Jekyll Or Hyde? - REVIVAL
Jekyll or Hyde?
Sermon Transcript by Rev. Ernest O’Neill
I don’t know how many of you have actually read Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.”
I read it over again this week and those of you who have read it know that Dr. Jekyll, the good
respectable doctor was at times taken over by the murderous lustful Mr. Hyde that was his other
self. Towards the end of the novel, he writes it all down, of course, in a confession and he
describes how the drugs ceased to work, how he was able to call up the worst part of himself, that
Mr. Hyde.
But how the drugs ceased to be able to get rid of that Mr. Hyde and indeed as the years went on,
that Mr. Hyde began to take him over completely. He says this: “All things therefore seem to point
to this: that I was slowly losing hold of my original and better self and becoming slowly
incorporated with my second and worse. Between these two, I now felt I had to choose.”
“Between these two I now felt I had to choose.” And so do we because there isn’t one of us who has
even heard of that story, who does not recognize that Stevenson spoke for us because every one of us
knows that there dwells within us a self that our friends do not know and have not seen. We too have
felt at times that we’re losing touch with the better self that our friends see. Stevenson, of
course, even though he was a dear child of God, and you can see that in some of his poetry, he did
not tell the answer that God has given for us.
And here it is at this communion table. This death of Jesus was the death of all our old selves. It
was the death of the human race — that’s the meaning of it. This table sets forth the death of
Jesus Christ of Nazareth in 29 AD. And all of this dear book that we have here, all of this dear
book tells us that when that man died, he was simply setting forth a complete remaking of the race
that had taken place in him even before the foundation of the world. So loved ones, every one of us
here in this room can be free, once and for all and forever, from that Mr. Hyde within us, that’s
true.
Now, loved ones really if you choose not to believe it, that Hyde within you will kill you, it
really will. It will destroy you and as the years pass it will just get more and more subtle in its
manifestations. Loved ones, you cannot live with it, without it taking over your life. You have to
as Jekyll himself said, “You have to come to a place where you choose between the two.” And the
truth this morning is that God is offering you an opportunity to believe what he has said he has
done in his son Jesus. That he has destroyed that old self part of you that manifests itself in
temper and anger and envy and that was destroyed with Jesus and you can believe that this morning
and you can go out of here in the power of that, that’s right.
Don’t sit there and say, “Oh, I don’t know how to make it real.” Believe, believe — that’s what God
has said, simply believe. Believe that it is done away with in Jesus. Believe that when he died that
was destroyed with him and you will see that the power of it in your life will be destroyed and the
Spirit of Jesus will begin to take over, and loved ones that’s it, you know.
Forget all the deep theology and all the labyrinthine twisting of our own minds. That’s the plain
simple Gospel: that you can be free this morning because God has already destroyed that part of you
that is spoiling your life and if you will simply believe that, the power of that reality through
the Spirit of Jesus will begin to manifest itself in you. Just three simple steps. First, if we
confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all
unrighteousness.
Be real this morning about your sins, just be real, confess. The Greek word “confess” means “raising
your hand and agreeing with God”. “I agree Lord, that is a sin” — that’s it. That’s usually where
the trouble is, where you’re trying to pretend a certain thing is right and it’s not. First of all
confess, repent and believe the Gospel. Second, repent. Change your whole mind — that’s what repent
means. Stop thinking of yourself as living your own life. See that that self has gone and that your
life is now in the hands of the Son of your Maker and he can live again his life in you if you’ll
give him room, that’s it.
Thirdly, “to as many as received him, to them gave he the right to become the sons of God.” Receive
Jesus’ Spirit into yourself by faith this morning and go out and let that Christ Spirit live in you.
The Christ Spirit that actually controls the swallows as they soar in the sky. It’s that Christ
Spirit that makes the breakers roll on the Hawaiian beaches. It’s that Christ Spirit that makes the
snows lie on Everest. It’s that Christ Spirit that makes the daffodils come up in springtime.
Accept that that Christ Spirit is in you now and respond to him, that’s it.
Loved ones, your life can change this morning, really. Now if you want to take part in communion
that’s what you need to do. None of us are members of this church, you don’t need to be a member of
this church, you just need to be real about those things. So, loved ones will you stand and receive
the invitation?
You that do truly and earnestly repent of your sins, and are in love and charity with your
neighbors, and intend to lead a new life, following the commandments of God, and walking from
henceforth in His Holy ways, draw near with faith, and take this holy Sacrament to your comfort, and
make your humble confession unto Almighty God.
Let us be seated as we pray.
We do not presume to come to this Thy Table, most merciful Lord, trusting in our own righteousness,
but in Thy manifold and great mercies. We are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under
Thy Table. But Thou art the same Lord, whose property is always to have mercy: Grant us therefore,
gracious Lord, so by faith, we will eat the bread and drink the wine, that we will proclaim the
Lord’s death till He come.
Grant us therefore Lord Jesus so to eat this bread and so to drink this wine that you yourself may
come inside us and may possess us and may fill us and energize us. Lord Jesus we want to live that
life above self, freed from ourselves and our own enslavements, and possessed and controlled and
delivered by you.
The Lord Jesus, on the night in which He was betrayed, took bread; and broke it and said, This is my
body which is broken for you, this do in remembrance of Me. In like manner He took the cup after
supper saying, This is the cup of the New Covenant in My blood, this do, as often as you drink it.
For as often as you eat the bread and drink the cup you proclaim the Lord’s death till He come.
Can You Change? - REVIVAL
Can You Change?
John 5:39
Sermon Transcript by Rev. Ernest O’Neill
There is that pathetic verse you remember in the famous poem by Robert Frost of “Two Roads” where he
says, “Both roads that morning equally lay in leaves, no step had trodden black. Oh, I kept to the
first for another day, but knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back”.
It seems that that is Satanic, doesn’t it? I mean it’s true, but it’s Satanic. So many of our lives
drift along in that way. You might almost say, drain away in that way. “Oh, I kept to the first for
another day, but knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back”. And it’s a
shame that not only older people here but some of us who are younger, can get ourselves into that
spot where we say, “Oh I’ve chosen this way and it’s led to that way and it’s led to that way and I
really can’t go back now.” And it’s the same truth that comes through in Auden’s pessimism, “in
headaches and in worry, vaguely life leaks away.”
“In headaches and in worry vaguely life leaks away. And time will have his fancy tomorrow and
today.” Loved ones, that is a Satanic lie. That is Satanic untruth. The meaning of every springtime
is the same. It’s what Hopkins said, “There lives the dearest freshness deep down things.” When you
see the daffodils come up and the tulips come up, you realize there’s something on this earth that
is eternally renewing and fresh and resurrecting. It’s the same in your life and mine. It’s never
too late to change.
You’ll never go far down along a certain path that you can’t decide today, “I’ll change”, and the
reason is that each one of you is actually part of the Son of the God who made our world. Each one
of you was made by Him. There’s not one of you here this morning that wasn’t made personally by
Jesus. That’s what the best book we have that tells us about what is beyond the world. It says, “all
things were made through Him, and without Him was not anything (or anyone) made that was made.”
(John 1:3) Every one of you was made by Jesus.
Every one of you has something of Jesus within you. The literal translation of John 1:3 in the Greek
is “That, which was made, was previously life in Him, you’ve been made.” You were originally life in
Jesus. You were part of Jesus’ life. You were a spark of his Spirit that has been given your body
and your personality. You are part of Him. And there’s another way you are part of Him. This dear
book says, when He died, you died too, and everything that has been a failure in your life was
destroyed in His death. That’s an eternal, a great eternal event that can be brought down into time
and space at any time by anyone of us here.
Just as lightening fires from one cloud to another and can be brought down to earth by a lightening
rod, so you and I are able to bring down into time and space- into our life – the eternal change
that took place in Christ. You bring it down by simply one thing – faith. The moment anyone of you
says, “I will be done with this, I am determined in God’s name, I am determined I will be done with
this”, at that moment, all the power of that eternal destruction and remaking of you which God
carried out in Jesus comes down into your life.
Do you realize that’s why even non-Christians, people who don’t believe in God, are strangely able
to make mighty changes in their lives? Have you noticed that? I mean there are some people who don’t
believe in God at all, can turn away from hideous situations in their life and can change
completely. You see it is because they too were put into Christ and were changed and the whole
dynamic of that eternal event is released into their lives the moment they determine it.
Now, I agree with you, they don’t give glory to Jesus and in that way they do not come alive in His
Spirit but they are able to make use of the power of that event. So it is for every one of us.
You’re able this very morning to say, “Lord God, I am not going to touch that stuff again. Lord, I
am not going to touch that habit again. Lord I am going to get out of this meaningless,
directionless, purposeless life that I have and I am going to accept what You said in Your word that
I am part of Your son, that you did put me here for a purpose, and now Lord, I am going to find that
purpose and You can use me for yourself.”
Loved ones you can do that, you can do that this morning. Simply because Christ died for all of us
and all of us died. If anyone is in Christ and that means all of us, all of us died. If anyone is in
Christ, he is a new creation and you can be new this day. So I would plead especially with those who
are kind of worn down. You get worn down, don’t you? You get worn down after a while. Either you get
worn down outwardly or you get worn down secretly in your heart, but you get worn down.
You just begin to get to the point where you think “Oh, nothing is going to change very much, I am
just going to drain on the way I am draining and dwindle out at the end”. Elliot said, “Not with a
bang but a whimper”. And that’s the way it’s going to go. Loved ones, get up. Get up! God, our
Father put you into His Son and He destroyed all that hopelessness in you. He destroyed all that
weakness in you and He raised you up in His Son and He made you new and He is able to give you the
power of that event here in your own life but you do have to do one thing. You do have to move
towards that in faith. You have to believe it and you have to make a move with your will towards it.
If you get a car with very good power steering, it is so easy. But the wheels only turn if you put
the pressure of your finger on the spokes of the steering wheel. You do have to do that. But none of
us here are in any doubt about whether it’s our strength that actually turns the wheel. It’s not.
It’s the power steering that turns the wheels. But you do have to put at least your little finger on
the spokes of the steering wheel, that’s what God says to you this morning.
I have made available a power, indeed I have already changed your whole life but I wait and the
whole resources of heaven wait upon you saying, “I want that Lord, I commit myself to that.” So I
would encourage you, especially those of you who have never made any move towards Jesus at all.
Those of you who have listened to this for weeks and months and have never actually taken the stand,
“I am part of Jesus and my God has put me here to do something that only I can do. Lord I believe
that. Lord Jesus I believe You’re in me and I now give myself to You and You can do what You want
with me.” Loved ones, I would suggest that you do it. Open yourself to God.
It might be good to look at the means of grace. Many of us are dissatisfied with our own spiritual
lives. We are vague about God’s voice and can’t get much strength from a sense of His presence. We
find ourselves at odds with other Christian’s views and attitudes and generally miss the joy of our
salvation. Then on the next page the spiritual life has the same symptoms of disease and rules for
health as a physical life.
Removing the symptoms of disease and following the rules of health opens the way for God to revive
us with His spirit. It’s not actually your breathing that keeps you alive. Isn’t it the air? You
could breathe like mad but if you’re breathing coal gas, you could die. It is not the breathing that
does it. It’s the air that you breathe. So, with this, it’s the grace that you receive in.
It’s not actually you coming to a prayer meeting or doing bible study, but it’s the grace that you
receive through that. The way to do this is to use the means of grace, which God has provided in the
body of Christ. Examine yourself and act and then God will answer. Don’t argue or philosophize or
rationalize. Appropriate action enables God’s grace to renew your life and that’s what I suggest
loved ones. Why I did this, was to show you there’s something you can do about it.
Some of you will say, “Well, how do I exercise faith?” Oh well, it’s easy, look at…
– #10 how many mornings in the week did you have a personal half-hour prayer and bible study? That’s
exercising faith.
– #11, did you invite anyone to fellowship lunch at Sunday morning service? In other words, did you
think of anybody else after Sunday morning service?
– #12, did you witness to anyone?
– #13 did you experience any answer to prayer?
– #14 did God speak to you about anything?
– #15 did you send anyone a book or tract, did you make any venture to bring a friend or relative
closer to God?
Well, that’s it loved ones. Faith is action. Those actions themselves are useless. Those don’t do a
thing for you but they express your faith that God has chosen you to be His child and is intent on
using you.
So loved ones, I would encourage you to take the opportunity that this beginning of a new year
offers. Look briefly over your life especially during the quietness during communion when we
distribute the bread and the wine. Just look at your life and see where it is going. Then see, you
can change it today. The power of Heaven waits upon you and waits upon you exercising the little
finger of faith.
Now loved ones, over the years we have always used this first Sunday, just as I have outlined here.
We renew our covenant with God and bring before our own hearts our commitment to the One who has
made us. John Wesley wrote these words and I’d read them just before we make our own covenant.
“Dearly beloved, the Christian life to which we are called, is a life in Christ redeemed from sin by
Him and through Him consecrated to God. Upon this life we have entered, having been admitted into
that new covenant of which our Lord Jesus Christ is mediator and which He sealed with His own blood,
that it might stand forever. On one side, the covenant is God’s promise that He will fulfill in and
through us all that He declared in Jesus Christ, who is the author and perfecter of our faith. His
promise still stands. We are sure for we have known His goodness and proved His grace in our lives
day by day. On the other side, we stand pledged to live no more unto ourselves but to Him who loved
us and gave Himself for us and has called us to serve Him, that the purposes of His coming might be
fulfilled”.
From time to time we renew our vows of consecration especially when we gather at the table of the
Lord. But on this day, we meet expressly as generations of our fathers have met that we may joyfully
and solemnly renew the covenant, which bound them and binds us to God. That is in remembering the
mercies of God and the hope of His calling, examine ourselves by the light of His spirit that we may
see wherein we have failed or fallen short in faith and practice and considering all that this
covenant means, may give ourselves anew to God.
Loved ones, though I’d encourage all of us to stand, I’d ask only those of us who are really serious
about this to take upon our lips these sacred words and this holy covenant. So let us stand
together.
If you intend to give up the ownership of your own life and the governing of your own future and
intend to put it into the hands of Him who really owns it anyway and intend to live the life that is
pleasing to God and that is empowered by Son Jesus, I ask you to join with me then, in repeating
this covenant.
“I am no longer my own but Thine. Put me to what Thy wilt, rank me with whom Thy wilt, put me to
doing, put me to suffering, let me be employed for Thee or laid aside for Thee, exulted for Thee or
brought low for Thee. Let me be full, let me be empty. Let me have all things, let me have nothing.
I freely and heartily yield all things to thy pleasure and disposal. And now oh glorious and blessed
God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, thou art mine and I am thine, so be it and the covenant which I
have made on earth, let it be ratified in heaven. Amen.
Let us be seated as we pray.
How will You live your life? - REVIVAL
Decide Today!
Sermon Transcript by Rev. Ernest O’Neill
Even for those of us who are young, this is a solemn day because this is the first Sunday of another
year and however young we are, we know we have only so many of these years to spend. So it is a
solemn time and a time when we need to, if we have any intelligence at all, look at our own lives
and see where they’re going, and try to fix in our minds where we want to try to get them to go this
coming year.
Loved ones, if you don’t do that, you will drift. And some of us here find we’re in the tragic
situation that we feel we’ve been drifting for longer than we care to imagine and we feel we’ve been
drifting from one spot to another, from one job to another, not really choosing our way, but almost
just bouncing from one spot to another. Often we have found — those of us who have believed God for
a long time – often mouthing the same old beliefs and the same old clichés but not really being
changed at all by them.
Now, I would ask you, whether you believe in God this morning or whether you don’t believe at all,
would you look at your own life and try to determine in your mind where it is going? Because you
only will have a certain number of years like this past one, and they are precious, and there is no
guarantee that you will see the end of this year — there just isn’t — and you and I both know
that. That’s no “hellfire and damnation preaching”, that’s a fact of life. None of us know whether
we’ll see the end of this present year or not, this is an important time for us. There is that
pathetic verse you remember in the Old Testament, “The harvest is past, the summer is ended and we
are not yet saved.” So I would ask you, where is your life going and what is happening in your
professional life, your job life, and your vocational life?
And then what is happening in your resolution life? Because it’s one way out of the difficulty to
become cynical about new year resolutions but it really doesn’t solved anything, you’re still left
with a thought that there are countless habits of thinking and habits of behavior that you’re still
fighting and you were fighting them 10 years ago, you were fighting them 15 years ago and as far as
you’re concerned, you can see little improvement in your own life over these past 5 or 10 years.
Now loved ones, it’s vital to look at those facts and not to ignore them and to see that that is not
normal, that’s not normal. It’s normal in a fallen world that has no God — but it is not normal in
a world that has been made by a Father that makes a new sunrise every morning. The norm for people
who live in that kind of a world is that they progress in their lives, their lives become more
ordered. They grow into greater and greater peace and contentment, greater trust, they have less
anxiety than they had before. They are fighting greater battles because God gives them to them, but
they’re able to fight them and win, that’s normal.
If your life is not like that, if your life — I remember it was an 18th century novelist called
Sterne and in one of his books, I think it was “Tristram Shandy”, he did a diagram showing the plot
of the novel and of course it went like that, then like that, then like that and then away back
there and it was a hideous novel to read because it kept flashing back and going back and forward.
Now, if your life is like that, it’s not the way your life was meant to be. Your life was not meant
to be a trail of unfulfilled promises, of failed resolutions, of broken relationships, of
uncertainty about your future and your job life. It’s not meant to be like that. Your God put you
here to do a job and He has a plan for your life and He means your life to go from glory to glory,
that’s it.
So I’d ask you, if your life isn’t going that way, will you seriously examine your life before your
Maker today? And I would say, will you do something about it? You may sit there and say, “Well, why
doesn’t He do something about it?” Well, He has done everything that’s needed, but He does require
you to stand up on two feet like a man or like a woman with some backbone in you and get going the
way He has shown you.
And if you say to me, “Oh well, I don’t know which way to go”, you know fine well, you have a
thousand little signals from your conscience from time to time that give you an idea which way you
should go and you should head out in those directions. Whether regarding your own personal behavior
or regarding your own professional future, you should head out in that direction. It’s only in
action that your faith is seen by God, and it’s only when your faith is seen by Him, that He can
operate to bring your life into order.
So I would ask you loved ones, if you’ve been drifting, or you’ve been sliding from place to place
now for several years, would you stand up this morning inside in your heart and your mind and
decide, “Lord God, You have something for me to do, I want to get my life going in a straight line,”
and loved ones, honestly, believe me, if you even make that kind of move, if you make any kind of a
move towards order in your life, the Creator will begin to work in your life.
But loved ones, we aren’t jellyfish. We aren’t jellyfish, wobbling about like that forever, we
aren’t. The society tries to make us think we are, that we’re the victims of our heredity plus our
environment, but we aren’t. We are able to make our lives go in a way that we believe our Maker
wants us to, that’s why He gave us intellects and minds. And you know fine well that the only way
you can achieve anything in this world is to determine what’s to be done and do it.
So I would ask you, will you think now, each one of you, wherever you are in your Christian faith,
wherever you are in your belief in God, wherever you are in your atheism or your agnosticism —
would you pause for a moment now on this first Sunday of this year and would you in the quiet times
that we’ll have for prayer during this communion service, will you examine your heart and look in
and see has God given you any impressions there that would give you a direction in your life? Has He
given you any hint over the years of which way you should go? Then will you align your will with
that?
Why I pleaded especially for that, is my heart goes out to those of us who have been educated in
recent years because we have been the victims of this kind of brainwashing that you can’t do
anything about it. “You are determined by your father and your mother and your environment” —
you’re not, you’re not. You’re a free person and that’s what we say, here in this country we say,
“We’re free and we can do what we really want to do”, and that’s true, loved ones, that’s true.
I would ask you to think seriously about it. This is what we call in the family here Covenant
Sunday. When we renew our covenant with our God, with our Creator — and we do it in some formal
words that have been used over the years, but most of all, we do it in our heart of hearts. So,
that’s what we’re going to do, we’re going to have the short covenant service and then we’re going
to have the communion service. So, I’ll just read the words really that we’ve used so often before
and that thousands of our forefathers have used.
I am no longer my own, but thine.
Is it possible to be certain God Loves you? - REVIVAL
Testimony: Ernest O’Neill
Romans 6:6
by Rev. Ernest O’Neill
17 April 1983, Minneapolis, MN U.S.A.
It’s difficult loved ones for me to go too long without testifying again to what Jesus did in my
life. So I’d like to do that simply.
I was a Methodist minister in Ireland and I sensed that God wanted us to go to London to study, so
my wife and I went there and I really didn’t know what to do next. I was a Christian and knew that
God had forgiven my sins. I knew that from when I was 17, when I went to University. That whole
business of sex and the impossibility of doing anything about the strong drives that I had in that
direction brought home to me the power of sin and the need to at least have it forgiven. So when I
went up to University in Ireland at 17, I got down to what was to Protestants a dreadful thing, the
Stations of the Cross. I began to spend my prayer time thinking about Jesus dying. I tried to get it
through my own thick head that He had actually died and that there was a piece of soil in Palestine
where His Cross had actually been thrust into the ground. Gradually, as I thought about that and my
mind dwelt upon it, I came to the conclusion He had really done that. There was really a man Jesus
who had a beard that you could maybe smell if you were close to it or He had ears like mine and He
had clothes on. And He had actually died on a cross in Palestine and He had died looking right down
the centuries past the Roman soldiers to Ernest O’Neill and saying, “Father, forgive HIM for he
knows not what he does.”
So it came home to me when I was 17 that Jesus had actually died for me, and that because He had
died for me, God was willing to forgive me my sins. So I was born of God when I was 17. From then on
I had a Bible study and a prayer life, not daily but pretty close to daily. Then I sensed God
calling me to the ministry and that’s why I went into the Methodist Ministry. Now after teaching
English literature for a couple of years in Ireland, I went into the Methodist Ministry and then
ended up in the position that I’ve described, where I felt God wanted us to go to London.
We found ourselves in London in the Methodist Church there and then did not know what to do next. My
life, even though it was Christian and I was committed to the ministry, was not what it was meant to
be. I didn’t know what was wrong then, but I knewm this is not a wonderful life. My mother would
often say to me, “Ernest, Christians are supposed to be happy.” I mean, it was just like a sword in
my side because I wasn’t happy. I was worried and anxious and concerned and troubled most of the
time or a lot of the time and very tense, and yet I was a Christian. So I knew that something was
wrong but didn’t know what.
When so it came to whether I’d go back to Ireland or stay in London I at last just said, “Lord, I
don’t know.” I began to seek God, fairly much day after day in London, where should I go? Through
prayer came “America” and that was the last place I wanted to go because America had a lot of money,
a lot of commercialism, it wasn’t the place where you wanted to go if you were really serious about
God, at least as a little Irish minister. And I felt I WAS serious about God.
That was the only answer I got so I went to my neighboring pastor and said did you know anybody in
America? He said he knew the Bishop of Minnesota and he’d arrive in London in the next month. So
eventually I had dinner with the Bishop of Minnesota and ended up here in Minneapolis. That was
about 20 years ago, the same year that Kennedy was assassinated. Then I got into the Methodist
ministry here in America but found the same problem there as I had in Ireland. It was this, and I
can tie it down fairly precisely: a lady could come into my study after I’d preached a sermon and
could say, “Well, I didn’t think this and this and this was good, I thought you could have left that
part out.” Well I sat there in my chair because in seminary we’re given smiling classes and I would
smile because you’re supposed to smile when they tear you apart. But it really didn’t matter if I
was smiling because inside in my heart, I was resentful of her. I had rising up within me the
feeling, “What right has she to talk about my preaching? What does she know about homiletics?”
That was one of the problems. A rising up of resentment and criticism towards other people which I
did not show on the outside but which were inside all the time. And that was inward sin; I didn’t
know about that. I didn’t know the distinction. I knew it was there, but I didn’t know what you
could do about it. That was one of the problems. I didn’t show it on the outside because I had
trained myself, I suppose, to discipline my outward expressions to other people so that they
wouldn’t see what I was really thinking. But I knew what I was thinking. And of course it really
makes a break between you and the person you’re speaking to because they think you’re one thing and
you’re really another. So you don’t feel in communion with them — they may feel they’re in
communion with you– but you know right well they’re just in communion with a just a hypocritical
appearance that you’re putting on. So that was one problem.
Another problem was selfish ambition. I don’t know about the brothers here, but we men are taught
that we must achieve things. We get the idea that we must make a niche for ourselves in the hall of
fame somewhere. I certainly was convinced of that and felt often driven by a selfish ambition to be
somebody important. I wanted to be somebody well known, somebody famous, for people to like me,
people to respect me and to be successful. I wanted to be able to write back and tell my mother what
I’d done in this world or something like that.
So selfish ambition, which often drove you to be very jealous of anybody else who did anything half
reasonably. So even if someone sang a song or somebody else did something well, that wasn’t doing me
any harm at all, yet I was so preoccupied with being center-stage and being the important one that I
would feel jealous of them or envious. I did not even want to sing, I just felt I didn’t want them
to be that well known or well liked or well respected when I wasn’t. And so selfish ambition begot
in me jealousy and envy and of course a lot of pride. And that was the second plain thing that I
knew in my life: pride. It’s so ridiculous now when I look at it, but I remember what it was. It was
pride in my own insight into Christianity and my ability to explain it to other people. That came to
me later one night when the Holy Spirit give me revelation and it came in those very words.
So I had pride and it was a thing that was debilitating because you’d preach a sermon and everybody
would say, “Oh, that really brought God’s Word home to me” but actually you took that to yourself
and said that means it was a good sermon and I did well, and that I had succeeded and I’m very
clever — that I can really see truths about God and am obviously pretty good at communicating it to
other people. So actually it stole the whole of joy and delight of being any use to God at all,
because I was so concerned with pride in what I could do. And of course that’s what brought the
resentment when somebody criticized me. I felt, if only they could see all the good things that I
do, if they could see all the wonderful things I do, they wouldn’t criticize me. There was a great
deal of reaction against any criticism because of that pride.
The third thing was just very plain, it was lust. I don’t know how you all are and eventually I
suppose as life goes on, we get too old or we wear out or something, but it seems to me most of us
men anyway, find we have tremendous problems with unclean thoughts, with fantasy life, not only with
dreams at night, but the terrible things that are the conscious dreams that we have during the day
and the fantasies we have and the playing around with the unclean pictures and unclean movies in
certain situations. It really spoils your relationship with all girls, you know. Well, they actually
are often very open and very straight and don’t have those same feelings about us. Often they are
very appealing in the holiness and the goodness of their feelings towards us, but of course we are
always after the main chance and always with an ulterior motive in the back of our minds. So lust
was a pretty constant problem and spoils all that you try to do, of course, with the opposite sex at
all for Jesus’ sake and much that you try to do in your own marriage because those of you who are
married and still have trouble with lust know that it really spoils marriage too. And it prevents it
being a relaxed and lovely and beautiful experience.
So those were the things that were working inside me as a Methodist minister. I was by that time, I
suppose when we came here, about 29 or 30 years old. I’d been in the ministry about eight or nine
years by then. I went in when I was 21 and yet it was no better, it was still the same. It was this
struggle within and this pretense on the outside. In fact, really there’s no question, there’s no
question what was my favourite verse, but it was the verse in Romans 7:15 that described my almost
daily experience. “I do not understand my own actions for I do not do what I want, but I do the very
thing I hate.”
When I look back on it of course, I really did what I wanted. I mean not actually, it wasn’t exactly
true — that verse in fact describes the situation of a Jew living under the law. In fact, if
anything it describes an absolute non-Christian. In fact, I did do the things I wanted. I pretended
that I wanted more holy things that I read in the Bible and the things that I’m supposed to want,
but actually I did what I wanted because I found inside me that there was an irrational streak that
wanted things that I, as a Christian, was supposed not to want. This irrational drive within me
wanted to jump into bed with some girl. This irrational drive within me wanted everybody to praise
me. This irrational drive within me wanted my satisfaction, wanted everybody else wiped out and me
elevated. So I found that there was a strong drive inside that actually produced a wanting of its
own. So in a deep way I DID do what I wanted. It’s just that in fairness, I suppose there seemed to
be two “I’s”, there seemed to be an “I” that wanted those things and there seemed to be a little
weak “I” that did want something of Jesus. And of course that was the Spirit of Jesus. When I was
born of God, the Spirit of Jesus did graciously come into me.
That’s the situation we’re in when we’re carnal Christians because that’s the state I’m describing.
I was a carnal Christian. I had in fact received the Spirit of Jesus into me. It was Him that drew
me into the Methodist ministry. I mixed it up with a lot of my selfish ambitions and tried to dirty
it and spoil it, but He still kept wanting His Father and it was His Spirit that made me want to
pray at times and to read the Bible or made me want to preach or to help other people to know Jesus.
And it was His Spirit that at times wanted God and it was His Spirit that pointed out to me that
these other things were wrong. Then beside me there seemed to be this Old Man, this Old Self that
wanted all these sinful things — and that was my situation. I saw no way out. I had not heard of
any way in the Methodist Church, I had not read of any way in the literature. I was brought up as a
in fairly liberal Methodist theolog. I had not read anywhere that you could do anything about those
things. Indeed I felt that this was the result of just being human and that throughout your life
your job was to hold those things down. Indeed in my semi-sophisticated way I thought, that is where
discipline comes in, that is where maturity comes in, that is what growing in grace is about. I
always looked forward to growing in grace to the point where I would have victory over these things.
If you had pressed me, I would have to admit that I wasn’t much better now, than I was nine years
previously. In fact, I would say that I was worse, because these things became more subtle in their
expressions. You became cleverer at holding them down. You became cleverer at avoiding them or
evading them in your own conscious mind because they brought such tears to your eyes and such
frustration to your heart. So that was the situation, and that’s a carnal Christian and that’s what
I was. I didn’t know it then.
I was invited to a little Bible school in north Minneapolis to speak because I was the new Irish
minister come to the Methodist Church a few blocks away, and so they invited me to speak at the
little chapel hour. I don’t know why I spoke about it, but the closest that I could see to any kind
of hope was a sermon that they had given us in the 44 standard sermons of John Wesley that we had to
read in seminary. Now, they did not give us the good sermons, but they gave us at least this one
which was closest. It was the one in First John 3:9, “Whosoever is born of God does not commit sin.”
But Wesley in that one does not go into the details of deliverance from the power of sin or
deliverance from carnality. He just states it pretty clearly, that if you’re born of God you don’t
commit sin. And you can’t get out of it by saying, “oh well that means I don’t on the whole commit
it.” You just don’t commit it because you’re free of it and I shared that at the little chapel hour.
In other words, really what I did was share my best aspirations, I suppose. I realized this was a
Bible school, I was a miserable old liberal theologian that was hardly meant to believe the Bible,
so I’d better share the best that I knew, so I did share that. It was from my heart that I said, I
believe it’s possible some time to come to a place in your life where you can live in this, you can
live “whosoever is born of God does not commit sin”, you can live like that.
Now I had a theological problem obviously in my own understanding because I was born of God, but I
did commit sin and so I couldn’t make sense of it. But at least I shared what I thought. There was a
man sitting at the back with a bald head and he had no clerical collar on, which is ridiculous to
anybody who thinks he’s a minister in Britain — and he came up to me afterwards and introduced
himself, and said to me that he was a pastor of this church. I thought, how can you be a pastor if
you don’t have a collar and tie on? And then the guy started to tell me that he used to be a used
car salesman. And I thought, “Here am I sitting with the degrees and all my training and this guy’s
a used car salesman. Well, the sooner I get off and get on with my work the better.” But he of
course started to talk with me and I saw an honest light in his eyes, I think that’s it. An honest
light, you know. He didn’t know Greek, didn’t know Hebrew, didn’t know all that stuff but he seemed
to be honest, that came through.
So I talked with him a little in the study. He started to tell me a story. He told me that his
church specialized in this very issue that I had touched upon in the chapel hour. Well, I hardly
knew what issue I’d touched upon in the chapel hour, I just had spoken the best I knew. Then he went
on and started to tell how he had been a missionary in Bolivia for years in that church and had
tried to preach this. And yet he had not experienced it at all. Then he began to outline — I didn’t
know what he was talking about — but then he began to outline in detail, he began to describe me.
He was actually describing himself. Then he began to describe me, as he described the state of his
own inner heart. Because most of us, if you’re sitting here and you’re carnal, you recognize
yourself. It’s not me I’m describing, I’m describing you. As he started to describe his own heart
and his own experience of defeat in the Christian ministry and the Christian life, so I began to
realize somebody else has experienced this. That was the first time that I had heard anyone talk
about these things.
I had known them in my own life, but I had never known anybody to talk about them in their lives. I
assume that everybody was either playing a game or was not having the troubles that I was having.
And he described exactly the carnal state of his own Christian heart, the problem with inward sin
that he had over years and years. Then he said, “But then I came to the secret and I found the
deliverance that God had prepared for us.” And He didn’t actually go into much detail. He said, “I
found that there was only one way.” He said, “I discovered that all the things that I had inside —
my lust, my pride, my selfish ambition, the anger, the jealousy, the envy, all the inward sins that
rose up inside me that I could not hold down — I just kept from expressing them outside to other
people — came from self. They all came from self. And then I saw Romans 6:6.”
I knew Romans, but I certainly didn’t know what Romans 6:6 contained. Then he said, “Romans 6:6, you
know, says” — or I think he used King James, ‘our old man was crucified with Christ.’ “Our old man
was crucified with Christ so that we might be delivered from the power of sin.” I had heard of it,
but I had never noticed it before. And he said the Old Man is the Self. I at last realized that my
old self had been crucified with Christ and that the moment I was willing to die to that self — and
that’s what he said and you might not like it and the psychologists might make mincemeat of it —
that’s what he said and it was Gospel to me. He said, “I realized that I had to die to Self. I had
to accept what had happened to me in Jesus. The moment that I would do that, that moment I would be
delivered from the power of sin.”
And so he then described to me how he began to seek God and ask God to show him himself in all the
clear reality that God could see it. And to give him Judgment Day honesty with the inward sin that
was within so that he would not cover up anything or pretend anything wasn’t there, but would be
absolutely honest with God. He said he began to do that. Then he said, “The Holy Spirit began to
show me things.” I knew the Holy Spirit — that was the Third Person of the Trinity — and He was a
kind of force that came upon the work of God — but he seemed to talk about the Holy Spirit like a
person. I never had heard that before. He said, “The Holy Spirit helped me and He began to show me
things within myself that I had never seen myself. He began to reveal to me what I looked like
before God. I began to see how rotten I was and how absolutely ugly I was. I saw myself in ways that
I’d never seen myself before. And I began to be sick and tired and sore. And I began to give up any
hope that I could get rid of such a monster as I appeared beside the pure and Holy Jesus.”
Then he said, “I came eventually to the place, after several weeks of seeking, where I said, ‘Lord,
I’m willing to do anything to be delivered from this.'” He said, “God’s Holy Spirit, in that moment
came in and cleansed my heart. And I was delivered from that power of Self. And I no longer after
that had that agonizing trouble with the lust. I had no longer the rising up of anger inside.” I
still remember him saying it, he said “there was no rising up from within me.” Well I listened to
him — and of course, I don’t know if you’re like me, but if your heart is hungry you know, I was
desperate for anything that would bring deliverance. I don’t know that I even had my skepticism
alive enough to be cynical about it. I just knew that if that’s possible that’s what I want.
Then he give me a book, “Possibilities of Grace” written by an old Methodist Bishop years ago in
America — “Possibilities of Grace”. I went home and looked up the chapter, I think he calls it,
“Holiness” or “Sanctification” and it says, “How to Obtain Holiness”. Oh, that’s what I wanted. I
looked right at that chapter. I started to read how to obtain Holiness. How to be cleansed from sin,
how to be sanctified, how to be filled with the Holy Spirit, how to be baptized with the Holy
Spirit, how to come into a closer walk and into full consecration, it really doesn’t matter you
know. The Baptists talk about it as full consecration, full surrender, the Methodists don’t talk
about it. The old Methodists talked about sanctification, entire sanctification. Pentecostals tend
to talk about Baptism in the Holy Spirit though they don’t always mean an inner work as well as an
outward work, but that’s really what it is. It’s the fullness of the Holy Spirit within you. I began
to read how you should obtain that.
First of all he said, “See yourself as you really are in God’s eyes.” So I started to do that. I
know, you all say, “you poor soul, you’ll drive yourself to distraction through introspection.”
Well, I didn’t know any better and that’s what I did. I looked at myself as plainly as I could. I
looked as plainly as I could at those things within. I didn’t see many of them at the beginning. I
didn’t see the pride I had about my own insight into Christianity and ability to expound it others.
I never suspected that. I just started to look at the bad things inside me and to see what a rat I
was and to look at the things and stop evading them. I wanted to see that they were there and that
was me, Ernest O’Neill. I did not just speak unclean words, I was a man of unclean lips. I WAS this
person, this was me. It wasn’t just little things that I was doing. It wasn’t little traits or
little human tendencies, it was me. This was the real me. I was filled with lust and pride and
filled with selfish ambition. I didn’t get very far, and I came to a position of frustration I must
admit.
It was then that I remembered what this man had said about the Holy Spirit and so for the first time
in my life I began to speak to the Holy Spirit. That is, I treated Him as a real person. I
remembered in the New Testament, Jesus had said He was a counselor. So I reckoned that’s what I
needed, I needed a counselor who would show me deeper, because I’m at a blank wall here, because I
was going as deep as I had got before with my introspection. I began to speak to the Holy Spirit. I
said, “Holy Spirit will you show me myself as God sees me. Show me myself until I’m sick and sore
tired of myself and I’m willing for anything so that I can be delivered. Give me a new conviction of
sin.” Now, loved ones I did that; I can’t apologize for it, you know.
I feel for all you souls who get all tangled up with false condemnation, but I have to testify to
what God did in my heart and how He worked with me. And I had to ask Him to bring me a new
conviction of sin. If you say, “Oh, you poor sick creature” – well, that’s what I was then, and I
knew that I had to see what was wrong in my life the way God saw it. I had to come to the place
where I was willing for whatever deliverance He had for me.
So I asked the Holy Spirit, “Show me Holy Spirit, show me how I look in God’s eyes.” Well, that’s
when insights such as I said to you would occur to me. I would waken up in the morning with certain
words on my lips, which obviously had come from the Holy Spirit and He would have shown me a whole
depth of my life that I’d never seen before. A whole gross monstrosity of Self that no one had ever
known and even I had never known was there. That’s why loved ones, I think it is a supernatural
work. Even in the seeking, even in the conviction of sin, it seems to me it’s a supernatural work,
right at that early stage. It is a revelation of things that you have not seen that only God can see
in you. And I sometimes think that this was maybe even the beginning of my deliverance because it
was kind of separating myself from Self and saying, “Lord, I cannot deliver myself from Self, I need
You to do it.” It was the ceasing to be God in my life — to be my own god and to control my
spiritual experience. It seems it was a going out to God or reaching out to God and saying, “Lord,
You’ll have to even show me what’s wrong in my life.” And so the Holy Spirit did that.
Then this book said that you should see that you can do nothing about that. That that Self of yours
has a grip on your life that you cannot break, and that carnality within you is so subtle, it loves
religion, just loves it. It loves a lot of the things you do in your Christian ministry. It loves a
lot of the good things in life, as long as Satan can hold onto your will, and so you will never
track down that old Self. Of course, that’s the error that I always made before, you know, you
control it, you tame it, you train it by reading the right books, you pray a lot, you have cold
showers, you do all kinds of things to try to control that old Self, but this book said, you can do
nothing about it, this is part of Satan within you. It’s like a spy of Satan’s is inside your heart,
it’s a self that is not under your control, it’s part of Satan’s kingdom. You have to be delivered
from it.
And so I thought about that and prayed about it, and as the Holy Spirit of course continued to bring
out more of the hideousness of my selfish will, I saw, “yeah, I cannot.” I tried, you know, as we
all do, we try to do works worthy of repentance which we always should do, we should always try to
obey. And I tried to obey and tried to get rid of these things and of course the more I tried the
more distraught I became and the more despairing I became, and the more convinced I became that this
is right, I cannot deliver myself from this.
Then of course the third step that this man said was, “See that it has all been done. See that it
has all been done.” And then he got the same verse, Romans 6:6, “See that your old self was
crucified with Christ.” And so I began to think about that verse. And really it didn’t mean too much
to me. I could get it intellectually, and I could look at the Greek word “polios” meaning, “old
man”, I could see that it had been translated “old man” in King James, I could see that “crucified”
was the eros of the Greek verb; it meant it had been done in a moment and was finished with, had
occurred at a moment in time. I saw that is what it meant. I didn’t understand how my old Self could
be crucified in a moment in eternity but I saw that’s what the Greek meant. It meant that it had
been done, it didn’t mean that I had to crucify myself, so I saw the foolishness of old Luther even
and the others trying to beat themselves with chains or kill themselves or crucify themselves. I
saw, yeah, that isn’t it at all, it has been done, I was crucified with Christ.
I saw that and I believed it and it said in Romans 6:11, “Reckon yourself therefore to be dead
indeed unto sin, but alive unto God through Jesus Christ my Lord” so I did that. I even knew the
Greek word for “reckon” – it’s “legizo” — “to consider and treat yourself as being really dead
with Jesus.” Well, I did — mentally and intellectually I tried to do that. I tried to believe, “I
am dead, I was crucified, it’s finished” — and I’d get up the next morning and I still had the
anger or the lust or the pride, and there would be no change.
So it went on like that. I had by that time dealt with my outward sin, so I was back in what we’ve
talked about, I was at least back in a justified experience. I was at least back obeying God
outwardly anyway, so I was back in salvation which I had at least — whether you believe you can
throw it away or whether you believe like Nee that you can be alive but live as if you’re dead. It’s
kind of rather a game with words. I was not in the full joy of Jesus anyway. And I got back into the
joy of salvation but I was not making headway on this deliverance from inward sin and the old Self
and so I kept on trying to believe, trying to believe.
And then gradually it dawned upon me what he had hinted at in his book. He said to really reckon
yourself dead with Christ you have to be willing to die with Him. You have to be willing to die with
Him. I would say that was throughout the whole experience the biggest new fact, although the
personality of the Holy Spirit was also fairly new to me. But probably the biggest new fact was that
one. The fact that I had to be willing to die with Jesus, because we’d always been taught in
seminary that Christ died for you so that you wouldn’t have to die. In fact, that’s where we got a
kind of an almost demonic joy thinking, “Oh good — He suffered we don’t have to!” It was kind of a
relief: “Good, I don’t have to die for my sins, He died for me so that’s great, I’m scott free and
can do what I want.” That had always been a pretty important tenet of my creed.
But this was new, the whole thought, “you are to be willing to die with Jesus” and then I began to
realize, well of course God has done the thing in Jesus, but He won’t force me to enter into that.
He will ask me, “Are you willing? I have already done it in my Son. You don’t have to make it real
in you, I will do that but you do have to be willing.” And so that’s were the pilgrimage began.
I began to deal with my own heart and will. Am I willing to die with Jesus? I began to think, now
what does that mean? I began to ask the Holy Spirit, will you show me what it meant? It might have
been different for other people but what was it for Ernest O’Neill? Lord Jesus, what did you bear in
your own heart of me on Calvary, that I need to be willing to let go of and die to. Then the Holy
Spirit began to dig and dig through the layers and layers — and you dealt with the things that were
most obvious, you know: would you be willing not to lose your temper? And you had to ask the Holy
Spirit, “Why, why is that a big deal?” He would show you, well you use your temper to actually hold
people off. You use your temper to get control of situations that you’ve already lost control of.
Now would you be willing not to lose your temper, in other words, would you be willing not to have
control of those situations? And that of course involves all the different situations, your job,
your home, your money, your salary, your future and that means you have to willing to trust God with
those things. So I went through that kind of thing.
It’s the same with the lust you know. What was it like for Jesus? Well, He had no woman, He was not
able to jump into bed with some woman, He never did have intercourse and would you be willing if
necessary never to have intercourse? Would you be willing not to, if that was God’s will? He may not
make it your will because you’re married and it’s normal for that to be the relationship, but would
you be willing if He wanted? Most of all with us men, would you be willing when He wants or when
your wife wants, not just when you want? Would you be willing to die to your right to that?
And that’s what it began to come down to more and more. Not attitudes even, but rights. Would you be
willing to die to this right? When Jesus died on Calvary He was looked upon as a criminal, they
misunderstood Him completely. Would you be willing to die to your right to be understood all the
time? Would you be willing to be misunderstood, and be happy and content? Would you be willing to
die to your right even to have two coats to your back? Would you be willing to die to your right to
a good salary, to die to your right to marriage, to die to your right to a successful future? Would
you be willing really to be with Jesus on the Cross? And more and more I asked Him, “Lord Jesus,
will You let me see what it feels like close to You on that Cross? Would You help me to see what it
means for me, Ernest O’Neill?” And the Holy Spirit would go on and on. It’s different with all of
us, there’s some besetting sin in your life, you know. May not be the obvious one — only the Holy
Spirit can show you — but it’s usually the one that holds all, the key to the thing, and for me it
was one Saturday morning in my parsonage in north Minneapolis I was praying — I spent a lot of time
now praying — and the Holy Spirit said, “Would you be willing to be nothing if it were for Jesus’
glory? Would you be willing to be nothing? Would you be willing to be a zero? Would you be willing
to be a failure?”
Well, that was the very opposite of all that I’d been taught in my education I should be, the very
opposite of the motives that often move those of us who are actors or preachers or public people. It
was the opposite of what was the tenor of my life. “Would you be willing to be nothing for Jesus’
sake? Would you be willing to be a failure? Would you be willing for your mum back in Ireland to
think you’d died, she’d heard so little about you? Would you be willing to be nothing?”
That was it for me, but it’s different with all of us. Maybe when we get to Heaven and I’ll find
that wasn’t it, you know it was just Jesus. “Would you be willing to be with Me, my son, on the
Cross? Would you be willing to be in Me and to be wiped out as far as this world is concerned and to
have a tombstone erected now, with your name on it, indeed not even a tombstone with your name. To
have a tombstone with nothing on it, for you to become public property for Me? Would you be willing
to be nothing and to be an absolute nobody for Me?” And then that was a miracle, and so then I said,
yes.
I spoke in tongues about a year and a half later. I don’t know that tongues are a big deal in the
thing anyway. I think there are many of us that haven’t spoken in tongues — I don’t think that’s an
issue. Certainly I didn’t then, but there was an absolute confidence that the Holy Spirit had come
into my life and filled me and cleansed my heart. I felt the cleanness inside. I felt the cleanness.
There’s a line in a First World War poem that goes — it’s a misinterpretation of course of the
First World War – “like swimmers into cleanness leaping.” Well, that’s what it was. It was like a
swimmer into cleanness leaping. For the first time I had not had this refuse and garbage and dirt
inside my heart. It was the first time I had not had a fountain of strong desire for lust or envy or
pride or anger or jealousy coming up from inside my heart. And so it was just a quietness inside. I
didn’t testify to my wife but I thought that if this is real, my wife will know it. It was just a
quiet sense in the bedroom. In that room a quiet sense that the Holy Spirit had come into my heart
and had cleansed me and filled me with Himself.
I had of course had to see immediate proof of it. I’ve told some of you before about two of the
issues, you know, that one of the most difficult situations and many of you have dealt with them is
divorce within the church. It can be a most unpleasant thing for everybody involved and certainly
for me because I was their minister. Some people are so nasty that you just don’t want to tackle
them. I was in the middle of one of those when a note was passed to me by my secretary. It said,
“Will you call Mrs. So and So? I knew what that was about and normally I would do what I think all
of us carnal Christians do, I’d run my own life, that’s really what we’d do. We just obey God when
it suits us, you know. But we run our own life most of the time and we make things convenient for us
and that’s why our life gets all piled up, do you know that? I never had enough time for things. I
never had time to do everything. My life was always chaotic and panicky because I never had enough
time because I was always lining all the things back there, to do them my way, to do the things
suitably and conveniently because I could divide them up into pleasant things and the unpleasant
things because I was still alive and I was still controlling things. But now it was different.
Ernest O’Neill was crucified with Christ. There was no Self rising up inside. The note came, I left
for the phone and called the lady and got right into the messy situation.
That was the first time I obeyed with instant obedience. It was a great relief to instantly obey.
And you could instantly obey because there was no longer any interest in your Self and in your own
convenience. In fact, your life was a schedule for Him to write. It was no longer a schedule that
you had filled in all days in and these things I want to do and these things I want to achieve and
I’ll try to work you in where I can, Lord. It was now all – that is wiped out, it’s finished. Now
Lord, whatever You want that’s what counts.
Then the next morning I got a letter from a friend of mine who’d been at seminary with me. I’d gone
to seminary with more degrees than anybody else and was ahead of most people. I was always anxious
to get on that old academic success line. Yet God had constantly made me want to find out how does
the Gospel work. So I constantly preached in churches to find that out. Meanwhile some of my own
colleagues had streaked ahead of me and got their doctorates and one of these of course was in
Garrett Institute I think in the University of Chicago and was now a doctor in psychology and he
wrote to me from time to time. Every time he wrote, of course, you can guess what I felt. I felt why
didn’t I get going, why am I not doing that, how jealous I am of him. So the letter came I opened it
and there was no jealousy. It was just a miracle. I knew there was a change in my heart. So that
changed my whole life.
Then everything didn’t go beautifully. Everything then fell, the roof fell in, all the outside
things, as I began to preach that in the Methodist church and they didn’t like it. Everything came
down around my ears. I left the Methodist Church and was without work for nine months. I ended up
teaching at Benilde High School. I remember saying to my wife, “I think I might never preach
again,” but I wasn’t even concerned about it. I was happy, “Lord, whatever You want me to be, I’ll
be. If You want me to preach I’ll preach. If You don’t want me, I won’t.”
So it was a great rest. I would say I entered into the second rest of the people of God. The rest
that God entered into on the Sabbath Day when He ceased from His labors. And it seems to me that’s
what you do when you at last accept your position with Jesus on the Cross: you cease from your
labors. You stop laboring to be God’s child and Jesus Himself takes control and He does it through
the power of the Holy Spirit.
So that changed my life, loved ones, and then from there some of you know some of the progress, but
I had to tell you because a little voice warns me “if I preach not the Gospel.” I had to tell you
this tonight. That’s true and it’s for you, you know. I’m not doing any commercials and it’s just
true. It doesn’t need selling. It’s God will to do the same for you. The Holy Spirit will deliver
you from the power of sin. Now, if you say, “You mean you have power to suppress the anger and the
envy and the jealousy?” No, no, that was the battle I fought when I was a carnal Christian. No,
you’re delivered FROM the envy and the jealousy. The envy and the jealousy do not rise up within
you. You feel Jesus rising up inside you, and it is a deliverance and it is a victory. And of course
it is full Christianity, you know and it’s the full Gospel. Now you have to make a choice. You
can’t just go away, because it is either hell or Heaven. When God began to make this plain to me I
began to see the truth, I knew that it was either Heaven or hell. You have to go on. Those of you
who are born of God, you have to go on. There is no way back. There is no where to go back there.
The bridges are burned. There is no way back.
You remember the old-fashioned evangelical phrase: “You’re spoiled for the world.” You are. You
can’t ever go back to the world. You will always feel that you’re living in an anticlimax life.
You’ll always feel you left the best if you ever go back there. No, it’s only on, you can only go
on. So tonight go on. Go after it with all your heart. Hunger after it with all your heart and God
will bring you. I didn’t have a whole lot of information, but I had a hunger I wanted deliverance
and God’s Holy Spirit met me, as He will you too.
Tonight we could have altar call and I’m sure that many of you would come up here. I would say this
to you, you have to get to the point where you’re determined. After the Benediction everybody gets
up and all that kind of thing. You have to get to the point where you determine that you’ll stay
here and you’ll seek God, if you can’t seek Him at home. Or if you think, “I don’t dare leave here
because, Satan will get me before I get home” then you should go to the prayer room, or go back into
the corner and seek God. If you want help I think there are enough of us here who are in the
fullness of the Holy Spirit; I would ask them to maybe stay around, and they can come over if you
just raise your hand up, they’ll come over and pray with you.
Really what I would urge you to do is either that or to go home and to get down to business with God
and don’t give up until you come through because you must be determined. It has to be, “I will not
let you go until You bless me.” It has to be that kind of attitude. It might take you weeks, might
take you months, but if you want that with all your heart and you keep going, God will answer you
because that’s why Jesus died.
Let us pray.
Dear Father, we thank You for that. We thank you, Lord, that Jesus died to save us from our sins.
Not to save us in our sins, but to save us from our sins. We thank You for that, Lord. We thank You
that His death was effectual because we were actually in Him when He died. That our old self was
crucified with Christ that the body of sin might be destroyed and we might no longer be enslaved to
sin. Lord, we thank You for that. That each one of us and indeed every soul that has ever lived or
will ever live has been crucified with Christ and that has been done –and that it is our great
privilege to bow before our Savior and accept from His dear hand the benefits of His mighty death.
Lord, we thank You for that. We pray for each other, our Father, pray Holy Spirit for each other
that we may get down to business with You, this evening at home or here or wherever we can get hold
of that great pearl of great price that is worth selling all the other pearls together. Lord, we
thank You.
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.
You Can Be Changed - REVIVAL
Revival
Sermon Transcript by Rev. Ernest O’Neill
(With Ted Farcasin sharing at the beginning)
Ted:
We discussed the impact that Evan Roberts had on a small community of believers in Southern Wales
and it essentially was a revival. It transformed the entire nation to some degree, the British Isles
and later on into Europe and it all started at a tiny little chapel. I would assume it’s relatively
tiny anyway, called Mariah Chapel in South Wales. Evan Roberts who was a member of that particular
chapel, went to the pastor one day in October, October 31st as a matter of fact and he said, “I
would like to have a time to go and speak with the youth of the church here and speak to them and
encourage them in the ways of the Lord.”
He said, “Sure, go ahead, do it”, and Roberts got together the youth of the church there and he
spoke to them specifically on four matters. The first matter was simply this, that if we want to
gather together and we want to move toward Christ then let us first of all get rid of any
un-confessed sin. So remove that from you, take it away from you. If there be anything that is
within you, that is a hindrance between you and God, a barrier, remove that from you. That was point
number one.
Point number two was essentially this: we need to be obedient. Obedient to what? Well, obedient to
the prompting of the Holy Spirit. Remember Samuel’s admonishment to the prophet of the Old Testament
that obedience is better than sacrifice. That was the message of Evan Roberts to these folks that
they be obedient to the prompting of the Holy Spirit. When he speaks to you, walk, function, move in
accordance to that and let Him demonstrate whether or not it is His will or not but be conscious of
that, be prompted by that and move in accordance to it. So those are a few things. One, be obedient
to His spirit and put away any un-confessed sin.
The third element that I tried to get across was simply this, to proclaim the goodness of Christ
within you, to make some sense of a proclamation of what Jesus has done. He encourages folks to do
as what Christ has admonished all of us at one time or another, I am sure, you know if you declare
me before your fellow men then I will declare you before my Father which is in heaven. In the King
James Version it says “I would declare you before the angels of God.” I do agree that what he is
getting at is that we can have a proclamation by our life. We can have proclamation by our own ethic
or theology and how we believe. So much is manifested by our personal behavior. But it’s interesting
to note that 93 percent of all people are saved because somebody spoke to them. Somebody spoke words
to them.
Isaiah said, “How shall a man hear unless there is somebody who would preach?”- to your colleague,
to your friend, to yourself. Those are the three primary factors that Evan Roberts spoke to these
young folks about. Consider them in your own mind.
Rev. Ernest O’Neill:
And what came home to me as Ted was sharing was that there was an incredible outpouring of God’s
Holy Spirit during the next few months. That took place about the 30th of October and then he read a
newspaper article which indicated that by December, about three months later, 34,000 people had
partaken in these meetings. And then of course after that, any of you who know about the Welsh
revival know that Evan Roberts would turn up to preach at a church but the church would have been
full from early morning.
People would have closed their businesses to get a seat in the church and there would be hundreds
outside and when he would arrive, he would go up and just open in prayer in Welsh and then sit down
and the service just went on. Prayer and confession of sin and conversions and baptism of the Spirit
and they would still be there 2 o’clock in the morning and at times right up till 6:00 a.m. the next
morning.
So, it was that God moved among them and it came home to me, wouldn’t God move that way among us? I
mean we couldn’t make God bring a worldwide revival but it does seem that where God’s people walk in
light, at least the Holy Spirit moves freely among them and brings Jesus life into existence among
them. Maybe it’s being extreme but could it be that we actually, here even in this room tonight,
have a whole lot of un-confessed sin? Or a lot of doubtful things?
It just came home to me that there are all kinds of things that we need to see happening among us
ourselves. There are healings that we need to see completed. You have loved ones that aren’t in
Jesus. We have a campus that is fairly well untouched by Jesus these days. We believe that Jesus
moves freely among us in power when we fulfill those conditions, indeed when we just walk in light.
So I was wondering does that mean that on the outside, we look like good Christians and we’re a nice
body of people but does it mean that we actually have a whole lot of un-confessed sin among us? Or
maybe we’re involved in all kinds of doubtful things that we’re not really sure of but we’re
carrying them on because we say, well, the Lord hasn’t really convicted us.
Then, when he mentioned the profession of Christ, I wondered do we have it in our heads and are we
all saying day-by-day at work, “Well, we don’t want to put them off Jesus by being too open about
it,” or, “We don’t want to go around knocking on doors like Dan Salem does because that doesn’t come
too naturally to us.” And could it be that we’re all actually living in sin? We don’t think we’re
living in sin because we’re not sleeping around with anybody or we’ve turned away from a lot of the
sins that were in our lives, but we’re actually not doing obedience. We’re not doing obedience, you
know.
In other words, could it be that all of us have all kinds of little feelings about somebody else
here tonight or somebody else who isn’t here and we keep that in our hearts and we just keep it
there? It’s kind of a root of bitterness and it just stays there but that’s what stops us entering
into the revival life in our own lives and the revival life as a group. Don’t you think it must be?
Don’t you think that wherever God’s people fulfill the conditions of revival — wherever they
confess their sin and get it out in the open and get rid of it and
agree about that and turn from it — and wherever they turn from things that are doubtful, God sees
them. And wherever they obey God’s spirit, obey in actual action, and wherever they begin to go out
of their way to profess Christ or to talk about Him to somebody else, do you not think that the Holy
Spirit would move among us as He did in that revival?
Loved ones, I know it’s just not sensible to say He wouldn’t. I think we’re a great group. I think
the world of you and we all like each other and I think it’s great. We have a great operation but we
don’t have revival, sure we don’t. We don’t. I mean other churches would look at us and think we’re
in revival and we’ve been in a remarkable state of revival compared with other churches for years
almost since we started, but we all know it isn’t what is talked about in this Welsh revival. It
isn’t that.
There isn’t a deep conviction of sin. I mean you find that with the ones you talk to, don’t you at
work? There’s no deep conviction of sin. Look, there are some of your relatives and there’s no
conviction of sin in them at all, you know there isn’t. There’s not even a vague interest in God and
it seems that conviction of sin comes when we get convicted about our sin and it seems to me that
what we could have, is a kind of a hard packed ice down there.
We’re kind of soft and squashy up here but when we get down here somewhere in maybe most of our
lives, there’s kind of hard packed ice where there is unconfessed sin that we have no intention of
confessing because we don’t want to forsake it. And where we have doubtful things, we’re glad when
we’re not absolutely sure what God thinks of them because we want to hang onto them. All of that is
really a controlled surrender, isn’t it? It’s not wanting to do whatever so that God would move.
I mean it’s not an attitude of, “Lord, I’ll do whatever. Here Lord, cut me open. I’ll do whatever
Father for You to move”. It’s not that. It’s a kind of uptight close attitude ‘I am a child of God’
and that’s all that matters. But it seems loved ones that if we would break open, surely God’s
Spirit would move.
Douglas Crossman, who is the gentleman that sold us the library upstairs, the Scroggie library,
preached in that Mariah chapel maybe 10 years ago and he knew there was one very old man there who
had been in revival and had written a little book about it. He asked the minister, “Is that man
here? Could you introduce me to him?”, and the man had come up, came up to him afterwards and
Douglas Crossman said to him, I forgot the man’s name but he said to him his name, “You, Mr.
so-and-so, you were in the revival”, and the man almost crumpled to the ground.
It was as if the power of God was still there and he almost crumpled to the ground when he had
mentioned it. It seems that that’s what we want to see. We want to see a deep working of God that
will move among our hearts and will enable you when someone comes along 30-40 years hence or
somebody comes to our children and asks about it, that they will sense that. It seems to me that
doesn’t come with trickery or with such stupid tears. It doesn’t come with all that stuff. It
doesn’t come with emotion. We turn from all the tricks of the clever music and all that stuff or the
showy preacher.
We turn from that because it doesn’t come with all that stuff. It seems from what we read that it
comes from honesty in the hearts of men and women like you and me and I think that requires us to
search our hearts and to act so that we say, “Well, we don’t know what everybody else is doing, but
as for me and my house, I will serve the Lord.” I am going to get the things right with You Lord and
I am going to clean out everything that’s doubtful and I am going to turn from it and I am going to
confess any sin both to You Lord and to the person that I sinned against and then Holy Spirit, I am
going to obey You whatever it means and then Lord Jesus, I am going to stop being a clam — a closed
mouth Christian who won’t speak Your name to anybody lest I suffer some of the reproach that You
bore. Lord Jesus, I am going to start talking about You to other people.”
Loved ones, I do think that it would be the same as most other things in your life and mine. I think
action would release a lot of pressure and tension and would resolve a lot of problems and I think
God’s spirit would move among us and I think it wouldn’t be long. It only took three months and
there were 34,000 involved. It wouldn’t be long before men and women would know that some men and
women are dealing with God in honesty.
I don’t know about you but I don’t want to carry on running services to you. Anybody can run
services. What we want to see is God’s Holy Spirit moving among us in power and what we want to see
is thousands going abroad, don’t we? Because we know only God’s Spirit can bring that about, we
can’t bring it about, but it seems to me that’s what we want.
I think that’s why most of us came together here over these past 14 years. I think it has to start
with us loved ones. I start with what I know and then God’s Spirit can take me deeper. So it might
be good to have a prayer time to be free to pray as God guides you in quietness or aloud, and to
simply guide you to just deal with your sins. I’ll deal with those that I know and then the
important thing would be that we begin to walk in this obedience.
We would begin to profess Christ, would begin to obey the Holy Spirit and not do what is convenient
for us or what somebody else thinks. And then that we’d walk in openness with each other. Where
we’ve got used to criticizing, would you stop that? I mean we just start being open and start being
real with each other and you know we’ll have to do it some time. I mean there is nothing Jesus said,
whispered in private rooms that will not be proclaimed upon the house tops. There will come a day
when everything will be manifested you know, then, for our condemnation.
So it really is how we’re coming into cleanness now so we can be saved and delivered and be used by
God or it all being proclaimed then. I think if you found heaviness in your own life or kind of a
deadness or coldness, it’s because of this. So let’s just pray together. Let’s pray.
Dear Father, we don’t want to be just an ice church. Lord we don’t want to be hypocrites. Father we
don’t want to be doing something that other human beings could imitate. Lord, we want to see You
work Your work that can’t be imitated among us. Lord, we really do want that kind of revival, new
life from Your own right hand.
So Lord, if You see sin in our lives or Lord, if You have been pointing out sin to us and we have
argued with You about it and pushed it to the back or Lord if You’ve brought things up to us and we
like to call them doubtful, Lord we see we’ll get nothing from You unless we put away all doubtful
things and are absolutely honest before You — open and clear and clean. Lord we know enough about
our society to know that only such people can be used by God to cut through this gray and lukewarm
society.
Then Lord, if You see that we’re not obeying Your Holy Spirit, anywhere in our lives, will You make
us aware of that or if we’re not professing Christ? If Lord Jesus, there are people in our work that
don’t know we’re Christians because we are so quiet about it, Lord we want to put ourselves outside
ourselves. We want to put ourselves out on the line and separate ourselves from all this
self-defensiveness and self-protectiveness which is just God, just being God, just wanting to keep
ourselves to ourselves and run our own lives our own way. Lord it’s just sin but we’ve just got so
used to it that we think it’s the way we live the Christian life.
Lord we want to begin to be honest with You tonight, confess and turn from these things. Amen.
Give New Life a Chance - REVIVAL
Break Up Your Fallow Ground
Hosea 10:12
Sermon Transcript by Rev. Ernest O’Neill
During Lent we remember Jesus’ suffering which preceded His dying on the Cross for us. Down through
the centuries since Jesus’ death and resurrection, Lent has been a time for self-examination. So
those of us who are Catholic in background remember how Ash Wednesday with the mark of the ashes
signified the sackcloth and ashes in which we examined our lives in preparation for our death with
Jesus on Good Friday and then our glorious resurrection on Easter Sunday.
So Good Friday and Easter Sunday will mean the world to you this year, if you begin to honestly
prepare yourself during this time of Lent. It’s not so much a time when you give things up for Lent.
That’s not the right attitude to Lent. That’s just an excuse that we invented to offer to God
instead of real change in our lives. We shouldn’t in that sense give up things for Lent and then go
back to it after that. We need to see this as a time for rooting out from our lives the things that
God has convicted of us as sin. We need to be real about that, just down to earth and practical.
Repeatedly, when all kinds of buildings are put up in large cities, men are amazed that through the
slightest crack in a piece of concrete slab there will poke a little snowdrop or a little daffodil.
Men are constantly amazed at the “dearest freshness deep down things.” That’s the way the poet,
Gerard Manley Hopkins told it. “There’s a dear freshness deep down things.” There’s a dear life
underneath all the concrete that man can put over the earth. There’s a dear life that surges up and
pokes its head through if it gets half a chance. Men are constantly amazed at the way little flowers
poke their heads up through slabs and slabs of concrete if there’s even a slightest crack. It’s as
if the earth is full of life and just wants to burst forth if men will let it. It’s the same in your
life. It’s the same in your dear heart this morning.
God has put you into His Son Jesus and there is springing up within you a Jesus life. A beauty of
God’s life that will spring up if you’ll give it half a chance. If you’ll just give it half a chance
it’s there surging within you. It will burst out. The fragrance of Jesus will burst out in you along
with hope and joy and delight if you’ll give it half a chance. That’s the truth, that’s what Lent is
about. Get the things out of your life that God has shown you are a substitute and an alternative
for his life. Get them out of your life and His life will spring up within you.
Get the lust out of your life and the beauty of God’s pure love will begin to pour forth on you. Get
the anger out of your life and the beauty of His gentleness and His patience will begin to lift out
through you. I don’t know if you realize it but in spite of all our medical research, most surgery
is cutting away the bad stuff to give the good stuff a chance to grow. There are some exceptions,
but most surgery is cutting away the bad stuff so that the good stuff will grow. In other words, the
only hope of man being healed is the power of healthy life that God has put in every physical body.
That’s the life that He has put in your heart and your spirit.
That’s why He has told us that our primary contribution to Him changing our lives is simply breaking
up old hardened concrete that has settled in any area of our lives. One prophet put it this way, he
said, “Break up your fallow ground so that the Lord can come and rain righteousness upon you.”
Fallow ground is ground that has been trodden over again and again and again and left without
anything growing in it. It’s dead and solid. It’s been stomped on like that, flattened and pressed
down.
All you have to do to get some flowers growing there, to get some crops growing there, is to break
up that fallow ground. That’s what is involved in a time of repentance. Don’t see it as a time of
negativism. It’s a time of positive breaking up fallow ground, fallow areas in your own life where
you’ve become blind and dead and therefore where God’s life has ceased to spring. You break it up
and God will make it spring up.
One dear man that was used in America mightily in this kind of revival experience was Finney. He
just listed some areas of sin that you and I might want to look at this morning. I really think I
should just read them slowly and you should listen to the Holy Spirit and if He speaks to you about
any of these, you should during our time together in prayer put them away from you, and repent of
them. God said if you confess your sins, He is faithful and just to forgive you your sins and to
cleanse you from all unrighteousness. You should just do that. Just agree with God, “This is a sin
in my life, Lord. I am going to repent of it. I am going to put it away now. I know this is what
caused Jesus to go to the Cross. I am going to put it far from me now so that when I take this wine
and this bread, the life of Jesus will spring up within me.” That’s what will happen, loved ones, if
you do that.
Break up your fallow ground and God will take care of bringing forth the fruit.
Here is a listing of some sins of omission: ingratitude, want of love to God, neglect of the Bible,
unbelief, neglect of prayer, neglect of the means of grace, want of love for souls, want of care for
the heathen, neglect of family duties, neglect of social duties, neglect of watchfulness, neglect of
watchfulness over your own life, neglect to watch over your brothers, neglect of self-denial. Those
are sins of omission.
God will through His Spirit, settle your mind on one or two of those. Don’t let them all fall on top
of you. God will deal with you on one or two. So settle those two now at this moment. And determine
to deal with those in the prayer time.
Here is a listing of sins of commission: worldly mindedness, pride, envy, censoriousness, slander,
levity, lying, cheating, hypocrisy, robbing God, bad temper, hindering others from being useful. I
know what I should deal with God about and if you do, I believe that we should just go before God
and be honest about these sins. Confess them to God and repent of them whatever the cost. There will
spring up in your life a new freshness that is of God. There will. Let us pray.
Dear Father, we thank You for Your patience with us over these years and now, as we come to this
holy season of Lent, when we remember the beginning of Your Son’s dark journey to Calvary for us
Father, we would engage ourselves in solemn and holy self-examination so that our Savior Jesus will
not have died in vain for us. As we face You Lord Jesus, we would be honest now about any sins in
our lives. In these sacred moments we would now confess them to You. We would repent and we would
ask You to replace them with the fragrant virtue of Your Holy Spirit. Lord, we would amend our
lives. We would not wait for that moment before death. We would amend our lives now Lord, we would
change our ways this very day, we would prepare ourselves now for burial and not wait till that
moment of panic.
We do not presume to come to this Thy table, O merciful Lord, trusting in our own righteousness, but
in thy manifold and great mercies. We are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under Thy
table. But thou art the same Lord, whose property is always to have mercy: Grant us therefore
gracious Lord, so by faith to receive Thy Son, our Savior Jesus Christ, that the bread which we
break may be unto us the communion of His Body, and the cup of blessing which we bless, may be the
communion of His Blood, and that we may evermore dwell in Him, and He in us.
The Lord Jesus, on the night in which He was betrayed, took bread; and when He had given thanks, He
broke it and said, This is My body, which is given for you: this do in remembrance of Me.
In like manner He took the cup after supper saying, this cup is the New Covenant in My blood: this
do, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of Me.
For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death till He come.
Where does revival begin? - REVIVAL
Heart and Soul Revival
2 Timothy 3:5
Sermon Transcript by Rev. Ernest O’Neill
I think most of you know that Campus Church has a missionary outreach arm which we call Christian
Corps, and that’s what that newsletter is that you received with your bulletin. It’s Christian Corps
International. You can see loved ones, the unique purpose it has on the back page there at the top
left hand corner of page 4. It reads, “Christian Corps International is a federation of businesses
committed to personal evangelism through the practical expression of the spirit and principles of
Christ in the secular world.” Our aim in this most opportune era, when Gorbachev and Deng are
interested in opening up their two countries to free enterprise, is to get thousands of us abroad as
businessmen and women who express the Spirit and the principles of Jesus in ways that will begin to
affect the ordinary life of the man on the street who never goes to church. It is a vision that God
has given us that is just right for the time.
I said that many of us are also involved in educational ministries because that’s what Ted and Cathy
have been doing in Beijing. Cathy has been involved with IBM the past year and Ted has been involved
in teaching business management in the University in Beijing. Many of us have a vision for our
worldwide English as a Second Language series at colleges — because at no time have so many people
wanted to learn English. So that’s what Christian Corps is about and I’d encourage any of you who
are feeling that God wants you to be abroad in that way to apply and begin to come to some of our
Christian Corps Institute classes which meet during the week and deal particularly with doing
business in the Spirit of Jesus and according to the principles of Jesus.
As you can guess, several of us in Guadalajara, London and here in Minneapolis are connected
together in a worldwide trading company. Communication is key to us and one of the ways we
communicate with each other is through telex. It’s a kind of ticker tape system of communicating via
high-speed telephone wires. During this past week, I had the responsibility of taking the IBM
computer apart and trying to put a phone modem in it that will connect up with the telephone wires.
Gentry went off and enjoyed himself this week and my job was to solve that problem. I spent hours
and hours trying to do it. I took the computer apart, put the modem in and then you type in the
various signals and I typed in percent Q and I am supposed to get back an answer percent H and
percent 2. But there was nothing on the screen, nothing.
At one point in the week, an expert came along and said, “That modem is dead, it’s dead”, and I
said, “It’s not. It’s alive, I put it in it.” And he said, “Yes, but the computer can’t find it.”
And so for the past week I’ve been typing in percent Q, pulling out memory boards and putting them
in again. At last it’s solved. I’ve got through. But I just thought many of us find ourselves in
that situation with God.
We send all the right signals, we do all the things that people tell us we’re supposed to do, but we
don’t get any response back from God. We’re doing everything we’re supposed to do. We’re saying the
right prayers, we’re reading the right part of the Bible, we’re going to church and we’re sending
the signals but somehow we’re not getting anything back from Him to tell us that He is alive and
that He is responding to us.
Now some of us are in the position that we once did get responses. Some of us have been born of God
in past years or have even been baptized with the Holy Spirit and there was a time when we were
getting responses and when we were having some sense of aliveness in our spirits and we could tell
there is somebody out there. There is someone out there who is feeding back signals to me. But that
ceased some years ago and since then, we have never had any signals back from God to tell us that He
is alive and we have joined another group of people who call themselves Christians (and there are
thousands of them in this dear land of ours).
They are Christians who run their own spiritual experience totally and completely by their own will
power. They have a spiritual experience that they control themselves and actually it wouldn’t make
much difference to them where there was a Holy Spirit or where there wasn’t a Holy Spirit. It
doesn’t make much difference to them whether there is a God or there isn’t a God. They do the things
that they’re supposed to do and they do them very religiously and very faithfully and very
obediently but they have never any sense of God’s Spirit feeding back to them.
They are often very faithful in their duties and responsibilities. But the chief mark of their life
is a lack of the fragrance of the Holy Spirit and a certain coldness and a certain deadness that
pervades all their religious duties, all their church going, all their Bible study, and all their
praying. It lacks the liveliness of the Spirit of God coming back to them. They never really have
any encouragement from God out there. They just keep on doing what they’re doing.
Now in some ways, it’s good for a short time, because it delivers you from introspection and from
being preoccupied with feelings and being concerned with “is God present in my life or is He not.”
So, to a certain extent it’s good not to be always looking in and introspecting to see if God is
feeding back to you. But in some ways after a period of time, it becomes a dead Old Testament kind
of religion.
In other words, it lacks the chief mark of the New Covenant. Here is the chief mark of the New
Covenant loved ones, if you look at it in Acts 2:38, it was stated very plainly by Peter in the
first truly Christian sermon that was ever preached. That is, the first sermon that was preached
after Jesus rose and ascended to the right hand of God and poured out the Holy Spirit.
Acts 2:37-38: “Now when they heard this they were cut to the heart, and said to Peter and the rest
of the apostles, ‘Brethren, what shall we do?’ And Peter said to them, ‘Repent, and be baptized
every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins’; (and here’s the
chief mark of the New Covenant) and you shall receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.'” (And that they
had no experience of.)
They have no experience of a new dynamic in their lives that gives them an awareness of a whole new
spiritual world that they never knew existed before. They had no sense of the rising of springs of
living water within them, a whole fragrance in their life that seems to come from beyond. They don’t
have that experience. Their religion is primarily a human initiated and human disciplined
experience. It has nothing of the freshness of God’s Spirit. It has nothing of a sense of Him
feeding back to them responses.
Loved ones, the mark of that kind of religion is outlined in the Bible here and it describes so much
of a religion here in our dear nation, it’s in 2 Timothy 3:5. Such people are “holding the form of
religion but denying the power of it.”
It’s the kind of religion that enables a nation like ours to be filled with church going, right
alongside gross immorality and widespread immorality. It’s a religion with a lot of outward form and
a lot of people doing religious things but without the power of God’s Spirit moving mightily. It’s a
religion without a Christ-like love, with a lot of sense of responsibility and duty, a lot of sense
of what God wants from us but little sense of the fragrance and the gentleness of Jesus’ love in a
Spirit rising within.
Brothers and sisters, God has told us what to do if we ever get into that position as a nation or if
we ever get into that position as individuals. If we ever get into the place in our own Christian
experience where we can’t sense God feeding back to us, we can’t sense that his spirit is alive and
within us, and we don’t feel that we’re getting signals back, God has told us what to do. So will
you turn to 2 Chronicles 7:13. The Father describes that state exactly to us in verse 13.
2 Chronicles 7:13, “When I shut up the heavens so that there is no rain, or command the locust to
devour the land, or send pestilence among my people,” now that’s the situation. “When I shut up the
heavens so that there is no rain.” That’s when you sense there is no rain coming from God into your
life. When there is no coming of the Spirit of life into you from God. When you’re not sensing that
He’s alive out there. He doesn’t seem to be responding to you when He commands the locust to devour
the land as our land is. I have to tell you this because it hit me so hard.
I don’t know if there are any loved ones who are homosexual here this morning, but you know how I
love you and how my heart goes out to you. But I was sitting, having coffee in a restaurant in a
certain area of this city and I looked up at this little guy who must have been about 13 years old.
He was a newspaper boy. He had sunglasses on and he turned around to me and he had lipstick on. So
when God sends the locust to devour the land — in the disease of aides – it’s not a time for
preaching at each other but rather the time for getting God to come through to us. It’s not a time
for condemning and pointing the finger. And it’s not a time for trying to whitewash the mess that
we’re in. It’s a time for getting God to come through to us.
“Command the locust to devour the land or send pestilence among my people”, and then He gives the
direction to us in our personal lives or our national life.
“If my people who are called by my name humble themselves, and pray and seek my face, and turn from
their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin and heal their land.”
And that’s it. If you’re in that state personally and we’re certainly in that state nationally,
that’s what God says. He will bring revival to us. He will begin to get signals of His Holy Spirit
through to us, “If my people who are called by My name, will humble themselves and pray and seek My
face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and
heal their land.”
In 1902, Wales was as dead as our nation is. It had lots of church going as our nation has. It had
lots of religious activity, but it was dead religious activity. There was not the fragrance of
Jesus’ Spirit alive in the hearts of people. Then some people began to get together in prayer groups
and began to pray for their own individual lives and for their nation, as some had begun to do in
Melbourne, Australia.
In a certain school was a young man called Evan Roberts, a young collier of 26 years of age,
preparing to enter the ministry. For 11 years he had prayed for a revival and for 13 years he had
prayed for the fullness of the Spirit. A word dropped by a deacon in a church meeting 13 years
before caused him to determine to know the Holy Spirit.
The deacon said, “Be faithful. What if the Holy Spirit descended and you were absent?” So, through
all weathers and difficulties, refusing to be tempted by the boys and the boats on the river near
his home, Evan Roberts made his way to prayer meetings and other chapel services year after year. He
came from a typical Welsh home and was the son of godly parents. At 12-years-old, he became his
father’s right hand in the mine and shortly afterwards commenced regular work underground in the
mines. He was never without his Bible, which he studied in the intervals of work. And so the time
went by until one night, in the spring of 1904, God seems to have drawn near to him in a very
special way.
He says that as he prayed by the bedside all night, he was taken up into a great expanse without
space or time, into communion with God. This was obviously a crisis in his spiritual life for up to
then, God had seemed to him a far away God and he was afraid of Him. But after this, the Lord would
awaken him night after night a little after 1:00 O’clock and took him up in divine fellowship for
about four hours. He would sleep until 9 o’clock. Then again he would be wrapped in communion with
God until about noon in the day.
Just about this time, one of the ministers who had been praying in the prayer groups, came to
conduct services in the town where Evan Roberts was attending this training school. He, with some
other young men, went to the service. The service was in a place called Blaenach. He went at 7
O’clock to the service. Roberts was already deeply moved, but he quite broke down when at the house,
the minister led in prayer and used the words, “Bend us, Oh Lord.”
The soul in travail, heard no words but these. “This is what you need,” whispered the Spirit of God.
“Bend me, Oh Lord”, but even yet, the fire did not fall. At the 9 O’clock meeting, the Spirit of God
led one and the other to pray and then Mr. Roberts says, “I fell on my knees with my arms over the
seat in front of me and the tears freely flowed. I cried, ‘Bend me, bend me.'”
Bend us, for we are a self-righteous nation. With all our methods, bend us. Roberts continues, “What
bent me, was God commending His love and I, not seeing anything in it to commend.” The Holy Spirit
had come and melted his whole being by a revelation of the love of God at Calvary. “For God
commended of His own love to us in that Christ died for us.”
The young man returned to the nearby town and prayed God to give him the seal of six others set on
fire by God and the six were given. Then the Holy Spirit bade him return to his own people and speak
to them. But he didn’t obey. He grew more and more troubled and ill at ease. One Sunday in chapel,
he could not fix his mind on the service for always before him as in a vision he saw the schoolroom
in his own village and all the young people and his old companions sitting in rows while he
addressed them. He tells how he shook his head impatiently and sought to drive all this away but God
would give him no rest. Back and back it came as the Holy Spirit whispered clearer and clearer, “Go
and speak to these people.” At long last Even Roberts obeyed God and went to Loughor, his native
place early in November 1904.
He says that he consulted the pastor of his church who told him that he might try and see what he
could do. He would find the ground stony and the task hard. Young people came together and they all
sat before him as he had been shown by God. At first, they did not seem touched, but presently the
Spirit of God began to work and six came out for Christ. Then the Pentecost began. This is what
revival is. Soul after soul came forward and the most extraordinary results followed. The whole
community was shaken. Meetings lasted until 4:00 in the morning and at 6:00 the people would be
awakened by the sounds of the crowds going to the early morning prayer meeting.
The work went on until a local minister said, “The entire population had been transformed into a
praying multitude.” Man and woman, of whom he had despaired, had voluntarily come to Christ. The
lives of hundreds of colliers and tin plate workers were transformed. The men went straight to
Chapel from the mills and the public houses were practically deserted.
On November 10, the first public reference to these remarkable scenes was made in a Wales secular
paper, which from this time to the wonderment of all, devoted columns to the reporting of the work.
They did much in the province of God to spread abroad that which God was doing among His people.
Other secular powers did the same and man marveled at the sovereign power of God to move the secular
press to report the work of God.
“From Rhoulacore”, the Revivalist says, “The young student began to be called, went on to another
town and other places, carried on their crest of a mighty wave of the Spirit which swept like a
cleansing tide along the mining valleys of Glamorganshire.
Everywhere the people thronged in multitudes to hear the Spirit-baptized young student. At Loughor
he spoke, it is said, with impassioned oratory, but once the overflowing stream had broken out, the
Spirit of God appeared to put aside preaching and used the voice of testimony. “He slew hanging Him
on a tree, him did God exult and we are witnesses,” was the burden of the message of the Spirit
possessed souls in the days of Pentecost.
This was the Holy Spirit’s message through his people as he bore co-witness by signs and wonders
wrought among the thronging multitudes. Under the constraint of an unseen power, the chapels were
filled with eager people at all hours of the day and the services took their own course under the
control of the Holy Spirit presiding as the executive power of the Godhead. Prayers, testimonies and
singing broke out in seeming disorder yet acknowledged by all to be the most harmonious order.”
The revivalist would enter during the meetings, sometimes unknown to those present until he arose
with some word to the people. The burden of his message would be “Obey the Holy Spirit” and when one
in the meeting would break out into prayer while he was speaking, he would calmly give place and
show to others, his acknowledgement of the presidency of One greater than he.
At some point perhaps, Mr. Roberts would test the meeting and put to it the four definite steps
necessary to salvation, which he said the Holy Spirit had given him to urge upon the people. These
are the steps. One, the past must be made clear by sin being confessed to God and every wrong to man
put right. If you want a revival in your own life, the past must be made clear by sin being
confessed to God and every wrong to man, put right.
Two, every doubtful thing in the life must be put away. Every doubtful thing in the life must be put
away. Three, there must be prompt and implicit obedience to the Holy Spirit. Four, there must be
public confession of Christ. Publicly testifying in a meeting like the communion service tonight,
where we will have an “open microphone”, testifying openly, confessing Christ in what He is in your
life. Forgiveness of others as an essential to receiving the forgiveness of God was often emphasized
as well as the distinction between the Holy Spirit’s work in conversion and in baptizing the
believer with the Holy Spirit.
In truth, the revivalist was giving the full Gospel as preached at Pentecost and like Peter’s
message had received the co-witness of the Holy Spirit and produced Pentecostal results. “Repent,
change your mind toward God and put away wrong to your neighbor, remission of sins will then be
given you and you shall receive the Holy Spirit if you will obey Him and publicly bear witness to
Christ.” Indescribable scenes took place at the meetings. Sometimes a very torrent of prayer and
then of song would sweep over the audience and hundreds of souls would rise to declare their
surrender to God.
The congregation would burst out in joyous thanksgiving and hymns of gladness. But the revival’s
special burden was always the church. Bend the church. We think we’re so great. We think we’re such
a mighty American church but we’re nothing. We have our beautiful buildings and have beautiful
choirs but the little guy still has lipstick on his lips and we still have our murders and we’re
trying to legislate it out of us.
“Bend the church and save the world” was his cry. “Bend the church and save the world.” The word
‘bend’ in Welsh conveys the meaning of submission to God and the taking away of resistance to His
will. His one aim seemed to be first to get the Christians right with God so that the Spirit might
break out in converting power of the unsaved and Calvary was the power both for sinner and saved.
The revivalists would break down in a heart-anguish sobbing when he touched the thing. “You would
not be cold if you had come here by Calvary”, he would say.
Thanks for Calvary was the burden of many prayers. The hymns rang with Calvary, the one most often
sung was “The Mount of Calvary”, an exultant song of triumph telling of Christ’s victory over death
and hell at the cross. Another hymn sung with melting power was “Here Is Love Vast As The Ocean.”
The people sang without books for these hymns had been in their memories from childhood but now
quickened and used by the Spirit they rang out as never before.
Many of the sweet singers of Wales were drawn by the Spirit of God into his service and often would
be heard a sweet warbling voice like a nightingale’s trill breaking out into a hymn while the people
were bowed in prayer. A singing revival it truly became. Souls were sung to Christ and exulted over
in song when won. The Spirit of gladness and praise filled all hearts as thousands rejoiced in a
newfound assurance of salvation.
The Spirit of God did His own work of convicting and many were the evidences of His power working
through him in testimony. A young man would return his prize medal and diploma because he had gained
it unfairly. A grocer would return money picked up in his shop and kept although knowing the one who
dropped it. Long standing debts were paid, stolen goods returned, prize fighters, gamblers,
publicans and others of the class rarely touched by ordinary means, came to Christ and quickly the
world knew the results.
Magistrates were presented with white gloves in several places because there were no cases to be
tried. Public houses were forsaken, rowdiness was changed to soberness. It was said among the
collieries that the horses could not understand the language of their drivers because they had given
up swearing at them.
Well, you can see, it’s not just good preaching or bad preaching, not just nice singing by Bob or
playing by Carmen, it’s something deeper loved ones. That’s what they need. And if you need it in
your own life the directions are plain. You repent, you bend before God. You clear up the past
completely, you make everything right with all your neighbors, you put everything doubtful out of
your life and you give yourself wholly to God. He remits your sins and gives you the Holy Spirit.
Then you have to obey the Holy Spirit. Do whatever He tells you and confess Christ publicly.
God will begin to feed back to you and this nation and begin to change it. But it starts with us.
The loved ones out there, the homosexuals, don’t even know what they’re missing. What’s the good of
preaching at them? It’s wrong what they are doing, but do they see Christ like fragrant love in us
that attracts them and exposes the coarseness of what they’re experiencing in their desperation as a
shadow of the truth? Bend the church and save the world.
Let’s begin to bend. Let’s begin to seek God for a revival in our own lives and in our church and in
our nation. Let’s pray.
Dear Father, it is more than 80 years since that move and it is more than 30 years from the movement
in the Hebrides in Scotland. Father, we need your mighty touch upon us. Oh Father God, we come
before you to ask you to bend us. Father, we know that no man is an island. We know that the little
guy with the lipstick on is as much our responsibility as that of his father or his mother or the
dear men that are misusing him.
Father, we come before you to acknowledge that they are all my sons, that he is our son also. Lord,
if you see anything in our lives that is preventing you coming again in mighty power of revival
Spirit in our nation, will you reveal that to us now this day so we may bend these mighty wills
before you and that we may clean these consciences and make whatever apologies or restitution we
need to make to people past and present. We will put everything doubtful in our lives away from us
and give ourselves wholly to You so that even Satan will not be able to contradict us when we say we
have surrendered all to God. And You Lord God may do whatever you want with our lives from this day
forward. Amen.
To whom have you given your life? - REVIVAL
Have You Given All For Jesus?
Mark 1:18
Sermon Transcript by Rev. Ernest O’Neill
I have a great sermon which I will deliver next Sunday but God has just made it clear or confirmed
really to me that I should go just with the Holy Spirit. So he just gave me the piece to read a
moment ago and I’d like you to turn to it please and then we’ll just trust him to speak to us, Mark
1:16.
Mark 1:16, “And passing along by the Sea of Galilee, he saw Simon and Andrew the brother of Simon
casting a net in the sea; for they were fishermen. And Jesus said to them, ‘Follow me and I will
make you become fishers of men.’ And immediately they left their nets and followed him. And going
on a little farther, he saw James the son of Zebedee and John his brother, who were in their boat
mending their nets. And immediately he called them; and they left their father Zebedee in the boat
with the hired servants, and followed him.” You can see there was a lot of net mending going on
there, everybody that Jesus passed were mending nets. And then the verse that God put in my heart
is the one in verse 18, “And immediately they left their nets and followed him.”
I think it’s obvious to all of us in America that church going is much more popular here than in the
rest of the world. And there are churches everywhere in America. And I think if you look at some of
them on television, you’ll see that some of them are massive and are crowded with people. And it is
very easy in this kind of atmosphere to create a form of following Jesus that is comfortable and
that fits in with our own activities and the plans we have for our own lives. But it may well be a
counterfeit of true following of Christ and yet the great danger of it is that huge numbers of us
are involved in it and the further danger is that we’re involved in saying many true things in the
midst of it. For instance all of us in some way or other read this Book, all of us sing the old
hymns, all of us pray prayers and so it is very easy in such an atmosphere to get used to coming to
church and thinking this is what God wants me to do because it has a great deal of truth in it.
It’s just that the crucial point where that verse cuts across it, it fails.
And you remember that verse runs, “And leaving their nets, immediately they left their nets and
followed him.” It’s very easy in our kind of church going atmosphere not to leave your nets and yet
to try to follow him. And so what a lot of us end up doing is, “I want to follow you but my foot’s
caught in my net and I can’t get it out. Yeah, I really do want to get it out. Oh, I wish I could
get this foot out of this net but I can’t get it out”, so we end up following Jesus with a limp. In
other words, we’re a little like lame duck disciples. We kind of appear to be following him but not
really wholly, not with our whole hearts.
Now the further danger, loved ones, is that we ourselves here this morning could comfort and
encourage each other to do that. It is possible to do that, you know. It is possible to get together
and so enjoy being together and so love each other that we just comfort each other in that
half-following of Christ. I feel it of course especially in these days because – not all of you know
but some of you know — that we have had exciting years in this church over the past two or three
years and you all have been just magnificent. You’ve been just so faithful and really what I should
do is be nice to you. You’ve been so nice to me but that’s not my calling, my calling by God is to
continue to present to all of us, including myself, the full call that God has given us through
Christ.
Loved ones, that call is not simply to run a church. You know I think that we could run a much
better church than we do now. You just kind of switch the preaching a little and you’d enlarge the
choir, and you’d share the little money around and before you’d know it, we’d have a massive church
again. But loved ones, that isn’t what God is calling us to. The Lord Jesus is calling us to leave
our nets and to follow him. Not to comfort each other in a kind of controlled surrender, not to
comfort each other in a kind of pseudo Christianity or a pseudo churchianity, but he is calling us
to leave our nets and follow him. That’s really what I want to bring before you. The Holy Spirit is
good to us, he kind of whomps me with this, maybe every six weeks or so, so you don’t have to face
me battering on you every week. But at times like this, I know the Lord wants me to bring it home to
you clearly again.
Jesus has given his whole life for you, his whole life for you. Jesus has died his death for you.
Now, it is no answer to him even to give a tithe. I mean it’s good to give a tithe, but big deal you
know it’s no answer just to give a tithe. The Lord Jesus, the Son of the God who made you and me,
has given his life for you. He died for you and me. He went to hell for you and me. He took the
worst of your sin unto himself and he allowed his Father to burn it out of existence and to give him
a sense that he was utterly forsaken.
In other words, if Jesus hadn’t died for you there’d come a moment after death when there’d be
absolute darkness and desolation around you. And because of the sin that you have in your life,
because of the selfishness, the uncleanness over the years, the lying or the deception, even if you
are very good now compared with what you were, still some of the selfishness that is in you, if you
had at that moment after death, that all inside you, then there would be such a sense of desolation
and loneliness and outer darkness and coldness that you would absolutely collapse into hell,
hopelessly in despair.
Now, Jesus did that for you. He went through that moment of death with your sin in his own heart and
he bore that terrible moment of God’s forsakenness when he cried out, “My God, my God, why hast
Thou, (of all people, my Father) forsaken me (your only begotten son, the one who is without sin?).”
And the answer was always because God made him to be sin who knew no sin. Now Jesus bore that for
you and me. See, he died for you and me. He gave up his whole life for you and me. Loved ones, you
know you cannot sit there, you cannot sit there and see him trailing down that Calvary road bleeding
to death and then going to hell for you and then quietly and complacently get up from here at the
end of the service and go on and get on with your own life and then come back and give him an hour
and give him a tithe. You know what it means.
It means you owe your whole life to him. You know me too. I’m in the same boat. We owe our whole
life to Jesus. We don’t owe just a little bit of suffering, or a little bit of hardship or a little
bit of popularity or unpopularity or a little bit of unhappiness. We owe everything to Jesus. I mean
I am saying to you I am with you, we have to look to him here and we have to say, “We owe you
everything, there’s nothing we don’t owe you. We owe you our whole lives. Anything less than our
whole lives is bargain hunting.” Anything less than our whole lives is the Daisy sale at Dayton’s,
it’s an attempt to get a good deal. It’s not honesty and of course, you know what the Lord is saying
to you today, “Are you really forsaking your nets?”
Actually, when I look around — because I see some of you and I know the love in your hearts — the
issue actually isn’t not living in Bloomington or not living in Richfield, that’s not the deal. I
think for some of us that is the deal. But the deal, in other words, I am not saying to you all,
“Get up and leave and go to London or get up and leave and go to Germany or go to Africa or go to
India.” I think maybe some of you are being called to do that. But that isn’t the issue. The issue
is “have you given your whole life to Jesus wherever you’re going to live it?” He won’t want us all
to go to Africa or India. He won’t want us all to go out of America. On the other hand he won’t
want us all to stay here. But the issue is, have you given your life to Jesus and said, “Lord,
whatever you want me to do with my life, I will do, I will do. I will not be part of that group of
spectators who clap you as you walk down the Calvary road and give you money each Sunday to thank
you for it. I will not be like that. I will lift up my own cross and I will walk down my Calvary
road to whatever that costs.” And that is what Jesus is saying to us this morning through this
verse, “And immediately they left their nets and followed him.”
Your nets are what you’re caught up in and entangled with, that’s it. Your nets are what are
catching your feet. I mean with the disciples, they were the means of earning their money. With us,
our means of earning our money often becomes the things that entangle us. They become our nets.
We’re caught up in a thousand impossibilities. Well, I have shares in IBM, what would happen to
them? Well, I have a retirement plan. What would happen to that?
Now I ask you, can you ask any good Westerner to give up their retirement plan, can you? I mean, who
would look after me? And then we go on and on and on. If you men and women who have received
education are like me, I was faced with my parents saying, “You have got a good education. You ought
to use it to make good money and make a good living for yourself.” And so we find that our
education becomes a net that entangles us. And of course, we want to rise to that, it appeals to us.
Of course, we have got a good education, but the Lord gave you a good education to do the same with
it as he did with his position with the Father. “He did not count equality with God a thing to be
grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, and humbled himself even onto death,
death on a cross.”
Do you see you can’t live with that Lord and have done less than that? You see that. I mean, let me
just put it to you humanly, you’d feel uncomfortable, you’d feel uncomfortable. I mean you just
wouldn’t feel right in heaven. You just wouldn’t feel right. I mean they’re all — and dear love
them they won’t be — but you know they’re showing their scars, and you’re sitting there with your
clean hands, and not a mark on you. It can’t be. Those of us who believe in the crucified one, we
have to take up our cross and we have to follow in whatever that means.
Of course, my job this morning is not to tell you what that means because I don’t know what it means
for you. I don’t know what it means for you, or for you, or for you, or for you, I don’t, that’s not
my job. That’s the job of the Holy Spirit to tell you that, but he can only tell you it if you have
determined that you will not live a controlled surrendered life but you will give everything to your
Lord Jesus. It will be life for life and the reason for that is that in Christianity, the truth is,
it’s all or nothing. That’s the truth.
It’s really all or nothing. You know you may say to me, “Now Pastor, some people seem to get a good
deal. Some people seem to just live an ordinary life and make all the money they want and just take
care of themselves and they go to church on Sunday and life looks pretty nice.” Loved ones, it’s all
or nothing. If you don’t give all, you end up with nothing. You end up with only a pretence or an
imitation of Christianity. And it may look good on the outside but it has nothing of the certainty
or the confidence that God witnesses within through his Holy Spirit.
It is all or nothing and I encourage you especially in these days to make absolutely sure that you
are giving all. Now why do I say that? Because you know all the stuff about the last days, you know
it. I don’t need to tell you. You know that in the last days, people will have the form of religion
but not the power of it. You know that in the last days, things will become blacker and whiter, they
actually will. Things will become blacker and whiter, it is not chance, whatever explanation you
want to give about AIDS and everybody seems to have their own explanations. It’s obvious from that,
and from the terrorists’ activity, that things are beginning to break apart. They’re beginning to
move apart. Even those of us who say, “Oh, there have always been great communications, oh people
have always, there have always been rumors of wars and wars, oh there have always been earthquakes.”
Even those of us who try to rationalize it all, we have to bow down to the fact that there are an
incredible number of wars now. There are an incredible number of earthquakes now. There is a
tremendous sense of communication so that everybody in the world knows exactly what is happening
everywhere and there is an increasing feeling that we are not able to control it all.
The world does not feel a more secure place now, does it? It doesn’t. You’re able to dial a certain
number and you’ll get the police in a moment, you’ll get a heart attack unit immediately at your
door, but we don’t feel more secure, do we? We feel less secure now than we ever did. We know
exactly what is happening everywhere in the world. We have magnificent missiles that we can send
anywhere to destroy anybody but we don’t feel more secure. The whole world feels more and more shaky
than it ever did.
Loved ones, these are the days when counterfeit religion comes in. These are the days when there
will rise up a Christianity that has an appearance of Christ’s gospel but does not have the
sacrifice and surrender of Christ’s gospel. And I would ask you “where is your life this morning?
Have you surrendered everything to him?” You know what that means. And you know if you’re sitting
there and thinking, “Do you mean give up my car, give up my money?”, it’s usually not those things,
it’s usually not the things. It’s the attitude of your heart. Is Jesus everything to you? Have you
given your whole life to him? If he said “Tomorrow, I want you to go to Africa or I want you to go
to India, or I want you to give up your present way of life. I have something for you to do in the
mountains in Kentucky or in the mountains in the Appalachians”, then would you do that? Would you
obey Jesus? Or are you trying to work the Lord into your plan and your program?
In other words, all of us are in a very real situation this morning. We are all gathered here to
thank a man for giving up His life for us. And now I am suggesting to you that there is only one
real thanks that you can give that is appropriate to such a sacrifice. And wasn’t it one of the old,
I think it was Papious; it was one of the old saints you remember in the early church. And he was
being burned at the stake and he was 86 or 87 and they said, “Have you anything to say?” and he
said, “I have served my master these eighty and six years and after what he has done for me, there
is no sacrifice too great that I could make for him.”
Well, those are the guys that will be in heaven. See? It’s not by being like them that we’ll get
into heaven but I am using that to say to you that there is only one appropriate response to what
you and I see Jesus has done for us. And that is to bow before him and say, “Lord Jesus, I give my
whole life to you. Whatever you want me to do, I will do. You just tell me.” Loved ones, that’s I
think what the Father wanted me to share with you so that we would not be involved, any of us, in
just a kind of nicey-nice religion or a nice little bit of church going but we would be real.
That’s the most important thing. There will come a day when you’re not able to hear anybody speak to
you. There’ll come a day when you’re not with any of us, you’re on your own and then at that moment,
it will be important to know inside in your heart that you didn’t sidestep Jesus but you faced him
straight on and you gave him life for life. It’s really up to you what you want to do, I think it
would be good if you feel that God has spoken to you then that you’d go to the altar during the last
hymn and give your life to him and then go back to your seat. But really, we’ll just sing a hymn
through once and it’s just your opportunity to do it if you want to privately and I would encourage
you to do what God tells you this morning.
I would think it would be good to sing that hymn “When I Survey The Wondrous Cross”, you remember
that verse “Were the whole realm of nature mine, it were a present far too small, love so amazing,
so divine, demands my soul, my life, my all”. It’s number 147 loved ones and let’s stand as we sing
and as we’re singing, if you feel there’s a declaration that you need to make privately to God, you
should just come up and make it at the altar and then return.
Why do we get Angry? - REVIVAL
Traits of the Self Life
Mark 1:18
Sermon Transcript by Rev. Ernest O’Neill
God wants you to feel like Him inside and we’re all so preoccupied with outside and with the way we
appear that we forget that. But the whole purpose of Jesus Christ is that you and I would be like
God on the inside and that’s, loved ones, the whole difference between the New Testament and the Old
Testament and unfortunately here in our society, we have all entered into an Old Testament
experience very readily. Outwardly we are God’s people and outwardly we come to church. We may not
offer our sacrifices but we come to our temples and we look on the outside like godly religious
people.
But we are just Old Testament people. We may not have been circumcised, but many of us are just
Jews. We live under the old covenant. Many of us here this morning believe that our sins are
forgiven. Many of us here can sleep at night because we believe we will go to heaven but our hearts
are not converted and we are not New Testament Christians. We use the term ‘Christian’ in a generic
way. We are Christian in that we’re not Hindu or we’re not Mohammedan or we’re not Buddhist, but we
aren’t really Christian in the sense that Jesus came to make us Christian. He came to make us
Christian by changing our hearts and many of us — we men of course, are the class examples of it,
but you ladies are in the same boat often — but we men, we do things that are outwardly Christian
but our hearts are unchanged and untouched.
We talk about the spirit of God but our hearts are really unaffected by that spirit and we’re moved
by the same things as our brothers in business are moved by. We are moved by the same ambitions, the
same selfishness, often the same greed and often the same defensiveness and certainly the same
jealousy and pride and lust that they are moved by. It’s simply that outwardly we come to church.
Many of us read the Bible; many of us believe the right things. Many of us do believe that God has
forgiven us our sins, but our hearts are really unchanged.
We have odd moments such as perhaps a Mother’s Day, or a Memorial Day or a day when we remember our
dad’s death or some moments when tragedy hits our home or we go to the funeral of someone whom we
care deeply for and then our hearts are a little softened. But on the whole, our hearts remain
untouched and unchanged by God’s spirit and indeed the term ‘spirit’ is strange to us. We regard it
primarily as a kind of an influence or an atmosphere that supposedly we feel at certain times when
Al would sing a song like that or Carmen would sing or someone else would sing or maybe at the end
of a sermon here there’s a certain atmosphere that God seems to bring about among us and we think of
that as God’s spirit but we ourselves are unacquainted with the spirit of God.
Our day-to-day lives are largely uninfluenced by that spirit. Our heart’s movements are what we were
born with as children and they haven’t been changed very much since then. Our hearts really are like
the hearts that are described in this little tract that has been on this table for some Sundays.
“Are you ever conscious of a secret spirit of pride, an exalted feeling in view of your success or
position because of your good training or appearance, because of your natural gifts and abilities?
Are you ever conscious of an important, independent spirit? Are you ever conscious of a love of
human praise, a secret fondness to be noticed, a love of supremacy, and a drawing attention to self
in conversation, a swelling out of self when you have had a free time in speaking or praying? Are
you ever conscious of the stirrings of anger or impatience which, worst of all, you call nervousness
or holy indignation; a touchy sensitive spirit, a disposition to resent or to retaliate when
disapproved of or contradicted, a desire to throw sharp heated flings at another?”
Many of us who call ourselves Christians are conscious of those things but of course, we have
encouraged each other for years to believe that that is the normal Christian life.
If you read the classics written by Plato and Socrates, you would find that that isn’t even a normal
life for heathen philosophers. Even they taught that there should be enough control over our inner
heart attitudes that we would not feel those things. But certainly the God who has said that he
desires truth in the inward part, the God who has said that the fruit of the Spirit is love and joy
and peace and long suffering and gentleness, goodness, the God who has said that strife and jealousy
and pride do not belong to the kingdom of God, he certainly says there is no place for these things
in our hearts, but loved ones, we have got used to these things, you see?
We have got used to these things and these are the things that bring tragedy to our homes, you know
they are. None of us have murdered anybody. Few of us here steal, few of us here probably even
swear, few of us here probably drink to excess. In fact, we are among the noblest of sinners. We’re
moral people, probably most of us here are outwardly very respectable people and yet we know that in
our relationships at home, in our relationships with those who are closest to us, we are monsters.
All domestic strife comes from hearts that are not clean and pure, they do.
Actually even your outward feelings come from that. Why do you resent people? Because they are not
giving you the praise that you think you deserve or because someone else is getting praise that you
don’t think they deserve as much as you do. That’s why you get resentful about people. That’s why we
get all kinds of complexes about people, because they’re not giving us what we believe we ought to
have. Why do you lose your temper? Because of the stirrings of anger, that’s why. You can’t hold the
thing down, it just bursts out, you can’t control it. It’s because your heart is rising up.
That’s the explanation you remember, in Romans 7, “I do not understand my own actions because when I
want to do good, I cannot. The good that I would I cannot do, and the evil I hate is the very thing
I do.” That is, you set your will to do good but there rises up from inside you, something that you
can’t control and that bursts out upon the other person. You know the illustration that we’ve shared
before.
Well, you go home at night, husbands, wives; we’re all in the same boat. We go home at night and we
are determined that this will be a beautiful evening. We are determined that this will be a blessed
evening for our partners. We are going to make them happy tonight and then she cooks the wrong meal
or it’s late or it’s a little burned or he is a little late or he doesn’t say the right thing to us
and there bursts out from our innermost hearts, attitudes and feelings that we didn’t believe
existed within us and the end of the evening is worse than the beginning. It ends up in a disaster
area. It ends up in a full-scale battle. That’s what this is about.
It doesn’t matter how good you are outwardly. If your heart is not changed, if your heart is not
cleansed, you won’t be able to live as you want to live and that was the problem with the Jews. You
understand that Romans 7 is a Jew talking, he’s a loved one from the Hebrews that is saying, “I am
under the law, I cannot do the thing that I want to do. I cannot do it because there is something
inside me that won’t let me”, and loved ones, so many of us are Christian in name only. We really
are Jewish. We live under the old covenant — trying to obey outwardly but unable to do it because
this monstrosity within us keeps rising up.
“Are you ever conscious of self-will, a stubborn un-teachable spirit, an arguing talkative spirit,
harsh sarcastic expressions, an unyielding headstrong disposition, a driving commanding spirit, a
disposition to criticize and pick flaws when set aside and unnoticed, a peevish fretful spirit, a
disposition that loves to be coaxed and humored?”
I don’t know about you men or you ladies, but when the other person feels you don’t understand
them, it’s usually because of this stuff. It’s because our hearts are not tender. The problem is not
in the sarcastic expression, there’s enough problem in that, but the problem is not in the sarcastic
expression. It’s the absolute indifference and cynical, almost hatred for the other person that
produces the sarcastic expression. Your friends, your children, your husbands, your wives — it’s
not the outward word that cuts them — it’s what it says to them about your inward heart, that’s
what cuts them.
No, they’re no sillier than you are, they can interpret outward things but it’s the heart that it
comes from, that’s what’s wrong. That’s why you see at times you can say something that isn’t right,
but it isn’t so cutting because it doesn’t come from your heart. It’s a mistake. It’s something you
didn’t intend to say but it’s the things that come from your heart that cut into another person’s
heart.
For some of us who are at work in business: “Are you ever conscious of a carnal fear? A man-fearing
spirit, a shrinking from reproach and duty, a reasoning around your cross, a shrinking from doing
your whole duty by those of wealth or position, be it your boss or someone else, are you ever
conscious of a fearfulness that someone will offend and drive some prominent person away? Are you
ever conscious of a compromising spirit?”
“Are you ever conscious of a jealous disposition, a secret spirit of envy shut up in your heart, an
unpleasant sensation in view of the great prosperity and success of another, a disposition to speak
of the faults and failings rather than the gifts and virtues of those more talented and appreciated
than yourself? Are you ever conscious of a dishonest, deceitful disposition?”
“The evading and covering of the truth; the covering up of your real faults, leaving a better
impression of yourself than is strictly true, false humility, exaggeration, straining the truth.”
Those are all the things that come from a heart that is not really at peace with God. It’s a heart
that is not really content to receive all it needs from God. It’s a heart that is expecting things
from other people, that’s it.
The real reason why your heart and mine are not filled with the Holy Spirit is because you and I
still look to other people or other things and we expect things from them, we do loved ones. We’re
wearing each other out, we’re expecting things from each other, we sons and daughters are expecting
things from our parents. We parents are expecting things from our children. We husbands are
expecting things from our wives. We wives are expecting things from our husbands. We friends are
expecting things from each other.
We are looking to each other for all kinds of things that we cannot supply each other with and only
God, our Father can supply us with all that we need. And every time we 1ook to each other for these
things, there’s a spirit of dissatisfaction and discontentment that takes hold of us and makes us
demand more. That’s where this heart comes rising up; we demand more from the other person and the
other poor soul is already worn out and already feels that you are demanding too much from them. But
we demand more and more and that’s what fills a home with demand, demand, demand, and no offer,
offer, offer. That’s what fills a home with empty hearts that are desiring love, love, love and
there’s short supply of love. It’s because we’re expecting things from each other and so our hearts
become filled with all kinds of dissatisfactions, all kinds of uncleanness, and all kinds of
resentment against other people.
Loved ones, there is a way to be free from that. Jesus looked down at the disciples from whom I
think you’ll agree he had a right to expect loyalty. He looked down at his mom from whom he probably
had a right to expect understanding of what he was trying to do in his life, especially at that
moment of death. And he looked down at the crowds who had come and gathered around him when he was
healing and had thrown down palm branches in front of him as he came into Jerusalem. And he saw all
of them with blank looks on their faces, maybe worry and anxiety and despair but not primarily about
him but primarily about themselves and what was going to happen afterwards and yet, he died in
absolute peace because he had, once and for all, died to what they could give him.
He had died to expecting anything from them and he had looked up to his Father for everything that
he needed so that — who of us can imagine what it was like in his own dear heart on the Cross? I
mean it’s impossible but it was certainly desolate and lonely and yet he was absolutely content that
his Father was looking upon him and loving him and was going to give him all that he needed.
Loved ones, that’s the place of peace for you and me. And God is able to change your heart so that
your heart becomes like Jesus’ heart but he does ask you to join his son on the cross. Now could I
just point out to you in a very commonsensical, practical way that every one of you has seen anybody
die, know fine well that you, and each one of us here, will come to a time in our lives when it
won’t matter who knows us. It won’t matter how many of us are outside your bedroom, it won’t. It
won’t matter how many nurses are gathered around you and putting all kinds of tubes into you to try
to keep you alive. It won’t matter if your pastor is by your side, it won’t matter if your dearest
mother or your husband is holding your hand. There will come a time loved ones. We need to face this
firmly.
There’ll come a time in your life when you are on your own truly and you actually know it
yourselves. You have seen dads or moms die. You know there comes a moment when it doesn’t matter how
close everybody else seems to you, you are on your own. So do you see what I am saying? There’s
going to come a time when you can look only to God, that actually all of us are limited in what we
can do for you anyway, that if you get anything from any of us during this lifetime, it’s purely
temporarily and actually it ill-fits you for the great moment in your life — which is the moment
when you enter into true life?
In other words, will you not die today and enter into reality? That’s it. Will you not die today to
the world and to your husband and your wife and to your friends and to living in dependence upon
them and living in expectancy of what they can give you and expecting them to give you love and
expecting them to give you care and thoughtfulness. They may do it and they may not but if you die
to that with Jesus, today, then you’re free, free from what they can give you and free from what
they fail to give you. And you’ll find that instead of your heart rising up in resentment, your
heart will experience a strange new spirit, because that’s the amazing truth.
If you will take your place with Jesus, which sooner or later you will have to take, sooner or later
you’re going to face that moment when you’ve got only God. If you will take your place with Jesus
today on the cross and will at last give up looking to people and to others for what God alone can
give you in the way of love and attention and affection and care and protection, God will send the
spirit of his son Jesus into your heart, into your innermost heart and you will experience a new
freshness coming into you.
You’ll sense there is something beautiful inside you that wasn’t there before. You’ll sense a
tenderness in your heart. You’ll sense actually a peace and a contentment and a satisfaction in your
heart but most of all, you’ll sense a love for all of the rest of us. You’ll sense a new love for
your father and your mother, for your friends. You’ll sense something beautiful coming out from
inside you. It’s a miracle. That’s God’s Spirit.
That’s what he gives, that’s what those converts in the lesson that was read for us, did not have.
They had been baptized in John’s baptism, but they had never received the Holy Spirit. Many of us
have been baptized into a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of our sins but we have never
had any experience of the beautiful and fragrant spirit of Jesus coming in and cleansing and filling
our hearts.
Loved ones, that’s what becoming a Christian is. But it does mean that we have to stop depending
upon each other for all this attention and all this affection. We have to stop insisting on the
rights that we have to this person’s friendship or this person’s attention or this person’s love or
this person’s care and it’s amazing when you enter into that death and God sends the spirit of his
son’s heart into your heart, suddenly you discover the love in everybody else, it’s amazing.
Suddenly you’re amazed that people care about you. You’re amazed that people do love you that much
because the little bit that they’re able to love you, seems great to you because you already have
this sense of love from your Father.
I don’t know where you are, you know in all this but I would encourage you to see that today, that
spirit can change your heart if you are willing to die to demanding things from the rest of us. If
you’re willing to look to God as your God instead of looking to all of us, if you will do that, your
Father will give you a great assurance of his love for you and he’ll give you a great sense and
heart feeling of his love for others. Needless to say to the husbands and wives, we know above
everybody else don’t we? We have to have something like this, you have to, otherwise we are
finished, we know it.
Marriage deteriorates badly unless there is this kind of love. It’s divine love, I suppose that’s
all you can call it but unless you have this kind of divine love, you’re tearing each other apart
after four years and you’ve torn each other apart after ten years and you have buried each other
after fifteen years, it just does not work. But the fact is it’s the same with all of life, the only
way it will work, is by us receiving this spirit and allowing our hearts to be changed. Let us pray.
Father, we know our own hearts, we know that we have been outwardly Christian and many people regard
us as Christian except that our hearts aren’t converted and our hearts aren’t born again, our hearts
haven’t received your spirit, our hearts haven’t been filled with your spirit. We find that our
wills are often set towards you but our heart rises up and contradicts our will. Father, we ask you
to look down upon us now, each one of us, and deal with us now individually and reveal to each of us
what dying with Jesus to other people and to other things means for us today.
Show us Father, where our hearts are filled with impurity and resentment because of wrong attitudes
to you, because of looking to people or to things for the things that we ought to trust you alone
for. Father we ask you to give us light this day and then Lord, we come to you now, we know this is
right, we know these things are true that witnesses with us deep down that this is reality. We see
clearly that sooner or later in our life, we will come to this point so Father, we now look to you
and we want to thank you for everything you’ve given us and Father we want to acknowledge you now as
our God, as the supplier of all that we need.
We want to tell you that we believe you that you will supply every need of ours from your riches in
glory in Christ Jesus. We want to tell you Father, that what love you don’t give us, we’re content
to be without, what possessions you withhold from us, we are content to lack, what affection and
attention and approval and praise you decide to give us, we are content to receive. Lord, we give
ourselves now to you and we tell you that you are our God and we will look to you now. And Lord
Jesus, we thank you that you did include us in yourself on Calvary and we accept that position Lord
in you on Calvary, dead to what our mothers think, dead to what our friends think, dead to what all
the people around this cross on which we are, can give us. And Lord Jesus, we thank you that you
have taken us into yourself and Savior, we ask you to fill our hearts now with your own spirit, with
your own attitude to things.