanse my heart by faith? Does it mean that there is a miracle than can happen inside me that can clean me out?” And that’s what it means, loved ones. Let us pray. Dear Father, we realize that we’ve made all kinds of excuses for ourselves over the years. What harm does a little bit of gossip do, little bit of criticism? Lord, we’ve always tried to justify it, as somebody needs to put things right, but Lord, we see there is only one who’s responsible for conviction of sins and that’s the Holy Spirit and the leaders that He appoints and anoints to use for that. So Lord, we would stop excusing ourselves. Lord, we’ve often got used to the low level of holiness and obedience that is present in so many of our churches and our society and we’ve excused ourselves and said as long as we don’t sin to do something wrong on the outside, we are alright. But Lord, we know that it’s this stuff in the inside that causes us the pain and the shame in your presence and Lord it’s this stuff that rises from our unclean hearts that makes it so difficult to obey you even outwardly at times. So, Father, we ask now, that by your Holy Spirit, you will come, dear Holy Spirit and begin to counsel us. We need your counseling. No other person knows us as you do. We ask you to be the Counselor and to reveal to us the depths of our unclean heart and take us to the very bottom of that heart. Take us down to the very end of all the sour spoiled stuff and then, Holy Spirit, enable us to give that all over to you and allow you to take up your residence there permanently. We apologize for so often expelling you, when we wanted to do something that we wanted to do. Holy Spirit, we want to come to the place where this is your home and you never need to be expelled, because nothing dirty is ever done there. So, dear Holy Spirit, we ask you to help each one of us these coming weeks to come to a place of full and absolute consecration where we give not only our outward life, but we give our inward heart to you, for your rule and for your leadership. And now the grace of our Lord Jesus, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with each one of us, now and evermore. Amen.

Living Without a Clean Heart Galatians 5 Sermon Transcript by Rev. Ernest O’Neill It’s so easy to say casually, “Oh Stephanie” — and I apologize to all Stephanies but, “Stephanie is all right, but she exaggerates a little.” It’s so easy to say that and you think, “Yeah, what’s wrong with that?” But you really are stealing her reputation, aren’t you? Because actually the person that you’re speaking to doesn’t know quite what you mean by “she does exaggerate a little” and you may mean she exaggerates ‘that’ little and they may mean she exaggerates ‘that’ little and actually it’s stealing Stephanie’s reputation, it is. Because the other person from that moment on is looking out for Stephanie’s exaggeration and actually doesn’t listen to Stephanie, if you’re honest – and ever after that remembers your comment. So when you steal somebody’s reputation like that or if you steal from the IRS by fudging on the medical expenses or the business expenses or you do something in real resentment against an associate or an acquaintance and you find that the resentment is growing almost to a hatred. When you do those things loved ones, all of those things, all of those sins, even though they may occur in your head or in your emotions or in your words, they all come from your heart. They come from your heart. That’s what Jesus said you remember. He said, “It’s out of the heart of man that come the things that defile him, anger and hatred and fornication and murder and adultery and slander and false witness, these are the things that come from the heart of the man and these are the things that defile him.” You may say, “No, no, no, those are just chance events in my life that are provoked by the circumstances that I live in. They don’t really come from my heart”, but Jesus says, “Yes, they do, and they indicate what you really are like deep down”, and you and I like to say, “No, no, they don’t. We just flip them off. They’re flippant. We don’t really mean those things. Actually we’re very very nice inside”, but Jesus says, “No, no. A good tree bears good fruit and a bad tree bears bad fruit and fresh spring doesn’t produce sweet water and sour water at the same time. No, what is in your outward life is an indication of what is in your heart because it all comes from your heart.” You may say, “Well, I mean what did He mean ‘by the heart’?” Well, not the blood pump obviously, not the physical blood pump that we talk about in heart transplants today, but the same as what you and I mean when we say, “Look, let’s get to the heart of the matter.” You know what we mean when we say that, “let’s get to the heart of the matter”, we mean let’s get to the very essence of this matter. Let’s get to the inner issue in this situation, let’s get to the very center of this situation, that’s what the heart is loved ones, in the Bible. Your heart is the very center of you, yourself. It’s the very essence of you. It’s the very inner core of your being and that’s why Jesus wanted to make it so clear to us that the things we do outwardly are not just chance responses to circumstances. They’re not just chance happenings, they actually do express what we are inside. Somebody has said, “When you squeeze an orange, the juice squirts out”, you squeeze it and what is inside comes out, that’s what happens. The circumstances and events of our lives push us into different situations, we’re squeezed and what is really in our hearts, comes out and shows itself in our responses and our reactions that we did not have time to prepare beforehand. Now the truth is of course, an out-and-out crook says, “Yeah, that’s right. That’s what my heart’s like. I killed a guy because I hate him. I wanted rid of him”, or, “I steal because it’s the only way to get money. Nobody else will take care of me and it’s the only way to survive in this place”, so an out-and-out crook won’t argue with that at all. He’ll say, “That’s right. What I do on the outside is what is in my heart.” It’s very interesting but a respectable church-goer who hasn’t necessarily dealt with Jesus will probably say the same kind of thing. He’ll say, “Well yeah, I may not be perfect but I live in a dog-eat-dog world and the only way to survive is to stand up for yourself and that’s what I do.” So it’s interesting that neither of those people will be too concerned about the problems they have with their unclean heart — but any of you here this morning who believe Jesus is God’s Son and who have confessed your sins to God and have repented of them and have some awareness of Jesus’ Spirit, to you, an unclean heart within you will seem like a blatant contradiction of your claim to be borne of God. And so an unclean heart isn’t a trouble to anybody but a person who has started to be aware that God is real and has started to try to obey Him and I think many of us are in that situation. We have found that there is something inside us that doesn’t seem to want to do what we know we should be doing and increasingly, as the years have passed, we found there has developed within us something that is unclean inside, something that actually does not want God and we’ve come to the point in our lives where we cry out a cry that wasn’t spoken by a child of God at all but that was spoken by a Jew trying to live under the law and we find we’re crying out, “I don’t understand my own actions. I do not do the good that I want but I do the very thing I hate.” So, many of us who are born of God, who have received the Spirit of Jesus into us and who try to read the Bible and who try to pray day-by-day, many of us have found that there is still within us, an unclean heart. There’s something within us that has started to make our life with God a kind of uphill struggle, that contrasts so clearly with our experience at the beginning because when we first sensed Jesus’ Spirit, it seemed to be easy and natural to obey Him and we seem to just zoom along, it was so easy. What was inside seemed to be all sweet and fragrant but gradually as the years have passed, we have begun to find there’s something inside, like a kind of weight inside. A kind of drag on us and we’ve begun to find, it’s more like climbing up a steep hill to obey God. You know what you should do but you don’t seem able to do it because your heart is not going the same way as your will wants to go. For many of us it’s like a kind of computer inside that has kind of a bug in the memory system and we’re going along and we meet suddenly a person who is very blunt and very argumentative and we know we should be able to punch up the gentle, peaceful Spirit of Jesus from our hearts and we punch the right button but there’s something wrong inside and the old memory storage seems to send up an attitude of ‘Give him as good as you get’ and you can’t hold it back and it’s as if your storage of feelings inside store different ones from the ones you used to experience. Or you’re passing by a magazine stand and you see the magazine with the picture on it and you try to punch up the Spirit of Jesus’ love for that dear person on the magazine cover but something goes wrong inside and that storage sends up on the screen of your imagination all kinds of lustful thoughts and actions that can’t possibly co-exist with the Spirit of Jesus. Loved ones, that’s the key to the up and down life, that last sentence. That’s why many of us who are Christians have an up and down, spirit and flesh, in and out Christian life because Jesus’ Spirit cannot co-exist with evil. His Spirit cannot co-exist with evil. In other words, His Spirit cannot dwell in an unclean heart. Now you may say to me, “But brother, I know that I have received the Spirit of Jesus. I know that I’ve sensed at times, Jesus’ motivation and impulses within me. I know that. I know that I have done some things according to His will. Now, is that not real?” Yes, yes, it is real. God’s Spirit did regenerate your spirit, that’s why you’re aware of God, that’s why you can even understand the things I am talking about this morning. God’s Spirit regenerated your spirit, made it alive and made it aware of God and aware of Jesus and His Spirit made your spirit new but your spirit still separates itself from God’s Holy Spirit when it chooses. That’s it. Your spirit is alive to God but when it chooses, it resists God’s Holy Spirit and while it has that attitude to God’s Holy Spirit, God’s own Holy Spirit is a guest in your heart that is driven out and brought in, driven out and brought in. No, you’re still born of God. Your own spirit is still alive. But the Holy Spirit is not able to dwell in your heart because your heart is not clean and you have not allowed it to be made clean. So there’s an inconstant Christian life, up and down, up and down, not a constant Christian life that comes from the indwelling Spirit of God. In other words, God’s Holy Spirit has to act upon you from outside. Here’s the way Andrew Murray puts the difference between the Old Covenant and the New Covenant. Many of you have maybe wondered, “Well now, what was the difference between the working of the Holy Spirit in the Old Covenant and the working in the New Covenant?” Because that’s something of the difference between a constant Christian life and an inconstant Christian life. This book loved ones is just a good one called ‘The Spirit of Christ’ by Andrew Murray and I’ll just read you two sentences, “In the Old Testament, we have the Spirit of God coming upon men and working on them in special times and ways, working from above without and within. In the New, we have the Holy Spirit entering them and dwelling with them” — you see, not working upon them from without as He did on prophets and kings and priests at special times but the Holy Spirit in the New, coming and dwelling within them, working from within, without and upwards. “In the former, we have the Spirit of God as the almighty and holy one, in the latter we have the Spirit of the Father of Jesus Christ.” Now the fact is those of us with unclean hearts are somewhere between the Old Testament and the New, that’s it. We’ve experienced the forgiveness of sins of the Old Testament and something of the regeneration of the New but not the full indwelling that God planned for us. You remember it’s what we said in that Ezekiel Chapter 36. You remember God gave the promise of the New Covenant and He said, “I will put a new spirit within you”, that’s, “I’ll regenerate your spirit. I’ll make it alive and new”, and then He says, “And I will put a new heart within you because I will put My Spirit within you”, that is the Holy Spirit. Now loved ones if your heart is not clean, your spirit is renewed and you have periodic experiences of the Holy Spirit’s action upon your spirit but you do not have a constant indwelling of the Holy Spirit within. He is not in fact at home in your heart. He is a guest and He cannot be at home until your spirit has finally given up the right ever to resist Him and until you have been prepared to make your heart absolutely what He wants it to be. Now you may say to me, “Now, do you not think that in the first century, they experienced the whole ball of wax at one moment? Do you not think that? Do you not think that in the first century, the Holy Spirit came upon them, regenerated them, made them alive in their spirits, and cleansed their heart and came and dwelt with them permanently from then on?” Yes, that undoubtedly happened. If you want to look at one of the times loved ones, it’s that kind of anomaly in a way that took place in Cornelius’s house, Acts 10:44. Cornelius was a centurion you remember, who certainly is talked about as a God-fearing man but there isn’t clear evidence that he was a Christian though one can’t be sure, but he invited you remember, Peter to speak at his house. Acts 10:44, “While Peter was still saying this”, that’s while he was still preaching the Gospel, “The Holy Spirit fell on all who heard the word and the believers from among the circumcised who came with Peter were amazed because the gift of the Holy Spirit had been poured out even on the Gentiles for they heard them speaking in tongues and extolling God”, and so it all happened at once there. I mean it’s strange but it seemed the first time they heard the Gospel, the Holy Spirit fell upon them and they were baptized with the Holy Spirit and they were baptized into Jesus’ name and everything took place at once. But as you saw in that preview you got in Acts 9:17, it didn’t happen that way with Paul. Paul you remember, met Jesus first on the Damascus road and then three days later this happened in Acts 9:17, “So Ananias departed and entered the house and laying his hands on him he said, “Brother Saul, the Lord Jesus who appeared to you on the road by which you came, has sent me that you may regain your sight and be filled with the Holy Spirit.” So it happened both ways in the New Testament. So if you’re in the position where you believe you’re a child of God and you’re born of God and you’re aware of Jesus and you regard Him as your Savior and you know your sins are forgiven and yet you still are aware you have an unclean heart, see that so were some people in the New Testament — and yet obviously some other people entered into the whole thing at once because referring to the situation in Cornelius’s household, you remember Peter said, “And God made no distinction between them and us but cleansed their hearts by faith.” So some people have experienced it all at once but many of us, and I suspect many here this morning, have not experienced the clean heart. But isn’t the truth this, not how should it happen or how did it normally happen — because that isn’t going to give us any assurance anyway — but examine your own heart. What is the state of your own heart? Does your heart immediately expel a thought or feeling of pride or jealousy or anger when it occurs, does it? Or does it welcome it and entertain it and relish it and nourish it? Well, if it does, your heart isn’t clean. That’s simple, and you’re walking with a heaviness inside you that you don’t need to walk with and that you can’t victoriously with. Do you find that your heart automatically sends Jesus’ sentiments up to your will so that it is easy and natural to be like Jesus? Or do you find that your heart is sending up to your will, all kinds of things that your conscience is condemning and indeed, your will cannot handle these things and it’s constantly trying to repress them and at times fails to repress them and they burst out into outward sin and stain your conscience. Well, if that’s the situation loved ones, you’re living the Christian life the hard way and your heart is not clean and the truth is that the New Covenant is a message that God is able to cleanse our hearts and in fact why many of us here walk with unclean hearts for so many years is because we don’t understand what the real New Covenant, New Testament Gospel is, and that’s true loved ones. I think many of us have had preached to us only the Old Covenant. Let me show you the Old Covenant and you’ll know what I mean, it’s the one preached by John the Baptist. Mark 1:4, and I think this will surprise you loved ones because this is the Old Covenant. This, don’t forget was John the Baptist as a Jewish preacher preaching. Mark 1:4, “John the Baptizer appeared in the wilderness preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins”, that was it. That was the Old Covenant. Preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. Now I wonder how many of us entered into that thinking that’s the New Covenant. We repent to have our sins forgiven, that’s it and the joy of being in Jesus is constantly thanking Him for forgiving us our sins. Well, the Jews knew that. The people that were baptized by John the Baptist before Jesus ever died, they knew that. That’s the Old Covenant. The New Covenant is a few verses down, Mark 1:8, John makes the distinction himself. He says, “I have baptized you with water but He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit”, that’s the New Covenant. If you want to know what baptized is, it’s ‘immerse’ — not the water, we’re not arguing about immersing in water or sprinkling — the Greek word means ‘Immersed in the Holy Spirit’. Immersed, totally immersed in the Holy Spirit — with the result that took place you remember, in Cornelius’s household where Peter says, “God gave the Holy Spirit to them as He did to us, made no distinction between them and us but cleansed their hearts by faith.” By immersing completely in the Holy Spirit, the heart is cleansed by faith. And yet you know that our society is full of all of us bleating away to each other that “your problem is guilt, your problem if guilt. You can have your sins forgiven.” We know fine well this permissive society doesn’t have a great guilt problem. This permissive society has one problem, “How do I do what I know I should do?” “How do I do what I know I should do, how can I live the way I know I should live?”, and loved ones, the guilt problem was what the Old Covenant took care of. The New Covenant takes care of the clean heart. It cleanses your heart through the baptism of the Holy Spirit so that you have a center of motivations and attitudes that are pure like Jesus. But the problem with so many of us is we don’t realize that it’s received by faith. We believe we receive our forgiveness of sins by faith and then you know what we do. You know what we do. We say, “All right, I received the forgiveness of sins by faith. I know I am on my way to heaven, now I’ve got to work on my unclean heart”, isn’t that right? I mean how many of us believe that we can receive a clean heart by faith? We don’t. We believe we work on an unclean heart by amateur psychology and group rationalization. That’s it, and because we haven’t experienced the miraculous deliverance from the unclean heart, the only way we can align ourselves with the Bible standards is by lowering those standards and so that’s what we do. You know we fill each other’s heads with the thoughts, “Anger is okay. You can’t get over it. Let’s face it. It’s just human. Gossip is okay. Let’s face it, you can’t get over it, an odd unclean thought, it’s human. You can’t get over those things. A little slander, a little jealousy, you can’t help it. Those are normal human feelings and you’ll always have them.” Isn’t that the way we talk? So we excuse anger and we excuse gossip and we excuse sarcasm and we excuse slick asides to other people and gradually the whole life in Christ lowers and lowers and lowers. Loved ones, you may say, “I believe what you say. I believe Acts 15:9. I believe that God can give the Holy Spirit to us and He can cleanse our hearts by faith. I believe that. I believe it’s possible to live that way. Now, how am I going to move towards that? How am I going to move towards the full consecration that enables God to do this miracle in me?” Loved ones, first of all call sin, sin. Call sin, sin. Stop looking at things that you do wrong or feelings that you have that are wrong and excusing them as shortcomings or as little weaknesses in your humanity or as little characteristics that occur because of your background. Stop that. Stop saying, “Oh well, I am a Swede you know and I am a bit incommunicative, not unloving, just incommunicative”, stop saying that. Stop saying, “Oh well, I have an artistic kind of temperament you know, and I am a little fiery, not angry, I am a little fiery at times”, stop that. Say, “I am angry”, that’s sin. Unlovingness, that’s sin. Stop saying, “Well, I am a student you know and I am a transient, not uncommitted. I am a transient, I am just transient”, No, say you’re uncommitted. Call it sin. Old marrieds, “Well, no, I am not ungenerous to God financially, I am just prudent at this time of my life.” No, no, just call it sin. Young marrieds, “I am not ungenerous but we just have to get the necessities you know, get ourselves together”, no, no, call that sin. Call sin, sin. That’s the first thing. Call sin, sin. You can afford to do it because there’s a cure for it and a remedy for it. You only have to pretend if there’s no remedy. If there’s no remedy but the amateur psychology and the mutual reinforcement groups then you have to avoid calling it sin, but call sin, sin, that’s the first thing. Be real about the things in your life that are sin. And see secondly that sin cannot be justified. You can’t justify sin. Some of us you know, take First John 1:8, “If we say we have no sin, we lie and the truth is not in us”, that is, we have never sinned and we have no unconscious sin. All of us have unconscious sin, every one of us. So in that sense, none of us can say, “We have no sin.” All of us have unconscious sin that we have not seen yet and we cannot deal with until it becomes conscious but see very clearly loved ones that the normal Christian life is defined in two verses in scripture, one is in James, “Whoever knows what is right to do and does not do it, for him it is sin.” So if you know something is wrong and you don’t do it, that’s sin, conscious sin not unconscious sin, that’s still sin but conscious sin is what God is concerned about. That’s what you have control of and First John 3:9, “Whosoever is born of God does not commit sin.” You don’t commit sin if you’re born of God. Loved ones, hold to that, hold to that. Don’t justify sin. Keep calling it sin. Why? Because the door to full consecration is continual repentance, that’s it. That’s why the Beattitude says, “Blessed are they that mourn,” — mourn for their sin — “for they shall be comforted.” The door to full consecration is continual repentance. In other words it’s not, “Well, I am the way you said I am, I am in that situation and I know it’ll be a miracle so I’ll wait for the miracle”, no, no, the way into the miracle, the way into the place of full consecration where the Holy Spirit can cleanse your heart by faith is by continual honest repentance day-by-day-by-day. I’ll read it to you because I thought it was important to put it as exactly as I could. “Impenitence”, that is lack of penitence, Impenitence, un-repentance, “Impenitence is not due simply to repeated sinning”, it isn’t. See, you may say, “Well, from what you’re saying if I am sinning all the time, there’s no hope”, no, “impenitence is not due simply to repeated sinning but to the growing tolerance of that sinning as a necessity,” see that? It’s not just that you’re sinning repeatedly — but impenitence, the time when your conscience become seared and when you get to the point where you can no longer come to a place of full consecration — is when you regard that sinning as a necessity in your life and you begin to tolerate it. “Impenitence is due not simply to repeated sinning but to the growing tolerance of that sinning as a necessity — to the acceptance of the idea that we can’t stop, to the regarding of sin as normal rather than abnormal, as natural rather than alien. However often we sin if we set our hearts against it with all our being and regard it as something that we must get rid of, not only will God forgive us until 70 times 7 but He will lead us to ask the all important question which is the key to deliverance, ‘Why can I not stop?’ ” That’s it loved ones. There’s no point you know in crying out this morning and saying, “Brother, by what you’re saying, there’s no hope for any of us because I sin”, but loved ones, it isn’t the sinning. It’s what the old Saint says, “It’s not the falling but it’s the refusal to get up and go every time you fall and to believe that there comes a time when you do not need to fall”, that’s it. That’s what repentance is. Repentance is not never sinning at this point in your life, before your heart is cleansed — but it is a refusal to accept sinning as normal in your life. It is a refusal to reject the word of God. It is a constant belief that the normal Christian life is one that is free from unclean hearts and free from unclean life and that is the way into the place of full consecration. It is a desperate crying out to God, it isn’t the crying out to man. “Why? Why can I not stop sinning?” While you’re crying out to man, while you’re having little counseling sessions, while you’re reading the books, while you’re talking to other people saying, “Why can I not stop sinning even though I am a Christian”, while you’re doing that, you’re just pretending, you’re just pretending. While you’re trying to justify your situation, you’re not even serious. But when you’re desperate enough to cry out to the Holy Spirit, “Holy Spirit, why can I not stop this? Why?” Then you’re coming into the place of full consecration where the dear Holy Spirit Himself can begin to deal with you and can explain to you in what ways your heart is not clean for Him to dwell and He will explain it to you loved ones because He wants to dwell in your heart. Your heart was made for His indwelling, that’s why your heart is there. You were made for the Holy Spirit of God to stay and dwell and live within you day after day, night after night, moment by moment and the Holy Spirit’s dearest desire is to come there and make that His home. You remember, it was Judas — not Iscariot but the other Judas — that said to Jesus, “Lord, how are You going to show Yourself to us and not to the rest of the world”, and Jesus said, “I’ll tell you. If a man loves Me, he will keep My words and My Father will love him and We will come and make Our home in his heart”, that’s it. The Holy Spirit will come and dwell constantly in your heart and fill your heart with the fragrance and the beauty and the purity of Jesus, if you will ask Him to come in and cleanse your heart of all that is self and all that is ungodly and all that is other than Jesus. Loved ones, He will do it. So I wanted to try you know, to help those of you who wondered, “Well, how do I live with an unclean heart?” Well, the truth is, you can’t live too long that way loved ones, it eventually overcomes anything that’s good in you at all but the way to live with an unclean heart until it becomes clean is by constant repentance that is an attitude. It is not simply an action, it is an attitude. It is an attitude of declared, relentless antagonism to sin, that’s it. That’s what repentance is. It’s a declared, relentless antagonism and hostility to sin that will not accept sin as normal. “I won’t accept it!” I don’t want to blaspheme but a bit like the guy in the movie. “I am mad as hell and I won’t put up with it anymore. I won’t! This is Satan within me. I am not tolerating it. Lord, I know I can be free from this and I confess this sin to You but I know Lord it goes deeper than this. This came up from my unclean heart. This came with such a surge of power that my will could not control it. Lord I ask You, Holy Spirit, will You reveal to me why I can’t stop this? Will You reveal what uncleanness in my heart has to go because I know the moment I am willing to let it go, that moment You take it away”, and that’s it. But I’ll tell you it’s a different life. It’s a different life. Instead of poison coming up from inside that you have to hold down with all your power, beauty and purity and love from Jesus’ own heart comes up from inside. You can see why I said to you last Sunday, “It’s your own fault then if you sin”, it is, because the will is receiving thoughts that are loving and kind and pure and naturally, spontaneously Christ-like. So the will is dumb if it doesn’t say, “Oh, go through, go through”, and that’s why such an effortless life when Jesus cleanses you through the baptism of the Holy Spirit. So loved ones, will you walk on and next Sunday I’ll try to talk a little more but it’s not talk you know, it’s you and the Holy Spirit, He will do it. He will be faithful with you as He has been with so many of us. Let us pray. Dear Father, we thank You for the New Covenant, the New Testament. We thank You for the real Gospel. We thank You Lord that our sins were forgiven in Your name because of Your death, just as the Jewish sins were forgiven in Your name because of Your death, but Lord we thank You that since Your resurrection, there is also available to us the indwelling power of the Holy Spirit. Lord that we do not need simply to experience Him from a far-off as the Old Testament people did, but that He comes and dwells within a cleansed heart. So Lord, we want that. We want our hearts cleansed by faith so that You, Holy Spirit, can dwell constantly and uninterruptedly within us. So we ask You dear Holy Spirit to start explaining to us why there are certain things in our lives that we can’t stop. Will You show us our hearts, reveal to us the uncleanness there, much of it we can’t even see yet, and take us to the very bottom of our hearts until we yield it all to You and give up the right ever to resist You again. We ask this in the name of our Savior Jesus. Now the grace of our Lord Jesus and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with each one of us, now and evermore. Amen.

How To Receive A Clean Heart Ezekiel 36:26 Sermon Transcript by Ernest O’Neill I’d like to try to speak on how to get a clean heart this morning. There are Christians and then there are Christians and then there are Christians. That’s right. And at different stages of my life I was each of those. And this morning you are one or other of them. And it’s important to know which you are. Why? Because the first kind of Christian has the following attitude. So examine your own heart and your life to see if this is your attitude. The first kind of Christian says, “Sure, I’m as good a Christian as anyone. I love my country, I pay my taxes, I believe in God and Jesus Christ, I go to church, I try to live by the Golden Rule, I try to do as much for the next guy as I can. Yeah, I’m a Christian, as much of a Christian as anybody is a Christian.” Now, what you’re really saying there is “I’m Christian because I’m not Buddhist, I’m not Muslim, I’m not Hindu, I’m Christian. I’ve been brought up in a Christian country, I’ve been brought up by Christian parents, I’ve gone to a Christian church since I was born, I was baptized there, I was confirmed there, I was married there, I hope to be buried there. I have been involved in a Christian society as long as I can remember.” But if you examine your own attitude to Christianity you’ll admit that even though Christian principles surround you in this society and surround you in your place of work, even though actually Christian principles are impregnating your very mind so that you’re full of Christian ideas, yet your heart, your inner heart, is just the same as the heart of anybody who isn’t a Christian. That is, day by day, it’s preoccupied with the same things as everybody else is: making money, getting enough food to keep yourself alive and getting by and getting what little bit of happiness you can. And your heart is actually not preoccupied with God and it’s not preoccupied with bringing people to Jesus. Your heart is actually just like the heart of any other person who doesn’t claim to be a Christian. Now the theologians call that being a “Natural Man.” That’s what a Natural Man is, loved ones, or a Natural Woman. You can believe all the Christian principles, you can go to church like all the rest of us, you can live in a Christian society, but the only thing inside you that is Christian is your conscience, which bothers you with guilt every time you disobey God. But actually in your heart there is no Christian spirit. In other words your life is primarily involved in observing external practices and principles and customs that you with your intellect approve of. Now that’s what a Natural Man is. Or we have another term, a “Nominal Christian.” Why I outline that to you this morning is, I am hoping that sometime in your life you’ll look back on these messages and you’ll say to yourself, you know, that’s where I was faced with reality repeatedly and I’ve never been faced with reality as continuously as those days. These are unique and precious days, you know. They are. We’re kind of a privileged bunch. Not at all because you have me to listen to. But because we’re together, and God has for the moment opened your ears so that you can hear some of this stuff and so that you can understand it. And loved ones, I want you to know where you are in relationship to God yourself, you see. Not to kind of make you feel bad or a second-class citizen, but so that you know, now, am I a Christian or am I a CHRISTIAN? Now the second kind of Christian is one whose conscience has been enlivened by the Holy Spirit so that they stop saying “Oh, I must try to cut down on my drinking. I just have to.” They stop saying that. Or “I must clean up my sex life sometime” or “I just have to start reading that Bible that Pastor talks about.” They stop that kind of easy-going attitude to what they know is right and what they know is wrong. And their conscience is enlivened so that it doesn’t just bother them, it weighs them down! The conscience, reinforced by the Bible and reinforced by the operation of the Holy Spirit upon it, begins to convict that person deeply of the fact that they are not living the way they were meant to live. They, in fact, begin to see hell yawning before them. They begin to see that their life is full of sins and that the wages of sin is death and that they are on the way to that death and they are on the way to a hell of selfishness with all the other Nominal Christians. And they begin to sense that and they begin to realize that God is utterly justified in excluding them from Heaven and utterly justified in destroying them before they destroy him and all the other people within their reach. And that Christian begins to come under deep conviction of sin and begins to treat God for the first time with a real sense of fear — and it’s then that he normally hears the gospel that the Jews in the Old Testament heard. I say that because I’m afraid so often in our society that’s the gospel that such a person who comes under conviction of sin as a convicted sinner hears. I’ll show you that gospel and I think you’ll agree with me. It’s in Mark 1:4. It’s the gospel that the Jewish prophets preached and among them John the Baptist. “John the baptizer appeared in the wilderness preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.” And that’s the gospel they hear. They hear that God is willing to forgive them their sins and First John 1:9 reinforces it, which says, “if we confess our sins He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins” and such a person goes to God and says “Lord, I confess my sins and I repent of them. I ask you now to forgive me.” And because such a person lives in a world that has already seen Jesus and knows that it’s because of Jesus that they can have their sins forgiven, they do what they’re told. They believe on Jesus and they receive His Spirit. And God acts upon their spirit and makes their spirit alive. And they become aware of God, but actually they’re still Old Testament Christians. They’re still Old Testament Christians. God’s Spirit has acted upon their spirit and made it alive and enabled them to be born again so that they’re aware of God. But they’re aware of Him VAGUELY. They don’t, for instance, have that vivid awareness of Jesus and the Holy Spirit that the disciples had and they know that. And they don’t quite know what’s wrong. Moreover, the experience they testify to will be the one that the Jews testified to, the forgiveness of their sins. That’s what such an Old Testament Christian is preoccupied with: the forgiveness of their sins. That’s all they know to testify to. That’s the primary experience they have. So they are strange hybrid creatures, because they are really in the same position as the Old Testament Jews. They know the forgiveness of their sins and yet they do know of Jesus, which the Old Testament people could only suspect, do you remember, “The One that was to come”. But they haven’t actually got into the whole of the New Covenant. And so you find they are preoccupied with their sins and they are very loathe to testify to the distinction that John the Baptist pointed out between the Old Covenant and the New Covenant. You remember what that was if you have the page open where you looked at Mark 1:4. Just look down to Mark 1:8 and John the Baptist points out the difference between the Old Covenant and the New. He says, “I’m preaching repentance for the forgiveness of the sins”, but then in verse 8, “I have baptized you in water,” — because all I can do is wash you clean from the guilt of your sin — “but He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.” And these, loved ones, aren’t very aware of that baptism of the Holy Spirit. Indeed they live primarily on the basis of First John 1:9: “If we confess our sins He is faithful and just to forgive our sins” and the basis of the truth of First John 1:7, “If we walk in the light as He is in the light, the blood of Jesus cleanses us from all sin”. They walk primarily preoccupied with sins actually. It’s interesting. They testify that their sins are forgiven, but yet they walk primarily preoccupied with sin; either with getting free from the guilt of it by continual confession and repentance or fighting it with all their hearts to try to overcome it, but somehow or other, all they know is the forgiveness of their sins — little of the power over sin and little of that whole beautiful life that is above sin completely. So they actually live in the world of the Old Testament Jew, where they cry, “I don’t understand my own actions! I do not do the good that I want, but I do the evil that I hate!” Now what is the problem with the Christian who is in that position — with the Carnal Christian? Because that’s what such a person is. They’re no longer Nominal Christians, they’re no longer Natural Men. They have got His Spirit acting upon their spirit and their spirit is alive and knows God, and the Holy Spirit at times works within them, but yet they live in this life of defeat as far as sin in their lives is concerned. What is the problem? Their heart. Their heart, that’s the problem. It’s their heart is the problem. Jesus explained that. He said, “It’s not what you eat. It’s not the food that comes through your mouth that defiles you. It’s what comes out of your mouth, because what comes out of your mouth is what comes out from your heart. Because from your heart comes fornication. From your heart comes slander and false witness. From your heart comes murder and adultery. It’s your heart that sends those things up.” And loved ones, that’s the situation. So many of us who are Carnal Christians have a very lively conscience, and reinforced by the Bible and reinforced by fellowship in the body of Jesus, it becomes intensely powerful and it’s constantly constraining our wills to obey God. So we find our wills are trying with all their heart to obey God, but the heart is sending up such a stream of evil to the will that the will cannot handle it and it cannot overcome it and it cannot repress it and it cannot hold it down and at times it has to let it through and break out into the outward life. Because even though your spirit has been renewed and made alive, your heart is still the old miserable heart that you had before you repented of your sins originally. In other words your nature actually hasn’t changed, because the heart is what we mean by saying “the heart of the matter.” Your heart is the real you. It’s the heart of you, it’s the very essence of you, it’s your very own deep self, it’s you as you really are. You may want to say “No, no it isn’t! I can’t be as bad as that!” That’s it. That stuff is coming from what you really are deep down inside and it’s your heart that is the problem. That’s, you remember, what Jesus said. He said it’s out of a person’s heart that come all those things that they can’t control. That’s why you’re in the same position as the Jews in the Old Testament. They felt “everything’s clean. Why can’t I obey?” And you tend to feel the same way. You say, “But look, I’ve been made clean. Everything is clean. Why can’t I obey?” And, loved ones, the reason is in that statement you remember in Ezekiel if you look at it just again, because some of you may not have read it last Sunday. Ezekiel 36 and it’s one of those great Old Testament pieces that foresee what the New Covenant is going to be like and outlines the New Covenant, and, of course, because it’s God’s Word says it in some ways better than even pieces in the New Testament say it. It’s Ezekiel 36:26. God is describing what He’s going to do in the New Covenant. “A new heart I will give you and a new spirit I will put within you.” Now a Carnal Christian has a new spirit. Their spirit is made alive by the operation of the Holy Spirit upon it. But the new heart they do not have. Do you see the way that goes on? “And I will take out of your flesh the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.” And that’s what hasn’t happened with the Carnal Christian. They still have a heart of stone. “And I will put my spirit within you and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to observe my ordinances.” Three things will happen in the New Covenant. God will renew your spirit. He’ll make you alive, He’ll regenerate you and He’ll enable you to be born of Him, He’ll enable you to become aware of Him. Secondly, He will give you a new heart and a clean heart and then, thirdly, He will put into that new heart His own Holy Spirit. Loved ones, the problem with a person who lives in defeat in their own lives regarding sin is that their heart is still under the control of their own will. The will still retains control of the heart and still maintains the right to have in that heart whatever it wants. It keeps that little part of itself private from God. It surrenders all the other kinds of things to God, but it will not surrender the very heart of its own being and the will retains control over that heart. And it’s that heart that spews up the evil and the uncleanness that you find coming into your mind repeatedly in the day-to-day life that you live. And do you see it’s because you surrendered as much as doesn’t matter, that’s it. You said you gave your life to Jesus. Well, actually you give as much as doesn’t matter. You’ve retained a little piece inside you where you retain the right to think what you want when you want. You retain the right to disobey when you please. Indeed you’re treating Jesus the way the Jews treated Him when He was on earth. They did what they pleased with Him and they ignored Him and they lived the way they wanted and pretended that He had never come upon the scene. You have a little piece in your heart where you live that way. There’s a little piece inside you over which Jesus is not Lord, the very heart, the very inner part of you. Now while such a Carnal Christian confesses and repents of their sin day after day and while they fight sin with all their heart or all their strength and while they try to obey as best they can, God will continue to give them His Spirit. But the Spirit will not be able to stay with them. God will not be able to put his Spirit in as a permanent resident in the heart because it’s not clean, but every time they confess God will regenerate them, will keep them alive. But they know the effect of that because their life goes up and then it goes down, then it goes up and then it goes down, so it’s life and death, life and death, life and death year after year, life and death, confess and repent. God gives us the Spirit, we sin again, we resist the Spirit, the Holy Spirit witnesses that He’s grieved, you go down in the guilt, up, up down… there is no constant life. But yet while a Carnal Christian will walk that way, they can remain alive in God, however defeated and inconsistent and sporadic their life is. If they ever begin to rationalize their sins and say, “No, that is not sin for me. Fornication is not sin for me. Adultery is not sin for me” they begin to rationalize God’s word. They begin to say “Well, who knows? Who knows whether that’s right or not right?” They begin to rationalize what is obedience and disobedience. If they once start to do that and then they begin to justify this unequal battle against the power of sin in their life as the normal Christian life and they begin to try to treat that disease with a mixture of positive thinking and Christian technique literature and kind of reinforcement from fellowship, then they will lose everything and their last state will be worse than the first. Now how do you get into the normal Christian life? How do you get a clean heart? By entering fully into what God has done for us in Jesus in the New Covenant. That’s it. It’s not something extra you need. In a sense you’re right, if you’re born of God you have everything, but you have to enter it into it all, enter fully into what God has done for you in the New Covenant in Jesus. What has He done? Well, Mark 1:8: John the Baptist says “I baptized you with water, but He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.” You need to be baptized with the Holy Spirit. Now you may say now “Wait a minute. I’m talking about my anger and my bad temper. I’m talking about my moral impotence. I’m talking about the fact that I can’t overcome sin in my life. What has the baptism with the Holy Spirit got to do with that?” Loved ones, look at this verse Acts 15:8. You remember Peter is telling them of an event that took place when Cornelius and his household were baptized with the Holy Spirit. “And God who knows the heart bore witness to them, giving them the Holy Spirit just as He did to us and He made no distinction between us and them, but cleansed their hearts by faith.” That’s it. The gift of the Holy Spirit is connected with the clean heart and the clean heart is cleansed by faith. So God gives the Holy Spirit and He cleanses your heart by faith. Just to remind you, some of you may still say “Oh, but didn’t I receive the Holy Spirit when I was born of God?” Loved ones, you receive what we’ve shared. Yes, you received as much of Him as you were willing to allow to control your life. But the fact is that He has not been able to DWELL in your life and you will testify to that, you will testify to the in out, up and down existence. The fact is that He has to operate upon you from outside as He did with the Old Testament people. He has not been able to ABIDE in you as a continuing presence in your life, as a resident within you. And the only way to have him abide in you is to allow Jesus to baptize you with Him. Now you may say “Does that mean that my heart then will begin to send up Jesus’ loving attitudes and sentiments?” Yeah, it does. That’s right. Your heart, instead of spewing up all the dirt that you have to put up with, will begin miraculously to send up the life and the love of Jesus Himself. That’s what that passage in Galatians means, you remember, in Galatians 5, it says “The works of the flesh are anger, adultery, fornication, murder, selfishness, strife, but the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness”. The works of the flesh over there, the desires of the flesh strive against the desires of the Spirit. And loved ones, your heart doesn’t have both. You see, that’s the mistake you make. You and I think, “Well, it’s just a matter of my heart edging over a little. I mean, instead of edging over this way it has to edge over that way. I mean my heart has good things in it, hasn’t it? It’s just that there are some bad things as well.” No. Face it. Your heart is dirty. Your heart is unclean all the way. The only reason that you have anything good in your life is because the Holy Spirit manages at times to get His life through to you. But your heart basically, if you just sat for 5 or 10 years, your heart is just filled with evil. It’s not filled with good. And loved ones, that’s part of Satan’s trick with you saying, “Now, look, it’s not as bad as he says. Your heart has some good things. Look at what you did yesterday.” Loved ones, the fact is that even that is tainted with evil and dirt and selfishness, if you see it as it really is. And of course, that’s the issue really, isn’t it? With a clean heart? And with a heart of any kind, you can actually go under the uncleaness of the heart and there’s a problem beyond the uncleanness of the heart. I will explain to you what I mean. You may say somebody has a generous heart. Somebody who maybe just seems to be generous with his possessions and giving them to other people. Now you know, if you talk to that guy or that girl and you say that, they’ll almost be unconscious of it. They’ll say, “No, I’m not.” And you’ll know why that is, you’ll know that their heart has an attitude of confidence about their security, either confidence in God or confidence in what they own themselves, but their heart will be filled with generosity because the heart’s attitude itself has a whole big attitude to life or to the world or to their security that is different from yours. That’s why they’re even unconscious of it. Or somebody has a magnanimous heart. If you find a woman who has magnanimity toward her critics and you say “How do you manage to keep away from spite or resentment?” and the person will say, “I never thought of it.” And you’ll know why that is. Because their heart no longer trusts in peer approval for its self worth and so she doesn’t have a dependence on people’s opinions and that’s why her heart can be so magnanimous. Now it’s the same with our unclean hearts. Our hearts are unclean because basically our heart has a wrong attitude to all of life. Our heart has a wrong attitude to life as a whole. It has a wrong attitude about what it depends on. It has a wrong attitude to what its resources in this world are. Jesus, you remember said, “Where your heart is, there will your treasure be also.” And that’s the problem with an unclean heart. Its treasure is in the wrong place. And in Jesus, on the cross, all of us were placed with our unclean hearts and the whole attitude of our heart which was wrong was changed and made right. In other words, our hearts, for years and years, have been trained to depend on the world and not on God. That’s actually the basic problem with the whole thing. Our heart is unclean because it actually depends on the world and not on God. Even though you’re born of the Spirit, even though you like God (Pastor said here: Even though you like God (change needed underlined)), even though you try to obey him, your own inner heart still depends on the world. It depends on the world of things for your food, for your clothing and for your shelter. It depends on the world of circumstances turning out right for your own happiness. It depends on the world of people for your self esteem and your self worth. Now in Jesus on the cross your heart was changed and you were crucified to the world. And Jesus on the cross turns His own heart away from the world of things and away from the world of people and away from the world of circumstances and turned your heart as well and changed it. And in that moment, you remember, when there was darkness upon the whole earth until the ninth hour, Jesus looked to God alone for all that He needed and your heart also was changed to look to God alone. That has happened loved ones. Your heart has been changed and it can be changed in you if you are willing to be baptized with the Holy Spirit because He alone can take that new clean heart that exists in Jesus and make it real in you. Baptism with the Holy Spirit means being immersed in the Holy Spirit, means being immersed utterly in Him, looking to Him alone for all that you need. Just as a fish is immersed in the ocean and looks even to the ocean for the oxygen that it needs, so in Jesus, you and I were immersed in the Holy Spirit and were separated from the world as the source of our resources. And we died to that world and we came alive to all the resources that God alone can give us. Now to enter into that, you enter into it by faith. Not by masochism, not by asceticism, not by trying to make it real in yourself, not by brainwashing, not by reading more books. That’s what the Bible says: “Your heart is cleansed by faith.” Faith is belief plus obedience. In the case of this full experience of the New Covenant, belief plus the obedience expresses itself in full consecration. Belief. Do you believe that that happened to your heart in Jesus on Calvary? Do you? Do you believe Romans 6:6 “our old self was crucified with Christ”? That’s the first part of faith. Do you believe that? Secondly, do you want that? Do you want a clean heart? That’s right. Do you want a clean heart? You know, not want in the sense of desire, emotional desire, but want in the sense of willing. Are you willing to have a clean heart? Are you willing to go before God and cry to Him, “Into Thy hands I commit my spirit along with my dear Savior. What You give me is all I want and what You do not give me I will not take. I depend on you utterly and I give myself to you only. And whatever You want me to have that I will receive, whatever You do not want me to have I gladly do without. I consecrate myself wholly into your hands.” That’s it, loved ones. Now the truth is that your heart is filled with resistances to God’s will that had been built up over the years through many unsurrendered attitudes and many disobedient acts. Now all those resistances are inside you, but as you open yourself to the Holy Spirit, He will reveal those to you. Then as He reveals them bow your head and your will to Him. And then the Holy Spirit will witness when you come to the place of full consecration where He knows there are no more of those down deep, that you cannot see that He wants you to see. He’ll witness that you are in a place of full consecration and then you’ll exercise faith that your heart has been cleansed by the Holy Spirit and your faith will rise up on wings of obedience. And God’s Spirit will come in and dwell in your heart permanently and take up His residence. And that’s it — God will do that with you. As I see, my brothers –I know life more from our angle because such am I, but as I see you sisters too — loved ones, stop living that hellish life where where you’re between stools! You’re neither a Jew nor are you a Christian. Stop that! Stop torturing yourselves and stop crucifying Jesus afresh. Will you not give to the Savior all that He died to bring you? Will you not? If I said to you, “This is fresh air. In here there’s fresh air — you can breathe it” and you wouldn’t believe me. Wouldn’t that be a disaster? Wouldn’t it? “No, I’m not going to breathe it! I’m not! I don’t believe you! I’m not going to breathe it! I’d rather die than breathe it!” Wouldn’t that be a disaster? Isn’t it a disaster to live with an unclean heart when all the time Jesus has a clean one that He can give you the moment you have faith? Now that can be this moment or it can be after some prayer when you go home today, or a prayer in the prayer room, if you want to pray there, or anywhere around this building. It’s all open, all this day. If you want to get down to business and get your heart cleansed by faith then you can take action, loved ones. Or we’ll sing a closing hymn, and if you want to come here, you can seek God here, but you can do it whatever way you want. Let us pray. Dear Father, we thank you for your dear Word that makes all things so clear and, Lord, we do not want to live under the Old Covenant, we want to live under the New Covenant. Father, what we have needed for years, has been a clean heart. Lord, we thank you that it can be received by faith. Father we thank you for showing us that faith is belief, that our old heart has been crucified with you and that a clean heart is ours and then being willing to have that clean heart, being willing to have no part of our lives that is outside your control. Lord we thank you, thank you that that can be ours this very day for your glory. Amen.

A Heart Cleansed By Faith Acts 15:9 Sermon Transcript by Rev. Ernest O’Neill Two of the most tragic words in many of the lives of those who are sitting beside you this morning and probably of your own life, two of the most tragic words are these, “I can’t. I can’t. I can’t stop being angry. I can’t stop taking tranquilizers. I can’t stop losing my temper. I can’t stop these lustful, unclean thoughts. I can’t stop being critical. I can’t, I want to but I can’t”, and then many of us who have been in that position begin to understand a little about God and what has been up to then just a personal problem of “I can’t do what I know I should do”, assumes utterly different proportions because we begin to realize that if you know what to do and you don’t do it, that’s sin. That’s what James 4:27 says, “Whosoever knows what is right to do and fails to do it, for him it is sin”, and then the Holy Spirit begins to bear in upon us and convict us and show us, “Look, this isn’t just a little personal difficulty you’re having, this is sin against your maker. This is rebellion against your God. This is the reason why you will spend eternity in lonely dark hell of selfishness.” And we begin to realize that the wages of sin is death and it’s then that we start to try other remedies and we start trying to go to church or we start reading our Bible or we start trying to be better people and we try to substitute all kinds of other cures besides the one that God said is the only cure, “The wages of sin is death”, and we try to substitute other wages. “No, we’ll do our best”, or, “We’ll try harder”, or, “We’ll try the power of positive thinking”, or, “We’ll try to be better people”, or, “We’ll attend church”, or, “We’ll give money to missions”, and somehow none of those cures take away the guilt that is lying on our hearts. And then God’s Spirit lights up different words of scripture to us and we see why we’re getting no relief. We see that, “By the works of the law shall no man be justified.” Doesn’t matter how hard you try, doesn’t matter how much you work at it, “By the works of the law shall no man be justified”, — or that verse you remember in the Old Testament, “All your righteousness,” all the things you think as so good about you, you try to tot up the good things and weigh them against the bad things, “all your righteousness is as filthy rags”, and its then that most of us sink into despair and helplessness and we see this thing is too big for me. There is no way in which I can make things right with God. There’s no way in which I can make Him accept me. He has every right to destroy me eternally. There is no way in which I can help myself. And it’s in that position of helpless despair that the Holy Spirit then brings home the truths of the Gospel to us. “God commended His love towards us in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us” and, “To Him that worketh not but believeth in Him that justifieth the ungodly, His faith is counted as righteousness”, and we sink in relaxation and peace at last into the arms of Jesus and we see that God has made it right, that Jesus has died for us, and that God accepts us as His own children and we sink in faith into Jesus. Most of us at that point in the evangelical atmosphere in which we now live, most of us at that point enter into the Gospel that was preached by a Jewish preacher called John the Baptist and you remember how it’s described. “John the Baptist came preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins” and that’s the Old Covenant. That’s before Jesus ever died. That’s the Old Covenant, but most of us in that situation and in this evangelical atmosphere enter into — believe it or not — the Old Covenant. That’s right love ones. You know that is true. You know that the primary truth that you grabbed hold of when you became a Christian was “repentance for the forgiveness of my sins” and that’s the Old Covenant. If you say to me, “Now Pastor, that’s what’s preached throughout the churches in America. Now that isn’t the Old Covenant. Why do you say it’s the Old Covenant”, I’ll tell you why, because you still, six months or two years after you’re born again, you still cry the original cry of frustration that was expressed not by a Christian but by a Jew trying to live under the law and up to the law, Paul himself. You still cry out his cry in Romans 7:15, “I don’t understand my own actions because I do not do what I want but I do the very thing I hate”, and for many of us who are born of God, that’s still the cry of frustration, the cry of frustration that every Jew cried under the Old Covenant. And maybe you say, “That’s insane”. It’s insane. That’s right what you say but it’s insane. That’s where I started. That’s where I started, that’s why I first felt guilt because I couldn’t do what I knew I should do. That’s when I first sought Jesus as my Savior because I was unable to deal with this power of evil within me. Do you mean I am back where I started?” Well, actually you know you’re not. You know you’re not back where you started. You know that you have experienced God’s gracious acceptance of you because of Jesus. You know that you have sensed a relief from guilt and you know that you’ve experienced forgiveness of sins. Moreover, even though you often resist God’s Spirit in your life yet you know too that at times you’re able to obey His Spirit and you know that there is at times within you a sense of Jesus’ Spirit urging you to obey God and to love Him and to want to serve Him. So you know you’re not in the position you used to be in. You know you’re aware of God in a way that you weren’t before you first gave your life to Jesus or received His Spirit and yet loved ones you know fine well that there is also coming up from deep deep down inside you, a fountain of filth and dirt and sarcasm and anger and bad temper that you are not able to control. It’s as if your spirit is alive to God and you’re regenerate and your spirit is born again. It’s as if even your conscience is alive to God and knows what it ought to do. It’s as if even your will wants to do it and your conscience tries to constrain your will to do what you know you should but there’s this stream of evil that comes up from deep deep down inside you, a stream that opposes both your conscience and your will and feeds your will such a powerful stream of filth that the will finds itself unable at times to hold it in and even when it does hold it in, it holds it in by dint of powerful repression and great strain in your own life but often it’s not able to hold it in and against your conscience, the will has to let that stream forth and you lose your temper or you’re sarcastic with somebody or you tell a lie to somebody or you’re absolutely dishonest to somebody or you give a wrong impression to somebody else or you get proud of something you’ve done and you know that there’s something inside you that is not Jesus. Loved ones the truth is that stuff comes from your heart and your heart is still as unclean as it was when you were first born of God, that’s what’s wrong. Your spirit is alive to God, even your mind and your will and your conscience, but your heart, the deepest part of you, the place where you really live, your own deepest self, is still as unclean as it was when you first heard of Jesus, and that’s the problem. The heart needs to be cleansed. Now how do you get your heart cleansed? Same way, you got your sins forgiven, same way. Same way, you got your sins forgiven, by faith. That’s it. And that’s the way it happened in the New Testament. Cornelius, you remember, asked one of the apostles to come and preach at his house. The people in that house had never heard the Gospel before and the apostle came and preached it and as they were listening, the Holy Spirit came upon them and the apostle, looking back to that day said, “God gave the Holy Spirit to them as He did to us and made no distinction between them and us but cleansed their hearts by faith”, that’s the way it happened in the New Testament. People would hear of Jesus and they would believe and they would give themselves all or nothing to Him and the Holy Spirit would cleanse their hearts by faith and they’d walk in an ever increasing victory in their own life until they met Jesus face-to-face. Now if you say, “Well, why did it not happen that way with me when I became a Christian? That didn’t happen with me. I am in a situation that you’re talking about. I do the very thing I hate and I can’t do the things that I want. I don’t understand my own actions anymore. Why did that not happen with me?” Well, first because on the whole, the Gospel that you and I listen to, here in our society, is an Old Testament Gospel. It’s not a New Testament Gospel. On the whole, that’s the situation loved ones. People preach at us the same things the Jews listened to, the forgiveness of sins and that’s on the whole, the Gospel that we hear so you can’t enter into anything more than you believe and so that’s one reason. We were told that Jesus died for us so that God could forgive us our sins and could take away our guilt but the power of sin we had to deal with ourselves by works of law. And that’s one reason why many of us are in the situation we’re in today. Another reason is that many of us do not see how exceedingly sinful and powerful sin is until the Spirit of Jesus begins to influence part of our lives, that’s true. Many of us don’t really see how absolutely intractable the power of sin is until we can set it against something pure and beautiful like the Spirit of Jesus. But the third reason is the most important, the reason you did not enter into a clean heart by faith and the reason you haven’t entered into a clean heart by faith since, is because you don’t want a clean heart, that’s right. I mean you may say, “Don’t want a clean heart? That’s what I want! That’s what I want! I want to be rid of this stream of filth that comes from inside me. I want to be able to look a friend in the eyes and think all the way through loving thoughts about them, not have those kind of critical thoughts inside me that I don’t let them see. I want to be able to look my wife or my husband or my children in the eyes and them to see outwardly all that is inside me. I want to be real. I want to be rid of this. I want to be rid of this unclean heart, all this sarcasm that spews up from inside me, this envy and jealousy that makes me feel a creep, I want to be rid of it. I want the stream of Jesus’ pure and gentle sentiments coming up from inside my heart. That’s what I want more than anything in the world.” Well loved ones, you want it, that’s true. You want it in the sense that you desire it. For all kinds of motives you desire it but you’re not willing to face the consequences and implications of having a clean heart, that’s it. That’s true. That’s what it was with me and that’s what it is with all of us who haven’t a clean heart. God gives us readily, is more anxious to give it to us than we are to receive it, but we cannot receive it because we’re not willing to face the implications and consequences of having a clean heart like Jesus. Look at it like this: you remember last Sunday, I said to you, we at times notice somebody of whom we say, “He has a very generous heart”, you remember that and if you ever say to that person, he has a very generous heart, you know you see that he hasn’t the attitude of possessiveness that you have about your possessions and your property. He just seems to be free and gives it away whenever anybody needs it and you see he is different and you maybe say to him sometime, “Boy, you have a generous heart”, and you know that the person will look and say, “No, no I haven’t”, and you know why he says that. He is virtually unconscious of his generosity and he is unconscious of it because he either has an endless supply of possessions and property and so he doesn’t miss what he gives away or he has an absolute confidence that he’ll always have what he needs. In other words, his heart has a different attitude to his resources for life than your heart has. Your heart kind of gets them and feels that it has to hold on to them to ensure that you have them tomorrow or the next year. He has just a different attitude to the resources for his life than you have. That’s why your heart is unclean. It has a different attitude about the resources for life that you need. You still look to money and to a good house and to nice clothes for feeling safe and secure. Your heart really looks to those things. Your heart still looks to people’s opinions of you for your sense of self-worth or your sense of self-esteem or value. You still look to favorable circumstances, nice looking friends, fast boats, fast cars for happiness. Now Jesus’ heart doesn’t look to any of those things, He looks to God. That’s why your heart’s unclean. That’s why you’re kind of only half converted. You want to obey God but you want to depend on the world and not on God. You want to depend on the world of people and things and circumstances for all that you need, not God — and so your heart sends up pride when somebody cuts you down, you see it. Somebody cuts you down in front of other people, your heart sense up pride. Why? Because your heart looks to those people’s opinions for your self-image. That’s why your heart sense up anxiety and worry when you lose your job because your heart, your own inner being, your own inner self, the real you doesn’t look to God for its security, it actually looks to its job and to the company and to the economy of the nation. So you’re kind of half converted. Your nature is still that of a child of Satan actually, because your heart looks to those things and those things draw your whole being out so your mind is running that way. I mean you hit the checkbook, the bank balance is wrong, the mind connects right up with a heart that depends utterly on the bankbook and depends utterly on your ability to have money and sends up anxiety. So your heart now has rearranged your whole nature, really not rearranged it, it always had control of it and your nature, your mind and emotions in the way they work in your body and your will, it still the nature of a child of wrath. It’s still actually an unchanged nature, that’s the incredible thing, part of why God says He does not deal with us according to our sins or reward us according to our iniquities because if He did, none of us would ever find Him. You may sit there and say, “Oh brother look, that isn’t true. I mean I do have the nature of Christ don’t I?” Stop that silliness loved ones. You can’t have two natures. Nature is the deepest part of what you are, it’s what you really are, that’s what we mean by your nature. It’s what you really are. You can’t really be deep down two things. You can really only be one thing and at times another and the truth is, you’re basically a child of wrath that depends on the world of people and things and circumstances and from time to time, because of the gracious influence of Jesus’ Spirit upon you, you want what He wants. You’re really like the disciples. You remember Jesus said to them, “The Holy Spirit is with you”, that’s the situation with us. The Holy Spirit is with you and then Jesus said you remember, “He will be in you”, and we’re not at that place. We’re not at the place where the Holy Spirit is a permanent, abiding residence within us. He is just a visitor. He is the one who said, “Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If any man hear my voice and open the door, I will come in to Him”, and we’ve reached that stage. He has come in. He is our guest. We sit Him down. We say, “Oh, we’ll obey You now. Now we don’t obey You. Now leave the room please. We want to do this. Oh come in again now, we want to obey You. Oh no, leave the room. I want to do this.” He is our guest but we haven’t reached the second stage. “I will sup with Him and He with me.” I will become the host and He will sup with me. The Holy Spirit is not the host. The abiding ruler and master of our hearts and lives, He is a guest. Now if you say, “How do I change? How do I get changed? What do I do?” Enter into the New Covenant. Enter fully into the New Covenant, that’s it. What’s the New Covenant? Well, you remember, John the Baptist pointed that out, he said, “I am preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of your sins but the one who comes after me will baptize you with the Holy Spirit”, that’s it. That’s the New Covenant. The New Covenant is not the forgiveness of sins. The New Covenant is the baptism with the Holy Spirit that changes your nature, that does what the law was not able to do for the Jews over thousands of years. The Holy Spirit changes your nature. If you say to me, “Oh, what do you mean baptized in the Holy Spirit?” The Greek word has the meaning of ‘immersed’ in it and don’t sit you know, and say, “Oh well, you mean water immersion”, it doesn’t matter about water immersion or not but it’s immersion. It means being immersed in the Holy Spirit, being washed inside and outside by the Holy Spirit. Being saturated by the Holy Spirit, being permanently surrounded by the Holy Spirit and supported by the Holy Spirit like water as if you were swimming in the Holy Spirit, utterly dependent on the Holy Spirit, that’s what it means to be baptized with the Holy Spirit. Looking to Him alone for all your real needs. Your heart, utterly dependent on Him and you know in your heart it’s dependent on Him, that’s what entering into the New Covenant is about. If you say, “Well, what is it? How do you get baptized with the Holy Spirit?” Well, Paul explained it to those who would come for baptism at the side of the river in the first century. He would gather them around and he would say, “Now, do you not know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into His death? We were buried therefore with Him by baptism into death so that as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life”. In other words, being baptized into Jesus is seeing that what happened to Jesus on Calvary, happened to us. That Jesus did not die just for the forgiveness of our sins, He did not just died to bear the punishment for our sins. In fact, you have all died with Christ and our old self was crucified with Christ and you all died to the elemental spirits of the universe that have enslaved you for so long, those chains and fetters of greed and anger and desire for position and desire for approval, those all were broken and shattered on Calvary in your life in Jesus because you were in Christ when He died. Your nature was changed in Jesus on Calvary, that’s what the Gospel is. It’s in that sense that Jesus died for us — not that God took it out on His Son like some madman who couldn’t discern who was the real evil person, not that God took it out on His Son — but He put us in His Son and His Son bore the pain that would otherwise have destroyed us utterly and yet at the same time God with His wrath burned out that old nature of yours and when He raised Jesus from the dead, He raised you up a new creation. Now how do you enter into that? Believe it, believe it! That’s it. Believe that, believe that; reckon yourself to be dead indeed unto sin — that is to getting anything from the world of people and things and circumstances, to getting anything good or bad from them. Die to that, reckon yourself dead indeed unto sin, that’s what sin is. It’s not just crime, it’s not just immorality, it’s the whole power of life that operates independent of God. It’s the world of things and people and events, die to that, reject that and look to God as you did when you were in Jesus and say “into thy hands I commit my spirit. I receive what You wish to give me in this life and what You don’t wish to give me, I don’t want. I depend on You utterly, Father, and now I turn away from this world of people and things and circumstances for anything that I need and I look to You.” Then loved ones, God will fill you with His Holy Spirit and cleanse your heart by faith and you simply put off the old nature because it has already been crucified. So you’re actually doing something that has already been done in the spiritual realm, you simply stop doing and stop thinking and stop feeling the things that have burdened you for years. If you say to me, “Brother, if I have difficulty putting off the old nature what do I do?” Loved ones, the problem is always impartial or a partial surrender, a controlled surrender, an incomplete consecration, an incomplete commitment –that’s always the problem. Just go to the Holy Spirit and ask Him to reveal to you what you’re still depending on the world of people and things and circumstances for instead of God, He will show you that. Yours may be the situation like the dear souls in Los Angeles 50 years ago. You may have to seek God in this prayer room, you may have to seek Him for hours, you may have to weep before Him — but the Holy Spirit will show you because that’s the only reason He’s here on earth, to reveal to you the things that you have in Jesus and the most precious thing that you have in Jesus is a clean heart that the Holy Spirit is able to give you. And so when you come to the very bottom of your heart at last, there’ll be a witness of the Holy Spirit that you’re looking only to Him for all that you need and you’ll have that witness in yourself and your faith will rise up and your heart will be cleansed by faith and you’ll be a different person inside, out as well, but inside — and so that you understand fully, there will no longer be evil rising up from inside, that’s right. This may seem miraculous to you and it is, it may seem incredible to you but loved ones, there will be no evil rising up from inside. You remember I said once before that’s why I say, after you’ve got a clean heart, it’s just your own fault if you sin. It means you’re choosing to; you’re not sinning because you have to, you’re just choosing to. The clean heart produces the very sentiments of Jesus, the very fragrance of His own heart within you and it’s easy to be a Christian because you are one inside and you feel like one. I would say to you that you should get down to dealing with God and I would do it whatever way you think it is best for you. The prayer room is open right through the week, during the business hours, there are always some of us here. As revival comes, I believe that it will be open all the time, night and day, but it is open through the business hours, Monday thru Friday and it’s open all day today, then loved ones, this building, you can take yourself anywhere in any of the rooms and just get alone with God and get down to business with Him and find out why He is not able to baptize you with the Holy Spirit this very minute and He will deal with you and He will show you. Now take time, take time to be holy, you know it takes time because you have been listening to everybody else for years and so it takes a while to get on to the same wavelength as God’s Spirit. But if I were you I’d do that. Or go home and do it, but sooner or later, loved ones, sooner or later you’ll have to settle this. Sooner or later you have to settle it. I mean there’ll never be a convenient time. There’ll never be a time that’s better than now, there won’t often be time that it’s as clearly presented to you as now. So you’ll have to do it sooner or later or live a life of constant defeat that can easily end up, if you get tired of the confessing and repenting over the years, can easily end up in hell despite what God has already done in your life. So loved ones, it’ll never be easy, you know. It’ll never be easy to take time from going out this afternoon or going out tomorrow. It’ll never be easy. It’ll take you to give yourself to God and to at least give Him time. Yes, there will be a day you know, very real, there will be a day when each one of us will have to face it. We’ll have to face the unclean heart but on that day, the judgment day, everybody in the world will see it and we will see that then we cannot change it. So I would encourage you and encourage your dear hearts to get down to business with God, loved ones, and to come through to the New Covenant and into real Christianity you know, and let’s leave this Jewish Covenant, this Old Covenant behind and let’s go on to what God has given us in Jesus.

We Need A Clean Heart Romans 6:6 Sermon Transcript by Rev. Ernest O’Neill Last time I tried to share a little of my own life story with you. You remember the change that took place in my life when God began to deal with the inward problem that I had. And I thought it would just be good maybe to spend one more Sunday, giving you a chance to decide about yourself. Now, I would tell you plainly what I think I was. There is a line in Gilbert and Sullivan; “he’s the very, very model of a model major general” – well I think I was the very, very model of a model Methodist minister. I think outwardly, you know, I looked pretty good. And I think even in my own eyes I thought I was pretty good because I had learned what outward expressions verbally and what outward actions I should avoid in order to keep up the appearance of being a Christian. I think you do learn to control, don’t you? Even in our society, where they say let it all hang out, yet as you grow older you learn to control your feelings and your thoughts and to keep them down — and that’s what I did. That’s the kind of life I lived until I was 30. And I’ll tell you it was just torture; it really was. I took it for granted that that was the way everybody lived. I just accepted that’s the way you live. Outwardly you’re nice, you’re kind, you’re smiling, you’re friendly — and inwardly you keep down all the resentment and all the jealousy that you feel for these people who are your friends, so you just hold it all in. And you’re kind of encouraged to do that, aren’t you? Even the books that come out nowadays, on the renewal of the mind or the control of the feelings — they all kind of encourage you to feel that’s what all of us are doing. All of us are on the outside very civilized people, very nice people but inside we’re monsters. And what you ought to do with that monstrosity within you is to work on it, just keep working on it, keep working on it. Read a book on how to renew the mind. Keep trying to think better thoughts. Read a book on how to control your feelings. Read all the endless articles in Reader’s Digest on how to get yourself to love people. “Well, don’t think of their bad points, think of the good things. Always think of the good things.” So you always think of the good things and you keep wondering what do I do about all the bad things I’m thinking of as well? So, you turn yourself into all kinds of contortions, don’t you, to try to clean up the inside. I don’t know, loved ones, if you’re like me, 10 to 15 years after I set out on that job, I seemed to be worse than when I started. It seemed I could not get hold of these feelings inside me. I thought I would get hold of the jealousy and I would get it under control and then I would find the pride springing up. Then I’d concentrate on the pride and I’d read books on pride and books on how to do it yourself and I’d get control of the pride and then the bad temper would spring up. Then I’d concentrate on the bad temper, and I’d go through all those recommendations they give you, how to control yourself, don’t think of what is annoying you, don’t think about it — think of what is bright and happy and what’s good. I’d go through all that business and I’d get the temper organized and here the old jealousy was up again. I’d just kept going around with hands, hands, hands, trying to keep the lids on the barrel. That’s really what it was like, you know, it really was. It was as if the minister was coming in to visit me and I thought boy, I’d better have everything organized, but I have this massive German shepherd dog that just bounded round everywhere. I mean, I knew he’d be up licking the minister’s face. So I put him in this big chest and put the lid down on him and I would bring the minister in and I would sit on the chest, you know, and pretend everything is okay, except that old dog is popping up from time to time and I’m going up and down and saying, oh! — And that’s what it was like; that’s what it was like in my life. So you could talk about the subconscious and the unconscious and you could tell me to try harder, but from time to time, that was the tragedy — from time to time those feelings would come out. I don’t know, you guys, I mean, you have to be the same as I was. You have to be the same. Sure you didn’t read the magazines, you didn’t go to the ‘X’ movies, but it was in your heart all the time. It was down there and every time you saw somebody beautiful, when you should be thanking God for something beautiful that he had made, this old lust was again knocking up against the lid of the chest and trying to get through. I don’t know about you, but I think with many of us, it’s just lack of opportunity, isn’t it? It’s just lack of opportunity, or we’re just afraid or we’re scared, that’s what holds us back. I mean, ladies, I’m sure you have the same difficulty, but I know how often the old criticism thing got hold of me. I felt deep down that I did really know what was right and what was wrong. And I knew that I wasn’t altogether right in God. So I felt the only way to prove myself better than everybody else is to prove that I can see what’s wrong with them and so while that criticism riles inside you, it’s ready to spark out at any moment. With me, it would just spark out, you just make that caustic comment that would in your opinion put that person right in his place, but of course, just destroyed the whole conversation. It was just so filled with irritability and anger and resentment, the comment, that you thought to yourself, everybody must see it. They all must see it. You were kind of relieved that they didn’t appear to notice how sharp your comment was, but you knew what it spoke. It spoke of a massive attitude of criticism inside you towards that person. And so you would try to love people and you tried to be everybody’s friend. You tried to be a faithful husband and a faithful wife, but really, there was this mess of stuff inside you that had never been dealt with. Loved ones that was my experience. And I would dare to say that there are others in this room this morning who have the same experience. There’s no question in your mind that you believe in God. There’s no question in your mind that you believe that Jesus is the Savior of the world. There’s maybe even no question in your mind that you believe that He’s your Savior. Because obviously, those people did who were converted by Philip. Even Simon, the guy who was a magician, he even believed that Jesus was God’s Son and they were baptized in Jesus’ name. I dare say that many of us here have either been baptized as infants in the Lutheran Church or baptized as adults in Baptist Church and we know that God is our Father and we know that our sins are forgiven. We even believe we’re going to heaven, but our lives, inside in our secret hearts, are a continual offense to God and are a continual worry to ourselves. I’ll tell you how I did it. I don’t know how you’re doing it. I rationalized. I began to rationalize. I was in disorder in my personal life. I argued, ” well, you can’t be kind of a poetic, intuitional, inspirational type you know, and be absolutely in order in your own life.” So I argued that’s just my personality. After all the great artists get irritable from time to time. They’re so demanding, you know. They have such a sense of perfection that they can’t avoid it. It just shows you how great they are. So, I rationalized my sin, because that’s what it was. All right, I wasn’t drinking myself to death every night. I wasn’t committing adultery with somebody else every night. I wasn’t doing those things, but inwardly, I had those feelings and attitudes which are called in the New Testament, “the marks” or “the works” of the flesh. Envy, jealousy, strife, selfishness, resentment, those things. I had those inside. Those I knew were sin as really as Sirhan Sirhan’s action was a sin; as really as Oswald’s action was a sin, those were sin. It was just nobody else saw them except the only person that mattered, He saw them and He saw them night and day because they were there continually in me. And I rationalized them. I said, “well irritability, it’s the kind of thing a fellow like me can’t avoid. In this society, who can be absolutely clean in their thinking? If you’re red blooded at all, you’re bound to have a few stray thoughts here and there. You can’t avoid it.” That’s what I did. I rationalized as much of the sin within as I possibly could. I rationalized it and called it “infirmities” or “little personality traits” or “little inexpediencies”. Now it always gave me problems because — well I’ll show you, if you’d look at that Galatians chapter — that was one of the ones that drove me crazy. It would have been all right if God had stuck with those outward, those big sins. You know, anybody can see a murder as a sin, especially when you’re free from it, you’re okay. But this Galatians 5 was miserable. Verse 19 is really the place to begin. “Now the works of the flesh are plain. Fornication.” Well I felt, you know, that’s outward promiscuity, so I wasn’t guilty of that. “Impurity.” Well, yes, but maybe that was just a personality trait. “Licentiousness.” Well I didn’t think I was very licentious. “Idolatry,” no. I mean I never saw the devotion to the car or the motorbike as idolatry. “Sorcery”, good I’m clear of that. “Enmity.” I mean, you could work yourself up to hostility for people. I don’t know about you, if you’ve ever had a carnal fit. Have you ever had a carnal fit? Really, where you just sit at home and you boil and seethe against that boss who did that thing to you or that guy who did that thing or that wife or that child and you just boil inside and seethe. You know, it’s as if you’re right there and you go through the whole argument with them, as if they’re present. That kind of thing; enmity I knew. Strife, I knew. Jealousy, I certainly knew. Whenever you saw somebody who was really better than you, but you were convinced of course or you couldn’t admit that they were better than you, so you were jealous and you convinced yourself that “yeah, yeah, they may be able to sing, but look at the way they dress!” So jealousy was just a continual kind of self-defense thing. Anger, Yes that was there all the time. “Anger, selfishness, dissention, party spirit, envy, drunkenness, carousing and the like.” And of course the next sentence was doom to me. “I warn you as I warned you before that those who do such things shall not inherit the Kingdom of God.” Well, I just ignored that bit, I just ignored that. I said that Jesus covered that, I just said Jesus’ blood covers that and therefore that doesn’t apply to me. I was continually concerned because Paul had written that to a church at Galatia but loved ones, that’s the way I lived my life. I don’t know what you do with the things you do think are sins. I’ll tell you what I did! I kept confessing and kept confessing. I confessed and confessed and confessed and confessed, but you know what you do when you do that. You know what happens. Eventually it becomes a game. You confess it, but it’s purely a verbal exercise, you’re no longer thinking it important to confess that. I began to see that, that if every time I’m angry, I’m putting a sword into the side of my Savior Jesus, then what I’m doing is getting used to doing that and like a surgeon who cuts people’s bodies, but does not feel the pain himself, I’m getting to the dangerous point where I’m crucifying my Savior anew day after day, confessing it, but not feeling any remorse for it or any repentance. So, loved ones that was my life. I rationalized away the sin that I could, calling it personality traits and inexpediencies and justifying it even though I saw that in the Bible it wasn’t regarded as anything but sin. The things I did really regard as sins I just kept confessing. Though the confessing was becoming more and more meaningless to me. Loved ones, I think that there are many of you here this morning who are probably living like that. And I think many of you have got to the point where you’ve said, “well, that’s the life, that’s the Christian life.” Of course when you say that, you’re contradicting this whole Book, which from beginning to end talks about having a clean heart and loving God with all your heart and soul and strength and mind and having your life filled with love, joy, peace, long suffering, gentleness and goodness, and Jesus saying “if you’re angry with your brother, you’re guilty of the judgement. If you look on a woman with lust your eyes, you’ve committed adultery with her in your heart” and the Bible is full of those things! Now, if you’re doing that, you’re having the same experiences I had. I begun to doubt more and more that God really existed — because I was repeatedly contradicting the things that He had said were true. And so it was beginning to affect my own intellectual awareness of God. I did what I’m sure you’ve done, I read the books, I read the books incessantly. It’s just that there are more of them now, do you realize that? There are more people trying to get us to be what God wants us to be without Jesus. There are! There are more books than ever on how to control your temper, how to influence your temperament, how to renew your mind, all kinds of gimmicky little extensions of Dale Carnegie’s, “How to Stop Worrying and Start Living”. The tragedy is many of them do kind of ameliorate the situation, that’s right. They kind of ameliorate it, so that you don’t have a group of Christians now who have outwardly stainless lives and inwardly have temperaments that are boiling and seething, no! You have many, many Christians now that have outward lives that are pretty reasonable and look pretty good and inside their temperament, there’s a kind of lid on it. It’s a lid! It’s really repression and suppression. Repression is an unconscious suppression. A repression and a suppression and a kind of disciplining of themselves, but they have to keep on reading the books, they have to keep on having plenty of fellowship, they have to keep on doing things that make them feel good inside. And so they have an appearance of victory within, except that you’ll notice they always rebel against any implication that we should be perfect even as our Heavenly Father is perfect. That’s right. They’ll always do that. They’ll go with you up to a point on this business of “yeah, we should have victory over anger and jealousy” until they come to the point where you quote Jesus’ words “be perfect, even as your Father in Heaven is perfect”, which is perfect in love of course, as Jesus elaborates. They don’t like that, because that means that you should always want the best for other people — doesn’t matter who they are. It doesn’t matter if it’s the boss that’s just fired you. It doesn’t matter if it’s your friend who has just criticized you behind your back. It doesn’t matter if it’s somebody else who has been unfaithful to you. You should always think the best of them and want the best. From where? “Love the Lord, your God, with all your heart,” — from the bottom of your heart ! From the bottom of your heart! And many, loved ones, who are Christians today know that they don’t do that. They know that the only way they can live in victory is: the jealousy springs up and there they go into the old sparring match with jealousy. They get out the right book and they read “now, think, you’re just an ordinary person, you’re the same as everybody else, you’re no better than anybody else, there’s no reason for you to be jealous, now renew your feelings of jealousy, change them, replace them with good feedings.” They go through all those exercises and they know that they haven’t real victory, they haven’t really a clean heart. They have a heart that’s kind of dirty! But each time “the dirt comes up”, they slam it down and they fight it. Loved ones, that’s not God’s victory! That isn’t God’s victory! I know some of you when you hear me saying this, say “oh, don’t lay that on me, I’m coming under conviction, don’t, don’t, don’t make me sad!” I’m making you sad, so that you’ll get glad and hoping that you won’t get mad in between! Loved ones, I’m telling you straight, that’s a counterfeit! That’s it! Now, don’t sit there and say, “oh, I’m doing my best, I’m doing my best and you’re beating me down and I’m still doing my best.” Loved ones, I’m telling you you’re doing your best with human efforts. You are receiving forgiveness of sins by faith, but you’re not receiving a cleansed heart by faith. That’s it, that’s what I’m telling you. I’m not laying more on you, I’m saying to you that when Jesus died on Calvary He took your heart with Him, and He destroyed it! That’s it! And that is to be received by faith into your life, just the same way as you received forgiveness of sins. But you keep hearing me saying that and say, “yeah, yeah, well, it’s a nice metaphorical statement that my old self was crucified with Christ, yeah, I see how my heart was kind of crucified with Jesus and destroyed, now I have to make that real in my life.” No, you haven’t, you haven’t. That is a miracle that is worked by the Holy Spirit in you, in a mighty work of grace. That’s it! You don’t read books to get control of the jealousy, you don’t read books to clean up your mind. You go to the Holy Spirit who is inside you, who has enabled you to be born of God and you say “Holy Spirit, You said You’d lead me into all truth, that’s what Jesus said about You, now will You go through the depths of my heart, that heart of darkness, and will You show me what I appear in God’s eyes? And will You take me down underneath the subconscious into my mode of life and the place where my reactions and my responses dwell, the place where I have not surrendered to God and will You expose that to me until I am so sick of it that I am willing to accept the only remedy that ever solves the problem?” That’s it, loved ones! And you have to want to, I agree. You have to want to. The Holy Spirit will not do what you don’t want him to do. So you have to want to. So you have to see first of all that you are a dirty sinner and rebel against God in your heart. And you have to stop rationalizing the old sins and pretending that those things are not sin, you have to want to be clean. That’s why God’s word said “if you seek me with all your heart, you’ll surely find me.” Loved ones, our Father is not hiding from us. He’s looking for you harder than you are looking for Him. You just have to want to be clean with all your heart. Start with the Holy Spirit. Start asking Him that. Secondly, see what God says about that self of yours. Romans 8:7 says “the mind of the flesh is enmity against God; it is not subject to God’s Law, neither indeed can it be.” Just see that. Stop that playacting “oh, yeah, I have a wee bit of trouble with sex, have a wee bit of trouble with anger, a wee bit of trouble with jealousy.” Stop that silliness! God’s word is plain, the only reason there’s sin inside any one of us is because our heart is rebellious against God, it is not subject to God’s Law, indeed it cannot be, and see that it cannot be. See that your heart that you have developed over the years of your life cannot be subject to God. That’s why you have such problems. That’s why you think you have it fixed and then it bounces up again. It cannot be! All you’re doing is ameliorating the situation, you’re not curing it, you’re not cleansing it. You’re not shooting the massive German shepherd dog, you’re just holding a lid on top of him and sitting on the lid hoping to hold him down. Your heart, your selfish heart wants only one thing: you! That’s right! That’s why we’re in such trouble. We say all these wonderful things you know “oh, I want to serve the Lord! Oh, I love the Lord with all my heart! Oh, Hallelujah!” Inside there’s a whole level of life that says “I love me with all my heart! I want me exalted! Hallelujah for me! I praise me!” That’s it, that’s it! And you see, while you are pretending that that doesn’t exist and that these sins are just things that you have to work through, you’re on Satan’s side. You’re protecting that thing. You alone can protect it. You alone can hand that heart over to Jesus. Only you, nobody else can. He won’t take it from you. See that mind of the flesh is enmity against God and then you’ll remember the thing that brought me such hope when I read it in Romans 6:6: “Our old self was crucified with Christ” — it was like water to a thirsty soul in the desert. I suddenly realized, in some cosmic miracle, God was able to foresee the kind of heart I would develop inside and He actually put that into His Son and destroyed it in Jesus. Suddenly I saw, you mean that this can come in a moment to me? This can come in a moment, if it’s been done in Jesus, I can receive it by faith in a moment? You mean I don’t have to go through years and years of struggling and fighting and defeat? And suddenly I realized: yeah, that’s right. That Jesus bore our sins, but He bore our old self. Loved ones, you have no idea how clean you can be. That’s right. You have no idea how clean you can be! You don’t, you don’t! You keep on thinking: “well, if I clean myself up, I could be quite clean.” But you have no idea how clean you could be and you have no idea what it is to be clean, to smell clean. You have no idea how good it is to be clean, clean, clean with God’s cleanness. And that’s what Calvary talks about — that dear old heart of yours, that keeps sniping at your friends and that gives you such trouble with unclean thoughts and with anger and pride and jealousy and with resentment, that heart was put into Jesus and was destroyed. And as he rose from the dead, you rose with Him and there’s a clean heart that Jesus can impart to you through the fullness of the Holy Spirit. And that’s the step that I saw, if that happened on Calvary, was I willing to reckon myself dead indeed unto sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus, and that’s the heart of it. Why you and I have trouble with sin is because we really don’t love God and because we really don’t want to live for Him, that’s it. I remember back there in Belfast, I remember shortly after I gave my life to Jesus, I remembered it occurring to me “what would it be like to live your whole life only for Jesus? Thinking only of him, determined only to please Him?” And I remember, I then thought — I almost remember the night I thought it — I thought, “but what about the other guys, we’re all heading for University and we’re heading for our careers and nobody else who’s given their life to Jesus, has done that. They’re all getting on with their own lives, they’re taking care of their own plans for their careers and they’re doing a bit of work for God on the side.” And I remember determining that’s what I would do, too. Loved ones, that’s why! That’s why we have trouble with sin because although we give something to God, we give most to ourselves and we’re really living for ourselves and not for God alone. That’s the heart of it. To have your heart cleansed by faith, to have the old self inside you finally resurrected in Jesus, clean and new, to be baptized with the Holy Spirit, you have to be willing to live your life for the purpose for which it was created for your God, for your Creator, for His pleasure, not for your own. That’s it. When we sin, we sin just because we care for our own pleasure more than we care for God’s. So I put it to you. Would you stop first of all defending yourselves? Would you stop defending the defeated Christian life? Because it’s a blasphemy! It’s nothing to do with Christianity, it’s a counterfeit! And then would you decide in your own heart, do you really want to live a clean life? Do you really want to be clean inside? Whether anybody sees inside or not, do you really want to be clean inside so that you feel clean and you love people because you feel love? Do you want to live that life where there are no shades of grey, where you’re not constantly justifying yourself in feeling a little tinge of resentment or anger? Would you like to live in the light? Oh, loved ones, you’ll live longer for one thing. Less strain, less worry, less anxiety, you’ll live longer, but you’ll live a fuller life. You’ll be free to be what you are and not have to keep watching for yourself. Do you want that? Well, loved ones, to be baptized with the Holy Spirit as those dear people were under Peter and John, you have to decide: are you willing to live for Jesus only? For Him alone? Are you willing to live your life for God and for Him only? Are you? If you are He’ll fill you with the Holy Spirit and He’ll cleanse your heart by faith. And He will do a job that no other book writer or preacher, no other psychologist or counselor can come anywhere near doing. Loved ones, it is for you, it is. Loved ones, will you be real? Be real! Anything else isn’t worth the name of Christianity, it isn’t! I’ll go on saying that even as I go down, honestly. It isn’t, it isn’t! Only real Christianity is worth going for and you remember what I think it was Chambers who said: “if this is all there is to Christianity, then I don’t want it.” And oh, that’s the way I felt before Jesus dealt with me in the Holy Spirit. If this is all there is, this struggling against these feelings inside, then it’s not worth it. Loved ones, it isn’t, because that isn’t Christianity. Christianity is not only receiving the forgiveness of sins by faith, but receiving a clean heart by faith and the same conditions are fulfilled. Confess what your need is, turn honestly from self and give yourself wholly to God and He will cleanse your heart. Let us pray. Dear Father, you alone can do this in each one of our lives and you are dependant upon our hunger and our willingness, but Lord I would pray that You would convince us all this morning, through the plain words of Scripture, that sin is rebellion against You and in any form it is wrong and can never be defended. Lord that, for us, it is either Hell or Heaven, it is either sin or obedience, it is either dependence on the world or dependence on God. And Father I pray that You will keep after each one of us because You love us so much until we are ready to see that the only way to victory is through the Cross and through the mighty miracle, which you did in Jesus. Lord we pray this for each one of us this day, that each one of us will deal with you this day on these issues of a clean heart. Now the Grace of our Lord Jesus and the Love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with each one of us, now and evermore. Amen.

TEMPTATION VS SIN Transcript of a clip from the talk A CLEAN HEART by Rev. Ernest O’Neill I’m going to swear so get ready, ok? It’s just a mild swear because I wasn’t good at swearing at all. Ok, are you ready? Damn! All right? Now, that wasn’t hard, was it? It wasn’t hard for you, but still, apart from an illustration, it’s still wrong. Doesn’t matter whether it was hard or not, it’s just as wrong as committing adultery, because Jesus said you shouldn’t swear by anything in heaven or anything on earth — and you shouldn’t commit adultery — so it’s still wrong, apart from using it as an illustration. But still why, even apart from that, did you feel “yeah, it wasn’t too bad!”? I mean why did all of us feel “well, yes, it’s kind of a surprise for you to say ‘damn’, but it didn’t seem too evil, really!” Now, why did it not seem too evil? Why? Why did it not, especially to you who didn’t even say it, why did it not seem too evil? And would you not say, “well, I mean, your heart wasn’t in it, your heart wasn’t in it! You were just saying it because you wanted to illustrate something to us, and your heart really wasn’t in it!” And that is right, isn’t it? My heart wasn’t in it and your heart wasn’t in it. Now that still doesn’t make it right, it’s still wrong, even if your heart isn’t in it, apart from using it, as we did, as an illustration, it’s still wrong! It’s still something that God has commanded us not to do! Still, it is helpful to make a distinction between temptation and sin. Because that is part of the distinction between temptation and sin. You see, just the way that word that I spoke came to you and you weren’t worked up about it at all, it just came to you — it didn’t find any response in your heart, you just heard it and you said “oh, that’s interesting! Surprising, but interesting!” –but it just came to you — so all through the day you are in situations where thoughts from the mental atmosphere around you insert themselves into your head. Where emotions, from the emotional atmosphere around you, inject themselves at times into your feelings. And as long as your response to them is as detached as your response to my ‘damn’ was, then there is no sin. You see that? As long as those thoughts can come in, or those feelings come in from outside and you are as utterly detached from them as you were to my swear this morning, then there is no sin. As long as you can say “well, that’s interesting, I’ve no interest in it but yeah, well there it is. Well, that’s a thought I know where it’s come from, but I don’t want to think it myself, I don’t want to dwell on it another second; well that’s an interesting feeling that’s passing through our office. I’m observing it academically, it has no answer in my own heart, no responsive chord in my own heart, but that’s a feeling that obviously is present in our office or in our family.” Then as long as that’s the attitude, you’re dealing with temptation and not with sin. But if I tell you, “you know the vacation you are arranging? Well, your travel agent made the reservation on the wrong date, so you can’t go on vacation”, or if I say to you, “You know your car? Well, there’s a drunk driver just totaled it a moment ago.” Or if I say to you, “You’re fired! The company is closing down” and then there’s a “damn!” rising out of your heart, then that’s sin! So, do you see, there is a distinction in the two things? A sin is what comes from the heart of a person, what comes from the very innermost being of a person, that’s what sin is.

PARTLY CLEAN HEART Transcript of a clip from the talk A CLEAN HEART by Rev. Ernest O’Neill [Illustration: Holding up a bottle of sour milk and smelling it:] It’s – ugh! Sour! Sour milk! And the whole life is filled with it, just filled with it. And you meet Jesus and you know that it’s wrong and you repent and you pour it out in repentance and He puts fresh milk in. Except that before he put the fresh milk in, after you’d poured it out, your heart was like that (sour) – in other words you know what was still coating it: still some of that sour milk. Still some of the old spoiled rotten stuff was still in your heart, so He came in and He poured his Spirit in, in on top of that. But because that old sour milk was still there, of course it isn’t long before the new fresh Spirit of Jesus is contaminated and your life is as full of sin as it was before. That’s the situation with so many of us. We’ve received the Spirit of Jesus. In a sense, He has made us alive. He has made us aware of God. We actually even have great respect for Jesus and some acquaintance with Him. But our heart was never cleared of the sour stuff that was still at the bottom. And actually you know fine well there’s only one way to make that bottle fit to contain fresh milk and to keep it fresh for a long period of time. There’s only one way in which fresh milk can abide in that bottle without becoming contaminated and that is that I pour out the sour stuff and then I put it under a faucet and I wash it right out, and I wash all the sour stuff out from the bottom of the heart and then I bring in the fresh milk and then there is every possibility that the fresh milk will remain sweet and fresh. The tragedy with so many of us is we haven’t gone that far, you see. We received the Spirit of Christ in some sense into our hearts, but He is not able to dwell there and abide there because there is sour self spirit that has never been cleaned out of the heart, from the bottom of the heart. And so, we find that our life is like that, up and down. Every time we get a new filling of Jesus’ Spirit it kind of overwhelms the sour stuff at the bottom of the heart and we walk for a while in victory — then we begin to take another dip as the sour stuff spreads all over His Spirit and then it comes Easter time and we get another infusion of His Spirit and so we walk in victory for another little while but really our life is like that, up and down, switch back. And actually the truth is that our nature has never changed. Our nature has never really changed.

FORGIVEN NOT CLEANSED Transcript of a clip from the talk A CLEAN HEART by Rev. Ernest O’Neill Our heart — deep, deep down — is still unclean. Our heart has never been cleansed by the Holy Spirit, and we have a sense of aliveness to God and we have a sense of our sins being forgiven, but our heart is still unclean and continues to contaminate Jesus’ Spirit every time He pours it in. And so, in a way, our nature has not been changed, it’s been just overwhelmed from time to time, by Jesus’ Spirit. Loved ones, that’s why we cry that cry of despair so often, even those of us who are children of God. That cry in Roman 7:15: “I do not understand my own actions. I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.” The only mistake is this! We are confusing the issue by using “I” in both cases. In actual fact there is something deep down in your heart that DOES do what it wants! And that’s what actually produces the evil in your life and mine. It’s the unclean heart that still wants what Jesus doesn’t want and it would be better for us to say: “Well, I don’t understand MY own actions because Jesus wants to do certain things in me when He comes in, but my own heart doesn’t want to do those things.” Loved ones, that’s the situation with many of us, I’m sure, here in this room this morning. That we have in some sense been acted upon by God’s Spirit and in some sense we’re a little further on than the Jew; we are at least regenerated and we are aware of God and alive to God and we know that He has forgiven us our sins. But actually we are very like the Jew in that our nature — deep, deep down — is still unchanged and our heart is still unclean and that heart continues to send up sin as we try to walk progressively with Jesus. There is a verse, you know, in the Old Testament that I think makes it very clear and will help you to understand it if you look at it. It’s Ezekiel, and it’s a verse where God is describing the New Covenant to the Jewish people and it’s Ezekiel 36:26. God is describing the New Covenant: “A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you; and I will take out of your flesh the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.” So God will do two things, you see. He’ll give us a new heart and then He will give us a new spirit and the new heart is explained a little more in the next verse, in verse 27: “And I will put my spirit within you.” That’s how He’ll give us a new heart. He’ll make our own spirits new, He’ll put a new spirit within us, He’ll renew our spirits, He’ll regenerate our spirits and make us aware of God and aware of Jesus, so that we’ll have some acquaintance with Him. But then, He’ll put His own Spirit in us, you see — “And I will put my spirit within you,” (my Holy Spirit, He will dwell with you and stay inside you and He will create a new heart inside you) “and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to observe my ordinances.” So there are two parts to the New Covenant. One is a new spirit and many of us have entered into that. Many of us have had our spirits renewed and regenerated and that’s why we come to church here. We know that it’s true; we know that God is real, we know that Jesus died for us, we know that our sins are forgiven and our spirit is renewed. But we know also an inconsistent Christian life, an up and down life. It seems when that little renewed spirit gets its way we are in victory, but it seems there are other times when that spirit isn’t getting its way and that’s because we haven’t entered into the second part of the New Covenant, where God said: “I will put My Spirit in you, My Holy Spirit in you, to dwell in you and abide in you and He will create a new heart in you and He will enable you to walk in my statutes and observe my ordinances.” Loved ones, the fact is there are many of us who call ourselves Christians, who have entered into only one part of the New Covenant that God gave us in Jesus. And that’s the part that we find in I John 1:9, you remember, “If we confess our sins He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins.” We haven’t entered into the second part: “and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” Our hearts are still unclean, but we walk in the first part of the New Covenant: “if we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins.” So, it’ amazing — if you are a child of God, and you are in that situation, if you keep confessing and repenting day after day, and you keep getting shots of God’s Spirit from Sunday services and you keep getting encouragement from other people’s fellowship, you will be able to walk in a fair degree of obedience for awhile, but soon you will begin to see a nose dive taking place in your own life because the Holy Spirit does not dwell in you. He does not abide in you, He is not at home in your heart, He acts upon you from outside and at times is able to speak within you, but He does not dwell within you, because you have not allowed Him to prepare a dwelling place for Himself.

CLOUDY VISION Transcript of a clip from the talk A CLEAN HEART by Rev. Ernest O’Neill You remember those things that Jesus spoke about that come out from the heart. Many of us are able to abstain from fornication but our heart wants to fornicate. Many of us are able to abstain from adultery, but our heart wants to commit adultery. Many of us are able to abstain from murder, but our heart wants to murder. We find a rising from within us that would do damage to a person if we possibly could. That’s why we’re often able to abstain from theft, but our heart wants to thieve. We are often able to abstain from slander, but our heart wants to slander. Now of course, the last two are what usually give away those Christians whose carnal nature is still alive inside them. That is, slander and backbiting. And that explains also why so many of us who are really carnal Christians with unclean hearts are so complacent about our state. Because most of the church is afraid of what the law can do to us or what society thinks of us. So many of us, who have become aware of God, don’t want to have a reputation spoiled by getting into trouble with the law, so we abstain from murder and theft and adultery and fornication, but there are no legal penalties for gossip and backbiting and slander. And that’s why so many of us in churches expose our unclean hearts not so much through the fornication or the adultery, but through the slander and the backbiting and the gossip — through the talking about other people behind their back. And loved ones, that’s how you can tell if you have an unclean heart. Have you ever found yourselves talking about somebody behind their back instead of going to them in love and sharing with them what you can see or what you think? If you do that, if you talk about people behind their back, then your heart is unclean and you’ll continue to allow that unclean heart to take you in an up and down Christian experience for the rest of your life — if you can last throughout the rest of your life — because increasingly that unclean heart clouds the voice of God, just as that does. It clouds the voice of God and it clouds your sight of God and the more years you walk with that unclean heart the more difficult it is to hear His voice and that’s why you’ll find as you go on in your Christian life, without having your heart cleansed, you’ll find: “I don’t think I hear Him as clearly as I used to, I see men, but as trees walking.” You haven’t been touched the second time to be able to see them clearly as real men. And have you ever found yourselves in one of those little negative complaining groups where everything you say is: “Oh, this is wrong, and that’s wrong and I’m complaining, because they should do this, this way.” Loved ones, if you find yourself doing that kind of thing, it’s because your heart is unclean, your heart is dirty and that heart of yours will continue to send up that kind of motivation to you as long as it remains unclean.

HOW TO GET CLEAN INSIDE? Transcript of a clip from the talk A CLEAN HEART by Rev. Ernest O’Neill Now, how do you get a clean heart? Loved ones, it is not by psychology and it is not by reading those “improve yourself” books. An unclean heart is something that only God can deal with. No man can deal with it and all you’re doing with these books is putting cosmetics on an old barn that doesn’t look too good and trying to make it look better. Unless you go to the heart of the problem, you’ll never be delivered from that unclean heart. How do you get a clean heart? Well, you’ll find it, loved ones, it’s gloriously simple, it’s Acts 15:8. And Peter is explaining what happened at the house of Cornelius. Acts 15:8: “And God who knows the heart bore witness to them, giving them the Holy Spirit just as he did to us; and he made no distinction between us and them, but cleansed their hearts by faith.” That’s how! You get your heart cleansed by the Holy Spirit through your faith. That’s it! It’s not a long, long series of trying to train yourself. It’s not years and years of trying to reroute the thoughts and feelings of your heart. It’s not years and years of psychoanalysis trying to track back where you got these wrong feelings or these bad feelings. It’s not trying to get a group who will treat you nice and will treat you right. It’s not that, loved ones! It’s what the Bible says: you get your heart cleansed by faith, through the Holy Spirit. Faith is belief plus obedience. When you were born of God, when the Holy Spirit acted upon you and made you aware of Jesus, and made you aware of God and of the realities of Heaven, you know what you did: obedience for you was repentance, it was turning from the things that were wrong in your life, it was stopping them, stopping them there. And then it was believing that Jesus had died for you and God was willing to forgive you. Now, it’s exactly the same for a cleansed heart. It’s faith — belief plus obedience — except that the obedience in this situation is consecration. Not repentance — not turning away from the things that are wrong, but giving everything in your life to God, consecrating it wholly and absolutely in complete and full surrender, right from the top of your head to your feet. Right the whole way down to the deepest part of your heart. It’s giving it all to God and saying: “Lord, I want the Holy Spirit to come in and to rule my heart and to do what He wants. I want Him to make His wishes my wishes; I want His will to be my will. I don’t want to even think a thought or turn an eye where He doesn’t want to do it. I want to give myself wholly to you, Holy Spirit. You take over this whole being of mine and even the thoughts that I think are harmless, if you say I have not to think them, I won’t think them.” It’s full consecration, loved ones.

WHAT IS AN UNCLEAN HEART? Transcript of a clip from the talk LIVING WITHOUT A CLEAN HEART by Rev. Ernest O’Neill So, many of us who are born of God, who have received the Spirit of Jesus into us and who try to read the Bible and who try to pray day-by-day, many of us have found that there is still within us, an unclean heart. There’s something within us that has started to make our life with God a kind of uphill struggle, that contrasts so clearly with our experience at the beginning because when we first sensed Jesus’ Spirit, it seemed to be easy and natural to obey Him and we seem to just zoom along, it was so easy. What was inside seemed to be all sweet and fragrant but gradually as the years have passed, we have begun to find there’s something inside, like a kind of weight inside. A kind of drag on us and we’ve begun to find, it’s more like climbing up a steep hill to obey God. You know what you should do but you don’t seem able to do it because your heart is not going the same way as your will wants to go. For many of us it’s like a kind of computer inside that has kind of a bug in the memory system and we’re going along and we meet suddenly a person who is very blunt and very argumentative and we know we should be able to punch up the gentle, peaceful Spirit of Jesus from our hearts and we punch the right button but there’s something wrong inside and the old memory storage seems to send up an attitude of ‘Give him as good as you get’ and you can’t hold it back and it’s as if your storage of feelings inside store different ones from the ones you used to experience. Or you’re passing by a magazine stand and you see the magazine with the picture on it and you try to punch up the Spirit of Jesus’ love for that dear person on the magazine cover but something goes wrong inside and that storage sends up on the screen of your imagination all kinds of lustful thoughts and actions that can’t possibly co-exist with the Spirit of Jesus. Loved ones, that’s the key to the up and down life, that last sentence. That’s why many of us who are Christians have an up and down, spirit and flesh, in and out Christian life because Jesus’ Spirit cannot co-exist with evil. His Spirit cannot co-exist with evil. In other words, His Spirit cannot dwell in an unclean heart. This book loved ones is just a good one called ‘The Spirit of Christ’ by Andrew Murray and I’ll just read you two sentences, “In the Old Testament, we have the Spirit of God coming upon men and working on them in special times and ways, working from above without and within. In the New, we have the Holy Spirit entering them and dwelling with them” — you see, not working upon them from without as He did on prophets and kings and priests at special times but the Holy Spirit in the New, coming and dwelling within them, working from within, without and upwards. “In the former, we have the Spirit of God as the almighty and holy one, in the latter we have the Spirit of the Father of Jesus Christ.” Now the fact is those of us with unclean hearts are somewhere between the Old Testament and the New, that’s it. We’ve experienced the forgiveness of sins of the Old Testament and something of the regeneration of the New but not the full indwelling that God planned for us. You remember it’s what we said in that Ezekiel Chapter 36. You remember God gave the promise of the New Covenant and He said, “I will put a new spirit within you”, that’s, “I’ll regenerate your spirit. I’ll make it alive and new”, and then He says, “And I will put a new heart within you because I will put My Spirit within you”, that is the Holy Spirit. Now loved ones if your heart is not clean, your spirit is renewed and you have periodic experiences of the Holy Spirit’s action upon your spirit but you do not have a constant indwelling of the Holy Spirit within. He is not in fact at home in your heart. He is a guest and He cannot be at home until your spirit has finally given up the right ever to resist Him and until you have been prepared to make your heart absolutely what He wants it to be.

RECEIVING A CLEAN HEART VS BEING BORN OF GOD Transcript of a clip from the talk LIVING WITHOUT A CLEAN HEART by Rev. Ernest O’Neill God’s Spirit regenerated your spirit, made it alive and made it aware of God and aware of Jesus and His Spirit made your spirit new but your spirit still separates itself from God’s Holy Spirit when it chooses. That’s it. Your spirit is alive to God but when it chooses, it resists God’s Holy Spirit and while it has that attitude to God’s Holy Spirit, God’s own Holy Spirit is a guest in your heart that is driven out and brought in, driven out and brought in. No, you’re still born of God. Your own spirit is still alive. But the Holy Spirit is not able to dwell in your heart because your heart is not clean and you have not allowed it to be made clean. So there’s an inconstant Christian life, up and down, up and down, not a constant Christian life that comes from the indwelling Spirit of God. I think many of us have had preached to us only the Old Covenant. Let me show you the Old Covenant and you’ll know what I mean, it’s the one preached by John the Baptist. Mark 1:4, and I think this will surprise you loved ones because this is the Old Covenant. This, don’t forget was John the Baptist as a Jewish preacher preaching. Mark 1:4, “John the Baptizer appeared in the wilderness preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins”, that was it. That was the Old Covenant. Preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. Now I wonder how many of us entered into that thinking that’s the New Covenant. We repent to have our sins forgiven, that’s it and the joy of being in Jesus is constantly thanking Him for forgiving us our sins. Well, the Jews knew that. The people that were baptized by John the Baptist before Jesus ever died, they knew that. That’s the Old Covenant. The New Covenant is a few verses down, Mark 1:8, John makes the distinction himself. He says, “I have baptized you with water but He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit”, that’s the New Covenant. If you want to know what baptized is, it’s ‘immerse’ — not the water, we’re not arguing about immersing in water or sprinkling — the Greek word means ‘Immersed in the Holy Spirit’. Immersed, totally immersed in the Holy Spirit — with the result that took place you remember, in Cornelius’s household where Peter says, “God gave the Holy Spirit to them as He did to us, made no distinction between them and us but cleansed their hearts by faith.” By immersing completely in the Holy Spirit, the heart is cleansed by faith. And yet you know that our society is full of all of us bleating away to each other that “your problem is guilt, your problem if guilt. You can have your sins forgiven.” We know fine well this permissive society doesn’t have a great guilt problem. This permissive society has one problem, “How do I do what I know I should do?” “How do I do what I know I should do, how can I live the way I know I should live?”, and loved ones, the guilt problem was what the Old Covenant took care of. The New Covenant takes care of the clean heart. It cleanses your heart through the baptism of the Holy Spirit so that you have a center of motivations and attitudes that are pure like Jesus.

Clean Heart And New Birth–Simultaneous? Transcript of a clip from the talk LIVING WITHOUT A CLEAN HEART by Rev. Ernest O’Neill Now you may say to me, “Now, do you not think that in the first century, they experienced the whole ball of wax at one moment? Do you not think that? Do you not think that in the first century, the Holy Spirit came upon them, regenerated them, made them alive in their spirits, and cleansed their heart and came and dwelt with them permanently from then on?” Yes, that undoubtedly happened. If you want to look at one of the times loved ones, it’s that kind of anomaly in a way that took place in Cornelius’s house, Acts 10:44. Cornelius was a centurion you remember, who certainly is talked about as a God-fearing man but there isn’t clear evidence that he was a Christian though one can’t be sure, but he invited you remember, Peter to speak at his house. Acts 10:44, “While Peter was still saying this”, that’s while he was still preaching the Gospel, “The Holy Spirit fell on all who heard the word and the believers from among the circumcised who came with Peter were amazed because the gift of the Holy Spirit had been poured out even on the Gentiles for they heard them speaking in tongues and extolling God”, and so it all happened at once there. I mean it’s strange but it seemed the first time they heard the Gospel, the Holy Spirit fell upon them and they were baptized with the Holy Spirit and they were baptized into Jesus’ name and everything took place at once. But as you saw in that preview you got in Acts 9:17, it didn’t happen that way with Paul. Paul you remember, met Jesus first on the Damascus road and then three days later this happened in Acts 9:17, “So Ananias departed and entered the house and laying his hands on him he said, “Brother Saul, the Lord Jesus who appeared to you on the road by which you came, has sent me that you may regain your sight and be filled with the Holy Spirit.” So it happened both ways in the New Testament. So if you’re in the position where you believe you’re a child of God and you’re born of God and you’re aware of Jesus and you regard Him as your Savior and you know your sins are forgiven and yet you still are aware you have an unclean heart, see that so were some people in the New Testament — and yet obviously some other people entered into the whole thing at once because referring to the situation in Cornelius’s household, you remember Peter said, “And God made no distinction between them and us but cleansed their hearts by faith.” So some people have experienced it all at once but many of us, and I suspect many here this morning, have not experienced the clean heart.

DO YOU HAVE A CLEAN HEART? Transcript of a clip from the talk LIVING WITHOUT A CLEAN HEART by Rev. Ernest O’Neill What is the state of your own heart? Does your heart immediately expel a thought or feeling of pride or jealousy or anger when it occurs, does it? Or does it welcome it and entertain it and relish it and nourish it? Well, if it does, your heart isn’t clean. That’s simple, and you’re walking with a heaviness inside you that you don’t need to walk with and that you can’t victoriously with. Do you find that your heart automatically sends Jesus’ sentiments up to your will so that it is easy and natural to be like Jesus? Or do you find that your heart is sending up to your will, all kinds of things that your conscience is condemning and indeed, your will cannot handle these things and it’s constantly trying to repress them and at times fails to repress them and they burst out into outward sin and stain your conscience. Well, if that’s the situation loved ones, you’re living the Christian life the hard way and your heart is not clean and the truth is that the New Covenant is a message that God is able to cleanse our hearts.

HOW DO YOU RECEIVE A CLEAN HEART? Transcript of a clip from the talk LIVING WITHOUT A CLEAN HEART by Rev. Ernest O’Neill But the problem with so many of us is we don’t realize that it’s received by faith. We believe we receive our forgiveness of sins by faith and then you know what we do. You know what we do. We say, “All right, I received the forgiveness of sins by faith. I know I am on my way to heaven, now I’ve got to work on my unclean heart”, isn’t that right? I mean how many of us believe that we can receive a clean heart by faith? We don’t. We believe we work on an unclean heart by amateur psychology and group rationalization. That’s it, and because we haven’t experienced the miraculous deliverance from the unclean heart, the only way we can align ourselves with the Bible standards is by lowering those standards and so that’s what we do. You know we fill each other’s heads with the thoughts, “Anger is okay. You can’t get over it. Let’s face it. It’s just human. Gossip is okay. Let’s face it, you can’t get over it, an odd unclean thought, it’s human. You can’t get over those things. A little slander, a little jealousy, you can’t help it. Those are normal human feelings and you’ll always have them.” Isn’t that the way we talk? So we excuse anger and we excuse gossip and we excuse sarcasm and we excuse slick asides to other people and gradually the whole life in Christ lowers and lowers and lowers. Loved ones, you may say, “I believe what you say. I believe Acts 15:9. I believe that God can give the Holy Spirit to us and He can cleanse our hearts by faith. I believe that. I believe it’s possible to live that way. Now, how am I going to move towards that? How am I going to move towards the full consecration that enables God to do this miracle in me?” Loved ones, first of all call sin, sin. Call sin, sin. Stop looking at things that you do wrong or feelings that you have that are wrong and excusing them as shortcomings or as little weaknesses in your humanity or as little characteristics that occur because of your background. Stop that. Stop saying, “Oh well, I am a Swede you know and I am a bit incommunicative, not unloving, just incommunicative”, stop saying that. Stop saying, “Oh well, I have an artistic kind of temperament you know, and I am a little fiery, not angry, I am a little fiery at times”, stop that. Say, “I am angry”, that’s sin. Unlovingness, that’s sin. Stop saying, “Well, I am a student you know and I am a transient, not uncommitted. I am a transient, I am just transient”, No, say you’re uncommitted. Call it sin. Old marrieds, “Well, no, I am not ungenerous to God financially, I am just prudent at this time of my life.” No, no, just call it sin. Young marrieds, “I am not ungenerous but we just have to get the necessities you know, get ourselves together”, no, no, call that sin. Call sin, sin. That’s the first thing. Call sin, sin. You can afford to do it because there’s a cure for it and a remedy for it. You only have to pretend if there’s no remedy. If there’s no remedy but the amateur psychology and the mutual reinforcement groups then you have to avoid calling it sin, but call sin, sin, that’s the first thing. Be real about the things in your life that are sin. And see secondly that sin cannot be justified. You can’t justify sin. But see very clearly loved ones that the normal Christian life is defined in two verses in scripture, one is in James, “Whoever knows what is right to do and does not do it, for him it is sin.” So if you know something is wrong and you don’t do it, that’s sin, conscious sin not unconscious sin, that’s still sin but conscious sin is what God is concerned about. That’s what you have control of and First John 3:9, “Whosoever is born of God does not commit sin.” You don’t commit sin if you’re born of God. Loved ones, hold to that, hold to that. Don’t justify sin. Keep calling it sin. Why? Because the door to full consecration is continual repentance, that’s it. That’s why the Beattitude says, “Blessed are they that mourn,” — mourn for their sin — “for they shall be comforted.” The door to full consecration is continual repentance. In other words it’s not, “Well, I am the way you said I am, I am in that situation and I know it’ll be a miracle so I’ll wait for the miracle”, no, no, the way into the miracle, the way into the place of full consecration where the Holy Spirit can cleanse your heart by faith is by continual honest repentance day-by-day-by-day.

WHAT IS REPENTANCE? Transcript of a clip from the talk LIVING WITHOUT A CLEAN HEART by Rev. Ernest O’Neill Repentance is not never sinning at this point in your life, before your heart is cleansed — but it is a refusal to accept sinning as normal in your life. It is a refusal to reject the word of God. It is a constant belief that the normal Christian life is one that is free from unclean hearts and free from unclean life. And that is the way into the place of full consecration. It is a desperate crying out to God. It isn’t the crying out to man. “Why? Why can I not stop sinning?” While you’re crying out to man, while you’re having little counselling sessions, while you’re reading the books, while you’re talking to other people saying, “Why can I not stop sinning even though I am a Christian”, while you’re doing that, you’re just pretending. You’re just pretending. While you’re trying to justify your situation, you’re not even serious. But when you’re desperate enough to cry out to the Holy Spirit, “Holy Spirit, why can I not stop this? Why?” Then you’re coming into the place of full consecration where the dear Holy Spirit Himself can begin to deal with you and can explain to you in what ways your heart is not clean for Him to dwell and He will explain it to you loved ones because He wants to dwell in your heart. Your heart was made for His indwelling, that’s why your heart is there.

NEW COVENANT OR OLD? Transcript of a clip from the talk A HEART CLEANSED BY FAITH by Rev. Ernest O’Neill You know that the primary truth that you grabbed hold of when you became a Christian was “repentance for the forgiveness of my sins” and that’s the Old Covenant. If you say to me, “Now Pastor, that’s what’s preached throughout the churches in America. Now that isn’t the Old Covenant. Why do you say it’s the Old Covenant”, I’ll tell you why, because you still, six months or two years after you’re born again, you still cry the original cry of frustration that was expressed not by a Christian but by a Jew trying to live under the law and up to the law, Paul himself. You still cry out his cry in Romans 7:15, “I don’t understand my own actions because I do not do what I want but I do the very thing I hate”, and for many of us who are born of God, that’s still the cry of frustration, the cry of frustration that every Jew cried under the Old Covenant. And maybe you say, “That’s insane”. It’s insane. That’s right what you say but it’s insane. That’s where I started. That’s where I started, that’s why I first felt guilt because I couldn’t do what I knew I should do. That’s when I first sought Jesus as my Savior because I was unable to deal with this power of evil within me. Do you mean I am back where I started?” Well, actually you know you’re not. You know you’re not back where you started. You know that you have experienced God’s gracious acceptance of you because of Jesus. You know that you have sensed a relief from guilt and you know that you’ve experienced forgiveness of sins. Moreover, even though you often resist God’s Spirit in your life yet you know too that at times you’re able to obey His Spirit and you know that there is at times within you a sense of Jesus’ Spirit urging you to obey God and to love Him and to want to serve Him. So you know you’re not in the position you used to be in. You know you’re aware of God in a way that you weren’t before you first gave your life to Jesus or received His Spirit and yet loved ones you know fine well that there is also coming up from deep deep down inside you, a fountain of filth and dirt and sarcasm and anger and bad temper that you are not able to control. It’s as if your spirit is alive to God and you’re regenerate and your spirit is born again. It’s as if even your conscience is alive to God and knows what it ought to do. It’s as if even your will wants to do it and your conscience tries to constrain your will to do what you know you should but there’s this stream of evil that comes up from deep deep down inside you, a stream that opposes both your conscience and your will and feeds your will such a powerful stream of filth that the will finds itself unable at times to hold it in and even when it does hold it in, it holds it in by dint of powerful repression and great strain in your own life but often it’s not able to hold it in and against your conscience, the will has to let that stream forth and you lose your temper or you’re sarcastic with somebody or you tell a lie to somebody or you’re absolutely dishonest to somebody or you give a wrong impression to somebody else or you get proud of something you’ve done and you know that there’s something inside you that is not Jesus. Loved ones the truth is that stuff comes from your heart and your heart is still as unclean as it was when you were first born of God, that’s what’s wrong. Your spirit is alive to God, even your mind and your will and your conscience, but your heart, the deepest part of you, the place where you really live, your own deepest self, is still as unclean as it was when you first heard of Jesus, and that’s the problem. The heart needs to be cleansed.

WHY IS MY HEART NOT CLEAN? Transcript of a clip from the talk A HEART CLEANSED BY FAITH by Rev. Ernest O’Neill Now how do you get your heart cleansed? Same way, you got your sins forgiven, same way. Same way, you got your sins forgiven, by faith. That’s it. And that’s the way it happened in the New Testament. Now if you say, “Well, why did it not happen that way with me when I became a Christian? That didn’t happen with me. I am in a situation that you’re talking about. I do the very thing I hate and I can’t do the things that I want. I don’t understand my own actions anymore. Why did that not happen with me?” The reason you did not enter into a clean heart by faith and the reason you haven’t entered into a clean heart by faith since, is because you don’t want a clean heart, that’s right. I mean you may say, “Don’t want a clean heart? That’s what I want! That’s what I want! I want to be rid of this stream of filth that comes from inside me. I want to be able to look a friend in the eyes and think all the way through loving thoughts about them, not have those kind of critical thoughts inside me that I don’t let them see. I want to be able to look my wife or my husband or my children in the eyes and them to see outwardly all that is inside me. I want to be real. I want to be rid of this. I want to be rid of this unclean heart, all this sarcasm that spews up from inside me, this envy and jealousy that makes me feel a creep, I want to be rid of it. I want the stream of Jesus’ pure and gentle sentiments coming up from inside my heart. That’s what I want more than anything in the world.” Well loved ones, you want it, that’s true. You want it in the sense that you desire it. For all kinds of motives you desire it but you’re not willing to face the consequences and implications of having a clean heart, that’s it. That’s true. That’s what it was with me and that’s what it is with all of us who haven’t a clean heart. God gives us readily, is more anxious to give it to us than we are to receive it, but we cannot receive it because we’re not willing to face the implications and consequences of having a clean heart like Jesus. Look at it like this: you remember last Sunday, I said to you, we at times notice somebody of whom we say, “He has a very generous heart”, you remember that and if you ever say to that person, he has a very generous heart, you know you see that he hasn’t the attitude of possessiveness that you have about your possessions and your property. He just seems to be free and gives it away whenever anybody needs it and you see he is different and you maybe say to him sometime, “Boy, you have a generous heart”, and you know that the person will look and say, “No, no I haven’t”, and you know why he says that. He is virtually unconscious of his generosity and he is unconscious of it because he either has an endless supply of possessions and property and so he doesn’t miss what he gives away or he has an absolute confidence that he’ll always have what he needs. In other words, his heart has a different attitude to his resources for life than your heart has. Your heart kind of gets them and feels that it has to hold on to them to ensure that you have them tomorrow or the next year. He has just a different attitude to the resources for his life than you have. That’s why your heart is unclean. It has a different attitude about the resources for life that you need. You still look to money and to a good house and to nice clothes for feeling safe and secure. Your heart really looks to those things. Your heart still looks to people’s opinions of you for your sense of self-worth or your sense of self-esteem or value. You still look to favorable circumstances, nice looking friends, fast boats, fast cars for happiness. Now Jesus’ heart doesn’t look to any of those things, He looks to God. That’s why your heart’s unclean.

THE NEW COVENANT: HOW DO YOU GET IN? Transcript of a clip from the talk A HEART CLEANSED BY FAITH by Rev. Ernest O’Neill What’s the New Covenant? Well, you remember, John the Baptist pointed that out, he said, “I am preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of your sins but the one who comes after me will baptize you with the Holy Spirit”, that’s it. That’s the New Covenant. The New Covenant is not the forgiveness of sins. The New Covenant is the baptism with the Holy Spirit that changes your nature, that does what the law was not able to do for the Jews over thousands of years. The Holy Spirit changes your nature. If you say to me, “Oh, what do you mean baptized in the Holy Spirit?” The Greek word has the meaning of ‘immersed’ in it and don’t sit you know, and say, “Oh well, you mean water immersion”, it doesn’t matter about water immersion or not but it’s immersion. It means being immersed in the Holy Spirit, being washed inside and outside by the Holy Spirit. Being saturated by the Holy Spirit, being permanently surrounded by the Holy Spirit and supported by the Holy Spirit like water as if you were swimming in the Holy Spirit, utterly dependent on the Holy Spirit, that’s what it means to be baptized with the Holy Spirit. Looking to Him alone for all your real needs. Your heart, utterly dependent on Him and you know in your heart it’s dependent on Him, that’s what entering into the New Covenant is about. If you say, “Well, what is it? How do you get baptized with the Holy Spirit?” Well, Paul explained it to those who would come for baptism at the side of the river in the first century. He would gather them around and he would say, “Now, do you not know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into His death? We were buried therefore with Him by baptism into death so that as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life”. In other words, being baptized into Jesus is seeing that what happened to Jesus on Calvary, happened to us. That Jesus did not die just for the forgiveness of our sins, He did not just died to bear the punishment for our sins. In fact, you have all died with Christ and our old self was crucified with Christ and you all died to the elemental spirits of the universe that have enslaved you for so long, those chains and fetters of greed and anger and desire for position and desire for approval, those all were broken and shattered on Calvary in your life in Jesus because you were in Christ when He died. Your nature was changed in Jesus on Calvary, that’s what the Gospel is. It’s in that sense that Jesus died for us — not that God took it out on His Son like some madman who couldn’t discern who was the real evil person, not that God took it out on His Son — but He put us in His Son and His Son bore the pain that would otherwise have destroyed us utterly and yet at the same time God with His wrath burned out that old nature of yours and when He raised Jesus from the dead, He raised you up a new creation. Now how do you enter into that? Believe it, believe it! That’s it. Believe that, believe that; reckon yourself to be dead indeed unto sin — that is to getting anything from the world of people and things and circumstances, to getting anything good or bad from them. Die to that, reckon yourself dead indeed unto sin, that’s what sin is. It’s not just crime, it’s not just immorality, it’s the whole power of life that operates independent of God. It’s the world of things and people and events, die to that, reject that and look to God as you did when you were in Jesus and say “into thy hands I commit my spirit. I receive what You wish to give me in this life and what You don’t wish to give me, I don’t want. I depend on You utterly, Father, and now I turn away from this world of people and things and circumstances for anything that I need and I look to You.” Then loved ones, God will fill you with His Holy Spirit and cleanse your heart by faith and you simply put off the old nature because it has already been crucified. So you’re actually doing something that has already been done in the spiritual realm, you simply stop doing and stop thinking and stop feeling the things that have burdened you for years. If you say to me, “Brother, if I have difficulty putting off the old nature what do I do?” Loved ones, the problem is always impartial or a partial surrender, a controlled surrender, an incomplete consecration, an incomplete commitment –that’s always the problem. Just go to the Holy Spirit and ask Him to reveal to you what you’re still depending on the world of people and things and circumstances for instead of God, He will show you that. Yours may be the situation like the dear souls in Los Angeles 50 years ago. You may have to seek God in this prayer room, you may have to seek Him for hours, you may have to weep before Him — but the Holy Spirit will show you because that’s the only reason He’s here on earth, to reveal to you the things that you have in Jesus and the most precious thing that you have in Jesus is a clean heart that the Holy Spirit is able to give you. And so when you come to the very bottom of your heart at last, there’ll be a witness of the Holy Spirit that you’re looking only to Him for all that you need and you’ll have that witness in yourself and your faith will rise up and your heart will be cleansed by faith and you’ll be a different person inside, out as well, but inside — and so that you understand fully, there will no longer be evil rising up from inside, that’s right.