Romans

What about Mysticism?Sermon Transcript by Rev. Ernest O’NeillWe may not all have the genius of old Einstein, but most of us really are bright enough to perceive that such an ordered and carefully designed universe must have a first cause; so most of us do not have trouble with the existence of God. We can agree with Einstein. He says this, “My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble minds. That deeply emotional conviction of the presence of a superior reasoning power which is revealed in the incomprehensible universe forms my idea of God.” And most of us would at least go that far. And we would agree that our problem is not, “Is there a God?” But our real problem is to have an idea of what he thinks about us personally. And that’s the important thing. And I think most of us are in that position this morning.There may be some real atheist here, though it’s very difficult to logically hold to a position of pure atheism, but there maybe some atheist and there may be a few agnostics who say, “Well, I don’t know,” and who haven’t caught up with Einstein’s own conclusions yet. But I think most of us probably would be in the position where we say, “Yes, that isn’t a great difficulty to us. We believe there is a God. But what is his attitude to us?” And that’s why really, those lovely summer afternoons during our early teens were so good, where school would be out, and you’d lie beside the lake. And you’d feel the water lapping there, and you’d hear the hum of the old bees and the crickets. And you’d just lie there with the sun beaming down on you, and it really would seem that just all was right with the world. And you’d just daydream and feel there wasn’t a worry in the world. And you hadn’t things like loans to think about or futures to think about, and it was just beautiful. And really what was most enjoyable about that experience was you felt, “In some way I’m touching near the heart of the universe. There’s some peace here; there’s some contentment here; and somehow I’m getting deep down near the heart of things.”Now that’s the way most mystics try to contact God. That’s the way most mystics try to feel that God is satisfied with them and that they’re right with God. They do it through that attempt to sense a oneness between themselves and the whole world of nature. And old Wordsworth would go out onto the lakes in England and would say, “And I have felt a presence that disturbs me with the joy of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime of something far more deeply interfused, whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, and blue sky, and the round earth, and in the mind of man; a spirit that impels all thinking things, all objects of all thought, and rolls through all things.” And nature mystics would try to feel that they were right with the Creator of the universe through that kind of almost cosmic identification of themselves with the life force in nature. And that’s one way of doing it.There are other kind of psychic mystics who would try to work primarily on their intellects rather than on their physical perception of their oneness with the world. And they would work on their intellects and either by drugs, or by hypnotism, or simply by the power of meditation would try to raise their intellectual perception to the nth degree, to the point where they would experience phenomena that would seem supernatural and would give them a sense of something supernatural. And old Coleridge was one of that kind of person really. He was an English poet and you remember he wrote a poem called “Kubla Khan.” And then you remember, he finished it and he said, “We’ve a circle round him thrice and close your eyes with holy dread for he on honeydew have fed and drunk the milk of paradise.” And we feel that Coleridge was trying it through drugs of some kind and he was reallytalking in honeydew about drugs.And either with drugs, or with hypnotism, or with meditation there are many kind of psychic mystics who work primarily on their powers of their mind to make themselves feel right with the being that is behind the universe.There are others really who do it primarily on an emotional level. There are people who try to give significance and a sense of eternity to the ordinary everyday things of life. And they try in that way, to emotionally feel that they are really eternal. Most of us I think look down on that glorified attitude to war that they had to the First World War, but I think a lot of people still do it with death. They try to raise either patriotism or death itself to such a high level that you persuade yourself emotionally that you feel a contact with the eternal behind the universe. And old Brooke was an air force pilot really in the First World War and he used this kind of way to express it. And we are very skeptical of it now with the mess in Vietnam. But I think a lot of people still treat death like this. He said,“If I should die, think only this of me; That there’s some corner of a foreign field That is for ever England. There shall be In that rich earth a richer dust concealed; A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware, Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam, A body of England’s breathing English air, Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.And think, this heart, all evil shed away, A pulse in the eternal mind, no less Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given; Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day; And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness, In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.And I think a lot of people try to attribute that kind of meaning to their own body and to death itself. And they try to feel emotionally, “Yes, wherever I go, wherever my body goes somewhere I’ll have contact with the great being behind the universe.” And you can see that whether they’re psychic mystics, or physical mystics, or emotional mystics, or intellectual mystics, or whether they’re spiritist mystics who try to contact indiscriminately the spiritual world that undoubtedly exists behind our world — whatever kind of mystic they are, they try to find out what the great being behind the universe thinks of them by feeling it in their own experience.There are of course two great difficulties with it: One is this, can you be sure that the feeling of harmony that you have in your own mind and emotions really represents some objective reality as far as the great being behind the universe is concerned? That’s the great problem with mysticism. Can you be sure that your inward subjective experience is saying anything at all about what is really out there? Maybe it is a great roaring tyrant that hates you and is determined to destroy you. Maybe your experience is not reliable.And we know it isn’t. You watch a ship going over the horizon and you know it is getting smaller. But, it’s not. It’s not getting smaller. But, it looks to you as if it’s getting smaller. Andrepeatedly we have seen that our own personal experience is not a reliable record of what is happening in objective reality. That’s one of the difficulties of mysticism, brothers and sisters. It’s one of the difficulties of laying total emphasis on your personal experience of what you think the attitude of the author of the universe is to you.The other difficulty is this: that all of us have found the bees stop humming; the crickets stop clicking; and school starts again, and winter comes; and the kind of feeling doesn’t last forever. And even the old drug doesn’t last forever. And we’ve found that the experience of harmony and integration that we sense at that time does not last. There are times when it disappears completely, and we’re back in the midst of anxiety, and depression, and fear, and worry. Now those are two of the great difficulties with trying to contact the author of the universe through just a mystical personal experience.Now it was never God’s will. It was never God’s will that we should wander about in such uncertainty about his attitude to us. It was never his desire that we should wander up and down the labyrinths of mystical experience trying to feel him present. God did not condemn us to that. And that really, brothers and sisters, is the tremendous difference there is between a kind of mystical experience and really the kind of Christian experience. That one has certainty and the other is bound with uncertainty.Here’s what God in fact did instead, he allowed his Son to live among us for 35 years; that is, in an ordinary physical body that we could touch, that we could poke our fingers into and see it was there. He allowed his Son to live among us for 35 years and he testified that it was his Son. And other people who were enemies of this man even testified the same thing.Now maybe you’d look at the historical record of that just before we go on. Its Matthew 3:17. And it’s this kind of down to earth fact that is the basis of our belief about God’s attitude to us. It isn’t just what we feel, but it is that this man actually lived on our earth for 35 years, and that we have historical records showing that. And the fact that he was God’s Son is testified to by God himself. Matthew 3:17, “And lo, a voice from heaven, saying, ‘This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.’” And you remember, I think it’s in Peter, that that was said again by God. And Peter points out that they actually heard that. And there was another occasion you see on which this voice was heard from heaven at his baptism, at Jesus’ baptism, and then on another occasion on a mountain top. And there you have it in 2 Peter 1:16, “For we did not follow cleverly devised myths when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty. For when he received honor and glory from God the Father and the voice was borne to him by the Majestic Glory, ‘This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased,’ we heard this voice born from heaven, for we were with him on the holy mountain.”So first of all, God allowed his Son to live among us and testified that this was his Son. Even enemies testified that he was God’s Son. If you’d like to look at Matthew 27:54, you see that even the man that was used by the government, the Roman government to destroy Jesus thought the same thing. “When the centurion and those who were with him, keeping watch over Jesus, saw the earthquake and what took place, they were filled with awe, and said, ‘Truly this was the Son of God!’” Now God didn’t only allow this man to live among us for 35 years but he allowed him to tell us that when he died he was going to give his life for you and me, and that actually he was going to take back his life again, and he wasn’t going to lose it forever. And God allowed this man to do this so that you and I would know that he was not just bluffing.It’s very easy for me to say to you, “Look, I’m going to make everything right between you and your Creator. I’m going to bear the penalty for all your sins, that’s what I’m going to die for.” And I die and you never see me again. Well, big deal I could be right I could be wrong; you can’t tell. But if I come back, if I say to you, “Look I’m going to give my life to my Father your Creator for your sins, and he’s going to give me that life right back.’” Then it will be easier to believe the first promise if the second is true, won’t it? It will be easier to believe that he actually did give his life for your sins and he made things right between you and his Father, if he actually makes the second promise come true. And this you remember, is what Jesus did.It’s John 10:17-18 where he made the statement. Maybe it would be good to look just at John 10:11 first, where he states the reason for his death. John 10:11, that he is not just a political victim of the Jewish/Roman feud. “I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.” And he states plainly that that’s why he’s dying. Then 17-18 if you look at it, “For this reason the Father loves me, because I lay down my life, that I may take it again. No one takes it from me.” “I’m not dying by sheer political chance here”. “No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again; this charge I have received from my Father.”Now that’s all illusion unless he actually came back from the dead and this in fact, is what he did. In 1 Corinthians 15, you see it there. 1 Corinthians 15:3-6, and Paul is repeating what he obviously observed, “For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received, that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. Then he appeared to more than five hundred brethren at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep.”Now God allowed that to happen. He allowed his Son to live among us, he identified him as his Son, he allowed him to give his life and say that he was giving it for our sins to make things right between us and his Creator, and then he returned again over a period of 40 days. Now that’s the basis of our belief that God is rightly related to us and that God approves of us, and accepts us. It’s not mystical experience. It’s really what is stated there in Romans 4:22 and it’s the verse that really we’d study this morning. Romans 4:22, “That is why his faith was ‘reckoned to him as righteousness.’ But the words, ‘it was reckoned to him,’ were written not for his sake alone, but for ours also. It will be reckoned to us who believe in him that raised from the dead Jesus our Lord.” Now the ‘it’ is faith. Faith will be reckoned to us as righteousness. We will be made right with our Creator if we believe in him that raised from the dead Jesus our Lord and that’s the basis of our sense that we are right with God and that’s the difference between it and mystical experience. One is faith, the other is sight.Now it might be good to look at the verse before we elaborate it. It’s 2 Corinthians 5:7. And this is the distinction really between a Christian’s assurance that his Creator accepts him and a mystic’s assurance. “For we walk by faith, not by sight.” And God is so anxious to preserve that in each one of us who have entered into that relationship with him that he often tests us with it. He often tests to see if we’re walking by faith or by sight. The mystic walks by sight, “And I have felt a presence that disturbs me with the joy of elevated thoughts.” And when I cease to feel it, I then, am uncertain of what the Creator really thinks of me. And the person who is under drugs and has a psychic experience that seems to him like a spiritual experience, when the drugs go he ceases to feel it. He ceases to be sure whether he’s right or not. He walks by sight. He walks by the sight of his feelings, the sight of his mind, the sight of his body.But we walk by faith. We believe that this historical fact is true; we believe that this Jesus actually did make things right when he went to his Father, and we believe therefore, that his Father accepts us. And it is by faith and not by sight. Now because it’s by faith, God goes to a great deal of trouble to make sure that we continue in faith and so many of us have found, when we first came to believe that Jesus had made things right between us and God, we found a great peace coming into our hearts; just an incomprehensible peace and contentment that filled our hearts. And we really felt, “My God I am thine, what a comfort divine, what a blessing to know that my Jesus is mine.” And we just sensed the joy of being God’s. And then God withdrew the joy from us to check if we were walking in a mystical experience of sight, or in a real Christian experience of faith. And of course, many of us in those early days, started to look around for our feeling. Where’s the joy gone? And really what God was trying to do was to see if we were walking by faith or by sight, whether we were walking by that great feeling of peace we had or that great feeling of contentment we had, and whether we were laying emphasis on that, or whether we were simply believing, “God is satisfied with the blood of his Son, so things are right between me and him.”And so God often does that. At the beginning, you remember, God really makes things go very well. Really, everything goes very prosperously for the first few months when you really believe that God loves you and accepts you as his own. And then God allows you to begin to come into some lack of prosperity, and some obstacles, and some difficulties to see if you are walking by faith or walking by sight. And so repeatedly he will do this. He will do it with your physical circumstances. He’ll allow them to become problematical to you, to see am I walking by faith or am I walking by sight? Because it’s so easy brothers and sisters, to suddenly change the ground of your justification, you see; to look in and see the things that God has wrought in your experience and actually to sink into a mystical experience.Now do you see that we believe things are right between us and God because Jesus has died for us, because it’s a historical fact? Romans 5:9, we are justified by the blood of his Son. God has said, “When I see the life of Jesus presented to me on your behalf I regard you as right with me.” That’s it. Many of us you see try to look at the blood of Jesus and feel its value. So in prayer times we’ll go before God and then we’ll look in and see, “Do I feel right with God? Do I feel his presence in my heart?” You can’t feel the blood of Jesus. You can’t feel the value of the blood of Jesus. You appreciate the value of Jesus’ life by saying, “God regards it as paying for the sins of the whole world so I’m going to look at it that way too.”It’s an objective reality that you look out to. And brothers and sisters, there’s a great deliverance from a welter of subjective mysticism when a person really plants their feet firmly on the fact of belief that the blood of Jesus satisfies our Father. There’s just a great deliverance from that subjective world of, “Do I feel the same as I felt yesterday?” And we go before God and we say, “Do I feel his presence? No. I have to feel his presence. Now, let me try to feel his presence.” And you start trying to feel his presence and you don’t feel his presence so you say, “Ah, there must be some sin in my life because I don’t feel his presence.”Do you see brothers and sisters that God has delivered us from mysticism? He has delivered us from looking into our feelings, or looking into our minds, or looking into our bodies, or looking into our spirits to see whether we’re right with him. We go by faith. Is it raining outside? Well, I mean it’s just corny, for Dave to say, “Well, I feel a twinge of arthritis. Yeah, I think it might be.” Or, for someone in the third row to say, “Yeah, I think I remember it was. No, it wasn’t raining. No.” Or, for all of us to strain our ears and to try and hear a vague sound of rainthrough the roof. The easiest thing is for me to say, “Jack, go out and see if it’s raining, come back and tell us.”Now that’s what Jesus has done, you see. He’s gone right out and come back and said, “Things are okay, and my Father loves you.” And it’s just all the difference in the world. It’s all the difference in the world between accepting that, and trying to ‘feel’ it by producing a mystical experience inside of you.And what do we do? Well really God has made it plain: you just admit any things that are wrong in your life; you stop doing them; and you accept that God has paid for those with Jesus’ blood, and that he accepts you as his own children. And when you kind of feel that maybe you’re not his child, you throw the feelings away and you say, “No, Romans 5:9 ‘I am justified by the blood of his Son; my faith will be reckoned to ‘me’ who believe in Jesus who was raised from the dead.” But it’s faith, dear ones. It’s faith in the fact. Let the feeling take care of itself.But do you see the importance? Brothers and sisters it seems it takes us so long to learn not to keep looking inside ourselves to see if we’re right with God. That’s not the basis of it. It’s not by sight but by faith. We don’t ask ourselves, “Do I feel right with God? Do I feel part of the universe? Do I feel part of nature?” No, Jesus has gone outside, has come in and told us, “The clouds have gone. The sun of my Father’s love is shining on you and he regards you as his children if you simply believe in me and begin to submit yourself to me.” And that’s it and it is really such a deliverance.So, I don’t know if some of you are wrapped up in the old mystical trip. I think most of us were at some time. I certainly was involved in it at one time. And I think it’s very hard at the beginning to disregard that inner mystical experience. But do you see that that’s the basis of a right relationship with God. Not looking inward mystically but looking out at what Jesus has done with his Father, and believing that. And sometimes that’s believing just ‘cold turkey’, just believing ‘dead cold’. Nothing! Nothing else! No feeling! Just believing!But then you begin to find, as you concentrate on the fact, that your faith grows and then the feeling comes up after it. But when you concentrate on the feeling, and when the feeling goes, then the faith is undermined, and then the fact seems vague and uncertain. But really when it’s Fact and Faith and Feeling, [emphasizing the order] then it is really a life of continuous assurance and complete confidence that the universe is friendly, and that the Creator really loves us. And that’s a good way to live, a good way to fly. I pray that God will show you it.Let us pray.Father, we would really pray for our brothers and sisters here this morning who may be involved either as Christians, or as unbelievers in some kind of mysticism. Father, we would trust you now to give them revelation. Not crudely to identify their experience with the one described this morning, but rather that they will go to you and will receive revelation about their experience. And Father, if any of them are up and down day after day because they’re looking in to their feelings instead of looking out to the fact that Jesus has made things right with you, then we would trust you to deliver them from that and bring them into this clear, open, sunlit upland where you walk in constant assurance that you are our Father, and that you love us, and that you have no doubt that you can accept us.Father, we thank you for that. We trust you to bring every one of us into an assurance of that situation for Jesus’ glory. Amen.

Righteousness through Faith or LawSermon Transcript by Rev. Ernest O’NeillWould you imagine that you had a friend whose father owned a service station and you’d known the friend for years but you never met his father. And your friend got a scholarship to an out-of-state college, and before he left he introduced you to his father explaining that it would be good, since you were just starting out on your own job life, you could get your car serviced there. And you could open an account with his dad at the service station.And so you did that but you were just starting out on your own job life and it was the first time you had had your own money to manage for yourself, and so you began to find those old difficulties. You over scraped yourself financially, and you were always intending to pay that account that you had at the service station. But week would go by, and week would go by, and you’d keep getting gas and oil at the service station, yet you wouldn’t pay the monthly account. And they’d just pile up in your apartment.And more and more you’d feel worse and worse about your relationship with your friend’s dad. This was a man that you didn’t want to be alienated from, you wanted to have a good relationship with him for the sake of your friend but really, you got more and more concerned and more and more embarrassed when you went to the station each day for gas. Until eventually you decided the easiest thing is to avoid the problem all together. And you just stopped going. And the whole thing lies heavily on your conscience because you’ve a massive bill there and yet you couldn’t do anything about it.And then the summertime came and your friend came home from school. And you explained the whole miserable story to him. And he said, “That’s okay I’ll make it right with my dad.” And you said to him, “No, no I’ve just blown the whole thing. I’ve just spoiled the whole relationship completely.”But the next day your friend came to see you and he said, “Its okay, everything is alright. I’ve made things right with my dad. You can go back and you can get your gas there.”And you were hesitant at the beginning. You didn’t feel really that anything could have made that mess right, the bills were so big and yet two or three days later you decided, “Well, I’ll go back and I’ll get my gas there.” And you drove into the station and the dad came out and he saw you and he said, “Really good to see you. Really good to see you. Boy, for a while I didn’t know what to think of you, but my son, he paid all your bills, and if my son trusts you that much then I trust you. Now I hope you’ll come back and get all you want here.” And suddenly the whole thing is right.Now, do you see that you had only confidence to come back to the service station because you really believed what your friend said? You believed that he had made everything right even though it had seemed impossible for anybody to make it right. You believed that he had made things right with his father.Now do you see it’s the same with us? It’s the same with us. You are right with the Creator of the world when you believe what Jesus has said. And Jesus has said, “Listen, I have made things right. I’ve made things right with my Father and you can go to him and get all that you need from him and you need not fear.”And brothers and sisters, that’s what we mean by saying that a person is made right with God by faith. Simply that by believing, by having faith that Jesus has actually made everything right with your Father, everything is right, and then going to your Father with complete confidence and receiving from him whatever you need.Now that’s being justified by faith. And the kind of faith, you remember — it’s described, if you’d like to look at it there in Romans 4:18. We’ve been talking about it over a couple of months anyway, but Romans 4:18 describes it. It’s the kind of faith that old Abraham had in God. “In hope he believed against hope, that he should become the father of many nations; as he had been told, ‘So shall your descendants be.’ He did not weaken in faith when he considered his own body, which was as good as dead because he was about a hundred years old, or when he considered the barrenness of Sarah’s womb. No distrust made him waver concerning the promise of God, but he grew strong in his faith as he gave glory to God, fully convinced that God was able to do what he had promised. That is why his faith was ‘reckoned to him as righteousness.’” And that’s that 4:22: just he believes that God would rejuvenate Sarah’s body and would enable her, even though she was 90 years of age to have a baby; just the way we would go to the service station. And even though everything seemed impossible, and it seemed impossible that this man should deal with us at all generously, yet we would go back in complete confidence that the son had made everything right with the father. And we would go expecting to receive. So old Abraham went to God expecting him to rejuvenate Sarah’s body and to give life to the old dead body.Now do you see that the problem was not Abraham’s inability to believe that God could do it? That was no problem. Abraham knew that God was the one who raised people from the dead. He knew that God was the one that stretched the galaxy and the stars across the heavens. He knew that God could do it. Abraham’s difficulty was ‘would’ God do it? Would God give supernatural uncreated life to his wife? And why didn’t he have any problem believing that? Because he knew that in the old ancient days the old father of mankind Adam had defied God and had refused God’s uncreated life away at the beginning of the world. He knew that Adam had said to God, “No, I’ll live on my own resources and my own way for my own purposes.”And Abraham knew through what his predecessors had told him that because of that God had pulled back this eternal uncreated life from mankind and from any opportunity of him receiving it. And so Abraham knew that that was man’s situation.He remembered, you see, what you and I read in Genesis 3, if you’d like to look at it. Genesis 3:24, Abraham knew that this would happen. That mankind had defied God and had said we’ll do without your life and because of that God had withdrawn his life from them as it says in Genesis 3:24, “He drove out the man; and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed the cherubim, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to guard the way to the tree of life.” And old Abraham knew that.He knew that there was no reason on earth why this man should extend anymore credit to him. He knew there was no reason on earth why this Creator should give him uncreated life, why he should turn back the process of death in his wife’s womb, because he along with all the rest had defied God.Abraham knew the stories of the flood. He knew how God had proved to man again and again, “Look, I’m finished with you.” God had mowed them all down in the flood and had said, “Look, you’ve defied me! I am not giving you eternal life! Look at this life that is dying now in the midst of theflood. This isn’t eternal uncreated life, this is dying life.” And Abraham knew that. He knew the great judgments of God that had come upon mankind by which God had impressed upon man again and again, “Look, the life you have is not uncreated spiritual life that can turn a woman’s womb of 90 into a womb of 35. It isn’t that kind of life that you have. It’s a death life that you have now because you’ve defied me.”And yet you see, Abraham was faced with one problem and you might like to look at it. It’s in Genesis 6:17. You see this is the way God treated mankind after they defied him. And Abraham knew that, “For behold, I will bring a flood of waters upon the earth, to destroy all flesh in which is the breath of life from under heaven; everything that is on the earth shall die.” But this is what baffled Abraham, Verse 18, “But I will establish my covenant with you.” And God was speaking to Noah, “And you shall come into the ark, you, your sons, your wife, and your sons’ wives with you.” And Abraham was faced with the problem that God hadn’t destroyed Noah.And dear ones, I don’t know how Abraham knew it because there was no cross raised on Calvary at that time. But somehow Abraham knew that there had been a lamb slain from the foundation of the world in place of Noah and because of that lamb that had been slain from the foundation of the world, instead of Noah, God had been able to give his life to those people who believed that. And it was because Abraham grasped that through the revelation of the Holy Spirit in his spirit that someone had already died in his place and that God was therefore free to make available his life to any man that believes that; it was because of that that Abraham was able to believe that God would rejuvenate Sarah his wife.Do you see that that’s what is needed by us? Do you see there are thousands of us in this world who feel alienated from the being behind the universe and feel alienated from each other? And so many of us are trying to remove this sense of alienation by proving that we’re good, or proving that it’s worth God’s while by giving us all the things that we need, or proving that it’s other people’s worthwhile. It’s worth their while to give us the respect that we ought to have.But do you see that that’s why Christianity has turned out so many moral do-gooders?There are so many people trying to prove, “Look, we’re good enough to receive your life, God. We’re good enough. We’re good enough.” Do you see that it’s not a matter of being good enough; it’s believing that some son has made things right between you and his father. It’s believing that some Son has died for the things, the defiance that you have shown to God and because that Son has died for that, that the Father no longer treats you as a rebel. He no longer treats you as somebody who is defiant; he treats you as somebody that he has no reason to withhold his life from.You see this morning loved ones, the Father is bending over you and me and saying, “Look my children, I really love you. I know you’ve done things that should make me condemn you to death, but don’t you see that my Son has died that death for you and I have no reason to withhold anything that you need from you. I’m willing to give you anything you need.” And you see, we’re sort of crouching down and saying, “But I’m not good enough.” But do you see that Abraham wasn’t good enough? Abraham continued in dishonest ways even after God dealt with him but Abraham did believe that there had been a lamb slain from the foundation of the world who had died in his place and had made it possible for God to remain a just God and yet forgive people who had rebelled against him. And that’s our situation. And there are thousands of voices from our parents up through our school teachers, to our professors at university. Everybody is trying to say the same thing, “You’re not good enough. You’re not good enough.”Loved ones, it isn’t a case of being good enough. Do you see that? Christianity isn’t first and foremost a case of being moral and goodie, goodie. Christianity is first and foremost seeing that you deserve death. You don’t deserve a thing from God’s hands, but because his Son has died for you the Father has changed everything. He’s willing to give you anything you want.Now do you see, going back to the service station, that there would have been no relationship between you and your friend’s father if you had not sooner or later gone back to that station for gas? You see that? It was no use you saying, “Oh yeah Tom,” or, John, or whatever his name was, “I believe you’ve made things right with your father; still I’ll deal with Fish Skelly [a different gas station operated by the business ministry].” (That’s the advantage you can do commercials half way through.) It was no use you saying you see, “No, I believe you’ve made things right but I’m not going back to that station.”The only way a relationship was possible between you and the Father was when you actually drove that car back into the station and went there for gas.Now do you see that’s what’s wrong with so many of us? There’s so many of us saying, “Oh, I believe in Jesus. I believe that Jesus has done something that enables his Father to be my friend. I believe that Jesus has done something that enables God to give me anything I need.” But, we never go to him. We never go to him. We keep saying every Sunday, “Yeah, I believe Jesus died so that God could give me the tree of life. I believe that Jesus died so God could give me health. I believe that Jesus died so that God could meet my financial needs.” But, we never go to God for those and so we never have a relationship with him.Now loved ones, being justified by faith is not only believing that something has happened on the cross and Calvary to enable God to be open and generous to you, but it’s a business of trusting God, treating God as a dear loving Father. See, it’s as if God is behind that curtain there and he’s trying to get through to you, and he’s trying to say, “Look, look my hands are open to you,” and you’re saying, “Okay, stay there, stay there. I’ll believe that. I’ll believe that but I’m not going to treat you like that.” Now do you see the Father wants you to treat him as a dear loving Father? Now that means you see that you begin to turn from your own resources. That’s part of being justified by faith that you turn from your own resources.Now, would you look at a record of Abraham’s life that would illustrate it? Genesis 13:2-9, “Now Abram was very rich in cattle, in silver, and in gold. And he journeyed on from the Negeb as far as Bethel, to the place where his tent had been at the beginning, between Bethel and Ai, to the place where he had made an altar at the first; and there Abram called on the name of the Lord. And Lot, who went with Abram, also had flocks and herds and tents, so that the land could not support both of them dwelling together.” That was the problem. “For their possessions were so great that they could not dwell together, and there was strife between the herdsmen of Abram’s cattle and the herdsmen of Lot’s cattle. At that time the Canaanites and the Perizzites dwelt in the land. Then Abram said to Lot, ‘Let there be no strife between you and me, and between your herdsmen and my herdsmen; for we are kinsmen. Is not the whole land before you? Separate yourself from me. If you take the left hand, then I will go to the right; or if you take the right hand, then I will go to the left.’”Now that’s treating God as your loving father. Not grabbing at everything that you can but trusting God to give you what you need. In other words, if you’re really treating God as a dear lovingfather this morning you’ll stop being covetous. You see? You’ll stop grabbing at everything that you can get hold of either in your job or from your roommate. You’ll really believe that this dear loving Father will give you whatever you need and therefore you won’t have any need to grab, and be greedy, and be covetous. And loved ones, then you don’t have to worry about your financial resources.You don’t have to be troubled about, “Will I get this or will he get that?” But you’re willing to do what Abram said, “Okay, you take the best land and I’ll take this land. Okay, you take the stuff to your right; I’ll take the stuff to my left.” But do you see Abraham treated God as a dear loving Father who would give him whatever he needed and that’s being justified by faith.Now loved ones, you see it’s the same with us. It means, turning from our own resources. Okay, so you need energy so you turn from the caffeine. That’s it; you just turn from the caffeine. You don’t have four cups so that you’ll have enough energy for the day; you turn from your own resources and you trust God, your dear loving Father to give you all the energy you need so you don’t need to drink all that coffee to produce all that energy. You don’t need to depend on your own resources. You don’t need to depend on the old tranquilizers for peace. You turn from your own resources.Loved ones, that’s proof that you’re trusting your Father you see. There’s no point in going to Fish Skelly if you really trust your loving Father. If you trust this Son to have made things right with his Father then you’ll go to his service station. Now do you see that going to tranquilizers is going to another service station? And if God is a dear loving Father who will give you whatever you need, then he’ll give you peace when you need it. He’ll give you peace and he expects you to turn from your own resources of peace and to turn to him for his peace.It’s the same with the whole business of sex and lust, you know. Is the Father not able to give us a sense of eternity? Is he not able to give us a sense of exhilaration through his Spirit? Or, does the Father expect us to go to some other service station to get those things? You see, God expects us to show that we trust him as a dear loving father by turning from our own resources for getting exhilaration or getting a sense of eternity and going to him and trusting him for that.And it’s the same with the old heroin, it’s the same for that desire, for that sense of transcendence or going to the eastern religions for that sense of transcendence to try to get away from this creeping pedestrian world. Is the Father not able to give you that sense of transcendence himself through his Spirit?Well, do you see that if you really believe that Jesus has done something that enables your creator to give you whatever you need, you’ll prove that by turning from your own resources and going to his? And you know it means not only turning from your own resources in that way but turning from your own resources as far as defending your own life is concerned. There’s a peace in Abraham’s life that brings it out if you look at Genesis 14:21.In Genesis 14:21, Abraham had just won a battle, you remember. “And the king of Sodom said to Abram, ‘Give me the persons, but take the goods for yourself.’ But Abram said to the king of Sodom, ‘I have sworn to the Lord God Most High, maker of heaven and earth, that I would not take a thread or a sandal-thong or anything that is yours, lest you should say, ‘I have made Abram rich.’ I will take nothing but what the young men have eaten, and the share of the men who went with me; let Aner, Eshcol, and Mamre take their share.” Abram was justified in taking his share of the spoils but do you see when you trust God as your dear loving father you don’t even need to take what is yourright.So you don’t even need to get indignant to defend yourself. You don’t need to get that old indignation when somebody takes advantage of you. You say, “No, I trust my Father to guard me. I trust my Father to defend me.” You don’t need to get angry to ensure they give you the respect that is your due, “No, I trust my Father to give me whatever I need.” You don’t need to get selfish to try to protect yourself in this weird world, you trust the Father to give you whatever you need. You see, it means turning from all your own resources and turning to the Father and trusting him to give you what you need. Not taking anything from anybody else which you can get from him.And then it means doing what Abram did. It means, putting yourself into positions that are only reasonable if God is a dear loving Father. It means that. It means putting yourself into positions and situations that are only reasonable, even half reasonable if God is a dear loving Father who will come through every time. And there’s an instance in Abram’s life. Genesis 12:1-4, “Now the Lord said to Abram, ‘Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and him who curses you I will curse; and by you all the families of the earth shall bless themselves.” That was what God was asking Abraham to trust him for. And Verse 4, “So Abram went, as the Lord had told him; and Lot went with him. Abram was seventy-five years old when he departed from Haran.” And you remember, went out not knowing whither he went.Now do you see, God is asking you and me to go out onto that kind of life? It means committing yourself to a Christian Corps [CCI = Christian Corps International], to something, to some outreach for God. To something that is way beyond anything that your own resources can face, and trusting your God to come through with all that you need. Now that’s what justifying faith is about.Loved ones, it is not – it is not – I have great respect for Bloomington [suburb of Minneapolis where Campus Church was located]. Bloomington is a lovely place, but it is not getting a little house in Bloomington, getting enough life insurance and social security to protect you, and your children, and the dog, and staying there for 50 long years. That is not it. It is trusting the Father. It is going out into situations that are only half reasonable if God is a dear loving Father who will give you whatever you need. That is what it means to be justified by faith, you see.And then God looks down and he sees not a bunch of people singing hymns and saying, “We believe you Lord. We believe you Lord.” But he sees a group of heroes and heroines who are going out into situations that require his supplies and his resources, and require him to prove to all the world that he has nothing against them, and that he will give them whatever they need because of Jesus.Now where do you stand yourself? I think what we need to do is be sensible. If you see some areas of your life this morning where you have been turning to your own resources and therefore where it cannot be said of you, “That’s why his faith was counted to him as righteousness,” then you should say that this morning to God, you see. You should say, “Father, I see I’ve been talking big but I’ve been acting small. So Father, I’m turning from my own resources there from this day on and I’m going to trust you for these resources.” And really, that’s what God wants today.But he doesn’t want a whole lot of high and mighty resolves and beautiful aspirations and holy intentions. He wants us to settle some things with him today. If you’ve been going to the oldcaffeine for energy, more energy to face the day or the old tranquilizers just to “steady my nerves, to steady my nerves,” well then if you’ve been doing that, then go to the Father. If you’ve been trying to defend yourself all the time instead of trusting him to defend you, then God wants you to put a stake in the ground today about that.But you see that’s the kind of faith that is counted as righteousness. That’s the kind of faith that makes us right with God, where you actually go to the right service station and you receive what he is willing to give you. And that’s God’s wish for us. And you’ll find him the same as we found him: he is a dear loving Father and he will give you whatever you need, and he will provide every need of yours. He knows your needs. You know your luxuries, he knows your needs. But he will supply all our needs and really he has nothing against us because of Jesus.So, I really pray that someone, anyway, this morning will begin to see that there’s a higher way to go, and will begin to go that way, and trust God as their Father.

Living by Faith 1Romans 4:18Sermon Transcript by Rev. Ernest O’NeillLet us pray. Lord Jesus, we would offer everything to you and we would offer this next half hour to you and trust you to use it in our minds and in our spirits in a way that will please your Father and will fulfill the purpose for which you have come to earth. We offer all that we are and all that we have to you for your glory knowing that you receive it with gratitude, with love, and with tenderness and will use it all as we offer it out of a pure heart. Amen.I know that we’ve often talked about this before, but have you ever really examined how much of your life and how much of my life is governed by living up to standards? First when we were little our dad and mum said, “You’re a good boy,” or, “You’re a good girl,” according to whether we pleased them or not. And we got used to living up to their standards of what was a good boy and a good girl. And they taught us when we appeared to be eating right and when we appeared to be eating wrong that it was very good to eat with one end of the spoon and very bad to eat with the other end.And right from the very beginning of our lives, we’ve been encouraged to live up to standards. And our parents, as we grew up, began to have other standards such as the kind of education we should get, and the kind of jobs we should get. And then later on, all the mums, the kind of people we should marry. And right through our relationship with our parents, much of it was dominated by our attempt to live up to their standards. And many of us who get married have real trouble in our marriages, I think, because we do not really leave father and mother and cleave unto our wives or our husbands. We in fact, keep trying to live up to some of the standards that our parents inculcated in us. And so we live up to the standard of our parents.And then you know that we come into contact with educators, and we begin to be preoccupied with pleasing them. And we come into contact with a professor that we admire a lot, and it isn’t long before we begin to realize we’re running our intellectual lives in order to please him. Or, we want to get a certain grade in school, and much of our eight hour a day work life is concerned with living up to that standard that we’ve received there. And many of us who move into higher education then, start trying to live up to other standards of our fellow faculty members. And many of us fall into the whole trap of ‘publishing or perishing’. And we’re constantly living up to standards.Many of us are dominated by the standards of our peers. You know that, that at school it was very difficult to run your life really independently along the lines of which you thought was right. You know that we again and again wanted to be swingers, or to be cool, or to avoid being squares, or to be thought popular, or to be thought a jock, or to be thought somebody who could do this or could do that. And more and more our lives became dominated by the standards of our peers.And then there are all kinds of religious standards. Some of us begin to get to know God and then we fall into the trap of trying to live up to religious standards. And we decide we’re religious if we speak in tongues; or we decide we’re not very spiritual if we don’t speak in tongues; or we decide we’re religious if this spiritual leader thinks we’re religious. And we begin to be dominated by living up to the standards of other so called ‘spiritual people’. And you get that whole ridiculous invention of Satan, ‘spiritual giants’ and ‘spiritual dwarfs’, when all the timethere is only one ‘spiritual giant’, and all the rest of us are dwarfs. And really, we only partake of any giant because we’re in him.But you can see brothers and sisters that it is incredible how much of our life we live dominated by standards and living up to standards. And I agree with you that some of it is good. Some of it is very good. It is right to have certain standards. But you see that it becomes wrong when that becomes a way of life; when we begin to justify our very existence by the fact that we meet standards of all kinds of people. And you see that that’s what God was concerned about. That’s why many of us have inhibitions, and guilt complexes, and constant neurosis, because God said, “By the works of the law, by living up to standards, no man will ever be justified.” And that’s where this business of living up to standards becomes something satanic you see.Standards are good in themselves. But when they become the very ‘raison d’être’, the ‘reason for our being’, when they become the very purpose of our lives, when they become the dominating and motivating force of everything we do loved ones, that is ungodly. It is anti-god, because God said, “Look, by living up to standards no man will be justified.” And that’s why you see many of us, though we’re constantly living up to certain standards, still we feel guilt and we feel inhibitions. And the reason is that “by living up to standards no man will ever be justified.” And many of us lose a sense of rightness with God, because we fall back into the trap of living by standards. And God said it is impossible you’ll never do it.And you remember that what he did say in fact was that, “You don’t please me by living up to standards. You please me by trusting me.” And you see that’s the real controversy that God has with us. His real controversy with us is not that we’re not good enough, because he knows you can be good independent of him. And so often living up to standards is just another subtle, clever, sophisticated way of living independent of God. And God knows that. That’s why he says, “Living up to standards will never justify you in my sight, because it can just be another way of doing something without me. The controversy that I have with you is not that you’re living up to standards, but that you don’t trust me. The Atlantic Ocean has to trust me; Mars has to trust me; The Mississippi has to trust me; the Milky Way has to trust me. All of them have to trust me. They’d fall apart if they didn’t trust me. But you refuse to trust me.” And that’s the controversy that God has with us, you see.And what we have been looking at the past few Sundays is a man who lived in the year 2,000 BC, who was told by God, even though the man was 100 years of age and his wife Sarah was 90, he was told by God, “You’re going to have a child.” And this man believed God and his belief, or his trust was reckoned to him as righteousness. And that’s the same with us. God says, “Listen, by living up to all your standards you’ll never please me and you’ll never please all the rest of the people anyways because they’re changing their opinions all the time. But if you trust that my son’s death makes you right with me, you’re right with me. That’s it. That’s all you have to do. Just trust that my Son’s death, however little of it you understand, or however much of it you understand, just trust that my Son’s death has made you right with me, and you’re right with me. That’s it! Just trust me, and start living as people who are right with me.” And that’s what God says.And many of us make the mistake in our own lives that we think that that’s a past act of the will instead of a present attitude. You see brothers and sisters, many of us keep thinking that’s a past act of the will, it’s not a present attitude. But do you see that if it’s the trust that makes us right with God, it’s something that has to be continuous day-by-day. In other words it’s not a moment of coming up at a Graham Crusade or some other Crusade and exercising an act of the will andsaying, “I trust, God, that your Son’s death has made me right with you. I trust that. Now that’s it settled, now I’ll get on and live my own life.” It isn’t that.Those who are justified in God’s sight live by this trust in faith day-by-day, and that is how they continue to sense their rightness with God. Now you can see that brothers and sisters if you want to tie it down to one verse in Romans 1:17. God says plainly there that trust is a continuous attitude that we have towards the Father. It’s not a onetime act of will. Romans 1:17, “For in it the righteousness of God is revealed through faith for faith; as it is written, ‘He who through faith is righteous shall live.’” Or, the King James Version reads, “The just shall live by faith.”Now it’s living by trust in God day-by-day that enables him to give us a constant sense of our rightness with him. And what we have been doing these past few Sundays is to talk a little about what it means to live by faith, and what is involved in living by trust in God as our Father. You remember one of the things we saw last Sunday from Abraham’s experience was that if you’re going to live by faith you must reject human hope and you must receive divine hope. You must reject human hope and live by divine hope.Now you can see that in the verse that we will continue to study this morning, but that we began last day, Romans 4:18. God says of Abraham, over this business of the child being born to Sarah at the age of 90, “In hope he believed against hope.” And if you’re going to live by trusting your Creator in your own life, you have to reject human hope and you have to receive divine hope. And you remember we said that human hope is often a vague wishful thinking that something may happen. And it’s usually based on the past record of our human abilities and experiences.That is, if we’ve done it in the past, we think, “Well, I hope I may be able to do it this time. I broke the record last time well I may be able to do it this time.” But human hope is that kind of vague wishful thinking on the basis of our own human abilities and our past record. Now, if you’re going to life by faith in God you have to reject that completely. You have to reject that kind of human hope. Divine hope is a sure and certain expectation that God is going to do something on the basis of his past record and men’s experiences of him. Now that’s a different thing entirely, you see; they are two different worlds. And it’s not just a matter brother and sisters, of human hope being a help to divine hope, human hope is detrimental to divine hope. You see, you can’t exercise both.In other words, you can’t read all the medical journals carefully to find out how many women recover from an operation for breast cancer, and then on the basis of the statistics persuade yourself that you don’t have so much to believe God for in regard to your mother. You see, you can’t read the statistics in order to sort of bolster up your divine hope by a little bit of human hope. You read the statistics and people say to you – I remember it in my own situation when my mum had breast cancer. And I remember the situation where dear ones would say, “Well, you know, most people recover in some way and maybe they recover completely. And then I thought at the time that that would help my faith.”Loved ones, that is detrimental to faith. Human hope is not something that helps divine hope. It is detrimental to divine hope. And what we saw last day was this business of getting into grad school, you don’t look up all the statistics, check up on your own grades and then say to yourself, “Well, humanly speaking I probably have a fair chance, so I’m not asking God to do too much to get me into grad school.” And you sort of eek out, you have the divine hope with human hope.Loved ones, it’s wrong. We believe in hope against hope. You reject human hope and you believe completely in divine hope. And you see the reason is, God will not share his glory with anyone, you see. God won’t share his glory with anyone. And he certainly won’t share it with your sizing up the past statistics, and your own human abilities, and your own past record. Then if he ever does something in your life you’ll never be sure if it was him or not. You’ll say, “Yeah, well God did a fair bit there, but of course I had some human hope that it would work out anyway.”It’s a little bit like old Peter being told by Jesus to get out of the boat onto the water and old Peter puts a water ski on one foot and gets out. It just is detrimental. It steals glory from God. God will not work in that kind of situation. He won’t work unless we reject human hope, unless we believe ‘against’ hope and believe ‘in’ hope in him. It’s the same thing as old Joshua running around with a magnifying glass checking the cracks in the wall before he told the people to walk around Jericho seven times. It’s the human hope and the feeling, “Well, I’m not asking God to do too much.”Loved ones, God is a big and a great and a magnificent God. Our God is bigger than any human hope we could produce, and we can afford to believe against human hope. Brothers and sisters, do you know, I think many of us prevent God doing mighty things in our lives, because we are trying to eek it out with human hope? We’re trying to eek out the divine hope with human hope. And do you see that we can’t do it? You believe in hope against hope.Now maybe we should deal just a little today with the other fact that you get in 4:18 and in that first clause, “In hope he believed against hope, that he should become the father of many nations; as he had been told, ‘So shall your descendants be.’” Now, if you’re living by trust in God, it means that you go beyond hope. That’s what Abraham did. Divine hope is a certain and sure expectation that God is going to do this thing in your life on the basis of his past record and men’s past experiences of him. But faith is believing that God has already ‘done’ the thing. And believing is a deeper thing than hope. And that’s why it says you see, that Abraham didn’t just hope and hope against hope but he ‘believed’ in hope against hope. And if we’re going to walk trusting God we don’t only hope that the thing will happen, we don’t only expect that it’s going to happen in the future, but we believe that it has already happened. And that’s what walking in trust in God means. You believe that the thing has already happened.Now maybe it’s good to just see that really from the verse itself in Romans 4:18. You see how it reads, “In hope,” Abraham, “Believed against hope, that he should become the father of many nations; as he had been told, ‘So shall your descendants be.’” Now, do you see the clause, “That he shall become the father of many nations.”? Now you can see that that is really a purpose clause, if you’ve suffered under general analysis or you’ve suffered Latin, or suffered Greek. “That he should become the father of many nations,” that is a purpose clause.Now some people have translated that as a purpose clause, as it is there in the RSV. Then it would mean you see, Abraham believed at this moment and hoped against hope that many centuries hence he would become the father of many nations. Now the Greek doesn’t read that way and you can check it and there is that Greek New Testament Interlinear in the Oak Street Offices if you haven’t one. The Greek reads, “eis to genesthai” and that form of the Greek is the expression of a result and the correct translation — and I’ll show you from the Old Testament — the correct translation is that “In hope Abraham believed against hope so that he became the father of many nations” at that moment. So that he was the father of many nations at that moment. In other words, the moment he believedit that moment it was true. It was a historical fact the moment he believed it.Now you can see that this is in line with the actual Old Testament references. Look at Romans 4:17 which refers to the Old Testament event itself. Romans 4:17, “As it is written, ‘I have made you the father of many nations.’” In other words, God said to Abraham, “I have made you the father of many nations. That’s it. I’ve done it now. You may not have a lot of little children running around your home but I have already made you the father of many nations. At this moment you’re the father of many nations. The symptoms have to occur and appear but at this moment you are already the father of many nations.”Now loved ones, let’s look back to the Old Testament because it is a hard concept for some of us to get hold of. Look at Genesis 17:5. Maybe we should look at Genesis 15:5 first and take it chronologically. Genesis 15:5, and God brought Abraham outside, “And he brought him outside and said, ‘Look toward heaven, and number the stars, if you are able to number them.’ Then he said to him, ‘So shall your descendants be.’” Now that was the promise. Then do you see Abraham’s response in Verse 6, “And he believed the Lord; and he reckoned it to him as righteousness.” And the moment Abraham believed it that moment it became historical fact.Now you can see that if you look over at Genesis 17:5, and don’t forget Abraham still hadn’t as son, “No longer shall your name be Abram, but your name shall be Abraham,” and God even changed the name to make ‘the father of many nations’, “For I have made you the father of a multitude of nations.” Now do you see that living by faith is believing that God has already done the thing?Now loved ones, do you see we have such a weak idea of faith? Do you know with our idea of faith we wouldn’t be seen dead near that Red Sea. We wouldn’t go near the walls of Jericho, we’d be so afraid we’d be let down by our God. No, but these Israelites in the Old Testament times, they went completely into the Red Sea, they walked around the walls of Jericho because they knew it had already happened in God. It was already true in Christ. And loved ones, walking by faith in God and walking trusting God does not simply mean, “Oh yeah, I believe it’s going to happen. Yeah, I believe it’s going to happen but I still have faith, you know.” It’s not that but, “I know it has already happened. I know God has already done it. It is already historical fact.”Now do you see why this is so? The reason these things are not so is because you and I lived independent of God, and therefore God withdrew from us his power and his life. But the moment Jesus died for us, God made all that power and life available again, and so we were replaced in the Garden of Eden with all the power and ability of God that was available before the fall of man. And so in actual fact, the whole world has already been reconciled to God. That’s what the Bible says, “God has already reconciled the whole world unto himself.”Now I don’t know that I can find the verse but maybe you would look at I think its 2 Corinthians 5:18-19. 2 Corinthians 5:18-19 where it says plainly that already the whole world has been reconciled unto God. 2 Corinthians 5:18-19, “All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation; that is,” God was “in Christ”, not ‘will be’ but was in Christ “reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation.” This means that already God has nothing against the whole world. Already all his ability and all his grace is available for the whole world. Already all sickness and pain has been born by Jesus, already all that has been cleared away.Now do you see that only when we believe it does it become historical fact? But the moment webelieve it, it is historical fact. Even though we still have no son we’re already the father of many nations. The thing has already been made real in us because there is a realm in Christ where all this has already taken place. Your father is already whole and well in Jesus. That’s a fact. Already there’s no reason except Satan’s lie that he still believes, there’s no reason why he shouldn’t be actually up out of his bed. Already his sickness has been healed in Jesus. That’s what Isaiah 53 says in the Hebrew, “Surely he has born our sickness and carried our pains.” They’ve already been carried, they’ve already been borne and the moment we believe it, it becomes historical fact in our lives.Loved ones, even though some of the symptoms may still be there it’s already historical fact. And you can see this if you look at some of the Old Testament illustrations. Let’s look at Joshua 6:16, “And at the seventh time, when the priests had blown the trumpets, Joshua said to the people, ‘Shout; for the Lord” will give “you the city.’” No, it’s the past tense, “Shout; for the Lord has given you the city.” Now dear ones, those poor souls would not have walked up to the walls of Jericho and shouted out madly like that unless they were already sure that the city had been given to them. After all think how corny you’d feel if you were left there shouting and the old wall is still standing. But those brothers and sisters knew that the walls had already fallen down. The symptoms of the walls were there but they were already down in Christ at the right hand of the Father.Now, do you see that we live in a realm where all these things have already taken place and they are actualized and materialized the moment you believe them? Now, it’s up to God to remove what symptoms he wants. It’s up to him if he wants to remove the solidity of those walls and leave the appearance of them still standing. It’s up to him to remove which symptoms when. It’s up to him when to remove the drip from your nose, and when to remove the sense of oppression that the cold has on your spirit. It’s up to him to decide when he’s going to remove the different symptoms but it is our place to believe that the thing has already happened. That’s what faith is.Loved ones, faith is not believing that God will do it. That’s hope and hope is good but if we have only hope in Christ God says, “We are of all men most to be pitied.” But faith is believing that the thing has already taken place. Dear ones, that’s the only way you could walk into that old Red Sea, isn’t it? You couldn’t dream of walking into the Red Sea if you were just saying, “Yeah, I believe it’s going to move back. I believe… blub, blub, blub [sound of bubbles from your mouth], I believe it’s going to move back.” No, no! You walk in there believing that God has already moved that sea back and it’s up to him to remove the symptoms of that sea when he pleases. But that is the Father’s will for us in faith.Now dear ones, it keeps going through you see if you look at Joshua 8:1 you get the same situation; you remember when they were attacking the city of Ai. Joshua 8:1, “And the Lord said to Joshua, ‘Do not fear or be dismayed; take all the fighting men with you, and arise, go up to Ai; see,'” ‘I will give into your hand the king of Ai?’ No, “See, I have given into your hand the king of Ai, and his people, his city, and his land.” And that’s the only thing that enables you to walk firmly forward in faith, knowing that the thing has already happened. And it’s so – Old Jonah is sitting in the old whale, right there are all the symptoms all around him. There’s a big whale’s stomach all around him. He couldn’t avoid it, he could see the tonsils. That was a whale, he was inside it. And yet old Jonah offers a sacrifice of thanksgiving in the whale, thanking God that he had delivered him from the whale’s stomach. Now that’s what faith is. It’s thanking God that the thing has already happened even while the symptoms are round about you.Now loved ones, do you see it gets over all this problem that many of us have with sicknesses? Often we’re walking by sight; we’re not walking by faith at all. We have a cold and we say, “Lord, will you deliver me from this cold? Okay, the symptoms are still there, you haven’t delivered me. Alright, Lord will you deliver me from this cold? Okay, I’m still not.” Do you see? And we’re walking by sight we’re walking by the symptoms. We’re looking in on the symptoms each time and each time God delivers us and then we’ll look at the symptoms, we cease to walk in faith, we walk by sight and Satan gets back in and inflicts the cold upon us. Now walking by faith is believing that God has already done the thing because we’ve asked him and “we know that if he hears us in anything we ask then we have confidence he will answer” [1 John 5:14-15] and we walk on knowing that that thing has already happened.Loved ones, do you see that it’s really very easy to see that the service station [reference to a new business started] is already the success that God wants it to be. It’s very easy for us to see that there are already 10,000 of us out in the world for Jesus. It’s very easy for us to see that The Stable [house where several young people lived] has already been bought. It’s very easy for you to see that your difficulties have already been solved. It’s very easy for us to see that our relatives are already healed, because that’s what faith is. Believing that in Christ the thing is already taken place. All things are already reconciled unto Christ.Loved ones, do you see it’s like Old Plato said really, “There is a perfect heavenly world where there are perfect forms of everything” and there is a place in Jesus at the right hand of the Father where all these things have been resolved. It says that Jesus died to save us from the curse of the law. Now the curse of the law includes every disease that has ever come upon people. And that means that Jesus has already saved us from all those sicknesses. There is a realm in Christ where all these things are perfect.Now, how do you do it at home? Well, you stop this business of praying, “Lord, will you release the tensions in our home? Will you stop my father getting angry and will you stop my mother gossiping? Lord, will you stop this? I believe you can stop it.” No, you have to change that and say, “I hope you can stop it,” because that’s a certain expectation that it will happen and we need to start saying, “Father, I thank you that in Jesus you have already destroyed all these tensions. Already you have dealt with Satan in my father or my mother. Already you have released them from these pressures and I thank you that you have.” And then you go to the home knowing that it’s already happened.Brothers and sisters, those of us who are in faculties, that’s what we do with these old faculty tensions. You don’t go saying, “Lord, I believe you can do it. I believe you’re going to do it.” No, that’s hope. “I hope you can do it. I expect you to do it. But now Father, I thank you that you have done it. I thank you that in Jesus all these things are destroyed and I’m going to walk in you Lord Jesus, here in the faculty room and I’m going to trust you now to clear away the symptoms when it pleases you.”But, loved ones, that’s the only part that God needs to do, clear away the symptoms. Once you ask in faith God has already done it and that’s the way he wants us to walk. But you can see that walking, trusting God is believing that the thing has already taken place. It’s already done. It’s already something that we thank God for and that’s part of what it means walking by faith.So I’d ask you, “Okay, are you walking that way? Are you living by faith in God or are you still seeing all these mountains as something that God will have to remove?” Well, he removed them 2,000years ago and he wants you to believe his word rather than the outward symptoms. So will you think about it and we’ll really try to talk a wee bit more about it next Sunday because I know it’s a new idea because we’re all used to this believing that the thing will happen in the future. So we’ll talk more about it but will you think about it brothers and sisters and will you begin to pray about it that God might reveal to you how to walk into the Red Sea with absolute confidence that the sea has already moved back, how to walk around the walls of Jericho and shout, not in order to knock the walls down, but because the walls have already fallen down in Christ? And you can see that Satan has stolen a lot of victories from us all because we haven’t been exercising faith at all, we’ve been exercising hope.But God wants us to walk in faith just as Abraham did; he believed that he was the father of many nations. The moment he believed it, it took place. Is it the power of positive thinking? No, it’s not, not at all. The power of positive thinking accepts that this is the real situation and maybe we can influence it by thinking hard. But faith believes that this isn’t the real situation that these things that we see around us and these tensions that are in front of us are unreal and that in Christ these have all been released, and transformed, and changed, and the real world is the unseen world in Jesus at the Father’s right hand and that is where we live and that is what we thank God for.So I pray that Jesus and the Holy Spirit will give you grace to see those things because I remember so often listening to this kind of message and thinking it was crazy. And it does, it’s a strange kind of divine logic, but really when the Holy Spirit reveals it to you it just changes our lives, dear ones. It means we walk with assurance and confidence instead of with this uncertainty that dogs so many of our steps. Well, that’s part of what’s involved in living by faith and that’s part of the way we have a continual sense of rightness with God. I pray that God will give you grace to do it. Let us pray.Dear Father, we’re tired of living in this old compromised diluted version of faith that it’s believing that something is going to happen in the future. Father, we are not any longer going to make you a liar and we are not any longer going to be deceived by Satan’s outward façade. We are no longer going to try to walk by sight and walk by faith at the same time. Father, we accept the world as we see it now as a fallen world and that most of the appearance of it indicates that you are not in charge. But Father, we reject that. We believe that you are in charge. We believe that you have overcome the world in Christ and that there is a realm in your immediate presence where all things are right, where there is no sickness, where there is no controversy, where there is no strain, and no argument, and no jealousy, and no anger, and where there is no war. And Father, we thank you that our job is to believe this real world down into the middle of this unreal world.Father, we undertake to do that now. We undertake to begin to walk by real faith trusting you that you have already done these things, that they are already actual, they are already historical facts and it is only your responsibility now to remove the symptoms or the appearance of things when you please. Until then our Father, we will continue to thank you that the thing has been changed, the position has been rectified, the sickness has been healed, the problem has been solved because it is so in Christ at your right hand where we also dwell.So Father, we thank you that we can walk in this kind of backward faith looking backwards to 1900 years ago when you destroyed the world and you reconciled all things unto yourself. We thank you for this in Jesus’ name. Amen

Living by Faith 2Romans 4:22Sermon Transcript by Rev. Ernest O’NeillMost of us try to live by certain standards and so many of us tie this into our relationship to God. We just want to do everything well enough so that we’ll please him and so our relationship with him will be right. And many of us end up in our lives as slaves to this whole business of standards. Always trying to live up to certain standards, to please my dad, or please my mum, or please my peers, or please my professors, or please God. And many of us get into the whole religious business that way. We decide the way to make things right with God the way to make our relationship right with him is to be as good as we possibly can be. And of course brothers and sisters, God in this book just put an absolute end to all of that.He just ended all that because he said, “Listen, by works of law, by living up to standards no man will be justified. You’ll never get into a right relationship with your peers or with me by trying to do works of law, by trying to live up to other people’s standards. That will never make you feel right with me.” And really loved ones, God ended all that silly infantile attitude to Christianity that so many of us have received and inherited.You would agree with me, that most of the people who don’t come to church believe that to get right with God you ought to be a very moral person. Isn’t that right? And most of them think of all of us as very moral people. You know, they always think, “Oh yeah,” – in fact, in Ireland we had a phrase we described Christians as ‘good living’ people, ‘good living people,’5 people who lived the good life. And it seems to me that many people think that a Christian is one who is morally better than everybody else.Now that may be as a result of God’s life in him but the primary mark of a Christian is not that he’s a good person but that he actually trusts God as his loving Father. And you remember that that’s what we’ve been discovering is the only right way to get into a good relationship with God. Not to try to be good, be good, be good. Not trying to live up to standards of your parents, and God, and everybody else, but trusting God. And you get that dear ones, if you’d like to look at it in Romans 4:22. You remember God is talking about Abraham here and he says, “That is why his faith was ‘reckoned to him as righteousness.’”Abraham was 100 years old, Sarah was 90. God said you’re going to have a son, be the father of many nations. Abraham believed God and his faith was reckoned to him as righteousness. He trusted God as his loving father. And that’s the only way to get right with God really, to trust him as your loving Father.If you say to me, “Oh now, what about with the kids? If they tell a lie do you not tell them that lying is a wrong thing and they have to live up to a standard of truth?” Well loved ones, no doubt we have to bring before them their responsibility of not telling lies, but do you see we ought to explain why? We tell lies because we don’t trust God to take care of the reaction of other people to our failure, or we don’t trust God that he will work out our circumstances for us, and we think we have to give him a bit of help. We miss the assignment, and we realize that the grade is going to go down, and so we lie in order to get round that, because we don’t trust God that he will circumvent that, and that if we really repent, whatever he allows to come to us, as a result of ourfailure, will be right for us.And it seems to me when we deal with each other we should not be continually saying, “Oh, you must live up to this standard, or you must live up to that standard.” But look, by not doing this you’re really not trusting God. That’s really what’s wrong and that’s the important thing to do, to really trust God.You know that last Sunday we saw that really that’s the way we’re to live. It’s not just a matter of one past act of the will whereby you believe that God will accept you because Jesus has died for you. It’s not just one past act, but it’s a continual living trusting God. You remember, Romans 1:17 says, “The justified live by faith.” That is they live by trusting God day-by-day and brothers and sisters, its true whenever you feel in a wrong relationship with God it’s probably because you’ve stopped trusting him in some area of your lives. And you know we say, “Oh, it’s because we sinned.” Yes, but you sin because you don’t trust him. You tell a lie because you don’t trust him. You covet because you don’t trust that he will give you what you need. You’re greedy because you don’t trust that he will give you the things when you need them. And it’s trusting God that continues to enable God to make us feel right with himself.You remember that last day we took that verse Romans 4:18, if you’d like to look at it and we were just looking at some of the factors involved in living by this kind of faith. And Romans 4:18, you see it’s, “In hope he believed against hope,” and we saw for instance that it couldn’t be just human hope it had to be divine hope and that human hope was based on the past record of our achievements and our poor human abilities and therefore we hoped on the basis of those that something might happen. But divine hope is a sure certain expectation that God is going to do something in our lives on the basis of his past good record. And we saw that divine hope was what we used when we were trusting God, it wasn’t human hope. It wasn’t eking out divine hope with human hope.We saw too, you remember, “In hope he believed against hope,” that it is faith that is not hope. In other words hope is old Abraham saying, “Yeah, well God has been good he’s made all the babies in the world, he’s made all the mothers of the world. Yeah, probably in time he will enable Sarah my 90 year old wife to have a child and in time, centuries hence, I will be the father of many nations.” And that is hope, a sure and certain expectation that something is going to happen in the future. And faith, you remember, is an absolute sure confidence that the thing has already happened because God has said it has happened.And you remember we got that from 4:18 there if you look at the Greek in it. “In hope he believed against hope, that he should become the father of many nations.” But actually the Greek is, you remember, “eis to genesthai” and it really means, in hope he believed against hope so that he became the father of many nations. So that he was the father of many nations. It has already taken place and that faith is that, an absolute confidence that the thing has already taken place. Why? Because God has said that it has taken place. You remember we traced it through with old Abraham. You might like to look at it because I know this is new to some of us and it sounds like just the old ‘double think’ of Orwell. [George Orwell, author of the book “Nineteen Eighty-four”]So maybe we should look at it, Genesis 17:5. There you have the promise you see. Before the thing ever took place you have the promise that God gave. “No longer shall your name be Abram, but your name shall be Abraham; for I have made you the father of a multitude of nations.” God said, “I have made you,” so Abraham believes it and it’s already so. In the moment Abraham believes it, it is already so. God says, “For I have made you the father of a multitude of nations.” And once Godsays this thing to you it’s done. The thing is done already.George Muller had maybe 4,000 kids to look after in orphanages that God led him to start in England in about, I think, the 19th century. And he would sit them down at the table, and this happened one particular day, he sat them down at the table and they all sat down. The larder was empty; there was no food in the larder but God had said to Muller, “There will be food on this table for this meal.” And so Muller sat down and thanked God for the food and they said grace, and there was no food. And they finished grace and all the children were sitting there and the knock came to the door and the baker came in with the food. It was a gift that somebody had given to the orphanages.But Muller sat down and thanked God for the thing because God had said, “You have it,” and so Muller believed. And faith is believing that you have the thing because God has told you, you have it. If I say to my wife, “You know that green coat of yours, well I put $5 in it and I know you’re going to Sears would you get me this?” She won’t have to feel in the pocket to see, “Did he put it there?” She’ll say, “He said he put it there. Okay, I go to Sears and I make provision to buy this thing knowing that I have $5 there. I’ve never seen the $5 but his word is good. I trust him.” Now do you see it’s that with God? When God says a thing has been done then it has been done. It’s a historical fact at that moment loved ones. It’s done already.Now do you see that the reason for this is that the cause of all our lack in the world and all our need is because we rejected God? And because we rejected him he withdrew from the world, you remember, the supernatural life of the Holy Spirit, the ‘tree of life’ that was to supply all our needs. Now, while that ‘tree of life’ is withdrawn Satan can say to us, “You’re in need, you’re in lack. You need this, you need that. You’re absolutely dependent on me and the world to fulfill your needs.” But do you see that the Bible says that God has reconciled the world to himself through Jesus’ death.In other words, Jesus died for the whole world so God no longer has to condemn the world to destruction and no longer had to keep his life back from it. So ever from Jesus rose to the Father and presented his blood before the Father, the Father has replaced the tree of life, the Holy Spirit. And the whole world is reconciled to God and the tree of life is available here among us. And so we only have to turn to that tree of life and receive immediately what we need.Now Satan’s only power now is one of deception. He says, “Look at the way things look. Look at the way things appear. Now is there a tree of life here?” And if we believe ‘that’, then the tree of life is not available to us. But if we believe what God has said is true, then the tree of life, the Holy Spirit, and all that we need is here available in our world today because, you see, God has already reconciled the world to himself. The world has already been put in Jesus and raised to God’s right hand and so God’s right hand is very close. My right hand, it’s very close to anything that appears there. If this hand is here, the right hand can grab it. Now, we’re at God’s right hand in Jesus and every fulfillment of every need is there.Now you can see that loved ones, if you look at it in 2 Corinthians 5:18-19, “All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation.” In other words, God has already reconciled the world to himself, there’s no reason why he can’t give us whatever we need. Indeed, it’s all there. And that’s really what Jesus meant when he said – oh it’s Matthew 3:2 if you look at it, one of the first things that Jesus said when he arrived upon the earth. “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven isat hand.” And the Greek word “aenggiken” means not ‘is at hand’ in that it’s just round the corner, but it means the kingdom of heaven is right here. And Jesus meant, “Ever since I have come to earth with my ability to heal blind eyes and to heal lame legs, ever since I have come to earth, the kingdom of heaven is right here among you. It’s right next door to you. It’s just at your right hand. The moment you turn to it there is the kingdom of heaven. And so dear ones, immediately God says a thing, that thing is done as far as he is concerned.Now you see that’s what Hebrews 11:1 means if you look at it. Hebrews 11:1, it’s a statement that God makes here about faith. Hebrews 11:1, “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” Now, the ‘conviction’ — the word conviction is a Greek word “hupostasis” and it really literally means the substantiating of things unseen and that’s what faith is. Faith knows that in Jesus the whole thing has been reconciled. In Jesus my mother is already well. In Jesus the family situation is already healed. In Jesus my job is already secure. In Jesus my financial difficulties have already been overcome. Now faith is the substantiating of those things. It’s the saying, “These things are so. I believe they’re so. I’m going to walk on in the assurance that these things are so.” But faith is that loved ones.Faith is not going forward saying, “Yeah, I believe God can do it.” There’s no question of that. Any critic of history will look back and see God can do those things. But that isn’t faith. Faith is thanking God that he has already done the thing knowing that the moment he speaks it, it is done. God says, “Let there be light,” there was light. Immediately God says it, it’s done and we walk on in that absolute assurance.Now you see that’s the way these Old Testament giants worked. Judges 7:15, when God said a thing to them they believed it and they went ahead, not believing it would come to pass, but believing it had actually come to pass. “When Gideon heard the telling of the dream and its interpretation, he worshiped; and he returned to the camp of Israel, and said, ‘Arise; for the Lord has given the host of Midian into your hand.’” Now he said, “Has given the host of Midian.” Now the Midianites were out there in their thousands but old Gideon says, “Arise; for the Lord has given them into your hands.”Now loved ones, that’s the only way old Gideon had any courage to go out there. He went out there because he knew the army was already defeated. And it was so with old Jonah you remember. Let’s look at him in there just trying to get air in the fish’s stomach, Jonah 2:1, “Then Jonah prayed to the Lord his God from the belly of the fish.” And then look at Verse 9, “But I with the voice of thanksgiving will sacrifice to thee; what I have vowed I will pay. Deliverance belongs to the Lord!” And Jonah said, “I with the voice of thanksgiving will sacrifice to thee.” And he thanked God that he had already answered him. Look in Verse 2, “Saying, ‘I called to the Lord, out of my distress, and he answered me; out of the belly of Sheol I cried, and thou didst hear my voice.’” And he’s sitting in there looking at the old tonsils of the fish and yet he’s thanking God that God has already delivered him.Now loved ones, that is faith. Faith is believing that God has already done the thing even before the fact is obvious to the human eye. In the eyes of faith the thing is already done. So I’m sure some of the boys were so sure that the walls of Jericho were already down that they probably bumped their noses on the walls of Jericho on their way in. They were so confident. They were so confident that God already put them down that they probably just tore up the old walls immediately they shouted.Now do you see that is what faith is? It’s an absolute confidence that God in Christ has already done the thing so the thing is already real right there. I remember one dear old preacher at a summer camp that I once spoke at saying, “If the Holy Spirit tells you to jump through that wall you jump and he makes a hole.” You know, it took me a while to see, yeah, yeah. And then I realized, that’s it! When God says the thing is done then you walk in absolute confidence that it is done.Now do you see loved ones that a lot of us don’t walk that way and so in our finances, and in questions of sickness, we’re praying to God, “Lord, will you help me? Will you help me?” But we’re actually providing – making provision for him not helping us. We’re not making provision for him helping us and we’re expected to walk believing that God has already done the thing.Now here’s an important thing: if the men round Jericho were walking by faith they might have bumped their noses on the wall in their confidence. But if they were walking by faith none of them would have knocked themselves out. In other words, they’d have got it just right. Just the moment God did it they would be there. And you see if the priests were walking by faith through the Jordan some of them might have got their feet wet because they were right on the second that God was doing the thing, but if they were walking on faith none of them drowned. They didn’t keep walking, walking until it got up above their nose. If they were walking by faith they were right there at the moment that God said they should be there.Now do you see that brings us onto the other factor in walking by faith? We have to believe God for what he wants for us, not for what we want for ourselves. Now those words are important. There are five of them and they’re in Romans 4:18. Old Abraham, you see, didn’t just say, “Oh, it would be nice for me to have a child. I’d like to be the father of many nations.” No, there are five important words that apply to all of us who intend to walk by faith. Romans 4:18, “In hope he believed against hope, that he should become the father of many nations,” the five words, ‘As he had been told.”Now you can only have faith for what is God’s will for you. We can only believe God for what is his will for us. Now many of us are prepared to take God as a miracle worker and many of us are prepared to take him as an almighty miracle worker and as a provider of all our needs. But we’re not prepared to take him as our guide and our Lord. Many of us are ready to love the power of God but we’re not ready to love the will of God. Many of us are anxious for God to be our servant and are ready to believe him for the things we want. But we’re not willing to ask him and spend enough time with him to find out what he wants for us.Now brothers and sisters God will only do for us what he himself wants to do. And do you see that many of us are offering prayers of presumption? Many of us are going up outside the walls of Antioch and praying that God will tear down the walls of Antioch. Well, he’s not interested in Antioch; he’s interested actually in Jericho. But we’re praying away at the walls of Antioch. And many of us you see are offering prayers of presumption, not prayers of faith. And you see the total difference between them.I mean, look at the prayer of presumption that old David prayed. 2 Samuel 12 it is. It’s part of that lesson that we read. And you remember it was in connection with the son that was sick. And without going into the explanation, of course, God had permitted the son to become sick. And yet 2 Samuel 12:15-16, “Then Nathan went to his house,” you see, “And the Lord struck the child that Uriah’s wife bore to David, and it became sick.” And then, “David therefore besought God for the child.” He had just contradicted God. “And David fasted, and went in and lay all night upon theground. And the elders of his house stood beside him, to raise him from the ground; but he would not, nor did he eat food with them.” See, he really went into the fasting and the praying and, “On the seventh day the child died.” And it was because David was praying a prayer of presumption, something that God didn’t want at all for his life.Now brothers and sisters when we’re walking trusting God we need to trust God for guidance about the things we’ve to believe him for and we need to walk anxious to know his will.Dear ones, many of us at this stage — because most of us are kind of the same generation — many of us at our stage in the Christian life have got into tremendous difficulties because we’ve offered prayers of presumption. And then we get into that position of saying, “Oh, God didn’t answer me. Why won’t he answer me?” Well loved ones, God will always answer what he has put into your heart to pray for. But it is his will to do it that way you see.God has not only reconciled the world to himself and then said to us, “Okay, you distribute the benefits of Christ’s death the way you want to.” God hasn’t done that. We don’t do it with a thing like penicillin. Once we discover penicillin we don’t say, “Okay, you can distribute it wherever you like it doesn’t matter.” No, we govern carefully the distribution of a drug like penicillin. Now so it is with the Father. The Father has already overcome all the need and lack in our world. But do you see that he has a perfect plan for applying the benefits of Christ’s atonement to the whole world and he wants us to listen to his plan for it?I have a dear brother, he’s at the fellowship now, and he got into tremendous difficulties the same way. He was at the old Coffeehouse Extempore you remember. And one evening, one Friday evening there was a group all round and they were talking about Christianity. And this fellow says, “Okay, if you’re God is so great, here my left leg has been paralyzed since I was born. If you’re God is so great won’t he heal it tomorrow night?” And of course my friend Ed said, “Yeah, yeah, God can heal it tomorrow night.” And dear love him he knows now he hadn’t asked God what he wanted to do with this fellow’s leg or whether he wanted to touch the fellow’s heart first to bring him to himself. And so Ed went out on a limb and said, “Yeah, yeah.” So of course, you can guess what tomorrow night was like. The fellow wasn’t healed, because God hadn’t given that prayer of faith to anyone. It was just a prayer of presumption. It was just something that Ed said, “Well, I’m in a tight spot. I’d better have some proof that there’s a God. Okay, let’s go with it.”You see, many of us loved ones do the same thing. We offer prayers of presumption. We believe God for all sorts of things that we think will be good. Do you see that what we need to do is love the Father’s will? Be anxious, “Father, what do you want in this situation?” And it’s in that that God brings about his will in you.And I shared with you about my mum with cancer and she was in Ireland and I was over here. And so often I’d pray, “Lord, will you heal? Will you heal? Will you heal?” And then this time there came a prayer of faith. And a prayer of faith is a conviction borne in your heart by the Holy Spirit when you’re in a place of neutrality and quietness that a certain thing will take place. And there just came a voice saying, “I have borne her sickness.” But it was at last something that came from God and not from me and she was healed. And do you see that a prayer of faith is God’s will for a situation and the moment you accept it God is able to do it.Now of course it has to be accepted by someone you see. You may say, “Well, why doesn’t God just do it? When he knows what’s necessary why doesn’t he just do it?” No, God refuses to dominate man’sfree will that way. Someone in the world must pray for the thing before God can do it. That’s Ezekiel 36:37, if you’d like to look at it. You remember God had the obvious plan for the Israelites. They needed more men, they were in exile. Ezekiel 36:37, “Thus says the Lord God: This also I will let the house of Israel ask me to do for them: to increase their men like a flock.”Now God knew that he had to increase the men like a flock but he said, “This I will let the house of Israel ask me to do for them.” And unless we pray the prayer God is unable to do it, because he will not answer apart from our free wills. And yet dear ones, it needs to be a prayer of faith, you see. And every prayer and every walk in faith, every step that we take in faith needs to be trusting God for his will in the matter, and then allowing him to show you it. And you see, you may say, “Oh well does that mean you pray every prayer, ‘If it be your will?’” No, that’s not a prayer of faith at all. That’s just an excuse for not praying saying, “If it is your will, will you do this?”No, we should go to the Father and seek his will. We should seek the Father’s face. We should seek what he wants to do, and ask him what he wants, so that we can pray for it and see it come to pass. But do you see that most of the prayers we offer aren’t prayers at all. We’re all praying like mad, “If it be your will, if it be your will, if it be your will.” And the Father is unable to do a thing, because it isn’t a prayer of faith it’s a prayer of doubt. It’s just a prayer of excuse and compromise. We’ve to seek God’s face and find out what his will is.And how do you do that? Well, there is a story in the Old Testament, you remember, that tells you, 1 Kings 19:11-12. And this was Elijah you remember. And God said, “Go forth, and stand upon the mount before the Lord.’ And behold, the Lord passed by, and a great and strong wind rent the mountains, and broke in pieces the rocks before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake; and after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire; and after the fire a still small voice.” And the way to come into a knowledge of God’s will is to still the earthquake of the emotions, and still the storm of the pressure of circumstances, and still the wind of your hereditary and come into a position of quietness before the Father where you say, “Father, whatever you want that’s what I want.” And then the Holy Spirit will speak in a still small voice and bring you God’s answer. And then once you’ve received that it’s done that moment. You just thank God for it and you walk in absolute confidence that it has happened and that’s the way the Father works.And loved ones, it’s the same with all the things you see. With the finances that you’re all in trouble about, with the jobs that we’re all in trouble about, with school and the assignments, and will I do this or will I do that. Some people walk around more in doubt than they do in faith, they’re so preoccupied with the problems. And do you see what God wants us to do? To come into a position of real quietness where we say, “Father, whatever you want that’s what I want.” And then in that moment of quietness the still small voice of the Holy Spirit makes God’s will known. And then you just praise and thank God.And that’s why loved ones, walking by faith day-by-day in a loving Father who wants the very best thing for us, is a way of absolute peace and absolute quiet. And the only time we experience anything but peace and quiet is when we don’t trust the loving Father, and we start trusting ourselves. Or, we start offering up prayers that we think would be very good with a God such as we have.Loved ones, we Christians don’t pray what might be good; we pray what is God’s will. Those of uswho are children of God walk, not as people that walk in the night not knowing where we’re going; we walk confidently because we’ve spent time with the Father. And every time there’s doubt, loved ones, every time there’s doubt in our lives — honestly, I know it in my own life — every time there’s doubt about shall we go this way or that way, will we live here or live there, it’s because we’re not before the Father. We’re working out with our minds all sorts of alternatives and so we’re filled with 25 different options. And one time we give our mind to one of them, the next day to another one, the next day to another one until we run through the whole 25. Then, we start all over again and Satan just dangles us from one to the other.Do you see that the way is quietness before the Father and satisfaction with our own position at the moment? You see, yes ‘contentment with the position we’re in’, “Father, you’ve allowed us to come into this position at this time. Alright, you’ve permitted us to come here. Whether it’s your ideal will or not here we are. We’re in this job; we’re in this school, thank you Father for that. Now, I want to love you and I want to be your person in this situation.” Come into a position of quietness and then God is able to make his will known.But it’s a good way to walk dear ones. And certainly it’s a lot easier on the old blood vessels and on the old nerves, really. Because, it is the Father’s way you see. We’re not intended to walk in strain at all. We have a loving Father who knows each one of us intimately and has a plan for us.Maybe we should just finish by just praying this morning instead of singing. Let us close our eyes and pray.Dear Father, we would each one look up to you this morning and say that we have had difficulty thinking that you could actually operate in our day-to-day lives. And Father we have felt for many years that it’s up to us to live them ourselves the best way we can. But Father, we thank you that it just makes sense that if we’re only here because you hold the atoms, and the neutrons, and the protons together, then you know everything that happens to us, and you are able to operate and to affect our daily lives, and you are able to keep us and to support us. And Father, we’ve been looking to insurance, and we’ve been looking to husbands, and fathers, and mothers, and wives, and friends. And Father, we want to tell you that we want to start looking to you this morning, and we intend to start trusting you and taking you at your word.You say you’re a loving Father, well Father we’re going to trust you as that. We’re going to stop worrying about things and we’re going to come into a place of peace and say to you Lord, whatever way you want this thing to go will you reveal it to me so that I can pray? Father, we don’t want to be faithless. We don’t want to just give up according to the way events fall out. We want to receive from you clear indication of what we’ve to believe for, and then we intend to walk in faith, trusting you day-by-day, and knowing the joy of being right with the Creator of the universe.So Father, we give ourselves to you this day. We trust you for a good day today. For a day when we will spend the hours as you want them spent and when we will see your hand moving in our lives. So Lord, I trust you to bless each dear brother and sister here and enable them to have a good day, and a day lived above the petty circumstances and above our petty selves, a day lived in you, in your world, with your Spirit within us.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 throughout this coming week. Amen.

Created or Uncreated Life 3Romans 4:25Sermon Transcript by Rev. Ernest O’NeillThis is a really big day for me and for some of you who remember what series we’re on — because today is the end of a chapter in Romans. And in the past five years on campus this is the fourth time we’ve ended a chapter in Romans. So it is fairly exciting. It’s Romans 4:25.Before we even look at that I should explain that we started to study Romans five years ago here on campus because we believe that Jesus is the Son of the Creator of the Universe. There are all kinds of reasons why we believe that. I don’t want to spend time going into it this morning. If you really want to look at that you can check back on the sermons that were preached five years ago. Some of them are on cassette. Some of it is in a book “Why Believe the Bible” that you could look at.But we do believe Jesus is the Son of God. And we believe that the book of Romans in the Bible, which was written in 57 AD by Paul, was written under the inspiration of the Creator of the Universe. We believe that Romans best explains how to apply the reality of this man Jesus to your own life. So that’s really why we’re reading and studying the book of Romans — because we believe it’s the best explanation of him who is the real answer to reality that we have in any literary form.We’ve been studying Romans 4 for the past year. Because of that we’ve been dealing again and again with the central neurosis of our time. The central neurosis of our time is really just a kind of paranoia that we all have, a kind of self-doubt, or an identity crisis that it seems all men and women –at least in western society — are sharing. This kind of paranoia, or self-doubt, or identity crisis has a practical effect in most of our lives. It results in most of us going around with a chip on our shoulders. We find out that whoever you speak to, whatever age they are, most people at one time or another seem to be going round with a chip on their shoulder.Here’s the chip: they’re out to prove themselves. They’re trying to justify themselves. They’re trying to establish their value in their own eyes, or they’re trying to establish their usefulness in their parents’ eyes, or their loved ones’ eyes. That seems to be the central neurosis of our time. A kind of questioning: who am I? What am I here for? And the resulting effect of that — a desire to prove that I am someone and that I have a right to be here. It does seem that most of us in the western world doubt our right to be here at all, and we’re always trying to prove it to someone else if not to ourselves.Now the answer that Jesus gave to this was that this sense of rejection that we have, this doubt about our own identity that we have, this sense of loneliness, and this sense of not having any place — is a correct reflection of the attitude of the only significant other in the universe. It’s a correct reflection of his attitude to us. That’s what Jesus said. He said, “Don’t believe that this is false. Don’t believe that this is unreal.”That’s what many of us do. Many of us, through psychology and philosophy, try to pretend that this isn’t real. No, we don’t have an identity crisis. There’s no sense in this paranoia that we feel. We try to do our best to wipe out all the symptoms of that paranoia.But Jesus doesn’t do that. He says, “You’re dead right. You ought to have a guilt complex. You people ought to have an identity crisis. Because I’ll tell you what you’ve done — and I have this right from the heart of your Creator who is my Father. You people have tried to live your own life in your own way according to your own plans. You’ve rejected the Creator’s plan for your life, and as a result, he has built into you a penalty of external death. It’s the fear of that eternal death that gives you a sense of identity crisis, a sense of impending doom, a sense of angst.” Jesus said that.But we’re right to have paranoia. We ought to feel we’re being caught at, or being condemned — because he says you really are. “You people have determined to live your own life in your own way according to your own plans — without any reference to your Maker who created you for a certain purpose. As a result he has built into his whole system a death penalty. A penalty of eternal death that is now working in you.” And Jesus said the proof of that is that you have this guilt. That is one of the marks of this death penalty — that you have a sense of guilt.Another mark is that you have a sense of fear. You say it’s fear of the mushroom cloud {atomic bombs people fear will be used in some upcoming war}. It’s not really. It’s fear of that darkness that is going to fall upon you with loneliness when this life is over. “That’s why you have a sense of angst, and a sense of guilt, and a sense of not belonging here. Because actually my Father has already declared you have no right to be in this world the way you’re living for yourselves.” That’s the real situation. That’s what Jesus said to us — that that’s the explanation for this central neurosis of our time.Now we humans are just stupid. We try to pretend it’s not real. We try to get away from any feeling of abandonment, from any feeling of being left out of things. We try to do our best to wipe out all the signs that we have been left on our own. So we spend our lives providing food, shelter, and clothing for ourselves so that we’ll never see the lack that has now set in our lives because of God’s rejection in us.We try to overlay our sense of fret and our sense of worry with emotional enjoyment of all kinds. We try to get rid of our lack of direction in our lives by manipulating circumstances, and manipulating people into some kind of order that we can perceive.But do you see all that we’re doing is dealing with the symptoms of the neurosis? We’re not dealing with the neurosis itself. Now God’s answer to the neurosis is always far more complete than ours is. As ours is superficial, so his answer is deep. As our answer is temporary, so his answer is permanent.Jesus explained to us, “My Father has allowed me to die for you. Actually, if you believe that, the death penalty no longer hangs over your head. You will no longer face a life of loneliness and darkness after this life is over, if you believe what I say — that my Father has allowed me to die in your place so that you don’t need to die. You ought to die because you’ve lived your own life selfishly. But I’ve died for you.”“So you’re really free from that, and my Father justifies you. He says, ‘You’re perfectly justified in being in my world.’ He says, ‘Two people can’t die for the one sin. My son has died for your sin. You don’t need to die for it now. You’re perfectly justified in being here. This is your home. This is your place. I’m glad you’re here.’”Now once a person really believes that God no longer holds the death penalty over us because Jesus has faced that for us, that person enters into a new land. Winston Churchill would say, “Bright sunlit uplands.” Just a different kind of place to be. A place where you’re really freed from paranoia, freed from the old guilt complex, freed from the old sense of self-doubt, and freed from the old identity crisis. You really just are at home in God’s world and you’re at home with yourself and at ease with yourself.You no longer live with a chip on your shoulder trying to prove yourself or justify yourself — because you know that the Creator of the Universe approves of you and that’s all that matters. He approves of you because his Son has died for you and he has no reason any longer for disapproving of you. So it’s just a different place to be.Now why do some of us believe what Romans 4:25 says and still walk around with a chip on our shoulders? Because, I think some of us do. I think some of us believe it in our heads but we don’t really walk in the freedom and the liberty that this arrangement of God’s brings us into. Let’s look at the verse first of all, because it really sums up all that this Chapter 4 says about this neurosis. Romans 4:25: “Who was put to death for our trespasses and raised for our justification.”One reason many of us believe this verse but still walk in some kind of shadow of a guilt complex is found in that word “trespasses.” Do you see it there, the word trespasses? It’s the Greek word “paraptoma.” It means almost the same as sin, but it points to a special characteristic of sin. You can see the same word in Romans 4:15. You’ll see the special characteristic of sin that this word “paraptoma” brings out: “For the law brings wrath, but where there is no law there is no transgression.” That’s the same word as trespass. And God says there, “Jesus has died for your trespasses.” That is, for the things that the law exposes to your conscious mind.One of the reasons why many of us still live in a shadow of guilt is we don’t take that definition of trespass or sin. We don’t accept that sin or trespass is something that you’re conscious of. But, that is what it is. A sin or a trespass is something that you’re conscious of yourself having done or are now doing. Many of us don’t accept that. Many of us have picked up erroneously a false idea of sin in our past childhood days. Here’s the definition we go by: “Sin is any lack of conformity to the perfection of God.” Or, “Sin is any deviation from absolute right — whether we know it or not.”Now many of us here in the theater still walk in practical dealings with Jesus’ death on the basis of that definition of sin. Do you see you can’t win with that one? You can’t win. You’re going to be sinning hundreds of thousands of times a day.There are hundreds of ways in which your mind isn’t perfect like God’s mind. There are hundreds of ways in which my emotions are not perfectly balanced as God’s emotions are. There are hundreds of ways in which all of us deviate from absolute perfection. You all don’t have perfect noses. You all don’t have perfect hair. You all don’t have a perfect tone of voice. Do you see there are hundreds of ways in which we deviate from absolute conformity to perfection in our own behavior?There are lots of things that you don’t do as God himself does. You know that. There are lots of things that I say that God would say entirely differently. There are lots of ways in which you and I deviate from absolute perfection. Do you see that that is not sin? That is just creatureliness.God does not hold us responsible for things that we don’t yet know. Say you’re saying something against me and I bring it up to you. I don’t bring it up to you with a sense of antagonism or hostility. I point out to you, “Look, you said something that wasn’t right.” I don’t come at you with hostility about it. I come with a sense of, “Look this is something you didn’t know and you were offending me, but you know it now.” Now it’s the same with the Father. He doesn’t hold you guilty for imperfections that you don’t know about.But do you see? Many of us define sin as any deviation from absolute perfection. So we judge, “We must be sinning in word and deed hundreds of times a day.” And the result of this attitude is — we become indifferent to sin.We say, “Well, we’re sinning hundreds of times a day, so one more sin won’t make any difference. So let me carry on. It’s a losing battle anyway, an unequal battle that I have. So let me just keep on doing the best I can.”We sink back to a pagan level of being the best kind of person we can be — which is really doing nothing as far as God is concerned. But do you see that the Father looks upon sin as a conscious knowing disobedience to him? Sin really is a resistance to his will that is exposed by the Holy Spirit and the law during the day from time to time during our lives. So sin itself is something that you know you’re doing.Many of us labor under a constant sense of guilt and imperfection because we think sin is any deviation from absolute right whether we know it or not. That is not sin. Sin is a knowing conscious disobedience to God’s law. In other words, the way to walk in the constant brightness of God’s justification is to identify your sin when you commit it. You commit some trespass against God, identify it, and confess it to him — and let it go at that. But if you go by the other definition of sin you constantly labor under a vague sense of guilt which certain powers in the universe are anxious to bring upon you.Now the Holy Spirit never brings a vague sense of guilt. That’s false condemnation. That’s false guilt. You know that the psychologists talk about false guilt. They call a lot of things false guilt that are real guilt. But they’re right in the sense that there is a lot of false guilt around.Whenever you have just a vague sense of guilt tied to nothing in particular, that is not the Holy Spirit’s work in you. The Holy Spirit always points out a definite word, a definite act that you committed against God, so that you can identify it and deal with it. It’s like a disease: you identify the disease and then you deal with it. So it is with sin. You identify the thing by name — then you deal with it. Make sure it is a sin. Check up in the Bible and see, “Is this thing a sin?” I think if you find yourself washing your hands 25 times a day and feel if you don’t do that then it’s a sin, you better check with the Bible and see which commandment says you better wash your hands 25 times a day.The Bible saves us from getting into the midst of false guilt. So if the Holy Spirit brings to you some sense of guilt, ask him, “Alright, what have I done wrong?” If he doesn’t tell you what you’ve done wrong, reject the guilt as false guilt brought about by the evil one who is concerned with stealing from you the freedom of the justification.There are many examples of this. There’s one where it just is so plain that God always deals in regard with sin with known conscious particular disobediences. God is not involved in tantalizing us with a vague sense of guilt. Acts 5:3 says, “But Peter said, ‘Ananias, why has Satan filled your heart to lie to the Holy Spirit and to keep back part of the proceeds of the land?’” Now that’s pretty definite, pretty detailed. Ananias couldn’t say, “Well, what land? What proceeds?” God just dealt right down the line and said, “It’s there that you did wrong.”Now in order to walk in a constant sense of justification sensing that God has justified you — and it doesn’t matter what anybody else thinks of you — you need to identify trespass as a known conscious disobedience to God’s law. That’s what you and I are responsible for. God can’t hold us responsible for the other things that we don’t know about until he shows us them.Some of you may say, “Oh, but brother! This leads into irresponsibility.” No. As soon as God shines the light of his Holy Spirit upon it, you are responsible for it, and he knows when you realize it or not. So the first step is to walk free from that wrong definition of sin. Then you have a chance of walking in a constant sense of justification.Now many of us have success in that kind of thing. But we still live in self-inflicted darkness because of another misunderstanding. You’ll see it there if you look at Romans 4:25 and look at another phrase. It’s the first clause in the verse. Romans 4:25: “Who was put to death for our trespasses.” There are many people who say they believe that verse, but they still live in a darkness that they inflict upon themselves because they don’t really believe those words, “Put to death.” They don’t really believe them.They say, “Oh yeah, yeah. He was put to death. And that cry of dereliction, ‘My God, my God, why has thou forsaken me?’ That expresses the loneliness, and the darkness, and the pain of eternal death that I will never have to face. It expresses the God-forsakenness that no longer is necessary for me.” And then they go on and they say, “But boy, I better suffer a bit for this thing I’ve just committed. God can’t make it that easy. That was something really bad that I did against him. I crucified Jesus afresh in my life yesterday or last night, and boy, God wants me to suffer for it. I must in some way put myself to death for this thing that I have done against my God.”Do you see that that attitude to repentance, which turns it into penance, is just egotistic salvation by works? Do you see that? It creates hours and hours of depression and unavailability to God. Yet many of us live in that.Many of us don’t realize the brightness of immediate forgiveness that God has brought us into by allowing Jesus to bear the pain and the darkness of eternal death. But do you see, God doesn’t require you and me to suffer for our sins? Do you see that God doesn’t require you to agonize and inflict pain and sadness upon yourself for hours in order to pay for your sin?That’s why Jesus was put to death — so that you wouldn’t have to put yourself to death. But many of us live in that gray twilight world of half forgiveness and half justification of God, and half self-justification — because we will not simply turn from our sin, express godly sorrow to Jesus for causing his death, and get on with obeying God. We instead want to substitute remorse, and sadness, and depression as if to prove to ourselves that we’re worthy of God’s forgiveness.Do you see you cannot accept any substitute but God’s substitute? God has substituted Jesus to diefor you and me because of our sins. He does not require us to substitute our own remorse or our own sadness or depression.Now many of us fail to walk in freedom and liberty of justification — because when we sin we think to ourselves, “Well, I better repent of this. Well, I better make a good job of this repentance. Okay, get the Kleenex out, and I’ll make a thorough job of this repentance. Well, I’m going away at the weekend so I have to be ready for then. Boy, I’m going to be miserable for the next half hour anyway.”Now do you see that that is not of God — that deal? That is not right. The Father does not require us to put ourselves to death. The Father requires us to see that repentance is a straight deal. It’s a love for Jesus, a sorrow to him for causing his death. And it’s action. It’s turning from the sin. It’s stopping doing it. A lot of us want to substitute a lot of emotional sorrow for real action and real forsakenness of sin.Now walking in God’s justification is a bright, free experience. It is a walking free from that vague sense of guilt. It’s a walking free from a need for penance. That’s where really the plan, I’m sure, in the Catholic Church was good at the beginning — the idea of penance — because I’m sure that originally the priest said, “It must be a godly sorrow that you have. It must be a godly sorrow that you express to God.” And maybe a little soul would say, “Well, how can I express a godly sorrow?” And maybe the priest would say, “You should do this,” or, “You should do that,” — until gradually penance became a kind of ecclesiastical method — a substitute for real repentance.It became a way of saving yourself by works, punishing yourself as much as you thought you ought to be punished. Then, of course, you went before God and said, “I’ve every right to your forgiveness, because I’ve punished myself.” Now that’s salvation by works and many of us who claim not to be in the Catholic Church are working the same way. We’re practicing penance instead of repentance.God cannot give you a constant sense of justification unless you walk by repentance and not penance. Some of us walk in that light — yet we really still don’t walk in a sense of justification because of a failure to enter into the reality of the last clause there in that verse: “And raised for our justification.”What it means historically, is that Muhammad could have said to us all, “Okay, I’m going to die for all your sins. I’m going to give my life for all your sins so that you won’t have to die for them. The Creator of the universe, who is my Father, he’s going to accept my death for your sins, and you won’t have to die again.” Then Muhammad died and we never saw anything more of him.We’d all be in doubt. We’d all be in uncertainty. Was he really right in what he said? If he was, surely we’d see some sign. Now you see that with Jesus he said all that and then he came back to life after three days and stayed 40 days here on this earth saying, “You see what I said is true. My Father has raised me from the dead to justify you people in coming before him with confidence that he’s going to accept you.”That’s what it means historically. Jesus was raised for our justification in that his very resurrection justifies us in going into the midst of death with absolute peace and confidence that God will accept us because of the resurrection.But the inner meaning of it is this: God justifies you and me in spite of the fact that we’ve lived our own lives in our own way — because we believe Jesus has been raised from the dead and his life is available to us day-by-day. In other words, God justifies us because we’re willing to receive Jesus’ life through the Holy Spirit day-by-day. And honestly, if you are not looking up to Jesus day-by-day receiving his Spirit into your life, you’re going to fall back into that walk with a chip on your shoulder. It’s just automatic.You’ll fall into it even in Christian groups. You’ll be trying to prove that you’re the best prayer in the group, or you’re the best singer in the group, or that nobody witnesses quite as brilliantly as you do.You’ll be trying to prove yourself in a Christian group all over again — unless you’re constantly receiving the life of the Holy Spirit from the resurrected Jesus, and the Holy Spirit begins to produce in you other additional signs that you are actually justified by God. Produces in you the fruit of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, and goodness. Begins to produce in you the gifts of the Spirit: the gifts of discernment or healing, or the gift of distinguishing between spirits. But the Holy Spirit as you receive him into you day-by-day will begin to enable you to walk in a complete sense of God’s approval — and therefore, in complete freedom from the need to have man’s approval.Now I don’t know, whether you still walk free of that neurosis or whether you walk in the midst of it. But do you see? God has made it possible for us to walk in absolute assurance that he justifies us and that he approves of us. What does it matter what anybody thinks? Then you’re able to walk in real freedom from that old paranoia and that old guilt complex.Now, would you each deal just honestly in your own thoughts about your own experience? I’ll tell you this. I have made every one of those errors. I have at some time in my life walked under the darkness that one of those errors brings. So I don’t think I can be the only one who has failed to enter into all the meaning of Romans 4:25. So will you identify if and where you’ve walked in error, and will you just make an agreement with God to walk free from that?Another way to put it is this: do you walk with self-doubt? Have you an identity crisis? Do you wonder, “Who am I? What am I doing here? What’s the meaning of life?” Do you have a sense of paranoia? Do you feel that somebody’s getting at you all the time? That everybody is down on you? Well, if you do feel some of those things, then it’s because you haven’t entered fully into the justification that is by faith in Jesus’ death. So you should just deal with God yourself. Or, I’d be glad to talk with you through the week if you’d just call and tell me you’d like to come in, or talk with you after the service, or even pray, or if you just want to stay behind and pray you should do it.But above all, don’t walk in paranoia. Don’t walk in self-doubt. That’s not the Father’s will for us. In a beautiful world such as he has made and in the absolute assurance we have that he loves us, he doesn’t want us walking in insecurity. So will you deal as you feel you ought to?Okay, shall we pray for a few minutes? Father, will you give us clarity to see where we stand in relationship to you this morning? Father, if we have walked with this neurosis of western society in our own lives, we trust you to show us where we have not accepted the full benefits of Jesus’ death. Father, if we walk in self-doubt, or if we do not really know who we are or why we’re here, Father if we’re unsure of ourselves, if we’re filled with paranoia, a sense that people arepersecuting us, Father if we walk in this kind of experience, we trust you by the Holy Spirit to give us real clarity and revelation now to see why we are in this state.And oh Father, enable us to see that Jesus died for us and that you have nothing against us, that the Creator of the galaxy has nothing against us, but that he thinks of us as his own children. That he wipes out from his mind everything that we’ve done against him, that he has put those things as far as the east is from the west, so far he has removed those things from us and from himself, and that you Father are ready to take us into your arms this very moment and to call us your own sons and your own daughters, and that with you by our side and inside us, there is no need to fear anyone or anyone’s opinion.Father, we trust you by the Holy Spirit to apply this to all of our hearts this morning so that we may walk out of here in freedom and live for you. Amen.

Real Justification Brings PeaceRomans 5:1Sermon Transcript by Rev. Ernest O’NeillWhat will you do after the service is over? That’s in about half-an-hour. I think a lot of us tend to feel — what would I like to do? I really need some reviewing before the exams, so I really can’t do much but go and get the old books out and get down to it. Some of us decide that way. Some of us who haven’t final exams say, “I’d like to go and meet some nice girl or nice fellow. I’d still have the picnic lunch and sort of enjoy myself.” Some of us feel we need some recreation and we decide that we’ll go down and play football, or maybe swim this afternoon or do something that we enjoy doing.Most of us, for most of our lives, have answered that kind of question in that kind of way. That is, we automatically take it as our right, to do whatever we feel we want to do. We run, and have run most of our lives like that — on the basis of our needs. Now, dear ones, do you see, that’s what sin is.We’ve gotten so used to it that we think it’s natural. But that’s what sin is. It’s living our lives as if we have no one to satisfy except ourselves, and maybe our wives when we marry, or our children, or our relatives. But it’s deciding what we are going to do moment by moment, as if there is no one to satisfy or to confer with, but ourselves. That’s really just sin. We live life as if we just don’t suspect at all, that there’s our dear Father, who is interested in every little thing we do. We live our lives as if there isn’t that kind of Being anywhere in the universe.You remember what it was like when you first left home? Your mom called you every half hour or every other week anyway. She checked up to see what you were doing because she really loved you with all her heart. She wanted to know everything that you were doing.Now, we have a loving Father, who is interested in our moment-by-moment daily existence — but we live as if He isn’t. Now that’s sin. Sin is just living as if there was no loving Father in the universe who is interested in us. Sin is living as if we only have to consult with ourselves in this life. Of course, God reckons that it’s not lack of evidence that makes us think that way. He reckons that he’s given us plenty of evidence. He’s not only alive, but he is that kind of God, he is a loving, real, dear Father. He said, you remember, in Romans 1:19-21 “For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. Ever since the creation of the world his invisible nature, namely, his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse.”God looks at us and reckons, “Well, you people say that I look after everything carefully. You see that it can’t be fairies that get the sun up in the sky every day. It can’t be fairies that make sure that the spring time comes at the same time every year. You know fine well that I am here. You know fine well there’s somebody behind the whole situation, keeping it going.” And God reckons that we are just independent revolutionaries who are determined to live our lives without him, not only in little things but in big things.It is true that we make not only the little decisions without God, but we certainly make the big ones. I mean we decide whether we’re going to make a bomb that is capable of destroying a wholepeople or not. We decide whether we’re going to use Napalm on human beings or not. We decide what we’re going to do on the big issues as well as the small issues. The Father has reckoned if I let these people go on like this forever, they are going to destroy the whole universe and make it again in their own hateful image. Therefore God has condemned us all to death. Of course we are all vaguely aware of that, even apart from hellfire preaching. We are vaguely aware that there’s something, somewhere in the universe, that has condemned us to death. You know it because most of us have a tremendous sense of paranoia, or guilt, or angst.Most of us in this life have a great feeling that something bad is going to happen to us. We have a terrible feeling that somebody disapproves of us. Whether we’ve heard a hellfire preacher or not, we have inside ourselves a deep feeling of angst and impending doom. We have a sense of worry and a sense of anxiety. Now loved ones that is just guilt. That is the human registration of God’s condemnation of us to death.We said last Sunday that our reaction to this is to try and find human answers to it. We have a sense all the time that we have no right to be alive in this world. And so, we’re determined we are going to prove we have a right to be alive. We set out in our lives, most of us, to try to prove ourselves and justify ourselves. We have a feeling that somewhere, somebody in the back of the universe disapproves of us but we’re determined to prove ourselves to ourselves and to everybody else and to try to overlay His disapproval with everybody else’s approval.That’s the heart of all our wish fulfillment dreams, don’t you see that? I certainly wanted to be Hop-along Cassidy on a white horse, if possible destroying all the gangsters in the western time. (Even in Ireland, we watch cowboy movies) and that’s why, all of us want to be the slickest 007 in our wish fulfillment dreams.We want to, in some way, establish our significance, or prove that we are worth having a place here in this universe. And the reason is, because we really doubt it. And the reason we doubt it is, that the Creator of the universe has condemned us to death for our independence. That’s our situation. Most of us go around this life for 40, 50, 60 years with that chip on our shoulder. We’re always trying to prove ourselves. We can’t enjoy the football game because we’re so busy trying to prove that we’re the best football player in the field. We can’t enjoy that little bit of talent that God has given us because we’re trying to prove that we’re the best artist that ever lived. We’re the best poet that ever lived. We’re the best painter that ever lived. And so we really can’t enjoy life. We’re so busy with this chip on our shoulder, trying to prove that we’re invaluable to the world. “World, you just can’t do without me! Even though the Creator of the universe is willing to do without me, you can’t do without me.”Brothers and sisters, that comes to a beautiful, relaxing, relieving, life-giving stop, when you at last realize that God no longer demands our death from us. That’s because his Son Jesus has died that death for us. There just comes a great relaxation and relief into your life when you realize, “God has justified me. I don’t need to keep on trying to justify myself like this. God has justified me. I don’t need this chip on my shoulder any longer. I don’t need to prove myself to everybody. I see I am no longer under condemnation to death, because Jesus has died so that his Father could forgive me.”And so it’s a great relief and relaxation when you enter into real justification. Real justification is what Paul talks about there in the first verse of Romans 5. This is another big day in our life because we begin a new chapter.Romans 5:1 — Paul is looking back over this whole meaning of justification that I have just explained and he says there in Romans 5:1: “Therefore, since we are justified by faith.” It might be good just to pause for a moment and see what the deeper meaning of that is if you look at the Greek behind the translation that we have there. The word “justified” for instance, we are justified. You can see, even those of you who aren’t able to conjugate English verbs and parse, you can see that “we are justified” is in the passive – it’s in the passive mood and it means, we are justified by someone else. That was the heart of it you see. The moment Jesus died for us, that moment, God justified us. He lifted the death penalty for us so that we had no longer any sense of guilt.Our method of justification is to try to justify ourselves by works and actions and achievements. The death penalty hangs over us, but we’re trying to prove all the time, no it doesn’t, no it doesn’t. It is as if we’re in a bus going 80 miles an hour and we’ve been told that in a matter of half an hour, you are going to hit a concrete wall. The bus is going to hit that wall, there’s no doubt — and the only way really to get away from that, is either for the driver to stop the bus — for God to stop the bus — or to remove the wall. But inside we’re all laughing and singing and saying “Oh no, we’re not going to hit the wall, we’re not going to hit the wall, we’re going to live forever, we’re going to live forever.”We’re trying to justify ourselves like mad inside the bus, when the only real justification, can be if the person who has power over death removes it from us. You see, that’s what it means “we are justified.” It means, instead of us trying to forget that we’re going to face death at the end of this life, the Creator of the universe has lifted the death penalty from us.So, he has justified us. Instead of saying you’re guilty and you are going to die forever and go into eternal darkness, he says, “No, my Son has done that for you. I welcome you into my land of life. You can live with me forever.” So it’s us being justified by God, as opposed to trying to justify ourselves. And then, you can see something else if you are able to read the Greek. The Greek is “dikaio” and it really is the aorist tense in Greek, which we don’t have in English. The aorist tense means that we were justified at a definite time.The moment Jesus died in 29 A.D., indeed the moment Jesus died in the heart of God as the lamb that was slain before the foundation of the world, that moment God no longer held the death penalty over you and me. Do you see? We were free actually from the moment that Jesus died. God no longer held the death penalty over us. And that’s what it means, “we were justified at a definite time.” At a definite time a man presented His life to God instead of ours and at that moment God had no reason to demand our death from us.So it’s a very definite thing that is tied to a space time empirical fact of history. That is Jesus’ death. And so, whenever Satan comes and says, “Oh no you are going to die”, you point to the empirical fact in history and you say, “No, one Person has died for me, there is no reason for me to die.”I think there’s another important fact about life. It’s that alhough God is then justified in not requiring the death penalty from us, we ourselves are not justified. He has justified us in allowing us to live free from the death penalty. But that puts us back in the position of Adam and Eve at the Garden of Eden, where they were innocent. The only thing that would justify them in God’s eyes would be obeying his word. He said, “Will you eat of the tree of the life of the Holy Spirit?” And that would have justified them. So it is with us. Though God is justified in forgiving us the momentJesus died, we’re justified in his sight only when we do what he put us here to do, that is, to receive the life of the Holy Spirit.You can see that though the whole world is accepted by God, yet the whole world can only be justified itself in going to God — whenever that world accepts the spirit of Jesus by faith. That’s what the last two words mean in that clause, “by faith”. It’s “pisteos” (in Greek) and it means those of us who by faith believe that Jesus died for us and prove that we believe by receiving him into our own lives. Then we’re justified.In a sense, we’re all free from the flood judgment. None of us have any need to fear God destroying the world at this time. He has given all of us 70 more years to receive his life. But we’re only justified in his sight when we actually receive the Spirit of uncreated life through Jesus into our own lives. That’s what Paul is saying. “Since therefore, we are justified by faith.” God is justified in forgiving us by Jesus’ death. But we are justified not by Jesus’ death alone, but by our faith in that — through our reception of his Spirit into our lives.That’s why, you see, many of us in our churches believe all that we have just said. We believe God is able to forgive us. God is willing to forgive us. We believe the death penalty has been lifted from us. But, we don’t experience anything of the life of Jesus because we haven’t received him into ourselves. We still have trouble. We still have that chip on our shoulders. We still run around trying to justify ourselves to others. That’s because we’re not yet justified in God’s eyes since we have not really received the Spirit of Jesus’ life into us. So I think it’s important to make the distinction. It’s important not to wipe out faith but to see that you have to actually receive Jesus in order to be justified.Now that’s the situation. Paul says, “Therefore, since we are justified by faith.” And then, what comes after the comma is a complete break in the book of Romans because here’s what Paul is saying. “I have been talking over the past four chapters to you about putting you right with God, making you right with God.” And Paul says, “This is done through Jesus’ death that you are put in a right relationship with God. God, as far as he is concerned, is ready to accept you with all his heart. He justifies you, he treats you as righteous.” Then from the next comma on, Paul is going to say, “Now once you are declared righteous by God, he is able to give you the Holy Spirit. Once you receive the Holy Spirit that brings about actual present changes in your life.”Now there is a big break there, you see. Being put right with God is justification. It’s where God says, okay, as far as I am concerned, you are not my enemy any longer. But after that, when you receive the Holy Spirit, you are beginning to talk about sanctification. Now that was the whole purpose in God putting us right with himself. God didn’t want us just to be friends with him so that he could say, “Ah, hello friend” and we would say, “Hello, friend.” No, God wanted us to be right with him so that he could give us what he originally intended to give us — the life of his own Holy Spirit. That’s the whole purpose of Jesus dying for us, that we might receive the Holy Spirit of uncreated life and experience sanctification. Maybe we should explain again the difference between those two words. Justification is to make us and treat us as right.God looks at John and says, “I treat you as right because of Jesus.” And he only does that, so that he can give John the Holy Spirit in order to actually make him right and make him righteous. So justification is treating you as righteous. Sanctification is making you righteous. Justification is treating you as a friend instead of an enemy. Sanctification is taking you as a sinner and making you into a saint.Now that was the whole purpose of Jesus’ coming, brothers and sisters. It is not just to establish a judicial relationship of rightness between us and our Creator. It was actually so that we could receive the Creator’s life. It’s because of a failure to understand this that so many of us were put off Christianity in the past. We saw all these people saying, I am justified before God. I have had my sins forgiven. I am going to Heaven. But their lives were miserable lives. Their lives were less Christ-like than many non-Christians we knew. How many of us were put off by our parents — not because of what they believed, (we realized that they believed probably good things), but their lives did not measure up to their belief. How many of us have been to churches — we like the churches, the buildings are nice, the stuff sounds good — but the people don’t live like they preach.Now brothers and sisters, it’s because so many of us have entered into what we call our right relationship with God but we have never received from God the life of his Holy Spirit that makes us like him. And that’s the whole purpose of Jesus’ coming. Now you can see that in John 1, if you look at it, John 1:33. The purpose of Jesus’ coming was not simply to put us in a right relationship with God. It was to put us in that right relationship, so that God could then give us the most precious gift he had.There it is in John 1:33, “I myself (John the Baptist says), did not know him (Jesus); but he who sent me to baptize with water said to me, ‘He on whom you see the Spirit descend and remain, this is he who baptizes with the Holy Spirit.’” Of course you see a lot of us get into the difficulty that we believe only verse 29. “The next day he saw Jesus coming toward him, and said, ‘Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!’” And many of us stop at that point and say, “Yes, that’s why Jesus died, so that my sins would no longer require the death penalty for me, and so that God could treat me as righteous.” No, Jesus only did that so that he could then give us the Holy Spirit.And loved ones, that runs right through the Bible, if you look at John 16:14 it comes again. John 16:14. Jesus, you remember, is talking about the Holy Spirit and he points out clearly that this is why he came. He says for instance, in verse 7, “Nevertheless I tell you the truth: it is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Counselor will not come to you; but if I go, I will send him to you.” And then in verse 14, “He will glorify me” –how? – “for he will take what is mine and declare it to you.” The Greek word means “to impart it to you”.The whole purpose of Jesus dying is so that we would begin to receive the life of God into us. You find it right through the Bible. First Corinthians 1:30 repeats the same thing. I think it’s important to see it because so many of us have stopped short.Jesus’ purpose is not only to put us in a right relationship with God, but to actually give us something of Himself and give us the very life of God. 1 Corinthians 1:30: “He is the source of your life in Christ Jesus, whom God made our wisdom, our righteousness and sanctification and redemption.”In other words, Jesus is not only to die for us, to save us from being exposed to eternal darkness, but he is to be alive to give us the very life of God. And that’s why you see, it says back in Romans 5:1 — if you look at it — Paul says, “We have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.” This life that we are talking about, this sanctification that we mention, comes through Jesus Christ.Now, that’s the mistake a lot of us make. We admit all forgiveness of our sins came through Jesus, now our job is to try to be like Jesus. We have to try hard and imitate Jesus. Do you see that just as the judicial act, that set us right with God, came through Jesus Christ — so the benefits of that judicial act come through Jesus Christ? That’s what Paul is saying, we have peace with God through — through what? — through our own trying hard? — through our own imitating Jesus? No! It’s through Jesus Christ Himself.Many of us make that mistake. We accept Jesus’ death so that we are right with God and then we go on and try to live our Christian lives on our own. But whatever you receive from Jesus at the beginning, you continue to receive everything from him right down through until you meet God face to face. That’s why Paul says, “We have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.”I think it’s important brothers and sisters to see what Paul is saying there. Do you see that those words “we have peace with God” — maybe it’s first good to see that it’s “with God”. A lot of us are trying to establish peace with our own consciences. Or we are trying to establish peace with standards that we have for our own lives. You know that. We grow up with big, idealistic standards for ourselves and we beat ourselves to keep up to those standards. A lot of us are trying to have peace with those standards. A lot of us are trying to establish peace with the ideals our parents had for us. A lot of us are trying to establish peace with our own ambitions, we want to achieve so much in this world, and then we’ll be satisfied.Do you see that all that is a substitute for peace with God? What we really need is peace with God. If there is a restlessness in your heart, a constant strain, or a constant sense that people are getting at you, criticizing you, tearing you apart, or putting you down, do you see that it’s peace with God that you need? It’s not them at all that are doing all those things. It’s that you haven’t made things right with God and you sense his vague condemnation in your heart. Then you project it onto all other kinds of people. That’s why you get antagonistic with each other. That’s why we rebel against somebody when they seem to do something that is going to destroy the plan we have for our lives. We are projecting upon them our own resentment against God, because he has condemned us to death.Now, peace with God is what we need. It’s God’s justification, not everybody else’s justification. Now would you just look at one other thing? Do you see the words “we have peace?” Now the Greek really reads “echomen”. It’s a Greek word that gets a long “O”. It’s actually the subjunctive tense of the verb; subjunctive in mood, and it actually means, “let us have peace with God.”Do you see that many of us believe that Jesus has died to justify us before God; but we don’t enjoy the peace that now exists between us and the Father? And so Paul is saying, “Look, since we are justified by faith in Jesus Christ, let us have peace with God; let us enjoy the peace that we’ve entered into with Him.”Now many of us don’t really do that. Many of us are dominated by a desire to be successful; successful academically, successful professionally, why? Well, we want to ensure our own livelihood and we want to make ourselves significant in some way in this world. We want to prove that we have a right to be in this world. Now Paul is saying, “Look, your Father in Heaven approves of you; he thinks the world of you; Jesus has died for you so that he could accept you completely to himself — now God thinks you’re successful even if you never do another thing after today. The Creator of the universe thinks you are successful; now stop trying to be successful in other people’s eyes. Enjoythe peace that you have with God.”Loved ones, it is a life of relaxation when you begin to study Physics for the joy of understanding truth, instead of in order to prove that you are worthy of people’s respect. It’s so good brothers, when you can do your job at work, just to do it well to glorify God instead of to try to prove that you are a good provider to your wife and your children, or that you are successful. It’s so good just to enjoy the peace that you have with God.Brothers and sisters, if the Creator of the universe accepts you, why are you trying to get everybody else to accept you; what does it matter about all the rest? If the one Great One accepts you, what about all the lesser ones? They don’t count. It doesn’t matter whether people think the world of you or not, if the Creator of the universe thinks the world of you. And that’s what Paul is saying. “Let us — since we are justified by faith, let us have peace with God; let us enjoy the peace that we have with God.”And the only way you can do it of course is by continuing to be preoccupied with God’s opinion of you. Where we lose our peace is when we start being preoccupied with the professor’s opinion of us, or our parents’ opinions of us, or other people’s opinions of us. Or we read Time magazine and see what everybody else is achieving, and then we begin to wonder, what are we achieving? And we begin to be preoccupied with what the world thinks of us.And you see, Paul is saying, “Look, you’re justified by faith. Now listen, enjoy the peace that you have with God.” You know another thing we do in the midst of conversation — we pass off one of those little self-congratulatory boasts — you know how we do it. Maybe we are particularly sensitive people and we say to the person, “Well, I wouldn’t say that I am an insensitive person.” We are hoping of course that they’ll say, “No, you are one of the most sensitive people I have ever met.”Or we really believe we are quite cultured and in the midst of a conversation we say, “Well, I am not the most uncultured, crudest Bohemian you could ever meet.” We are hoping of course, that they’ll say, “No, you are the very opposite.” Or we’ll say, “Well, I think I lack patience” and we are hoping of course, that they’ll say, “No, you are one of the most patient people I have ever met.”We pick one of the few virtues we have, and we try to set it up so that somebody else will admire it. Do you see we do it so often, loved ones, to make an impression on somebody else? We want somebody else to think we are good — just to notice us — if somebody would just notice us.Loved ones, do you see, that the Father of the whole universe has noticed you? The Father of the whole universe has counted all the hairs of your head. The Father of the whole universe has given his Son for you. That’s how much he thinks of you. Nobody will ever think that of you, nobody will ever think that much of you. Now what does it matter about making an impression on all the rest? What does it matter whether they notice your brilliant wit or whether they notice your scintillating personality? It doesn’t matter.Paul is saying, let’s enjoy peace with God, let’s enjoy it — and it goes on through all the other things. There are all kinds of little tricks we have, where we are trying to justify ourselves in other people’s eyes. Paul is saying, “Listen, let’s stop doing it, let’s just enjoy our peace with God, and let’s not try it any longer.”We do the same when strain comes into our lives. Strain is what takes away peace, isn’t it? Strain comes into our lives when we worry over the unexpected, don’t we? We can plan for certain things but when the unexpected comes along, we’re all panic-stricken. We just lie in bed at night worrying over the unexpected. We worry about something coming into our lives that we may not have expected. Now why do we do it? Well we obviously feel that we don’t have an omnipotent person who can at the moment of that unexpected happening, weave it harmoniously into his plan for our lives.Now Paul is saying, “Listen, since you are justified by faith and since you have a loving Father who is big enough to create all the galaxies in the universe and can at a moment’s notice decide what he is going to do to get you out of a tight spot, let’s enjoy peace with God. Let’s not worry over the unexpected.” But do you see brothers and sisters, we always get caught, don’t we? We always get caught. We pray hard and we say, “I am going to do that.” But then something comes along and we think automatically, “God couldn’t know about this one, so I’d better get to it myself.”Now loved ones, you see what Paul’s saying and what the Father is saying? He’s saying, “Look, since you are justified in my sight by faith in my Son Jesus, I am your loving Father and I’ll take all precautions necessary for your life; now just trust me.” Let’s enjoy peace with God and let the peace take away all strain. And that’s God’s will — that we really accept the peace that he is willing to pour into us through the Holy Spirit. You have to apply it in detailed particulars in your life.Would you look at somewhere in your life where there is not peace, would you? Pick some spot in your life where there isn’t peace and then ask the Holy Spirit, “Holy Spirit, in what way am I not accepting the peace that comes through my justification in Jesus? — show me.” He will be faithful and he will show you. And then you should enter into that peace.It’s a bit like this. I remember (I don’t think my wife knows about this) it was about three years ago. I was lying in bed one night and suddenly I realized I was frowning! Frowning? I was trying to relax and go to sleep but suddenly I realized I was frowning; there was strain on my face. I wasn’t relaxing at all. I’m sure I’ve been like that for years and years and years. And I think a number of us have strain in our lives that we don’t actually realize. We’ve grown so used to the lack of peace in that part of our lives and that’s why many of us grow old prematurely. That’s why many of us get sick when God doesn’t want us to be sick. It’s because we have all kinds of little strains in our lives, all kinds of lacks of peace here and there in our lives that really God wants us to enjoy. He wants us to enjoy peace in that area.So, brothers and sisters, will you ask the Holy Spirit about that? Because God’s word to us is, “Since we have been justified by faith, then let us enjoy the peace that we have with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.” And that peace will come through Jesus. Look to Jesus and say, “Lord Jesus, I need that peace. Will you show me how to receive it here and now? He will reveal it to you; and then it’s just a good life. This is what we’ll be talking about — maybe for the next 20 years. I think it goes on quite a bit in Romans. But sanctification, or the life that results from being in a right relationship with God, it’s just a good life. Let us pray.

Justification and Sanctification – #1Romans 5:2Sermon Transcript by Rev. Ernest O’NeillWe’ve been studying dear ones, the explanation of reality that Christianity gives. We’ve been studying it as it’s outlined in that letter that Paul wrote to the Romans in 57 A.D. This morning we’re looking at Romans 5:2. “Through him”, that is Jesus, “we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand, and we rejoice in our hope of sharing the glory of God.”A lot of us have found that we have had a real sense of discontent in our own lives. Most things have been going well for us and many people might even look upon us as being successful. But deep down we sort of felt that somehow we weren’t quite hitting life. We weren’t quite making it. And there was a kind of restlessness inside us. Many of us took two alternatives. In one we rationalize the feeling away by saying it wasn’t real, we didn’t really feel this restlessness, life couldn’t be any better than it was and most people were feeling the same half-hearted satisfaction as we felt.On the other hand we identified it with having the wrong job or the wrong wife or the wrong house or the wrong vacation or the wrong salary. And we gave ourselves to trying harder at all these things to try to make those things right thinking that life itself would get right too. Now, what we’ve been saying over the past Sundays here is that down through the centuries, outstanding men have consistently pointed to one reason for that sense of restlessness and that sense of uncertainty. For instance, Moses wrote it in Genesis if you would like to look at it, Genesis 1:26. Moses must have written this 1400 maybe 1500 B.C., about three and half thousand years ago.Gen 1:26, “Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.” Moses said God’s plan for you was that you would be like Him — made in His image. Paul wrote it another way in Romans 8:29 maybe 1500 years later. I suppose about 1900 years ago.Romans 8:29: “For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son.” And again you see that God planned for us to be like himself — actually to be like Jesus. And the reason we have so often a sense of restlessness and a feeling that we’ve missed the mark somehow and we’re not quite hitting life as it should be is because really we’re not like this man Jesus. And there’s something that continually moves inside our conscience and keeps making us realize that. That is the spirit of reality inside us that makes us feel we’re not quite hitting it. There’s something in life at which we have not yet arrived. Many of us go on 40, 50, 60 years and we never get to the place where we feel we’ve arrived.These men say the reason is because you’re not fulfilling the plan that your Creator had when he made you. We keep thinking it’s because we haven’t all the social security settled or we haven’t the life insurance settled or we haven’t the house finished or decorated or we haven’t the children at college. We keep attributing it to some other unfinished task. But really, what the people who have spoken of God have said, is that the real reason we feel we haven’t arrived is that we’re not fulfilling the plan that God had for us when he first made us.Now, in what way are we not like God? Well, you know lots of ways if you just look at some of the events in Jesus’ life. You’ll see it in Luke 2:51. “And he (Jesus) went down with them and came to Nazareth, and was obedient to them,” (that’s his parents) and his mother kept all these things inher heart.” And in that way, many of us have not fulfilled God’s plan for us. We have either resented our parents or we have put up with them. But really we haven’t been to them what Jesus was to his parents. We haven’t honored them and loved them. Many of us have not even accepted them. Maybe many of us have just rejected our parents all through our lives. And because we have not entered into the plan that God had for us, we have a constant sense of falling short.That’s really the way the Bible puts it, “All of us have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.” Well, the glory of God is Jesus. You remember it says in John, “We beheld his glory, glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.” The reason we have this sense of uncertainty and not having arrived in life is because we have fallen short of the glory of God. We’re not like Jesus.All of us in this theater this morning, we’re made to be like Jesus. Your parents were intended to experience Jesus in their homes — a Jesus who would love them, who would bless them and accept them when they did make mistakes and who would build them up by the respect that you give them. But many of us have not been like that and so God witnesses that in our hearts by a sense of restlessness, a sense of having fallen short. And we keep thinking, “Oh, it’s because we haven’t achieved all we want to achieve.” It’s just because we haven’t achieved one thing, we’re not like Jesus.You get it you know, if you look at his attitude to his friends, in Matthew 6:14-15. “For if you forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father also will forgive you; but if you do not forgive men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.” Many of us have failed to do that. In regard to our friends, we hold grudges. Many of us have treasured resentments over years and years. Many of us have relationships at the moment that are poisoned because a root of bitterness has grown up in our heart.Some of our friends did something to us or said something to us. At one vital time they let us down and we have allowed a root of bitterness and resentment to grow up in relationship to them. Our lives are not open to them at all. When we meet them there’s a kind of a haze over our eyes because we can’t be open, we can’t be honest with them. We can’t really look them straight in the face. That’s another way you see in which we’ve fallen short of God’s glory and it’s that that makes us feel that we haven’t really arrived.It’s not all the other things about economic success and professional success, it’s just that we haven’t really achieved God’s plan for us. Or, if you’d like to look at just one other verse in Luke 22:42 — “Father, if thou art willing, remove this cup from me; nevertheless not my will, but thine be done.” And one of the marks of Jesus’ life was that whenever it came to God’s will over his, he always yielded his. He always yielded his own personal rights. But we, (and you know it yourself) have fallen short of Jesus again and again in that. We will not yield our personal rights.Of course we have a right to express our own personal opinion whenever we want to. We feel that is a democratic principle that we ought to be able to do that. We wouldn’t dream of yielding that right. It doesn’t matter who it hurts. It doesn’t matter what situation it confuses. We are very reluctant to yield our own personal rights. We’re very reluctant to yield our right to our own will to do something at a certain time for the sake of somebody else or even for the sake of God. We’re very reluctant to yield our own right to earn money and spend money as we want to. There are many other ways we won’t yield our personal rights. And so we’re falling short of God’s plan for us.Now, that’s really why so many of us feel dissatisfied in our lives. In relationship to the onlysignificant other in the universe, (i.e. the Father of the whole creation who is alone able to do anything finally for any of us), we have a feeling of falling short, a feeling of hiding from him and not meeting all the plans that he had for us. It’s because of that that we have this sense of falling short and of failing. Many of us won’t admit this and that’s why so many of us have all kinds of physical tension and emotional tension in our lives.God pointed it out in one of the Psalms. Psalm 32:3-4. Really, many of us even when we hear this diagnosis won’t accept it or won’t admit it. It’s a refusal to admit God’s account of reality that brings the kind of physical troubles that we have. Falling short of God’s glory is just sin you see, it’s just independence of him.Psalm 32:3-4, “When I declared not my sin, my body wasted away through my groaning all day long. For day and night thy hand was heavy upon me; my strength was dried up as by the heat of summer.” And it’s stupid that so many of us take tranquilizers and think what we need is more sleep and more rest or what we need is a vacation – if we can only get another vacation. And really our strength is being dried up as the heat of summer and our face is growing pale and our body is becoming weak because we’re disagreeing with the one significant other in the universe, God.Brothers and sisters, that’s the situation in which many of us find ourselves. We try to sort it out by sensitivity groups, by another book on psychology or maybe by taking a degree in psychology. But somehow we still are under this problem of feeling that we haven’t arrived. And really as far as God’s plan for us is concerned, we haven’t arrived. What I’d like you to see this morning is that it really makes a difficulty for God.Now, I think first of all, to understand justification, you have to see that the difficulty here is not only on our side but there’s a great problem that this makes for God. I’ll show you it in just a couple of verses. The problem is that God is a just God. Now, that’s in Romans 2:6-11. “For he will render to every man according to his works: to those who by patience in well-doing seek for glory and honor and immortality, he will give eternal life; but for those who are factious and do not obey the truth, but obey wickedness, there will be wrath and fury. There will be tribulation and distress for every human being who does evil, the Jew first and also the Greek, but glory and honor and peace for every one who does good, the Jew first and also the Greek. For God shows no partiality.”That is the first problem God has. He is a just God. He is the director of the universe. He is the final arbiter as far as morality is concerned. He has to hold to what he said, “That anyone who sins against me or who falls short of my glory must die. I must destroy them; otherwise they will destroy my universe.” God is a just God and he is bound by His justice.Now, that would be no problem for God if he was just a just God. But would you look at the other part of God’s character in 2 Peter 3:9. “The Lord is not slow about his promise as some count slowness, but is forbearing toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance.” The real problem is that God is merciful. God is not willing that any of us should perish. Yet, because he is a just God, he is committed to destroying all of us who have fallen short of his plan. Now that is the difficulty that God is in.You can see what he can do. He can, for instance, just establish his mercy — just establish his mercy without any concern for justice. Or, he can establish his justice without any concern for mercy. Now that’s what de did you remember way back at the time of the Flood if you look at it inGenesis 7:23. That’s what God did initially. He decided, all right, I’ll establish my justice. They have fallen short of what I wanted them to be. They’ll obviously destroy my universe so I will simply destroy them. Genesis 7:23 is really an event that is reinforced by geologists, by the discovery they have made of the sedimentary rock.Genesis 7:23. “He blotted out every living thing that was upon the face of the ground, man and animals and creeping things and birds of the air; they were blotted out from the earth.” God there established his justice. Without justice everything would collapse into chaos, you know that. Without justice we would all do whatever we wanted and the thing would be chaos. Therefore in order to prevent that, God established his justice.Or you see he could just establish his mercy and this he did too in Genesis 9:15. “I will remember my covenant which is between me and you and every living creature of all flesh; and the waters shall never again become a flood to destroy all flesh.” God could simply have established his mercy and said, “Look, do what you want. I won’t harm you in any way. Live just the way you want, prostitute if you want, be amoral if you want, spread venereal disease if you want, do whatever you want. Pollute the air, pollute the water, and kill each other. I am showing my mercy to you. I am letting you do what you want.”You can see, loved ones, that real love does not express only justice, which is not concerned with the individual. Nor does it only express mercy, which is not concerned with the order in which people live. Real love includes forgiveness and mercy. And you know that’s very difficult to establish them both, isn’t it? Every mom and dad finds the problem, don’t you? Every one of us who own anything that we control, find the old problem of how do you mirror your justice to them and yet how do you show your mercy to them? You can see that mercy without any concern for sin is not mercy at all.If sin isn’t important enough to be punished then it isn’t serious enough to forgive, all you do is overlook it. But if justice is not tinged at all with love for individuals then justice itself is something harsh, unreal and impersonal. You can see that God’s problem was inside his own nature. “How do I really forgive these dear ones that I love, and yet declare to them that I hate their sin? I detest it and can’t bear it near me in my own heaven.”The answer was found in God realizing that if part of himself was punished for our sin, then we would suddenly realize that he hated sin more than he loved Himself. If part of himself was punished for our sin we would suddenly see, “Yes, sin does means everything to God. It means so much that he would destroy his own family for that sin.” And we would in no wise be easy about our attitude to sin. Yet God himself would be able to remain just and punish sin and yet be able to extend his mercy to us.Now, that’s really what God did you remember in Jesus. Maybe you’d just look at it because it’s the heart of justification. It’s Romans 3:25-26. “Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as an expiation by his blood, to be received by faith. This was to show God’s righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over former sins; (he had not destroyed the world again by a flood. He had passed over the former sin) it was to prove at the present time that he himself is righteous (that he’s still a righteous and just God) and that he justifies him who has faith in Jesus.”In other words, when Jesus died, it made it possible for God to be merciful to us and yet to retain his just attitude to sin. That’s what this present verse that we’re studying this morning is sayingin Romans 5:2. “Through him we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand.” In other words, we stand in a broad and sunlit place now with God because he has no reason to destroy us in order to show forth his antagonism to sin. He is free and able to look upon us with love. Now, that’s what justification is, dear ones.Justification is when God treats you and me as if we had never sinned even though we have sinned. He treats us as if we had never sinned not because he has had any problems wanting to do that. He has always wanted to do that. He has always loved us with all his heart. His problem before was how to do that without seeming to be indifferent to sin. But ever since Jesus died for that sin, we can have no doubt of God’s antagonism to sin. If he destroyed his own Son in order to establish his attitude to sin, then we know sin means a lot to God and he will not tolerate it. Because of our belief in that, God treats us as holy people and that’s what justification is.It’s God treating us as being holy and righteous people even though we have not been, simply because Jesus has died for us. Now, it might be good to look at one or two things about justification just to be sure of it. Do you see that it’s not a subjective feeling to be felt? Do you see that? It’s not a feeling to be felt. It’s an object of fact about God’s character that you believe. You’re not asked this morning to feel God’s love in justification. You’re not asked, “Do I feel I am justified?” You’re asked to believe a fact that has taken place in time and space and has enabled God to be merciful towards us even though he still remains just.In other words, justification is based on our belief in an objective fact that Jesus’ blood has been presented before the Father for us. Now it’s not a subjective feeling to be felt. So if I ask you this morning, “Do you feel justified?” You can’t feel justified. You can’t feel justified. If I say to you, “Now listen, because of what you did to me last week — I am having nothing more to do with you.” Then a friend of yours comes along, explains the whole thing to me, makes it right, and I say, “Okay, because of what your friend explained to me, I really love you. I just accept you as my friend.”Now that’s not something you have to feel. It’s something you have to believe. You say, “Okay. If you say my friend came to you and made things right, all right, I believe it. I may not feel it. I may still come to you and wonder, do you still hate me? Do you still not accept me as your friend? But I believe that my friend has made things right.”It’s an objective fact to be believed. That’s why you see it says in Romans 5:9, “Since therefore we are now justified by his blood”. You’re justified in remaining alive here in God’s world without being destroyed by a flood because Jesus has been destroyed in your place. You’re justified and remain alive. And because Jesus has allowed God to punish sin in him, God is justified in allowing us to remain alive. Now that is an objective fact based on Jesus’ sacrifice.You can see an instance of it in Exodus. It is the effect of the outpoured life before God. It’s the effect that the blood of Jesus has on God and the way we are to appreciate it in justification. You remember God explained, “Kill a lamb, and put the blood on your doorpost. When the angel of death passes over all the other houses, he’ll see the blood on your doorpost and he’ll pass over and not destroy your children.” Do you remember that?Exodus 12:23. “For the LORD will pass through to slay the Egyptians; and when he sees the blood on the lintel and on the two doorposts, the LORD will pass over the door, and will not allow the destroyer to enter your houses to slay you.” When God saw the blood, he did not destroy the people.The people did not sit in their houses saying, “Do I feel that God is going to do this? Can I feel the effect of the blood on my doorpost? Can I feel that God is going to forgive me?” No, they sat inside and said, “God told us to put the blood on the doorpost. He is going to pass over and not destroy us. We rest on that fact. It doesn’t matter whether we feel it or not, we believe it.”Now do you see it’s the same with Jesus? Many of us get into trouble with our justification because we want to feel the blood of Jesus. We want to feel what God feels. That’s not what you’re asked to do. You’re asked to believe that the blood of Jesus means your forgiveness to God so you have to accept the meaning of the blood as God accepts. If God treats the blood of Jesus as taking the place of your death, then you’ve to do the same. You’ve to rate things the same way God rates them. You’ve not to try to feel that blood applied, that’s the first thing. Justification is not a feeling to be felt.Secondly, you can never be more justified than you are when you first become a Christian. Do you see that? The blood of Jesus can never justify you any more than it does when you first become a Christian. So, you can never become more justified. You can become the Pope if you want to. You can become the most saintly person that ever lived. But do you see you will never be more acceptable to God than when you first became a Christian and believed that Jesus had died for you. That’s because at the end of the day God accepts us all because Jesus has died for us — not because we’re good or holy people.Now it’s good, you see, to establish that because I’d like you to see that that’s justification. You can never be more justified than you are when you first become a Christian because you’re justified in God’s eyes not by how good you are but by Jesus’ death for you. Now would you move over with me to this other big experience that we’re beginning to talk about in Romans, the experience of sanctification?You remember that the reason God was antagonistic to us was because we’d fallen short of his glory. In other words, God’s will for us is to become like him, to become like his Son. You see that in all kinds of places but you see it there in Genesis 3:26, you remember, “Let us make man in our own image.” You see it again in Romans 8:29, “That we are pre-destined to be conformed to the image of his Son.” You see it in 1 Thessalonians 4:3. This verse brings out this word “sanctification”. Maybe we should look at it just so that we understand it plainly.1 Thessalonians 4:3. “For this is the will of God, your sanctification: that you abstain from immorality.” In other words the real purpose God made us was not just to forgive us but actually to make us like him. Now that’s what we call sanctification. Those of you who know a little Latin, “sanctus” is “holy” — and “theo” is “to make or to be made”. Sanctification is to make up a person holy. Justification was God treating you as holy because Jesus had died for you. Sanctification is God making you holy.Now many of us come into difficulty when we begin to move into sanctification. Here’s how we do it. We see that we’re the same as the Corinthians. You get that in 1 Corinthians 3:1-3. Many of us see we’re the same as the Corinthians. Many of us see that yes, we’re Christians. A man like Paul can call us brethren but there is some sense in which we have not entered into real sanctification. We have not really become like God. He treats us as if we’re like Him but our own characters are not like Him.1 Corinthians 3:1-3: “But I, brethren, could not address you as spiritual men, but as men of theflesh, as babes in Christ.” (Many of us find we are carnal people inside. Yes, we’re children of God but inside we’re not like God even though God treats us as if we were like him because of Jesus’ death.) “I fed you with milk, not solid food; for you were not ready for it; and even yet you are not ready, for you are still of the flesh. For while there is jealousy and strife among you, are you not of the flesh, and behaving like ordinary men?”Many of us, who have been justified by our belief in Jesus’ death for us, are still behaving like ordinary men and women. We get jealous, we get angry, we get impatient, and we get irritable. We haven’t really entered into this experience of sanctification that is not only a crisis event but is also a progressive event. Many of us have not entered into that.Do you see in that situation Satan is eager to get hold of our conscience. I’ll show you how he does it in Galatians 5:19. Many of us see we’re like the Corinthians. We’re like these Galatians. We’re justified but in this business of sanctification, we have not entered into it in any real sense.Galatians 5:19: “Now the works of the flesh are plain: immorality, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, anger, selfishness, dissension, party spirit, envy, drunkenness, carousing, and the like.”Many of us who are justified — we don’t drink and we don’t carouse. But we have envy, we have jealousy, we have dissension, we have anger, and we have hostility to other people. Then we read the next line and this is where Satan often steels our justification from it.Galatians 5:21. “I warn you, as I warned you before, that those who do such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God.” And there our hearts drop. We want to enter into sanctification but we look at that verse and we see, “This is the way I am. I get angry, I get jealous — so I am not going to inherit the kingdom of God.” Then we take the next vicious step and we say, “I must produce those things in my own life otherwise I am not going to get into the kingdom of God even though I do believe Jesus has died for me.”Now, loved ones that’s the wrong step because that’s the old self getting up on his hind legs and saying, “I am going to be like God because I know Jesus has died for me. But I can see I have to produce those things in my own life in order to get into the kingdom.” Now dear ones do you see that that is not the attitude that God wants you to take.God wants you to see that you are acceptable to him even though you sin seventy times seven. You are acceptable as long as your heart is soft enough to repent and you are ready to believe that Jesus has died for you. That’s the basis of your justification. Your sanctification is something that the Holy Spirit begins to work in your own heart and you can trust him to work in time to get you into the kingdom of God.Now do you see how different that attitude that we take is to the attitude expressed in this verse that we’re studying this morning? Romans 5:2, “Through Him (Jesus) we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand.” And it’s the perfect tense that means we stood in this at the time we met Jesus and we stand in it now. We stand in it as long as we believe Jesus has died for us. We stand in it firmly. And then we rejoice in our hope of sharing the glory of God.Now that’s the attitude the Father wants us to take towards sanctification. It’s not to get into this old self-help attitude, where we say, “I must overcome the anger in myself. I must overcome thejealousy. I am condemned until I overcome it.” No, we rejoice in the hope of sharing the glory of God. We have a sure and certain expectation that God through the Holy Spirit is going to share his glory, the glory of his Son’s character with us through the Holy Spirit. And we rejoice in that and we walk on day-by-day glad and rejoicing.Now the other attitude is utterly depressing. The other attitude is the one whereby we come into a situation where once again our anger is exposed. We get thoroughly irked with ourselves, thoroughly fed up and irritated and we say, “I can do better than that.” And do you see it’s “I” saying, “I can do better than that.”It’s so different to God’s declaration about us that there is no good thing in us. The child of God who is walking on in the right attitude towards sanctification is one who comes into a situation, loses their temper and immediately says, “Father, you’re right. There is no good thing in me. I see that you’re not accepting me because of anything good that there is in me. I can’t even live the life you want me to live. Lord, I thank you for this situation where you’ve exposed to me again that there’s nothing good in me. Father, I want you to show me that I am unable to produce any of the beauty that Jesus had. The only way to do it is for you to destroy me completely on the Cross with him and just give me his spirit through the Holy Spirit.”But do you see it’s a totally different way. Now brothers and sisters I share it with you this morning because I know a number of you are anxious to go on into the beauty of Christ. You and I know that that’s what has put people off at churches. We’ve all being crying, “justification, justification, we’re saved by the blood of Jesus” but we have not gone on into sanctification. Yet many of you are anxious to go on into it by the old self-help method, and that isn’t God’s way.The attitude of the child of God is “Through Jesus we have access to the grace in which we stand”. We stand in this grace of God’s forgiveness till eternity, as long as we’re ready to believe that Jesus has died for us. That’s why God justified us. But we also rejoice in our hope of sharing the glory of God. We walk day-by-day grieving each moment when God exposes our own un-Christ-likeness to us.We greet it as joy and we say, “Thank You, Father. I thank you that you’ve shown me I am rotten. You’ve shown me I am absolutely hopeless. I am a selfish, miserable creature. Lord, you’re showing me that there’s nothing that you can do but destroy this whole thing absolutely with Christ on the Cross and then remake me completely by filling me with the Holy Spirit.” But do you see it is a glorious trust that God is going to do this in us?Oh loved ones, it is not a position of strain and strife. Now I agree with you, there is a glorious desperation that we all come to where we are willing to do anything if God will fill us with the Holy Spirit. But do you see it isn’t something that we strain into ourselves or strive into. It is a rejoicing in a sure hope of sharing the glory of God and just look at those things. The glory is of God. It is of God, it isn’t of your own producing. It is sharing his glory. It is the Holy Spirit giving you the attributes of Jesus day-by-day. It is a rejoicing. It is not a sad irritation with yourself all the time.You’re only irritated with yourself when you’re still hoping for something good from yourself. When you’ve really given up any hope of getting anything Christ-like out of yourself, then at last, you’re ready to rejoice. And then it is a hope, it is a trust and quiet rest that is ready to receive this when God finds it possible to give us — when you have entered into all the conditions.Do you see that is the relation of justification and sanctification? If you don’t take that attitude, you see what happens. You try to enter into sanctification. You start beating yourself over the head. And because you’re not meeting God’s standards you fall into salvation by works and you fall out of trust in the blood of Jesus. And so you lose everything. Now that is not God’s will for us.God’s will is that we as a body should walk continually day-after-day knowing that God is accepting us because of Jesus’ death and yet walking on more and more into the fullness of the Holy Spirit until we’re really absolutely like Jesus. That is what God wants.I pray that those of you who are really serious about this, that you’ll back off a wee bit from trying to produce it yourself. And that you’ll begin to hand it over to the Holy Spirit by saying, “Holy Spirit, I am a miserable mess — so big a mess that I can’t even begin to estimate what it will cost to put me right.” Say to the Holy Spirit, “I am such a mess Holy Spirit; I don’t know where to begin. Now will you show me where to begin?” And let him take you step-by-step. He will take you the whole way. Why? Because we rejoice in our hope of sharing the glory of God. God will fulfill what he has begun in you and me. That was his purpose in beginning it.

Justification and Sanctification #2Romans 5:3Sermon Transcript by Rev. Ernest O’NeillDuring this year here in the theater, we’ve been talking about justification. You know the way you do something wrong; you lose your temper at home or you cut somebody out of a lane of traffic on the freeway and immediately you begin to say to yourself, “Well, he provoked me. I had the right to do it. He was just asking for it. People can’t walk all over me.” And you begin to justify yourself and satisfy your conscience that you were fully justified in doing what you did.This is the very opposite of what God wants us to do. He wants us, immediately when we lose our temper or cut somebody out of a lane of traffic, to see that we did it because we don’t trust that God is in charge of our lives. We feel we have to look out for ourselves and we’re refusing to let the life of Jesus minister through us to other people. God has every right therefore to destroy us before we destroy him in his universe. Then God wants us to see that he has actually destroyed Jesus instead of us. For that reason, we are justified in coming to him and asking him for forgiveness. And he is justified in not destroying rebels like us but in accepting us as children.That’s real justification as opposed to self-justification. Now you remember that we saw that a remarkable miracle takes place whenever we begin to admit our sins before God and accept Jesus’ justification. You’ll see that in Galatians 4:6. Immediately we believe that God has justified us in Jesus because he has destroyed Jesus instead of us, so too he has no justification for destroying us.Galatians 4:6: “And because you are sons, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, ‘Abba Father!’” So the moment you experience God’s justification, that moment also God sends the Spirit of his Son into your heart. The Spirit of his Son begins to work another miracle inside you. Because you believe that Jesus died for you, God treats you as holy even though you’re not. He then sends the Spirit of his Son into you who begins to try to make you holy.So there are two great miracles in the Christian life. Justification — where God treats you as if you’d never sinned because Jesus has died for your sins and they’re cast out of God’s memory forever. And sanctification — where God begins to make you like himself. He begins to make you holy. “Sanctus fio” in Latin is to make holy. It’s that magnificent experience of sanctification that we’re beginning to move into here in the study of Romans where God sends the Spirit of his Son into us and that spirit begins to make us more and more like God.Now it is important to see that there are two differences. In justification, instead of enemies of God, you become friends — but you’re still sinners and not saints. In justification, you come into the favor of God but you have not yet come into the image of God. So it’s really a half of the work that is done. God treats you as holy because of Jesus but inside you still are not holy yourself. And that’s what Jesus begins to deal with. He begins to try to make you holy through his Spirit.I think it’s important to see brothers and sisters that there is a time lapse between the two experiences. God deals with us individually in regard to sanctification as he dealt with the Israelites. He gave the Israelites a promise at the beginning of his dealings with them but it wasmany years afterwards that that promise was realized. Now you’ll see that if you look at it in Exodus 6:8.Our own individual experiences parallel this experience of the Israelites as a nation. Exodus 6:8: “And I will bring you into the land which I swore to give to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob; I will give it to you for a possession. I am the LORD.” Then they had 40 years of wandering in the wilderness and they still had that promise. Then they had hundreds of years of fighting in the land of Canaan itself and they still had that promise.Now do you see there was a great gap? There was a great intervening time between God giving the promise that “I’ll bring you in the land of Canaan”, and him actually bringing them in. In all that time the relationship with God was maintained by faith, not by sight. Their tenuous contact with God was maintained by their faith in his word. Now it’s the same with many of us who have experienced justification.We’re on the way to becoming like Jesus and all the while we’re on the way to becoming, our contact with God is maintained by faith and not by sight. It’s important to see that. Some of us don’t really move in that realm. Some of us come under the law again like the Galatians. Here is what many of us do and we looked at it briefly last day.Look at Galatians 3:1-5. Many of us come into, or fall into this salvation by works again at this point in our lives. Galatians 3:1-5: “O foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched you, before whose eyes Jesus Christ was publicly portrayed as crucified? Let me ask you only this: Did you receive the Spirit by works of the law, or by hearing with faith? Are you so foolish? Having begun with the Spirit, are you now ending with the flesh? Did you experience so many things in vain? – If it really is in vain. Does he who supplies the Spirit to you and works miracles among you do so by works of the law or by hearing with faith?” The Galatians had fallen back into salvation by works.Many of us do the same thing over this whole miracle of sanctification. How do we do it? Well, turn to Galatians 5 and you’ll see it there. We know that we are accepted by God only because of the blood of Jesus. Romans 5:9 says, “We’re justified by the blood of Jesus.” But then we come to a verse like Galatians 5:19. “Now the works of the flesh are plain: fornication, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, anger, selfishness, dissension, party spirit, envy, drunkenness, carousing, and the like.”You can see that we have some anger still in our lives. We have some jealousy still in our lives. We have some envy still there. We have some impurity still there. And then we read the next verse, which just destroys us. Galatians 5:21: “I warn you, as I warned you before, that those who do such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God.”And so we say, “Those things are in our lives. Therefore we’re not sons of God, we have no relationship with God, and we won’t enter the kingdom.” Now dear ones do you see why we do that? It’s because we ignore two words in that verse. We ignore the words “shall” and we ignore the word “inherit”. Do you see that both of those words indicate that there is an intervening time between the moment we’re justified and the moment we’re sanctified wholly like Jesus?It’s an experience that begins the moment we first receive Jesus but it’s an experience that goes on and probably will go on until we meet him face-to-face. Thought it’s an experience with a greatcrisis in it that is very real and that really does deliver us from the power of sin, yet there is a real sense in which it’s a process that goes on until we meet Jesus face-to-face. Many of us come to this verse and we say, “We won’t inherit the kingdom. That means we’re not Christians. Okay, we better get rid of these things.” And we begin to try to root out envy, jealousy and anger by sheer strong will power. We’re not long in that way before we’ve developed our independent wills again. Of course, it’s not long before we’re out of any relationship with Jesus.It’s all because we forget that the only reason God accepts us is because of the blood of his Son. We’ve changed the ground of our justification. We change it to having a life without anger or jealousy or envy. Dear ones, it doesn’t matter how saintly we ever get in this life, we’ll never be more acceptable to God than we are today because of the blood of his Son. God wants us (as he requested from the Israelites) to walk this intervening time trusting his word, and trusting his promise that the good work he started in us, he will complete inside us.In other words, there is an intervening time phase. Many of us go further. We go to Matthew 7:16 and we condemn ourselves. We don’t give the Holy Spirit any chance to do it rightly. We condemn ourselves wrongly with false condemnation. Matthew 7:16 – Jesus says, “You will know them by their fruits.” We look into our lives — introspection again — which is one of the greatest sins in the Christian life. We look into our life and we see there’s no joy in my heart, there’s no peace in my heart so I am not a Christian.You will know Christians by their fruits. Jesus is saying that you will know false prophets by the fruits of their ministry. He is even saying that other people will know you as a Christian by your fruits. But he is not saying you will know yourself to be a Christian by your fruit. Many of us look inside and we say, “Oh, there are no fruits so we aren’t converted, we aren’t justified, we aren’t accepted by God.” Loved ones, our justification depends on the blood of Jesus.God looks at the blood of Jesus and sees that blood outpoured for your sins and mine and he says, “I am willing to accept you because of the blood of my Son.” Now, that’s why Paul gives this presentation of sanctification in Romans. It’s the verse we studied last day. Romans 5:1-2: “Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. Through him we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand, and we rejoice in our hope of sharing the glory of God.”Now that’s the attitude of a Christian who is walking as God wants him to walk. You’re justified by the blood of Jesus and you’re rejoicing in the hope of sharing the glory of God. You’re not beating yourself over the head trying to make yourself a saint. You’re not exercising your will power trying to get rid of the anger and the jealousy and the envy. Do you see that the love, joy, and peace are fruits of the Spirit? They’re things that the Spirit brings about in you if you let him. They aren’t things that you can bring about yourself. The right attitude of a Christian walking on into sanctification is that stated in Romans 5:2, “We rejoice in our hope of sharing the glory of God.” We thank God for every time he shows us something in us that has to change.Now, that’s what God begins to do. God begins to work upon us to do two things: to strengthen our faith in our justification and secondly to destroy our old independent selfish will. Now that’s what the Holy Spirit begins to do in us after we’ve become Christians. He works to strengthen our justifying faith and he works to destroy that independent selfish will. All the experiences that we come into are planned with that purpose in mind.All we can do today for a few minutes is to talk about how God strengthens justifying faith. The next day when we deal with the next verse, we’ll try to deal with how he destroys our selfish, independent will. Do you see that the first thing God does before he begins to work on us to make us like himself is to strengthen our faith in his justification of us? In other words, he must make sure that we are in no doubt that he accepts us as his children because he is going to take us through some hard things and we’ll often want to look up and say, “Father, you don’t really love me because of this hard thing.”So the first thing God has to do is to really assure us that we are his children. Now to do that loved ones, the first thing he deals with is our weak faith in the effectual nature of Jesus’ blood. It is weak and you’ll see that in a moment. That’s the first thing God begins to work on and that’s the explanation of this next verse. Maybe we should read the verse and then I’ll show you how it applies.Romans 5:3: “More than that, we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance.” So the reason God allows us to come into affliction is to strengthen our justifying faith so that he can begin to work on those independent wills without making us doubt our salvation. Now do you see that?Now, what is he to do first of all? Well, first of all he has to deal with the perversion of faith that Satan works in us immediately after we become converted. We believe that God accepts us for Jesus’ sake and Satan gets in and begins to pervert that faith. How does he do it? Well, you know when you turn your whole life over to Jesus, one of the great changes that comes about is that your life begins to take on order and pattern at last. Your life was chaotic before. You didn’t know where it was going. It was meaningless and purposeless. Now it seems as you surrender everything to the Father, your life begins to take on pattern and order.You begin to know where your future is going. You begin to see order in your home life. You begin to see some kind of plan in your career and somehow things begin to fall into place. Now that change comes of course because we’ve at last taken our hands off the wheel of our lives and we’ve really given God the chance to direct them. But do you see it isn’t long before we change the ground of our justification? We change it from our belief in the blood of Jesus to the way things are working out in our life. It’s not long before in testimonies and in prayer meetings and in fellowships, we’re busy sharing about — the preciousness of Jesus? And about the beauty of the death of Jesus? No. We’re sharing about the great things the Lord has done in my life this week. We’re sharing the great way the Lord turned that out just beautifully. We share how God does things in our lives.At the beginning it’s good, but do you see that if you go on sharing that kind of thing, you’re going to more and more take part in an infantile kind of fellowship. Because it’s not long before you and your friends become preoccupied with the way things are turning out right in your life. This becomes the mark of a child of God.It’s not long before you’ve declined into an Old Testament faith where you begin to say you’re right with God because things are going right with you. You know the kind of joke many people make whether they’re Christians or not. They say, “Oh, why does it go so well with you?” “Oh it’s because I live right.” And that creeps into our Christian life. We begin to sense, “Yes, we’re right with the Father. All right, it’s because things are turning out beautifully.”Then do you see what God does? He knows that that is weak faith. He knows that is virtually no faithat all. It brings little glory to Jesus and it doesn’t draw us closer into Jesus. It draws us more and more into ourselves and more and more into preoccupation with the way our own lives are going. So God allows afflictions to come into our experience. You see what many of us do? Like the little kid we cry out, “Aaaah”. We don’t rejoice in the suffering. We don’t see what the Father is trying to do. We start shaking. We start saying, “Oh, what’s wrong? Things aren’t going right. They were going right before.” We do exactly what Satan wants us to do. We begin to doubt if we’re in a right relationship with God.If you’re a farmer the crops fail. If you’re an insurance man, you stop selling insurance. If you’re a teacher, the class starts swinging on the lights. If you’re a housewife, the children start being impossible and the house begins to bear down upon you. Now, loved ones do you see that that’s why God allows us to come into affliction — so that at last he’ll break us from that dependence on things going right being the mark of a Christian. That’s why the Apostle Paul says, “We rejoice in our suffering.” Why? “Knowing that this will produce endurance.”Endurance is a Greek word “upomene”; it means a strong brave courage that goes on and on even if the roof falls in. Do you see that God’s desire is to strengthen our faith in Jesus’ blood and in the fact that God has accepted us as his children because of Jesus’ death whatever it looks like to other people. That’s why he allows afflictions to come upon us. So loved ones, unless you’re very young in the Christian life and God therefore has to treat you very gently, you’re bound to come into some afflictions and sufferings.Now, what you need to do is to look up to the Father and say, “Father, why has this come? Why are you allowing this to come? What is it in my attitude to you that is not right?” Really examine yourself and ask, “Do I really believe that I am accepted by God because of Jesus’ death or am I beginning to believe I am accepted by God because of the way things are going?” Do you see the danger? Satan can make things go right too because he is the prince of this world. That’s why God wants to take us out from under that perversion of faith – i.e. walking by sight instead of by faith.Now that’s one of the ways God strengthens justifying faith — by taking away the walking by sight instead of by faith and allowing us to come into affliction. That’s what Paul means when he says, “You see we rejoice in our sufferings knowing that suffering produces ‘upomene’, which produces that brave courage that keeps going whatever things look like.” It strengthens justifying faith. Isn’t it true in every difficulty that you’ve been closer to Jesus than ever before? Isn’t that right? It’s prosperity that is difficult, isn’t it?You need to be mature to take prosperity. You remember John Wesley who was used by God in the 18th century – they used to drive cattle among his congregations and they stoned and imprisoned him. He said, “At the beginning of my life they stoned me, they imprisoned me, they insulted me, they ignored me and my time with God was safe. Now they laud me, they praise me, they talk about me, they write books about me and my soul has never been in such great danger from Satan.” Do you see that the afflictions are the good times, brothers and sisters.God uses the sufferings to bring us into that place where we believe we’re accepted by him because of Jesus alone and his blood. What is the other kind of affliction he uses? Well, many of us experience a great relief when we receive Jesus into our own life. There is just a tremendous deliverance when the guilt lifts off your conscience and you begin to sense acceptance by God. All the worry goes and all the concern about what your future is going to be and how you’re going to beafter death comes. You just have great peace and great joy.Now the tragedy is that many of us begin to lean on that joy and that peace and so you can tell infant fellowship by their attitude to joy and peace. Many infant prayer meetings will be all concerned with how we all feel. “Oh, I didn’t feel good in that prayer meeting.” That means they didn’t feel joy or they didn’t feel peace. Or, if the meeting was full of singing, was uplifting and joyful, they’ll say, “Boy, that was a really a good service.” And so bit-by-bit people begin to depend on the peace of God’s presents rather than God’s presence.They begin to depend more on the feeling of joy than they do on the absolute assurance that God really loves us. They begin to want to feel God’s love more than believe in God’s love. Now brothers and sisters, do you see that that is a perilous situation; that is a weak faith in Jesus’ death for your sins. It isn’t long before Satan can begin to produce the same kind of joy. In fact, you can get it with drugs; you can get it with alcohol. So it isn’t long before Satan begins to make your circumstances right and you seem to still have that joy and yet underneath your faith has crumbled.Now this is why God allows us to come into affliction in our emotional life. What does he do? After we’ve been walking a while with him, he withdraws the peace. He withdraws joy. And so many of us are like the little kid who is hurt and wants it back. So many of us say, “We’re not right with God, that’s why we haven’t got joy and peace. We’re not right with God.”Loved ones, do you see that we’re right with God because we believe that he has accepted us through the blood of Jesus that has been presented to the Father. It’s naked faith and that’s why the Apostle Paul says, “We rejoice in our sufferings” – when God withdraws the peace and joy and love from our hearts, when we begin to have to exercise our wills to show these in our lives, then that is God bringing us into sufferings because we know that suffering will produce endurance. And that endurance is that word “upomene”. It means something that stays under the load. It means an attitude that stays under the load, remaining under the load of affliction without faltering and complaint. It’s going right on no matter what the load may become. Now that’s the meaning of that word.You see that’s the kind of faith that God produces in us as we learn to do without the feelings of joy and of peace. Now brothers and sisters, that’s one of the reasons why Paul says we rejoice in our sufferings, we rejoice when God allows our circumstances to become really hairy. We rejoice when God withdraws those great feelings of joy and peace because what happens inside is we sink back into the beginning of the whole miracle, our faith in Jesus’ blood presented before the Father.I remember John Bunyan who wrote “The Pilgrim’s Progress”, was being hounded from town-to-town. They were at last determining to imprison him for life and he said, “Whatever comes, I will leap into eternity by blind faith, come heaven, come hell.” Now that’s it. I will leap into eternity by blind faith in Jesus whether heaven comes after that or hell comes after that. I will believe Jesus whatever.Now loved ones, God is out to strengthen that faith. Why? Because you’ll see next Sunday he’s going to bring us into some hard things to deal with in that old independent selfish will of ours. As we come into those hard things there will be a great temptation to wonder, “Am I still justified?” That’s why God strengthens that faith in Jesus in Romans 5:9, “We are justified by the blood of his Son.”I pray that if any of you today are teetering like that that you will see what God is doing in youand will allow him to strengthen that faith so you will be prepared to go by naked faith, not by sight. It is not by circumstances and not by feeling but by naked faith in Jesus. That’s the place of peace and rest and it’s a place where God can begin to work on us and begin to sanctify us by his Spirit.Question and AnswerQ: How really do you distinguish between the spirit and the soul and how can you be sure that you’re walking right if you’ve heard nothing recently from your spirit?A: It seems brothers and sisters that the basic verse for assurance in the Bible is Romans 8:16, “The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are the children of God.” Our spirit’s witness is the witness of our own human spirit that we have experience of those fruit spoken of in Galatians 5:22, “The fruit of the Spirit is love and joy and peace.” We don’t look in and say, “Do I really feel love?” Probably you’ll never feel that you feel enough love. But it’s that other people see Jesus in our life and that lets us know that our own spirit is witnessing.The witness of God’s Spirit with a capital “S” is that we have assurance, trust and confidence that Jesus has died for us. It’s a trust and confidence within. And it’s that witness of our spirit that assures us that we’re children of God. It’s not the witness of our feelings — that we feel joy or we feel peace. But it’s the witness that other people are seeing Jesus in us because they see the fruit of the Spirit in our lives. It’s the witness within of a sure trust and confidence that we have that Jesus has died for us. It’s a belief in him.So that’s really how we walk in regard to our own assurance. The only one that we should allow to spoil that assurance is the Holy Spirit himself. The only way he will spoil it is when he convicts us of a definite sin, a definite, particular sin. Then we can deal with that definite, particular sin. The Holy Spirit never brings a vague sense of guilt upon us. He always says, “That is wrong,” and we deal with that.So if you have not the Holy Spirit dealing with you in a particular way and you’re feeling or sensing a definite hold back in a certain part of your life, then you walk according to that. Now you know how to discern between your soul and your spirit. The vital thing is you don’t try to do it yourself. That’s because it’s your soul or your mind looking in and trying to distinguish what is your spirit and what is your mind. All your mind can see when it looks in is your mind. And so you’re walking by your mind.You can’t distinguish between your soul and your spirit by looking in with your mind. It’s in Hebrews 4:12 that you have the two answers: breaking experiences, (Paul talks about “crushed but not perplexed”), and revelation. You remember the Holy Spirit says that the Bible divides between the soul and the spirit revealing the intentions of the heart. It’s the Holy Spirit that distinguishes between your spirit and your soul.The way it really works is that you’re doing something and suddenly the Holy Spirit says, “Now there’s a little emotionalism in there, isn’t there?” And you look up to him and say, “Holy Spirit, yes, I can’t get rid of it. I give it over to you. Will you discipline me in this regard?” And he’ll bring more breaking experiences until gradually he brings your emotions under his control.Let us pray:Holy Spirit, we remember what you taught us when we first began our studies in the evenings. You taught us that we could not bring these things about by ourselves. Holy Spirit, we would not try to do that. We would receive from you the warning that you have given us about the emotions and we would trust you Holy Spirit in your own unique way to bring our emotions under your control. When we clap, it is because you are clapping. When we sing it is because you are singing. When we pray it is because you are praying. When the body does something it is because you, Holy Spirit, have prompted us to do it because Jesus has told you.O Holy Spirit, we would give ourselves to you now tonight, telling you that whatever it costs you to bring our emotions and our minds and our wills under your control, we want you to bring that about in our lives. However breaking it may seem, however abandoned we may seem at times, we give you the right to bring us into a daily bearing of the Cross so that our souls become submissive and efficient servants of our spirits and so that the Holy Spirit of Jesus flows out freely from us to others and the world sees Jesus and not our personality. We ask this for his glory and in his name.Now, the grace of our Lord Jesus and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with each one of us now and evermore. Amen.

Jesus Died for You at Your WorstRomans 5:6Sermon Transcript by Rev. Ernest O’NeillI think many of us have felt that our parents have dealt with us unfairly or that we haven’t had a fair chance in this world because of the terrible parents we’ve been given. I think first of all it’s important to share with you that I wish we really would all stop that kind of self-pitying attitude.Brothers and sisters, none of us are perfect and none of us will be perfect parents. We ought to see for a start that all of us are in more or less the same boat. We’ve all had parents that have not been perfect saints every moment of their days. What I want to use is that kind of example just to begin thinking today about the verse we’ll be studying.If you feel that your parents have treated you unfairly, or you just had an unfair deal in this world because of the kind of parents you had or you haven’t got, you know that often you can begin to bear a grudge and be resentful against them. I think the psychiatrists are right when they tell us that often these grudges run very deep in people’s hearts. Often people destroy their own families because of this resentment and this grudge that they still feel towards their own parents.Now, you know that if you’re in that situation where your parents have treated you unfairly or have somehow dealt with you in a way that you think was wrong, you know when you feel that grudge and resentment inside. There are two opposing factors inside you operating at this time. One is the conscience. The conscience keeps on saying, “Listen, you ought not to feel this way. You ought not to be so petty over this kind of thing.” And you know that there is in you a sense of guilt that spreads death in your own personality and spreads death in your relationship with your parents. There is something inside you that says, “No, you shouldn’t be acting this way. Even though you feel this grudge, this somehow isn’t right.”So there is something inside you that gives you a sense of guilt even though you feel in many ways this grudge very strongly in your heart. Then on the other side, there is a sense inside your will where you feel, “Well, I have every right to do this.” There is defiance inside you that says, “No, they treated me this way, this is the way I ought to treat them.” At times the feeling is so strong that it bursts out and is uncontrollable. You’ll go home to visit your parents and be loving and kind to them but this thing inside you will burst out from the inside and will fill you with bitterness and coldness. You’ll want to love your mother with all your heart but there will be a coldness and you hold back.Now brothers and sisters, I think it might help if we see that all of us have come into that kind of experience. You’re not alone in it. All of us have found that there is something inside us that seems to condemn our action. There’s a conscience inside us that makes us feel we’re wrong and yet there’s another thing inside us, our own strong will that is defiant and that tries to justify it. You know with the first guilt, it doesn’t matter what you do, you can’t do anything with it. You try to rationalize it away as a kind of adolescence hangover.You try to say, “Oh no, everybody feels a certain amount of this towards their parents and so I can feel it too.” You try to rationalize away the guilt but it still stays. Some of us try to work itout. We try to be kinder to our parents in other ways. Those of us who have some money from our job, try to give them presents. The bitterness still stays inside us but we try to give them presents to work over the guilt. We try to justify and make up for it.Some of us try to be good parents ourselves. We decide, “I feel this towards my parents and I know it’s wrong but I am going to be a good parent myself.” We try to rationalize and work away the guilt. It’s no use because your conscience keeps on reminding you that you’ve broken the fifth commandment of the Father in heaven. “Honor your father and your mother that your days may be long in the land which the Lord, your God gives you.” Your own conscience keeps on reminding you, “You’ve broken God’s law and God has committed himself to breaking you and to condemning you to death for that defiance against his will.”You just know it’s impossible for you to get rid of that guilt unless somehow someone bears that death penalty for you and takes away the condemnation — unless somebody enables God to receive you despite that thing that you’ve done. That’s really why Jesus called out on the cross, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me”? The answer to it is, “I have forsaken you because of the sins you bear in your own conscience that all the other men and women in my world have committed against Me. You are experiencing being forsaken from me, and eternal death and separation from me for their sake.” If we begin to see that Jesus has borne that penalty for us, then we are justified in being allowed to live. Otherwise we really feel we’re strangers in the world. We feel we have no right to be alive and we still keep trying to punish ourselves.But when we see that Jesus has died that death for us then we feel justified in remaining alive. We see that God is justified in allowing us to remain alive. That’s because already he has condemned someone for that sin. That’s the experience of justification and that’s what we need if we’re to become children of God. That’s what we need if we’re to have that guilt dealt with in our consciences. But most of us, even after we’ve had the guilt dealt with in our consciences, even though we’ve had our sins forgiven, even though we’ve been born of the Spirit and have become children of God, most of us still have trouble with that independent defiant will inside. I think that’s true.Many of us go home as Christians. We know our guilt has been forgiven. We know we were wrong in the attitude we took towards our parents and yet we find something inside us continuing to break out against them. At a time when our father needs real gentleness and real love, we break out against him with sarcasm or with criticism. At a time when our mom needs real fellowship, company and understanding, we wipe out against her with some kind of caustic comment that hurts. Most of us find that still we have the problem of the independent will.Most of us have found as Christians that we’re clear of the guilt but that independent will is still there and it will not let us be like Jesus even if we want to be. We find we want to be like him but we cannot because of this strong defiant self-assertiveness inside. This self-deification continues to put God in the background of our lives and makes us more and more incapable of obeying him.Now we begin to see that what we need is not just justification but what we need is to be changed inside in our attitudes, our motives, our reactions and our desires. What we need really is sanctification. That’s what we’ve begun to discuss over the past few Sundays. There is a need for sons and daughters of God — not only to be justified, not only to know that God accepts them because of Jesus’ death — but to be actually sanctified. We are to be made more and more like Jesus inside so that we will act like Christians and not only simply believe like Christians.Now brothers and sisters, that explains the plan that God gave to Paul in the book of Romans. In the first four chapters he deals with justification and in the second four chapters he deals with sanctification. Maybe you’d like to look at that now if you turn to Romans chapter 1. The first four chapters of Romans deals with justification — the need for us to be justified in God’s eyes by God himself, by some arrangement he has made rather than trying to justify ourselves in his eyes.You see Romans 1:28 deals with the predicament that we were in because we ignored God. Since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a base mind and to improper conduct. The whole of Romans chapter 1 deals with that – i.e. the predicament that men have got into by living independent of God. Then chapter 2 deals with the fact that we know we rebelled against him. It’s not something we’re ignorant about.Romans 2:15 for instance. “They show that what the law requires is written on their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness and their conflicting thoughts accuse or perhaps excuse them.” God deals with the truth that we know we have rebelled against him.Chapter 3 deals with the fact that God justifies us because of our faith in Jesus’ death and you get that there in Romans 3:24. “They are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption which is in Christ Jesus.”Then chapter 4 deals with the fact that our faith is regarded by God as righteousness. We always think that we have to try to be righteous or moral for God to think well of us. But the fact is he counts our faith in Jesus’ death for us as righteousness. You get that in Romans 4:22. “That is why his faith was reckoned to him as righteousness.”Then you see Paul changes to the great result in our lives of justification. In chapters 5,6,7 and 8, Paul begins to talk about sanctification. If you don’t want to hear anything about sanctification, you shouldn’t come to the theater for the next five years because it’ll probably take us that long to get through the chapters. But chapters 5, 6, 7 and 8 of Romans deal with the results of justification in our lives today.You see that’s why the church has so often failed before the world. It has not allowed God to change its life and its heart. So often it has stood in a place of justification but it has not allowed itself to be sanctified. So often we Christians have said, “Oh, we’re accepted by God because of Jesus’ death”, but we have not allowed our lives to be changed. Our friends at school and our friends at work and our neighbors in the street see no change in us. And it’s because there has been no change in us that they do not believe in God.Chapter 5 deals with our reconciliation with God. You see it there in verse 1. “We have peace with God.” Then chapter 6 deals with our freedom from sin, where God frees us from the power of sin. Chapter 7 deals with freedom from the law. So many of us live under the law even if it’s the law of Freud or the law of our parents or the law of good social behavior. There are so many of us that live under laws and regulations. Then in chapter 8 it’s the description of the life in the Spirit that results after we’re justified.Now brothers and sisters, those four chapters are summarized in chapter 5 verses 1-5. Those four chapters are all summarized in the first five verses of chapter 5. For instance our reconciliation with God is stated in the verse 1, “We have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.” That’sone of the effects of being justified in God’s eyes, we have real peace.Then you see the result of this is a beautiful natural experience. I think we have to see that. Becoming like God is a beautiful natural consequence of justification and it is a lovely and a spontaneous and a joyous experience. That is described clearly for us there in those first five verses. For instance, look at verse 2. Romans 5:2: “Through him we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand, and we rejoice in our hope of sharing the glory of God.”In other words, becoming like Jesus is not a grinding, working, striving business. It’s a thing that you rejoice about. In fact the Greek is the subjunctive mood, and it means “let us rejoice”. Let us rejoice in our hope of sharing the glory of God. So, sanctification for a Christian is a joyous experience. It isn’t a striving, straining one.It goes on in Romans 5:3: “More than that, we rejoice in our sufferings.” Even the trials that God allows to come to us to expose our own waywardness and our own inadequacies, even those we rejoice in. In fact the Greek mood is again subjunctive and it says, “let us rejoice in our sufferings”. So you see that it is a joyous thing.Then we see in verse 4 that these inadequacies within us eventually drive us to the only source of real hope which is Jesus. Romans 5:4, “and endurance produces character, and character produces hope.” Then in verse 5 the answer to all our yearning and our hoping is the Holy Spirit. God’s love is poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit which has been given to us.Sanctification is a joyous thing. For most of us that isn’t so. For most of us we give our lives to Jesus at the beginning and we receive him into our hearts. It’s just a delight to serve him and to love him. For the first weeks the Bible study is great and the prayer is easy. We love to be with our Savior and witnessing is spontaneous. We love to talk about him and it’s easy because he’s changed our whole life. We walk like that for two or three weeks or two or three months. But then we begin to find a will within us that does not want to bend towards him.He tells us to speak to somebody about himself and we begin to feel a fear that they will think the wrong thing about us. He tells us to witness at work and we begin to feel a fear that they will think we’re wild, fanatical fundamentalists. We begin to hold back. He tells us to get up early one morning and we say, “Oh, just another few minutes in bed.” We begin to negotiate our surrenders to Jesus and bit-by-bit we begin to discover a lion inside us that is growing stronger and stronger.We want to do what Jesus wanted us to do and it was easy at the beginning of our lives but now it seems hard. We don’t want to lose our temper but we lose our temper. We don’t want to think unclean thoughts but we find ourselves thinking unclean thoughts. Then we make an effort to overcome these unclean thoughts. We pray about it for a number of weeks and we get victory over the unclean thoughts. Then the jealousy comes in and we start working on the jealousy. Then the unclean thoughts come up again when we work over the jealousy. Gradually we find that we’re beset on all sides with strong desires and feelings in our hearts that are against God.Now brothers and sisters I’m afraid most of us do not walk into sanctification in a glorious rejoicing way. At that point in our lives, many of us look into ourselves after years as Christians. We find that we’re hypocrites. We have a double life. We have a life inside that is not like Jesus at all. And outside we’re professing what we don’t possess. Many of us at that point begin to look inside and say, “I can’t be a child of God. Look what I feel.” Then we look at a verse likeGalatians 5:19. We see ourselves described there and not at all as described in verse 22. The spirit has love and joy and peace and patience and kindness.Galatians 5:19-21: “Now the works of the flesh are plain: fornication, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, anger, selfishness, dissension, party spirit, envy, drunkenness, carousing, and the like. I warn you, as I warned you before, that those who do such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God.” We say, “That is what I’m like. I get angry at times and certainly I have envy, and I get jealous. In fact these things are so great and strong inside me that they’re tearing me apart. I cannot be a child of God the way I am.” So we look inside, we see the mess there and we say, “God cannot possibly accept me.”Now loved ones, that’s how many of us try to tackle sanctification. Do you see the answer to that mess? The answer to that mess is your answer to this question. How good were you when Jesus died for you? Did you have no envy? Did you have no jealousy? Did you have no anger? Do you see that Jesus died for you when you weren’t even trying to be like him? Jesus died for you when you were an absolute rebel. He won’t cease to die for you because you’ve become a little more like him yet there’s still a lot of uncleanness and satanic work inside you.Many of us lose our sense of our justification before God because we look inside to see how well sanctification is going. If you look inside to see if you look like a child of God then you’re trying to save yourself by your works. And you remember Romans says, “No man will be justified by works of law.” So it wouldn’t matter if you looked inside and saw yourself perfectly sanctified. You still wouldn’t be acceptable to God. Sin is not a quantitative thing that if I have that much of it I need Jesus to die for me, but if I have only that much, I can make it on my own.Sin is a qualitative thing. It’s an inborn, independence and rebellion against God that made it necessary for him to condemn the whole world to death — unless someone died that death for the world. Now you see Jesus died for you when you were a sinner. He still dies for you more especially as you’re now beginning to want to enter into real sanctification. But the tragedy with many of us is that we try to start entering into sanctification and God begins to bring conviction of inward sin upon us. Then we start looking in and being preoccupied with our defeats and our inward sin. We do this instead of seeing that the only basis of our acceptance with God is Jesus’ death for us — not our sinlessness and not our sanctification.Brothers and sisters, unless you retain an assurance that you’re accepted by God whatever you’re like, God cannot continue to work in you to sanctify you. That’s the importance of this verse today and it’s why Paul goes back to it in Romans 5:6. You can see that God has taught us how to see the connection between justification and sanctification by guiding Paul to write of it in this order. He finishes in the first five verses of Romans 5 telling us the kind of thing that God is going to try to do in us.Then he says in Romans 5:6, “While we were yet helpless, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly.” Brothers and sisters, even though you have envy and jealousy in your heart, do you see Christ died for you when you were far worse than that? In fact, the Greek word is repeated twice, it’s a word called “eti” and it means “still”. A more correct translation would be “still even at that time”, at that very time when we were incapable of doing anything to help ourselves, at that time Jesus died for us.Jesus died for you when you were utterly unclean, when there was not even the beginnings ofsanctification inside you. Jesus died for you not because you were beginning to move towards his Father but because he loved you with all his heart. You see even the word that is used in that verse is not “unrighteous people who know what the standard of the law is but fail to live up to it”. It’s not even for unrighteous people that Jesus died. The word there is the word that means ungodly. Jesus died for the ungodly.So even when you were incapable of doing anything to save yourself or make yourself right with God, Jesus died for you and made it right for you. How much more is his death still effectual for you now as you are beginning to receive a new conviction of sin within? Do you see that this is why so many churches have turned against sanctification and have said it’s responsible for neurotic introspection, it’s responsible for a teaching of perfectionism that is not possible? For so many of us, as God has begun to deal with us in a deeper way about the inward sin, we’ve changed the ground of our justification. We’ve changed it from belief in Jesus’ death to the attitude within ourselves.Do you see there’s a subtle pride there? We only begin to look inside of ourselves for some justification for God’s accepting us because we really think there is still some good inside us. That’s really why we lose the sense of our acceptance with God — because we’ve looked inside and we’re starting to hope that there’s something good inside us.Now brothers and sisters, a joyful, safe and victorious entrance into sanctification depends on our right attitude to two verses. I’ll show you the two verses. One is Romans 7:18: “For I know that nothing good dwells within me, that is, in my flesh. I can will what is right, but I cannot do it.” While we have that attitude to ourselves then do you see we can go to only one place for our acceptance with God and that is Romans 5:9? It says, “Since therefore we are now justified by his blood.”A right attitude involves a real belief in Romans 7:18. While you have no doubt that there is nothing good dwelling in you and nothing good that can persuade God to accept you as his own, you’re driven to look to Jesus’ blood and to say, “That’s the only ground on which you can possibly accept me, Father.” But when you begin to doubt Romans 7:18, when you begin to think, “Yes, maybe there is something good inside me. God can look in and see how well I am doing — victorious in sanctification”, then you begin to doubt Romans 5:9.I remember a letter that a dear one wrote in this week’s “Decision” magazine. She’s just become a child of God and it says, “Dear God, I thank you for forgiving me my sins. I hope to walk in a way that makes me worthy of your salvation.” Do you see we can never become worthy of God’s salvation. The entrance into sanctification depends on us hanging on to the fact that the only reason God accepts us is because of Jesus’ death.Jesus dies only for sinners. Jesus can’t die for people who think they’re saintly. God expects you to become saintly but he expects you all the time to have the attitude of Paul, “I am the greatest of all sinners.” You will be receiving more and more conviction of inward sin within you so that you will yearn and cleave all the more to Jesus and to his Spirit. It’s a paradox to Christian life.God expects you to enter into Christ likeness but he expects you inside yourself to see that none of that can come from you yourself. Jesus only dies for sinners. That’s emphasized throughout the New Testament. But if you look at Matthew 9:13, there’s a clear statement of it there. It is good for us to believe this fully as the Holy Spirit begins to convict us of sins like anger and jealousy. It’s good to see that our acceptance with God depends on Jesus’ blood.Matthew 9:13, “Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy, and not sacrifice.’ For I came not to call the righteous, but sinners.” Jesus died for you when you had only sin in your life. He is still in the business of dying for that kind of person. You remember what it said in the verse that we read in the New Testament lesson, it’s Luke 7:47 and it’s the same truth.Luke 7:47, “Therefore I tell you, her sins, which are many, are forgiven, for she loved much; but he who is forgiven little, loves little.” It is God’s will that each time the Holy Spirit brings us an awareness that we are not like Jesus, it is the Holy Spirit’s will that we should immediately look to Jesus and thank God that he accepts us because of Jesus. Then allow the Holy Spirit to begin to deal with that spirit within. That is God’s plan for us.He wants us to walk joyfully into sanctification, not looking in and saying, “Oh, I failed again. I’ll never be like Jesus.” You should say that but then say, “That’s right. I never will be like Jesus. I can never be like Jesus. I of myself can do no good thing. Father, I thank you that you accept me because of Jesus’ death. Holy Spirit, I trust you to come in and fill me completely; be like Jesus yourself inside me.”That is the attitude God wants us to have. We are to remember constantly that Jesus died for us while we were yet sinners. At a time when we were absolutely ungodly, Jesus died for us. It’s not because we looked as if we might be godly. It’s not because we weren’t as ungodly as the rest but because he loves us.Jesus died for you because he loves you not because you looked as if you might be useful to the Father. It’s not because you looked as if you might become a saintly person. It’s not because you were trying hard. Jesus died for you because he loved you and he still loves you today. He is still willing to offer his blood to his Father on your behalf. He will do that as long as you’re repentant enough to offer that blood.When you start offering your own degree of sanctification to God and ask him to accept you because of your own worthiness then you’ll begin to doubt. The ground will begin to rock and shake underneath you. Loved ones, do you see that it is the Father’s will that we should walk joyously into this. I agree with you, it’s a paradox.The Holy Spirit wants to smack you right down every time you get angry. He wants to cut you right down every time you get jealous and bring it home to your heart that you are still on the throne of your own life. But he wants you at the same time to offer to Satan’s accusation not a kind of self-justification, “Well, I am better than I was last week,” or “I’ll pray my way through this if you give me a couple of months.” Rather we should say, “Father, I thank you that you accept me because of Jesus’ death. I am justified by his blood whatever I am like inside. Holy Spirit, will you continue to cut me down until you cut all this out of me and you put me completely on the Cross with Jesus.”I am so anxious that you’ll all begin to walk in this way. Because you know, I know, and our generation knows that what has put people off Jesus is Christians. That’s what has put people off Jesus. It’s so often because we have not gone into this Cross-experience with Jesus. We haven’t gone into it because we’ve allowed the new conviction of sin to shatter our old confidence in Jesus’ blood.Now it shouldn’t shatter it. It should emphasize it and stress it more and more. Every time the Holy Spirit shows me something of myself that is there I just thank God all the more for Jesus’ blood. And that’s what he wants. He wants us to walk that way so that we walk in continual peace, yet in a new conviction of sin each day so that we are really growing into his grace.I pray that the Holy Spirit will show you it because I know it’s difficult to understand. I pray that the Holy Spirit will interpret it to each of you. If you have questions, will you ask me? Or maybe it’s better even to begin reading a book like “The Normal Christian Life” by Watchman Nee — a book that would really begin to explain this to you. It is time brothers and sisters that we began to go on into sanctification as a body. Let us pray.

God Loves You Whatever You’re Like!Romans 5:7aSermon Transcript by Rev. Ernest O’NeillWhy are we here? That is, not why are we in the theater (the meeting hall for this talk) but why are we here on this earth? Why are you alive? Why am I alive? You know that we keep on giving secondary answers like to make money or to have children or to be successful. But many of us are still bewildered about why we are alive at all. You know the answer that God has shown us. We’re here so that we can live forever in fellowship with him. That’s really why we’re here at all.That involves two problems: how can a holy, just Creator accept unholy people like us and secondly, how can we ever become the kind of people that he would want to spend eternity with? Those are really the two problems that we’ve seen that Jesus answers. Most of us have problems when it comes to the second one.We know that God accepts us because Jesus has died and paid the price of our unholiness. Therefore, God is free to accept us. But many of us who call ourselves Christians have problems at the second step, becoming like God so that we will be enjoyable for him to be with for eternity. It’s at that point where many of us run into real problems in our Christian life.We call it sanctification, this business of becoming like God. You find it, if you want to look at it, in Romans 8:29. That’s where the truth is expressed. It is really the truth of sanctification, God making us like himself. Romans 8:29: “For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son.” And that’s it. God wants to conform us to the image of his Son.Now it’s at that experience where many of us begin to run into difficulties. You can’t make free agents (like us), like Jesus unless you begin to show them in what ways they’re not like Jesus. You want them to enter into it willingly so you can’t make them like Jesus by putting them to sleep and just making them wake up the next morning like Jesus. That would be taking away their free will. The only way to get free agents to be like Jesus is to begin to point out where they’re not like him.Now that’s where many of us who are Christians fall into difficulties. Soon after we are converted, the Holy Spirit begins to point out the inward sin inside us: the selfishness that nobody sees, the jealousy that nobody sees, the anger that we never express, the pride that is deep down in all our motives and our ambitions. The Holy Spirit begins to show us these things and many of us at that point throw up our hands in horror and say, “Oh, God couldn’t possibly accept a person like me. I must not even be a child of God”.Now do you see dear ones that you’re a child of God, accepted by God not because you’re good, not because you’re pure and not because you’re utterly unselfish? It’s because Jesus died for all your selfishness and that’s why you’re a child of God. But it happens with many of us that when the Holy Spirit begins to work on us as children of God to take us the second step, (that is, to begin to make us like God), we throw up our hands in horror and say, “Oh, if all that mess is down there, I must not be a child of God. God couldn’t possibly accept somebody like me.”Now, loved ones that’s why God prompted Paul to write clearly in black and white why God was willing to accept us at all. You’ll see it in Romans 5:9. We’ve talked about this verse often but it is goodto remember it especially if you’re beginning to go deeper with God and move into more of the dealings of the Holy Spirit – that experience we call sanctification. It’s the basic reason why God accepts us.Romams 5:9: “Since, therefore, we are now justified by his blood.” Now God is justified in accepting us not because we’re good, not because we’re worthy, and not because we’re trying harder than we ever did before. It’s because Jesus has paid the debt of the death penalty to his justice on our behalf and therefore God no longer has anything against us. We similarly are justified in expecting God to accept us because we can say, “This man has died for us. You don’t need any longer to demand our death. He has died for us.” That’s the reason God accepts us.But often we come under a kind of false condemnation when the Holy Spirit begins to deal with us. He takes you in your home situation. Your mom or your brother or your roommate say something to you and before you know it, you have spoken out against them in a bad temper. You say to them, “What right have you to treat me like that?” All the irritability, impatience and sarcasm come out from inside you. And if you’re looking inside you say, “If I am like that, I couldn’t be God’s child.”Do you see brothers and sisters you’re God’s child not because you have none of that down there but because Jesus has died for all that. Jesus has made things right between you and the Father but many of us still rebel against that. Many of us fall under the condemnation that Satan brings and it is Satan. I think it is good to see that for some of us, if you look at Revelation 12:10, you can see Satan’s main function in regards to those of us who believe God has accepted us.Revelation 12:10: “And I heard a loud voice in heaven, saying, ‘Now the salvation and the power and the kingdom of our God and the authority of his Christ have come, for the accuser of our brethren has been thrown down, who accuses them day and night before our God.’” Often when we begin to enter into some of the new conviction of inward sin that the Holy Spirit brings — when he begins to point out to you that it’s not just drinking, it’s not just swearing, it’s not just these outward sins that we have called sins that matter — but it’s the inward pride.It’s the sarcasm in our voices when we speak to people. It’s the critical attitude inside our heart that nobody sees. It’s that that God wants to get rid of. When we begin to receive the new conviction of the Holy Spirit that precedes an experience of sanctification, often Satan gets into the act as well and starts accusing us. He says, “Yes, Jesus has died but he has died for people who are better than you. He hasn’t died for you.”Many of us get into that position. We say, “Oh yes, Jesus has died for everybody. But he couldn’t have died for me. God couldn’t love a person as miserable and wretched as I am.” That’s why we read that verse last Sunday. Jesus, at the very time when we were incapable of doing anything to make ourselves right with God, Jesus died for the ungodly. It’s so good to see that Jesus died for ungodly people not for godly people. Yet many of us have trouble.We still say, “Oh yes, Pastor, I know he died for the ungodly but no he couldn’t love me. If you saw into my heart, nobody could love me.” Now, why do we feel that? Why do many of us here this morning, when we begin to move into sanctification, suddenly begin to doubt if God can possibly love us?Well, dear ones the answer is in the verse that we’ll study today. If you’d like to look at it, it’s Romans 5:7. This is the reason why many of us (though we accepted at one time that God loved us and Jesus had died for us) begin to doubt whether God loves us at all when we begin to move into somenew conviction of inward sin.Romams 5:7 – “Why, one will hardly die for a righteous man – though perhaps for a good man one will dare even to die.” It’s because you and I judge God’s love according to the world’s love. You and I judge God as loving us the way the world loves us and the world always loves us depending on the kind of people we are. It depends on our state. The world looks at us and if we’re worthy of love then the world loves us.So the world says, “Well, for a righteous man, one who just abides by the letter of the law and is morally upright (like a Pharisee), one will hardly dare to die for him at all. But for a good man, a man who not only abides by the law but is warm, loving and generous as well, one might even dare to die for him.”In other words, the world decides whom it loves on the basis of the state of that person’s heart and their character. So we have a great tendency to look into our hearts and to say, “God couldn’t possibly love me because the world loves me according to the kind of person I am. So if God loves me on the same basis, he couldn’t possibly love me.” And that’s the error that we fall into.The world does love us on that basis. People hire you on that basis, don’t they? They examine you completely. They examine all your abilities and then they decide whether to accept you or not. They fire you on the same basis. If you haven’t performed well, they fire you. We get friends on the same basis. It’s so often that people love us because we’re worth loving. There’s something attractive in us or there’s something worthwhile in us. We in fact tend to love other people on the same basis, don’t we?We try to love, we tend to love people who are compatible with us or who are attractive to us in some way and we ourselves try to win acceptance by our peers on the same basis. At school, we try to be swingers. We try not to be squares. At college we try to wear beards because beards are in. We try to gain acceptance with other people by being the kind of people that they would want to love.Now brothers and sisters, that’s the way the whole world works. Even the commercials on TV assure you that if you could possibly ever get the sweetest breath in town, then you’re set for a married partner for the rest of your life. Or, if you mothers could possibly have hands like your teenage daughter, then family troubles would cease.Everybody loves someone with sweet breath and with smooth hands. Do you see that we’re brainwashed with the idea that you’re loved when you’re worth loving. You’re loved when you have a certain state of heart or a certain character — then people like you.You know it works even in marriage which is the highest form of worldly love and human love that we see. So often married people come together because they see something in each other that they want. They love each other because they see something in each other that attracts them. That’s why so many marriages fall apart because they cease to see in each other what they want. And so they love each other according to the state of each other’s character and heart.Now brothers and sisters, God’s love is absolutely different from that. You just have to face it that God’s love is not like human love at all. You know even in Christian circles it comes about. We say we love people’s souls. But so often the brothers love the sharp looking girl souls, and the sisters love the sharp looking boy souls. So even in Christian circles, our love is governed by whatthe other people are like. Now God’s love is not like that at all.God’s love depends not on the character of the person to be loved but depends on the character of the person loving. God’s love depends on his own nature. God loves because he is loving, because his heart is filled with love. He doesn’t look at a person and say, “Oh, you’re nasty and jealous, selfish and proud. I am not going to love you.” God loves independent of your nature. Independent of how bad or miserable or rotten you are, God loves. It’s utterly different from the world’s love.So do you see it’s never right to look at the way other people love us and then say, “Oh, God loves us like that multiplied to the nth degree,” — he doesn’t. Human love is based on your character; on the kind of person you are, on whether you’re useful or attractive to the other person. God loves you utterly, completely independent of whether you’re attractive or not. God loves you because he’s a loving Father and his heart is filled with love.You will never build up your faith by looking at people and their attitude to you. You’ll never build up your faith in God’s love that way. Faith comes by hearing and hearing by the word of God. The Bible is full of passages and stories that show you that God loves independent of the person’s character that is loved.Now even in the Old Testament you see it. If you look at Hosea you’ll see God’s attitude to Israel. In Hosea 11 you’ll find that God loves the nation of Israel independent of the character of the nation of Israel. You can see God’s heart.Hosea 11:1-7; “When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son. The more I called them, the more they went from me; they kept sacrificing to the Baals, and burning incense to idols. Yet it was I who taught Ephraim to walk, I took them up in my arms; but they did not know that I healed them. I led them with cords of compassion, with the bands of love, and I became to them as one who eases the yoke on their jaws, and I bent down to them and fed them. They shall return to the land of Egypt, and Assyria shall be their king, because they have refused to return to me. The sword shall rage against their cities, consume the bars of their gates, and devour them in their fortresses. My people are bent on turning away from me; so they are appointed to the yoke, and none shall remove it.”Now here is God’s heart coming out. Hosea 11:8-9 – “How can I give you up, O Ephraim, how can I hand you over, O Israel! How can I make you like Admah! How can I treat you like Zeboi’im! My heart recoils within me; my compassion grows warm and tender. I will not execute my fierce anger, I will not again destroy Ephraim; for I am God and not man, the Holy One in your midst, and I will not come to destroy.”Brothers and sisters, God is God and not man. He loves people because he loves them, not because they’re worthy to be loved. You see it right through Jesus’ life. You remember the times when he does it. Look at Matthew 8 at just one indication with a leper.Matthew 8:1-3; “When he came down from the mountain, great crowds followed him; and behold, a leper came to him and knelt before him, saying, ‘Lord, if you will, you can make me clean.’ And he stretched out his hand and touched him, saying, ‘I will; be clean.’”Now the leper’s skin was not smooth. The leper’s skin was peeling and was putrid. The leper’s breath was not sweet smelling. It smelled like his body and like his disease. Jesus saw nothing in theleper that was useful to him but he loved the leper. Loved ones, Jesus looks at us in the same way. However leprous we are in the inside, Jesus loves us independent of the kind of people we are.You’ll find it with Zacchaeus who was a traitor to his country. He was just a quisling, a fellow that was being used by the occupation forces to milk finances from his own people. Yet when Jesus came together with him, he asked him, “Can I come to your house for tea?” The Pharisee said, “Why do you have anything to do with a sinner like that?” Zacchaeus was not a popular man and he was not a man that everybody wanted to be with. But Jesus loved him.Now brothers and sisters, God continues to love us even as he is showing us the ways in which we are not like Jesus. God not only loves us but Jesus has died for all of us. God has atoned for all of the stuff that he’s even showing you inside your heart. He has atoned for it all. In other words, the death of Jesus is for all of us whatever state our hearts are in. Whether we’ve been Christians for years or whether we’re not Christians, Jesus has still died for us.Now that’s different from saying we are all therefore accepted by God. God loves us all but he doesn’t accept us all. He can only accept those of us who repent and who trust him. So it is important to see that. Some people have perverted “God loves everybody” into “God accepts everybody”. God can only accept those who come to him. It’s like having a lifeboat in a raging sea. The ship is going down and the lifeboat is available but survivors have to get into the lifeboat in order to be saved, otherwise they will be lost.Now, it’s the same with God. God loves us all. There’s no question. Loved ones, do you see there’s no question as to whether God loves you or not. There’s just no question of it. There’s only a question in your mind when you look at human beings and you see them despising people who aren’t attractive and who aren’t winsome and who aren’t personality people.It’s only difficult for you then to believe that God loves you. But if you look at God as he appears in Jesus and as he appears through the Bible, you’ll have no doubt that God loves you. Of course he loves you but he can only accept you when you begin to come towards him in repentance and in trust. But God does love you.Do you see there’s no question of God’s love? If you want God’s love, it is there. The only people who cannot believe in God’s love this morning in the theater are people who will not believe. I know that’s hard but that’s the way Jesus put it. Jesus said, “There are some people who will not believe.” They have all the ground, all the basis for believing, but they won’t believe.Now you see that in Luke 22:67. Jesus put it strongly and there are two Greek words for the negative “ou” and “mn” (oo may) and he uses both of them to emphasize there are some people who just will not believe. It doesn’t matter what you say to them. Remember the priests and scribes are speaking to Jesus. Luke 22:67; “If you are the Christ, tell us.” But he said to them, “If I tell you, you will not believe.”Now brothers and sisters, the only way not to believe that God loves you is to actually will not to believe. And if you keep looking at human beings and their attitude to you then you are willing not to believe because you keep on saying what is not true. You keep on saying, “Yes, that’s the way God loves me. He loves me like human beings love me. They love me when I am attractive or when I’m good. That’s the way God loves me.”If you will to believe that way, then you cannot enter into truth at all and you live a lie for the rest of your life. Now here are some of the people who do that and the psychologists have helped us in this. Some people say, “Well, I had a cruel father. I had a father who wasn’t loving at all. He was hard and impersonal. He laid down the law to the family all the time.” Or, “I had no father.” Or, “I had a father that left my mother and abandoned me.” And they say, “Now you tell me, how can I possibly believe in a loving heavenly Father if I had a father like that?”Do you see that it wouldn’t matter if you had the greatest father in the whole world? His human love is nothing like God’s love. Do you see that’s only a cop out that we’ve been enabled to enter into through psychology? Do you see that it doesn’t matter if you had an angelic father? His love is nothing like God’s love. Because even his love is tainted a little with your own state and your own character. God loves differently from any father.Some of us say (and you know it came in through liberal philosophy and through humanism), “Now if my brothers won’t love me”, (we Irishmen and minority groups say this and are strong on it) “If my brothers and sisters won’t love me, whom I see, how can I possibly believe that God whom I cannot see loves me?”Now dear ones, do you see that it wouldn’t matter if you were surrounded with the best and most loving friends in the whole wide world? Their love is still different from God’s love. It wouldn’t give you any better an idea of God’s love. The only way you see the way God loves, is to look at the Father and to look at Jesus in the New Testament and to see that he loved the leper who was dirty and smelling. He loved Zacchaeus who was a traitor, a liar and unpopular. And this is the same Jesus who lives this morning and loves you even as (through his Holy Spirit) he begins to expose the jealousy, envy, pride and the sarcasm inside you so as to make you like himself. Yet Jesus is still loving you and he is accepting you because he died for you. It’s not because you’re perfect and it’s not because you’re pure.A lot of us say, “Well, I want to believe that but I can’t believe it.” Loved ones, everybody has a will free enough that with the aid of God’s grace they can believe what God has shown them of himself down through the centuries. Some of us say, “Oh yes, I know many can, but I can’t. I’ve tried and I can’t feel God’s love.”Brothers and sisters, do you see that your feelings are programmed by other people’s attitude to you? If you try to feel God’s love then you’re dealing with feelings that are programmed by human love and by a human attitude towards you. It’s not a matter of feeling God’s love; it’s a matter of believing God’s love. You believe that if God loved a leper, if he loves Zacchaeus, then he loves me. Whether I feel he loves me or not, I believe he loves me.Loved ones, it’s vital to walk in that confidence as we begin to walk into this experience of sanctification. Otherwise, it will just be a desperate, defeating, sorrowful, grief-stricken experience. But if you look at it this way and you see that God loves you independent of what you’re like. Even if we are the saintliest person in the whole world God loves you no more than he loves you today. Then you can begin to move into the new conviction of sin that the Holy Spirit brings and begin to move towards crucifixion with Christ and move into it joyfully and confidentially. That’s the Father’s will for us.So will you stop looking in? Will you stop judging God by the way other people think of you? Do you know that you’re the most lovable person in the world to your Father? Dear ones, do you really knowthat? Now would you stop cringing yourself up in a little ball and saying, “Nobody loves me?” That’s not fair to your Father. He gave you good hair and a good face and a body that he thinks is good and he thinks he has given you a good personality. Now you have no right to look up to him and complain by saying, “You haven’t. You haven’t given me the right things and you don’t love me.”You’ve never given your life for anyone. The Father has given his own Son’s life for you. So really it’s time for us to stop pitying ourselves. God doesn’t love you because you’re pitiable or because you need sympathy. God loves you because he loves you. He thinks the world of you and he doesn’t want you to let Satan get in and persuade you of a lie or let human beings persuade you of a lie. They will never love you as God does. Let us pray.Dear Father, we thank you that when we look at you in Jesus, we don’t have any doubt that you love us. Father we can’t have any doubts. We see it plainly stated that you love the world so much that you gave your only begotten Son for us. Father we know that. When we look into Jesus’ eyes, we see compassion for lepers and for traders and for liars. When we look into your eyes, we see compassion for sinners. We see compassion for confidence tricksters. We see confidence for people who have opposed you and fought against you. Father, we know that that is your attitude to us this morning.So Lord, we thank you that you are beginning to show us the ways in which we’re not like Jesus. We thank you that you accept us not because we’re like Jesus but because you love us with all your heart and because Jesus has died so that you could accept us. Father we believe that. We choose to believe that this morning, accept your love, and thank you for it. We trust you for more conviction of inward sin by the Holy Spirit so that we may come into the fullness and the baptism of the Holy Spirit and into real sanctification. For your glory. Amen.

ReconciledRomans 5:7bSermon Transcript by Rev. Ernest O’NeillYou can read the story of God’s creation of the earth in Genesis. And in Chapter 2:7-9 it says, “Then the Lord God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being. And the Lord God planted a garden in Eden, in the east; and there he put the man whom he had formed. And out of the ground the Lord God made to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food, the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.”That’s really what it was like on the first morning. It was beautiful. We knew our Maker just as our dear Father and old Adam had no trouble. You remember I shared with you before. God showed him where to get the orange juice, he went over, got it, and had breakfast. Then the Father showed him what he wanted him to do that day. Adam obeyed him and he dammed up this river, he pruned that tree or he ploughed this field. God therefore provided everything that Adam needed and Adam received all his enjoyment from just working hand and glove with the Father. Loved ones, that’s what it was really like.It really was a beautiful place and that was the Father’s plan. That also is his plan for us. It is possible to live that way. You know it’s all gone miserable. We were watching TV in London about two weeks ago and Jack Manoe was on, the geneticist, talking about genetic engineering as the only solution to the over-population problem. You know what their solution is.You select the ones who can reproduce and you eliminate the ones who can’t reproduce. You know that’s the miserable mess we men and women have got ourselves into. It was a beautiful place and God would have governed it if we had listened to him. He’d have governed us so that there wasn’t this over-population problem but you know that it’s all just gone down the drain.Really, at the very beginning men knew their position in the world. They knew what it was like. They knew why they were here. They knew how important they were to their Maker. But one of the things you and I fight now is just the sheer insignificance of our lives. It’s come to such a point that we all feel that terrible insignificance. It’s so hard even to gather together like this, however loving and concerned we are with each other. We’ve had the feeling, “Oh, I am insignificant. I really am not important to anybody.” You know the way that has led you into trying to make yourself significant.From when we were teenagers, we’ve been trying to get ourselves noticed by somebody. We feel so insignificant. We want somebody to notice us so we’ll be significant to somebody. We tried all kinds of things when we were teenagers. Now we’ve got a little more subtle. We think, “Maybe if I do a doctorate – there aren’t so many doctors as there are bachelors.” So, we go for a doctorate.We’re all struggling to get some kind of significance. It is very difficult to get that without eventually beginning to discourage others from getting significance. It’s very hard to try to go for significance in your own life without ending up discouraging others from catching the limelight.You know bit-by-bit you begin to manipulate and to dominate other people in order to get yourselfinto a position of significance. You know how that leads to alienation. You begin to feel, “Well if I am doing this with my roommate, if I am doing this with the people in my family, if I am doing this with my girlfriend, then they must all be doing it to me.” It leaves us with alienation and we begin to suspect each other. We begin to suspect everybody else is trying to manipulate and dominate me. In trying to establish our significance we’re all becoming fearful of each other establishing their significance.It just goes on and on like that and we try to get over it in different ways. Some of us begin to get so distraught about it that we settle, “Well, we have to get safe in some way. If everybody is alienated to me and everybody is trying to get one over on me, then I’d better band together with some others and we’ll band against the rest of the world.” And so we love to join things.We love to join clubs for the wrong reason. We love to be part of a political party for the wrong reason. It’s good to be for a governor or for Nixon. But so many of us are just using that to feel we’re with a herd, we’re with a group of some kind that will be safe because it’s a bundle of people who are grouping together to get their own significance in the world. You know that that whole herd instinct doesn’t do it any good at all. It begins to destroy the individuality of us, ourselves.We begin to cease to be individuals ourselves, those of us inside the group, and it further intimidates the people outside the group. They feel more and more threatened. Brothers and sisters, that’s something of the mess that we men and women have made of what was a beautiful situation at the beginning.You know as we try to tackle all these problems, we get to feel more and more inadequate. Because we feel inadequate, we think that we have to do something about our inadequacy. And so we try to prove ourselves adequate. We set goals for ourselves in this life and we try to hit those goals. We call the people who hit those goals achievers. The people who fail to hit them, they’re under-achievers. We try to achieve in order to declare ourselves adequate and significant in some way. It all brings strain and striving.We’re all straining and striving for the “A” (top grade) even though we know that the university administration is committed to giving only four “A’s” per class. But we’re all aiming for the “A”. There is strain and striving because we’re all trying to get to that point where we prove that we’re of some value in the world. Yet you know if you’re like me, you just never get to feel you’re valuable enough. You feel nobody really estimates your personal value high enough.The more indiscriminate bombing that takes place in Vietnam, the more violence that takes place in the city streets, the more mass classes of 500 people watching a TV set there are, the more we feel that we have very little value to anybody. Therefore we try to establish our value and you know how we do it. We try to get into a position where we prove that we’re indispensable. This is what makes so many wives and so many children pout when they’re not given attention. They feel, “No, I am of value, I am of value.” It’s what causes so many husbands to seek alliances elsewhere outside their home because they want somebody that gives them some value and respects them.It’s really what makes so many business and church people just pained. They’re always trying to get into a position where they think they’re indispensable. Now brothers and sisters, you know that we’re not talking about everybody else, we’re talking about us, poor people. That’s very much us. In all kinds of different ways we’re trying to justify our being here. We’re trying to prove that we have a right to be here.Now brothers and sisters, don’t you see where it leads you? It really leads you into constant frustration. Your mind and emotions get utterly disturbed and destroyed and you have to do something to quiet them down just in order to keep going. Nobody is giving you the notice that you need. Nobody is giving you the significance that you need. Nobody is setting the personal value upon you that you need. Therefore, you get frustrated inside and resentful. You get worried and troubled and anxious. All you can do is deal with those symptoms.You know the way we deal with it — we try to calm our emotions. First of all we do it with the tranquilizers, then with the alcohol, and then we go a bit further into the drugs. Now you know the latest thing is what some of you mentioned in prayer this morning where you try to hypnotize the soulish powers, the mind and emotion, into a place of passivity through chanting “Hari Krishna” or through practicing the negation of self and Zen Buddhism. You try to blot it out and that’s the point that many of us are at today even in America.In Europe it’s worse. The old story is that Europe is ahead of us in thinking and they are ahead of us in the decline. There’s a great sense of hopelessness. People feel, “If only I can blot out the whole mess. I can’t find a solution to it so if I can just blot it out I’ll last through it.” That’s what sister was talking about with the girl concerned with suicide.I don’t think there’s one of us who live in this chaotic world with all its alienation and all its self-seeking and desire for significance that have not come to the point where there was real heavy depression you’re stepping over. Now brothers and sisters, do you know that there is a sensible, planned solution? The Maker of the world does have a way out of that.Now, all of you won’t accept it this morning, and I understand that. If you have come in this morning with a whole lot of atheism inside and a whole lot of agnosticism, you’re not going to accept what I explained this moment. But I am asking you to begin to consider that there is a way other than the drugs, a way other than the alcohol, a way other than the occult. There is a real solution.There was a man in the first century. You know who he was, Jesus. He said, “Listen, you’re all seeking significance from the wrong people. You’re all trying to get it from each other. The reason you’re trying to get it is that you have lived your life without the Maker of the world. Things were beautiful at the beginning but you no longer treat him as your father. You treat him as an “it”. You call him an “élan vital” or a vital force of some kind that started the world. You call him an explosion in the middle of nowhere. You call him two atoms coming together. You call him a single-cell amoeba. You have ignored this Creator.”“You have ignored him and lived your own life in your own way for your own purposes. Now because of that, my Father has turned his face away from you also. He has ceased to make his power available in your life. In fact, he has released his wrath upon you and what you feel now of loneliness and insignificance is a result of God’s reaction to your rebellion against him.”Jesus explained that there was a man at the beginning called Cain who killed his brother and from then on he became a fugitive and stranger upon the earth. Jesus explained, “Look, that’s what you’ve become.”When you live your life without the Maker of the world with you, you sense this rejection. Whatyou’re doing is attributing it to everyone else. You are trying to live with it by getting other people to accept you. But Jesus said that’s not what is needed. “My Father has condemned you to go into infinite darkness after this physical life is over. It’s the fear of that and the awareness of that in your conscience that makes you so desperate.”Then Jesus said, “But listen, my Father loves you. He has allowed me to go into that infinite darkness in your place. He is able to keep his antagonism and his condemnation against people who rebel against him, he is able to remain a just God and to keep his promise that those who forsake him will die, and he is able to keep his promise by working that out on me. But he Himself wants no longer to work it out on you. Because I have died for you, my Father is ready to give you another chance. He is willing to accept you as his children and he wants you to start all over again, this time to start with him as your loving father, and to start treating him as a real person.”Brothers and sisters, all I can share this morning is that those of us who have believed this and have begun to deal seriously with this man Jesus, someone who was above time and space and is alive today, we have found an utterly new Spirit coming into our lives. We have found freedom from our depression and worry. We have found freedom from frustration and a freedom from always pulling somebody’s coat tails and saying, “Look at me, look at me, look at me.” So many of us have never got beyond that childish stage, “Daddy, look at me, look what I am doing.”We have found a new spirit inside us that makes us realize that the Maker of the world knows us, notices us and loves us personally as one of his sons and daughters. We have found that he makes things available to us that we need. But the real reason we started to treat him in this way was not because he did these things for others but because God is real.God is the loving father of Jesus. That’s why I am asking you to start believing that — not because he’ll do all those things for you but because God is real. God is a loving father. He knows you this morning. He knows your name. He notices you. He knows how you’ve dressed this morning. He knows what you ate or didn’t eat this morning. He knows what you’ll do this evening. He knows you by name. Even though you have ignored him for years and treated him as a kind of religious principle for generations, he is willing for you to start all over again with him and to start believing that he really does love you and he really is a father.Brothers and sisters, for many of us in this theater that has changed everything. And as this Father has begun to give us his life, we’ve sensed a freedom from all those frustrations that I shared with you at the beginning. Now you have to think the whole thing over. You have to think it all over.You have to read some of the books that you’ll find in the lobby or in the Fish bookshop and you have to start talking with some of the people here. Then decide — is this true? If it’s true, then take the step of saying to Jesus, “Lord, I believe you were real. I believe you did not die as a political criminal but you did die so that my father would be free to forgive me. Lord, I am going to believe that now and I commit my life to you. I ask you to give me your Spirit and drive away this darkness, desperation, frustration and insignificance. Enable me to be what I was created to be.”So will you think about it? If you want to pray with someone about it then set up a time. Come and see me or see some of the brothers and sisters or just stay behind the theater or talk to some of them in the fellowship. But move forward in it as God guides you to. Let’s begin to live in the waythat we were planned to live. Let’s begin to really live with God as our father. I’ll pray that Jesus will enable some of you today to see it and to come to it.Let us pray.Dear father, I thank you for my brothers and sisters here this morning. I trust you Father by your Holy Spirit to make it real to somebody for the first time today. Father, I know that men’s voices are of no value, man’s intellect achieves nothing — but I know you by your Holy Spirit can make all this new and real to all of us today. I trust you Father to do that. Now we would commit ourselves to living this week with a loving Father who knows us, who owns the cattle on a thousand hills, who set out the galaxy, who planned the seas and the rivers. We thank you that we can call you our Father and we can trust you and love you because of Jesus. Amen.

Jesus’ Death Reconciles – Jesus’ Life SavesRomans 5:10Sermon Transcript by Rev. Ernest O’NeillThe verse that we’re studying this morning states the heart of the truth God has shown us over the past years here on campus, at the University of Minnesota. It might be good brothers and sisters if you’d look at that verse. It’s Romans 5:10. “For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by his life.” And what we’ve said in our churches was that we believed in the first part of the verse, you see the bit, “While we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son.” But we have very little experience of the second part of the verse in our own lives — of being saved by Jesus’ life.So many of us have felt we were children of God but we weren’t like children of God inside in our own lives. Maybe the simplest way to express it is to tell you how it worked in my own life. I was brought up in an ordinary Methodist church in Belfast, Ireland. They shared again and again the truth that Jesus had died for us. When I was about 13, at Sunday school, I thought I’d give my life to God.What I did was become a believer in God. I began to believe that there was a God and I would ask him to help me when things were difficult. Belfast was a shipyard city and during the war the Germans got as far as Belfast because of the oil tankers that were being built there. When the bombs would come over and my father (an electrician) would be down in the shipyard taking care of his job, I would pray that God would help him. I would pray that God would help me in my classes and in my school work. When my mother was sick I would pray that God would heal her.I believed in God but that was really about it. That’s the way it went through high school until I was 17. I really felt I was a Christian but all I was, was a believer. I believed that there was a God, and that he was a loving and a kind God. Then at 17, I began to come up against some of the old problems of sex that many of us come into guilt over. I began to feel that I was not fit to stand before God at all and I had real trouble fitting Jesus into my Christian life. I really couldn’t quite see how important Jesus was.I saw that he showed us what God was like but he was not vitally important or precious to me. I remember a fellow that was training in the Presbyterian seminary saying to me, “Do you really believe that Jesus has died for you? And if you were the only person in the whole world, do you believe he would have died for you?”Well, loved ones, I really didn’t believe that. I believed that Jesus had died for the whole world to make it a better world, but I didn’t feel a personal obligation at all to Jesus. Although I acted in many ways like a Christian (because I was brought up in a kind of Christian environment) inside my own heart I hadn’t a real burning love of Jesus. There was guilt because the moral failings were lying heavy on my heart. I saw quite plainly that if you sin, the wages of sin was death. I saw that God, a holy God, was committed to destroy all people that weren’t holy.That began to weigh on me. I began to realize that I wasn’t fit to stand before God at all. Each time I’d fail, the guilt would come in more and more until the guilt became debilitating itself. I began to lack even the motivation to be good. I began to realize that there must be something betterin Christianity than this.So I began to do what many Catholics do. I began to dwell on the fact of Jesus’ death. I stopped my prayer times where I prayed for all the missionaries all over the world and I started just to concentrate on Jesus’ death. I began to try and settle in my mind, “Had this really taken place? Was there really a spot in Palestine somewhere where the cross had actually been stuck in the ground?” I started to read the historical documents that are behind the New Testament. I began to think, “Had Jesus, this man who says he was the Son of God, at one time hung on a cross – had he actually thought of me at that moment?”Brothers and sisters, after nights and nights of doing that in my prayer times, gradually it came home to my own spirit. I don’t know how when Jesus looked down at the Roman soldiers and said, “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do,” he was actually looking right down the centuries at me and he was saying, “Father forgive him for he doesn’t know what he is doing.” Now it was after that, that I began to see that it was because Jesus bore the death penalty that the just and holy God was then free to forgive an unholy person like me.At that particular moment, all I sensed was that Jesus was actually miraculously interested in me at the moment he died and that he actually died in my place. God was not demanding my death from me but he was willing to receive me as a child of his own. So, there and then, faith sprang up in my heart to receive Jesus into my life. I reckon I really became a Christian when I was 17. I entered into the first part of that verse.I really felt I was reconciled to God. If you’d asked me, “Are you afraid of dying?” I would say, “No, I am not afraid of dying.” If you said to me, “Is God really your Father?” I would say, “Yes, he is really my Father.” If you would ask me, “Do you know Jesus personally?” I would say, “Yes, I know Jesus personally.” And so I went to university in Ireland for three or four years. I trained as an English teacher and then felt God calling me into the Methodist ministry. I taught for two years at my old high school and then went into seminary for three years.During all that time leading up to age 26 when I was ordained in the Irish Methodist ministry, I had one particular problem in my life. I could pray to Jesus and sense he was there in my room with me, but then I could deliberately sin. Now that was it. I could actually see him, sense his presence and then turn around and sin — either an act or in thought or in word. That developed more and more in my life from the years 17 to 26.I just found it more and more impossible to live the way a Christian was supposed to live. At the beginning it took place deep down inside me. It was a kind of inward sin that nobody else would have seen. It was present in my motives. You know the way churches try to encourage us bright young Christians. They ask you to read the lesson or to do something in the service and you do it for God’s glory. Then people would come up and praise you and doubt would creep in. “Well, for God’s glory?” “Well, yes, 75 percent for his glory and 25 percent for mine.” As the years went on, it didn’t get easier, it seemed to get worse.The double motive life began to get worse inside me and it would show itself in attitudes. I knew that a Christian shouldn’t worry. I knew that you shouldn’t worry, but you should cast your care completely on the Father. You should walk joyful and peaceful and in utter contentment whatever your circumstances were like. But brothers and sisters, I spent hours and hours worrying about theexamination the next day or worrying about what was going to happen to my finances six months from then, worrying what I was going to do when I grew up, what I was going to do for a career or worrying what I was going to do when tomorrow’s problem came up. I found that in my attitudes I did not have the attitude of a Christian.I would want to love people because Christians are supposed to love people but I would come up against somebody who had criticized me and there would come up from inside me a sharp, satirical, caustic attitude of hostility towards them that I couldn’t control. It showed itself in responses.I was okay when I was all prepared and prayed up to meet somebody but if the wrong person came along or if something happened that I wasn’t ready for….like the motorbike I had in Ireland. It was the bane of my life. I’d be changing the oil or couldn’t get the bolt on properly and there would be a mixture of blood and oil flowing down and at those moments I was not a Christian at all.My reaction was out, the irritability was out, and the bad temper was out immediately. Outside I was the preacher, the budding Methodist minister but when I’d go home with my parents, I was just a miserable little person that caused continual fighting and disagreement in the home. That was the problem.Outwardly, I knew that Jesus had died for me. You couldn’t have shaken me in that. I knew I was a Christian but inside, I was an absolute mess. I had no experience of being saved by Jesus’ life. I was just the same miserable old person inside that I had been before I ever met Jesus. Now that’s how it worked out in my life. I walked like that through ordination, and served Methodist churches in Ireland. I had a church in London, then came to Minneapolis and had Methodist churches here. But all the time I still had that problem inside. It was just a hypocritical, double life.I tried on the outside to be like Jesus but inside I was not like Jesus at all. That continued until I was 31 and came to the States. I was about 6 months here when I began to see I could not continue in the ministry with this kind of bluff in my life. It was about then, (God is so good to us you know, he arranges you to come to this service this morning or….) God arranged for me to go to a little place in North Minneapolis where they asked me to speak. I spoke and talked of what I thought a victorious life could be.John Wesley founded Methodism and Wesley preached that you could live a victorious life above irritability and above sin and above impatience and anger. I used to read those flowing sermons of his and wonder how you got up there. I shared the kind of victory that I thought was possible. A fellow at the back, who must have been about 42 at that time, came up to me afterwards. He was a pastor of the church and he explained, “I was in Bolivia for four years as a missionary and I lived the same kind of miserable life as you lived. A year ago, God delivered me from it.” That was the first time I had ever met anybody who claimed to live inside the way they appeared to live outside.It was the first time I had met anybody that suggested that the life could actually be utterly victorious. He told me what had happened to him. Then he gave me an old book by a Methodist Bishop called “Possibilities of Grace”. I read it and got to work. By that time I had been on the Christian way for 14 years. I was fed up, ready for suicide, fed up with the whole thing.So I began to work and this is the way it worked, dear ones. I began to see that all my introspection had taken me as deep as didn’t matter. I saw some of the bad things that were inside me but I didn’t see what the cause of all that evil inside was. I gave up the introspection. I gaveup examining my own mind and attitude. Instead, I started to speak to the Holy Spirit.Now you may say, “You were a fool. You were ordained; you had two degrees and theology training so you must know the Holy Spirit as a person.” Yes, I knew it in my head but I never treated the Holy Spirit as a real counselor in my life. So I began to speak to the Holy Spirit and say, “Holy Spirit, will you show me why I am in this mess that I am in? Will you show me why I am not like Jesus inside and why it’s beginning to burst out into my outer life?” I just began to pray to the Holy Spirit and that seemed heretical to me.I was brought up as an ordinary Methodist. I knew nothing about the Holy Spirit and it seemed heretical to pray to anybody but God the Father or God the Son. But I started to ask the Holy Spirit to do what Jesus said he ought to do. He said, “The Holy Spirit will counsel you and will lead you into all truth.” The Holy Spirit began to counsel me and he began to show me that there was a degree of egotism inside me that I had never dreamed of before.He began to show me verses like, “We were crucified with Christ.” He began to show me, “You aren’t crucified with Christ. You’re ready to be born of the Spirit and to come alive with God but you’re not ready to die. That’s why you’re not saved by Jesus’ life.” Because Jesus died we can live, but unless we die, he cannot live. I had never died.I had come alive all right, but I had taken with me all the dirt and the egotism that was still inside. The Holy Spirit started to show me, “Look, you must be willing to die with Christ.” I asked the Holy Spirit, “What do you mean?” He said, “When you get angry, you get angry because you want to keep things under your control.”Now Jesus, as he was walking down the Calvary road, sensed that things were no longer in his control. They were in the control of God, his Father and he couldn’t change anything. It was only God that could change it. That’s what it means to die with Jesus. It means to be willing for him to let things run as he wants them to run and for you not to call “uncle” before God wants to stop it. It means letting him stop things when he wants to. Dying to self means giving up the right to control your own life. Loved ones, I felt that it was every educated man’s right to control his own life, to control his career, control the amount of money he made, control his circumstances and his vacations. It was new to me that I was expected to die with Jesus to controlling my own circumstances and my own life.Then the Holy Spirit would show me that there was incredible pride in my life — a great selfish ambition and great desire. We men seem to all have it, don’t we? We seem to have to achieve things. We’re brought up with the idea, “Now, you’re going out in the world. You are the son; you have to achieve something great.” We lie under that burden of achieving something great — it drives us and hounds us.You know the way it makes us walk over other people just to achieve something worthwhile and establish our own significance in the world. The Holy Spirit began to show me, “You must be willing to die an insignificant nothing, to die as Jesus died if it is his will for you.” Bit-by-bit, the Holy Spirit started to show me, in what way I had never been willing to die to self and be crucified with Jesus.He went into the whole area of lust and he began to show me, “The lust is there because you own your own body. You think you have the right to do with your body whatever you want. You think you havethe right to get whatever satisfaction you want for it. Now, you must die to your right to controlling your own body. You must die to the right to any physical satisfaction or any emotional satisfaction.”Brothers and sisters, do you see it’s because we have not died that we’re parasites on everybody else. With our girl friends, we’re trying to draw enough affection from them to satisfy us. With our husbands we’re trying to draw enough attention from them to give us a sense of value and well being. With our friends, we are trying to trample over enough of them to get to the top of the heap to persuade ourselves that we’ve succeeded. It’s because we really have never died and never accepted that we were crucified 1900 years ago and that there’s no self to succeed. It’s because we haven’t accepted that that we are filled with so much self and so much self-assertiveness and so much self-defensiveness.Gradually, the Holy Spirit began to take me deep down into areas that I had never known before — areas that had never been revealed to me before in my life. I began to go down into a place that I had never seen existed. There I saw a massive ego, a great, giant of a monster that demanded to be God not only in my little world but actually wanted to be God over other people’s world as well.Loved ones, don’t you see that’s why we get irritable with people? We get irritable with people because we think we alone know the way they should behave. We think that they’re opposing us, who know the way they should behave. Loved ones, it may be that the way they behave is the right way. Maybe our timing is not the right timing. We get impatient with people because we think we have the right for everything to go our way.Brothers and sisters, it’s impossible to get life going like that, do you see that? You’re not going to get everything going your way and God’s plan is that we should accept our position as Jesus accepted his — a real position where we give the control of our lives completely over to him. Gradually the Holy Spirit took me down and down. It didn’t get better, it got worse. I got harder to live with, more and more irritable, more and more bad tempered and that’s the way it goes. It gets worse before it gets better.The Holy Spirit brings you into more and more situations until you see, “Unless I go through with this, I can find no deliverance at all.” Several times I thought, “No, I don’t need to die. I can go along with a little more of a Holy Spirit and do better than I’ve been doing.” The Holy Spirit would allow me to come into a situation where I would go to pieces again and inside would be a mess.Gradually he wore me down and pointed out to me, “Now listen, you are crucified with Jesus. Are you willing to accept that? Are you willing, really willing to die to yourself, to die to your desire for success? Are you willing to be nothing for me if I want you to be?” One Saturday morning in a parsonage in North Minneapolis, I at last came to the place where I said, “Yes”. It was a miracle. I didn’t stand up and dance and I didn’t have a whole lot of emotional effusiveness. I just had a quiet assurance that the Holy Spirit had come into my life and filled me. I felt no more envy or anger or jealousy inside.Brothers and sisters, it was a transformation. Later on the Holy Spirit gave me experience of gifts of the Spirit and of ministry and power but at that point it was a deliverance from that inward defeat I had suffered for years. I at last began to experience what it meant to be “saved” by Jesus’ life. Jesus’ life was actually able to replace mine completely if I was willing to give up and let God. That’s really the big change that came in my life about seven years ago. It just changedeverything.It is only then that you began to get outward conflicts. You thought your life was hard until it came to that point. But when the Holy Spirit really fills you with himself, then he leads us into difficulties, trials, problems and conflicts. What was amazing was to walk through them with absolute peace and contentment because at last I hadn’t that old thing on my shoulder saying, “Are you going to succeed? Are you going to succeed?”At last I had a real willingness to be whatever God wanted me to be. Now it seems to me that that’s what we mean by being not only born of the Spirit or reconciled to God by the death of Jesus but actually being saved by Jesus’ life. The Christian life doesn’t really begin in fullness until you come into that deliverance.Now you may come into it differently from me and I have to walk in it. If I don’t keep my position in Jesus on the Cross, all that miserable pettiness and selfishness just bursts out again. It’s not a work that is done once and forever and then you never have to have it done again. It is done day-by-day by the Holy Spirit. It is maintained in you day-by-day but you have to enter into it initially in one definite time of consecration.If you’re in a Baptist church, you’ll probably call it consecration rather than being filled with the Spirit. But it is a point where you are really willing to die to yourself and to your own life and really willing to let Jesus live his life through you. When that moment comes, the Holy Spirit fills you and delivers you from that inward sin.Now that’s really what we mean when we say, “If we have been reconciled to God by the death of his Son, now that we are reconciled, how much more shall we be saved by his life?” Brothers and sisters, you can actually be saved from today’s envy, jealousy, anger, worry and depression by the life of Jesus. You can be saved from those things by the life of Jesus flowing through you today. It’s not true that the Christian life is one of defeat. It’s not true that it’s an up and down life as mine used to be.It’s not true that it’s a life fighting anger and fighting envy and fighting jealousy. It’s not true that it’s a life continually confessing old sins that you’ve been committing for years. The Christian life when it’s being saved by Jesus’ life is a life of real victory inside and that’s what God has started to show us here on the campus. That’s really what the world wants to see.The world for years has seen a body of people who call themselves the church. They talk a lot and do nothing. The world for years has seen people who preach but don’t live as they preach. Now the world needs to see people who live like they say they live. Loved ones, it can only come through that being saved by Jesus’ life.I’d ask you to be honest with yourselves. Stop all this pretending that a Christian who gets angry, gets jealous, gets envious, lies under depression and worry for hours and hours, and runs cold wars with his wife or his family, that that kind of person is the kind of person that God is pleased with and wants.God wants you to be different from that. He is patient with you while you’re like that but he has a deliverance from that that he can provide for you. It’s found in that experience of being ready to die with Christ to yourself and allowing him to fill you completely with his Holy Spirit. Then hetakes you on into the other things — into the ministry of the gifts, into healings, and into tongues and into other things. But basically he has to get first of all, your inside, your heart. He wants a clean heart.So would you be honest this morning? You know how often we’ve sat in churches and listened to the pastor preaching away and we’ve said, “Yes, yes, I agree, I agree”, then we walk out and we’re nothing like that. Would you be honest about your own life today? Do you have real trouble with the thought life? Do you brothers have problems with pride, and ambition that drives you relentlessly on? And you sisters, do you have trouble with the caddishness, sarcasm and tearing the other person down?Well, do you see that all that comes from a person who really is not willing to share everything with her Lord or with his Lord? Loved ones, we cannot share heaven with Jesus, if we do not share death with him. There’s no resurrection unless there’s a death. Now it may not come the way mine came. It may come differently. It may come more gently for you. But it needs to come where you are delivered from those things and it is the Holy Spirit within you that motivates your life.We’ll try to share these truths during the next year because Romans 5 on through the next five chapters deals with the sanctified life — the life that is changed by God’s Spirit. We’ll be sharing them Sunday-by-Sunday. You do need to begin to deal with God about it yourself. Let us pray.Father, we trust you to draw us again to the close place with yourself at the foot of Jesus’ Cross so that we can begin to see ourselves as we really are in comparison with Jesus. We need to see that the only way we can ever be like him is for him to come and live inside us freely, unrestrained, and uninhibited with all of our old selves crucified on the Cross and with his Spirit alone motivating us. So Father, we trust you now to begin to deal with each one of us during this coming year so that we may enter completely into this life that you have planned for us for Jesus’ sake. Amen.

Original Sin and DeathRomans 5:12Sermon Transcript by Rev. Ernest O’NeillIt’s may be unfair to tempt you with this question, but have you ever been to the Caribbean? That’s where some of us were this past summer in Puerto Rico. The islands are just beautiful. I remember being there three or four years ago and going to an island called Buck Island. It was just a little kind of desert island and I spent the whole day snorkeling. It really is just like the ads say,it’s beautiful.The blue sky, deep blue clear water, long white beaches, the hot sun and the sea breezes are all so beautiful. All this is for a point. I am not just trying to make you feel uncomfortable and discontented. It is a magnificent place and yet this last summer, eight people were playing golf when several blacks came, shot them dead and ran away.You wonder what has turned what is really a heaven into what is a hell. “Time” magazine had something on it this past week. One of the residents says this, “This place has become like New York or worse. I won’t even drive home alone at night. I can’t leave the island without someone backing a truck up to my house and filling it up. We’ve all been robbed several times. That’s standard.”Now what has made the islanders there hate the wealthy Americans so much? It ties up with the reason we want to go down to the Caribbean and into Latin America. One of the reasons is that we wealthy Americans move in and buy up all the luxurious houses and build beautiful houses on the hill and the islanders live in tarpaper shacks. It’s as “Time” magazine says, “They have begun to feel that we want a piece of the action.” They see what look to them like greedy Americans taking their land and using it for themselves. Yet it’s that same greed among us today that is driving even the Republican administration into price-controls.I mean it’s incredible to think that Richard Nixon or any Republican administration would move towards price-controls. But it’s the same greed that is running through us that is doing it. We will not control ourselves. We will not regulate our own salaries. We want more and more and more until eventually in a democratic society, the only way to keep any kind of balance in it is to take away some freedom of some kind. It’s the old greed that is at the bottom of it.It’s the greed and violence in our streets that is turning what is really a paradise from a natural point of view into a hell of slums and ghettos. You wonder, where does it all end? Then you jump over to the Olympic Games – a great picture of international friendship and international peace. But it was the scene for that shoot out where 11 athletes were killed and murdered. The same Black September group had promised 10 or 11 more operations in the Middle East and Europe, similar to that one. It’s come to the point where we are afraid — afraid to get on certain planes, afraid to walk out in certain streets.When you think of Ireland, it’s ironic now to think that one of the titles of Ireland used to be, “The land of saints and scholars”. Now, we don’t think of it as that at all. We think of it as just another heaven that has been turned into hell. Brothers and sisters, why the mess? Why all this mess? Why has it all come about? How have we men and women taken what every astronomer admits to be the most beautiful planet in the universe and polluted it, dirtied it, destroyed it and brought itto this point? We wonder if we’ll see out this decade.1900 years ago, a man called Jesus explained why we got into this mess. He did it so authoritatively and realistically so that many of us here in this theater believed him. And when we believed him, we began to experience a new kind of life in ourselves that not only was able to face the mess but was able to bring it into order and harmony. All of us had part of this mess in our own families and in our own schools. But as we have begun to deal with this man Jesus, and deal with his answer to the reason for the mess, we’ve begun to find that the mess came into order and harmony under this man’s life in us.Now this man explained it very clearly. He wrote the thing down through disciples of his. For almost six years now some of us have been studying the letter one of these disciples of Jesus wrote to the Christians in Rome in 57 A.D. This disciple elaborated Jesus’ explanation of how we got into this mess. He made it very clear. We have managed over these six years to reach chapter five of that letter. Maybe you’d look at it.The incredible thing is that as we’ve been plowing through it, the mess has been gradually clearing in our own lives and that’s a miracle. But if you look, brothers and sisters, at chapter five of that book “The letter to the Romans” and look at verse 12, it describes and summarizes the reason Jesus gave for the mess we’re in today.Romams 5:12, “Therefore as sin came into the world through one man and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all men sinned.” I think a lot of us have tried to laugh each other out of the only realistic account that we have of the beginning of the world through making jokes about it. “Oh the first original sin, that was eating an apple.” It has nothing to do with eating an apple. That isn’t the first original sin. So some of us say, “Oh no, it was intercourse, sexual intercourse.”The puritanical Bible writers thought intercourse was wrong. Intercourse was the first original sin. Brother and sisters, it wasn’t. Jesus said neither of those things started the whole mess. But, he does tell us and you can see what the beginning of the world was like if you look back to Genesis 2:16-17. The purpose of the trees is that mankind was in its childhood thousands of years ago and God presented the complex choice to him in terms of trees. Maybe he would do it differently with us today – us sophisticates. He might present it in some other way, but to them he presented it in terms of trees. The trees have meanings.Maybe it’s good to look at what God did at the very beginning, Genesis 2:16-17: “And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, ‘You may freely eat of every tree of the garden.’” In other words, God obviously made full provision for men and women at the very beginning when he made the world. He said, “Look, you can eat up all these trees. I’ll give you whatever you need.” He just made one command. He said, “But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat.” But God made provision complete provision for us.He even made us like himself. A lot of us wonder why we’re really here in the world at all. The reason is given in 1 John 1:3. It might be good just to look at that because some of us are very superficial in trying to find out why we ended up in this mess. And we really don’t see why we’re here on the earth in the first place. This is the real reason God made full provision for us in every way when he put us on the earth. In fact, this is why he put us on the earth.1 John 1:3, “That which we have seen and heard we proclaim also to you, so that you may have fellowship with us; and our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ.” Now the reason God put us here was so that he’d enjoy our company forever. That’s really it. He didn’t put you here just to make money or to be successful but so that you could live with him forever, love him and be part of his family. Now because of that, God made full provision for us and made us in his own image. He made us like himself.That’s why it says, “Let us make man in our own image.” God made us like himself and if you would like to look at the details you can see them there in Genesis 2:7. There you get where he gave us psychological and spiritual capacities like his own and physical capacities. Genesis 2:7: “Then the LORD God formed man of dust from the ground.” That is, he made our physical, material bodies; “And breathed into his nostrils the breath of life.” He gave us spiritual capacity so that we would understand the kind of thing he understood. Man, as a result of that, became a living being. You remember the Hebrew word is the word for soul, “nephesh”. It means man became a “living soul”. “Soul” in the Greek is “pseuche” which is the psychological part of man.God breathed into this physical body his Spirit, so that we had a spiritual and physical capacity. The result of those two joining together, was that we ended up with minds, emotions and a will like God himself. So in every way, we were made with capacities that would enable us to really fellowship with the Creator of the universe.The one other thing God gave us is there in Genesis 2:16-17. It’s important for those of us who tend towards determinism and gallop polls to see it. Genesis 2:16-17, “And the Lord God commanded the man saying, ‘You may freely’ — freely — well, we haven’t free will. Well, ‘you may freely’, well, we haven’t free will, ‘Well, you may freely’.” Sooner or later you have to admit that God knows how to put the things so that we understand it.“You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die.” God wanted to make us utterly like himself. He gave us free will and he said, “Look, it’s up to you. I have given you everything you need. I have given you a body as I have a spiritual body. I have given you a physical body. I have given you a spiritual capacity to communicate with me. I have given you a mind, emotions and a will. Now, you can do whatever you want with all that. The key to it all is in a certain tree that I have put in this garden.”No doubt God would have put it differently to us but the tree is mentioned in Genesis 2:9 there, “And out of the ground the Lord God made to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food. The tree of life also in the midst of the garden.” And God said, “Really, all you need to do to make the whole thing work beautifully is to eat of the tree of life. The tree of life is the tree of my own life. It’s the thing that makes Me God. It’s the thing that makes me loving and kind and gentle and forgiving.”“It’s the thing that enables the Trinity family to enjoy such peace. This Spirit of life that I have made available to you will make you absolutely like me. It will make you like the Trinity family but I want you to opt into it freely. I am not making you part of the Trinity family. I don’t want robots that are with us just because you can’t be anything else. I make you free. You can choose to come into us and to receive the Spirit of my life into you or just to ignore it.”Brothers and sisters that was the setup. If the first men or women had just been prepared to receivethe one thing that was needed and to hunger after their Creator until they received the Spirit of his life into them, that Spirit of life would have molded their minds, emotions and their wills so that they would have had lives with direction in them and with purpose.That Spirit would have told them what to do — what God wanted them to do. That Spirit would have given them enjoyment so that they didn’t need to get a faster boat or a faster car to get some kind of thrill. That Spirit would have created exhilaration in them that was beyond anything that they have ever experienced sexually or any other way.That was God’s plan: that we’d receive this Spirit, this Holy Spirit into us that would make the whole thing go like clockwork. It would be like premium gas. In a 289-V8 engine it would make it go beautifully. And that was God’s plan. All we had to do was receive that Spirit. If we did that, then we’d receive God’s approval on our lives. God meanwhile would enable us to meet all our physical needs as we began to bring his world into submission to his will. That was God’s plan.We wouldn’t have been straining and scrabbling in the dirt to get our needs fulfilled. That was man’s choice. God warned man. He said, “Listen, I want you to take it my way and receive my life into you. Don’t eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Don’t start trying to decide what is good and evil for yourself. Don’t start trying to find out what is good and evil by trial and error and by hard experience. Trust my life. Receive my life and let my life do in you what I want to do.” The thing that got us into the mess was that man didn’t do that. He decided, “No, I am going to live it my own way, with my own resources. All this beautiful world of nature that you have given me, I am going to use it myself. I want to be independent of you. I want to ignore you. I don’t want to live depending on the little bit of life that you have prepared to give me every day.”Now dear ones, that’s the sin. It isn’t sexual intercourse. It isn’t eating an apple. It isn’t getting drunk. It isn’t shooting drugs. It isn’t. The basic sin is saying, “I am going to live independent of you, God. I do not need your Spirit.” And do you see loved ones — we apparently don’t need his Spirit. Apparently we can walk with the power that is resident in our own bodies. It seems that when we tackle the Pythagorean’s theorem we can manage it with the power resident in our own mind.It seems when we want to decide whether light contains particles or rays, we can think about that on our own without depending on this Person’s Spirit in us. Do you see that’s the kind of thing that we’ve been doing for years and years — and that’s sin? That’s what God means when he says, “Sin came into the world, and people started to live independent of me.”Now you see along with sin, death came in as well. Sin came into the world and through sin, death. You can see the kind of death, if you look at it there. First it’s in Genesis 3:22, “Then the LORD God said, ‘Behold, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil; and now, lest he put forth his hand and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever.’” The first death was physical death. We were made to live forever.We were really made to live forever. The first thing God did when he saw men going their own way was to decide, “I can’t give them infinity so that they can spread the poison and the destruction throughout my infinite universe. I have to withdraw infinity from them.” And so God withdrew the Holy Spirit that enabled them to live forever. We began to live just for 70 or 80 years at the most.So the first thing we entered into was physical death. That’s where a lot of the sadness comes from,isn’t it? A lot of our sadness comes from the feeling that our dad will not be always there or, our mom will not be always there or, we will not always be here. Yet that was a death that came in because we wouldn’t go God’s way and he withdrew that Spirit of eternal life from us. There were other deaths I think that in some ways are more serious.Genesis 3:24, “He drove out the man and at the east of the Garden of Eden he placed the Cherubim and a flaming sword which turned every way to guard the way to the tree of life.” In other words, God withdrew the Holy Spirit from the world. He withdrew the Holy Spirit from our accessibility and so that dynamic, pulsating eternal spiritual life that makes the whole thing go like a 289-V8 engine on premium gas, that whole power was withdrawn from us. It was spiritual death. We really came into spiritual death. We no longer had communication with the Creator of the universe. We have always felt that we were made for something better because we are, and yet we couldn’t reach it.We feel we were made to fly high, that’s why we go onto drugs. Do you see it? That’s why many of us go into sexual intercourse outside marriage –because we want eternity. We want that feeling of soaring high and flying high. That’s why at times we go for any emotional kind of experience with the rock singer that will take us beyond the world. We are made to fly higher than these petty little pedestrian lives that we have on earth.Do you see that it was God’s plan that we go that way with the Spirit of life. He withdrew that once we refused to go his way, once we declared ourselves independent. That had certain effects on us. It resulted really in the beginning of psychological death. You see that in Genesis 3:19. Everything up to this point is good. God saw everything and it was very good. There was plenty of everything for us.Genesis 3:19, “In the sweat of your face, you shall eat bread.” Sweat symbolizes all the worry that set upon us. The Holy Spirit was withdrawn from us and it was like trying to run that 289-V8 engine on just regular, low octane gas. You began to hear the knock in the engine and the car wouldn’t go fast enough. So too the mind began to be inefficient. Our minds became impaired. You can see that because in the early days, you know you only have to study the Aztec Indians or the Egyptian pyramids to see the amazing things that we were able to do at the beginning of the world. Gradually the mind became more and more impaired as we lacked this power of the Holy Spirit flowing through us. Until now our minds make mistakes, all kinds of misjudgments. It is passive at times, and at times we can’t control it.Then we fell into emotional death too. The Holy Spirit was no longer present to give our emotions joy and peace. Our emotions became frustrated, irritable and unbalanced. We began to enter into emotional death. Then our bodies began to feel the effects of the worry and the ulcers and the hypertension. The bodies of men gradually became weaker and weaker as they lacked this Holy Spirit in them to bring them the life of God. Because we were all made to work with his life pulsing through us, when it was withdrawn everything began to fall into deterioration. That’s part of what we mean when we say, “Death came into the world.”Men began to find their minds impaired, their emotions unbalanced, their bodies weakened and it was this weak, sick group of people that began to try to tackle the superhuman task that their Creator had given them. Then the world itself experienced the same thing when the Holy Spirit was withdrawn from the world. There was a death took place in nature. You can see it in Genesis 3:18. That helps those of us who have had trouble with things like earthquakes, and floods.Genesis 3:18, “Thorns and thistles it shall bring forth to you.” The world of nature, when the Holy Spirit was withdrawn, fell into disorder and strain. Trauma developed in the earth’s crust so that earthquakes and volcanoes resulted. The whole earth just shared the same degradation that we ourselves shared. Now that’s what we mean when we say that death came into the world.When the Holy Spirit was withdrawn, the elemental spirits of the universe were released and they began to have power to dominate men and to bring men dreams — evil dreams and nightmares– and to insert demons into people’s lives. It was into that world that you and I have been born. That’s why the thing has ended up in the mess it’s in. It all stemmed from us declaring our independence of God and that’s the kind of world we’ve been born into.Now brothers and sisters, here is what’s important. It’s important to see why you and I still experience death today. A lot of people would try to persuade us by saying, “You were all in Adam when he sinned, so you’re all facing the effects of his sin. You’re all paying for that man’s first sin. You’re paying for the original sin that that man sinned.” Brothers and sisters, the Bible does not say that.The Bible emphasizes again and again by the 8th century B.C. prophet that every man is responsible for his own sin and no longer will it be said, the father eats grapes and the son’s teeth are set on edge. No longer is that true. The Bible says, God says that we are responsible for our own sins. We don’t experience death today because Adam sinned back then. God says plainly why we experienced it.It’s that verse that we’re studying today, Romans 5:12. It’s there very plainly in black and white. You should really be honest about it and not try to lay this off on Adam and Eve or put the blame on someone else.Romans 5:12, “Therefore as sin came into the world through one man and death through sin and so death spread to all men.” Why? Because all men sinned. In other words, you and I experience death today in so far as we ourselves sin today. Is your memory poor? Is the old mind weak and passive at times? Do you find your emotions doing things that you don’t really want them to do?You get mad when you don’t really want to get mad. You lose your temper when you don’t really want to lose your temper. You get all depressed when there’s no reason in the world why you should be depressed. You find the old body as it gets into the winter believing the lie that winter works a toll on every physical body in Minnesota. And so as you get into the winter, the old body believes the lie, falls down and just can’t quite make it.Brothers and sisters, do you see that that is all death and we experience that death in so far as we ourselves sin and live independent of God’s life. That’s really why many of us meet together here every Sunday. We’ve found that this man Jesus didn’t only gave us the explanation of the reason for the mess we’re in, but he actually Himself has brought the solution. In Jesus, the tree of life has been replaced in the world. The Holy Spirit is again accessible to us. And many of us have begun to receive this Holy Spirit.Now, dear ones, if you’re sitting there thinking, “Oh that sounds good but I don’t know the first thing about how to receive the Holy Spirit.” All you can do is to begin to set out on the pilgrimage, isn’t it? All you can do is to read some of the books and come to some of the fellowships and begin to share. But loved ones, it is possible to turn that clock back. It is possible to stop the death working in yourself.If you say to me, “Even so that you wouldn’t experience physical death?” Yes. It can be so that physical death would present no fear for you or no threat at all. So that it would be what was usual. A “koimet” or cemetery is a “koimeterion” in Greek. It means “a sleeping chamber” so that it’s just like sleeping and a going into the next room. Yes, it can be like that.If you say to me, “So that we don’t experience death in our body, this dying, this weakening, this sickening, this disease that I feel?” Yes, the Holy Spirit is able to come in and turn all that back and it is possible for us again to live in a Garden of Eden experience. Many of us are doing it today. It was Scott that prayed, and his mind was shot through with the drugs that he took. He’ll excuse me just to say that, because I don’t think we should give each other’s testimony, but his mind was shot through with the drugs. For years the Holy Spirit has been working and transforming.Don’t you see that the clock can be turned back? We need not experience death — psychological, emotional, physical, or spiritual death. It is possible to receive the Spirit of Jesus and to be transformed. The Americans in the Caribbean, why are they greedy? The poor souls don’t enjoy life. They don’t. Why? Because they lack the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is the only one who will give you real exhilaration and satisfaction deep down. They keep on buying more things and building bigger houses and ignoring the tarpaper shacks more and more, hoping that they’ll get something that will give them a thrill.What about the tarpaper shacks? What about the islanders? They’re in the same boat. They really are no more right than the wealthy Americans. They are grabbing what they need because they’re not trusting. They’re not depending on this God to work his will and to bring it about in them. It’s the same if you work right through the Olympic debacle, if you work through Ireland, if you work through the mess that we have in our own society economically. Brothers and sisters, it gets back to this: the life of the Holy Spirit will enable us to work free from the death that has worked in our minds, emotions and our bodies and will bring about a society filled with life.Now, loved ones, if you sit there and say it’s theory, then begin to come to some of our church houses [Christian communities]. Come to the Fish Center [Christian businesses], or the offices. Come to some of the classes [Christian Corps training school]. If you’re in London, go and visit the eight brothers and sisters who are there and you’ll sense that there is a coming again of life among us and a banishing of death. So it is possible.Why the mess? Because we run our lives independent of God, thinking that the Holy Spirit was something at Pentecost for other people who were emotional, but not for us. Loved ones, what we most need is God’s Spirit. He can give you his Spirit and it’s not just an emotional experience. It’s a deep life of God that contains his own genes, that reproduces his character inside you, and it is for each of us.So will you begin to think about it and talk about it and begin to come and ask about Him? I’ll be glad to talk with you during the week if you just call the office or any of us. I think it would be really good here on Sunday mornings, if you want to talk, why not come down front and there’ll be a number of us here. I’ll be here, my wife, Scott and some others will be here and you can just talk. It might be a good idea because a lot of you I know can’t get back to the offices or the classes during the week.So if you really would like to talk about some of these things, I’d just come down and mill around.Eventually the ones that want to talk will be here and we can discuss. We really need to help each other into this miracle. Let us pray.Dear Father, we thank you that there is an answer. We thank you Father that we don’t need to keep wandering in this world of relativism, hopeless, going down the hill more and more, always talking about the tragedies. Instead we thank you Father that we can see the basic reason why we got into this mess in the first place and that it is the lack of your Holy Spirit in our own lives. That this is what sin is, rejecting your offer of the life of your Holy Spirit.Father, we would say to you today, we’re tired of the bodies that are sick and weary; we’re tired of the minds and emotions that are unbalanced and impaired. Father, we’re tired of the loneliness. We’re tired of getting irritable when we don’t get our own way. Father, we tell you we want your Holy Spirit. We don’t know every way how to get it. We ask you now to take this desire in our hearts and show us how to receive this life of the Holy Spirit from your Son Jesus.Father we commit ourselves to this so that our lives will be transformed and the Garden of Eden will blossom again inside us and among the people with whom we’re friends. We commit ourselves to you for this purpose in Jesus’ name. Amen.