Romans

What about Mysticism? Sermon Transcript by Rev. Ernest O’Neill We 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 really talking 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. And repeatedly 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 rain through 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 Law Sermon Transcript by Rev. Ernest O’Neill Would 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 the flood. 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 loving father 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 your right. 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 old caffeine 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 1 Romans 4:18 Sermon Transcript by Rev. Ernest O’Neill Let 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 time there 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 and saying, “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 believed it 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 we believe 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 2,000 years 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 2 Romans 4:22 Sermon Transcript by Rev. Ernest O’Neill Most 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 our failure, 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 God says 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 is at 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 the ground. 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’s free 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 us who 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 3 Romans 4:25 Sermon Transcript by Rev. Ernest O’Neill This 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 die for 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 are persecuting 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 Peace Romans 5:1 Sermon Transcript by Rev. Ernest O’Neill What 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 whole people 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 moment Jesus 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. Enjoy the 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 – #1 Romans 5:2 Sermon Transcript by Rev. Ernest O’Neill We’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 in her 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 only significant 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 in Genesis 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 saying in 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 the flesh, 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 the jealousy. 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 #2 Romans 5:3 Sermon Transcript by Rev. Ernest O’Neill During 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 was many 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 great crisis 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 faith at 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 be after 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 you and 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 Answer Q: 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 Worst Romans 5:6 Sermon Transcript by Rev. Ernest O’Neill I 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 it out. 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’s one 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 like Galatians 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 of sanctification 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 5:7a Sermon Transcript by Rev. Ernest O’Neill Why 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 good to 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 some new 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 what the 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 the leper 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 know that? 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.

Reconciled Romans 5:7b Sermon Transcript by Rev. Ernest O’Neill You 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 yourself into 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. What you’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 way that 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 Saves Romans 5:10 Sermon Transcript by Rev. Ernest O’Neill The 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 better in 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 the examination 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 gave up 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 have the 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 changed everything. 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 he takes 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 Death Romans 5:12 Sermon Transcript by Rev. Ernest O’Neill It’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 it to 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 receive the 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.

Resistance Romans 5:13 Sermon Transcript by Rev. Ernest O’Neill Have you ever had a situation in the office or in school out of which you could see no escape? Your thoughts just go round and round and round and round and you get caught up in your little claustrophobic mind. You can’t see any way out. It’s almost as if you’re bound with iron bands. You think round in your circle and right round again and right round again. Whether it’s physical weakness through a cold or an emotional tightness through an emotional situation at school or whether it’s just a kind of mental block that you have in an office job, it seems that we’re just tied up in our own little circle of thinking. Really, you just wonder how to escape. The psychologists or the philosophers don’t really help us today, neither the dramatists. The Christian theater class meets on Thursday and we’re trying to find a production that we can do. It doesn’t matter which of them you look through — Camus, Miller, Painter, Williams– it doesn’t matter who it is, all the dramatists do the same thing. They describe the hopelessness and the futile little circle that most people live in today. If you go to the philosophers or the psychologists, they’re in the same trip. They’re all following, more or less, Skinner’s implication that we’re little run down machines that are driven by deterministic and fatalistic kind of powers. We can’t escape from our carnal existence. Brothers and sisters, that’s one of the exciting things about this book [the Bible], it’s one of the really exhilarating things about it that we believe and discuss here on Sundays. Because Jesus is the best empirical evidence of who the Creator is that we’ve got. But the book itself is exciting and exhilarating because it does really seem to give you authentic expressions of a great magnanimous mind that is bigger than our own. It’s good when we get caught up in our own little claustrophobic circles of thinking, to come into this theater on Sunday and get a glimpse of a bigger view of it all. It’s good to be blasted out of our little circles, our little vicious circles that we go round and round in. Some of us just go round and round in those circles for life. Instead of becoming greater and bigger and bigger so that at the last day the spiritual body transfigures the physical body and we just blast up into God’s space — instead of that many of us have become wizened and withered and weakened — smaller and smaller as our life goes on. Really, it’s God’s will that we should begin to see things the way he sees them. That’s why this book is kind of exciting. What we need here on Sunday mornings is what I think Scott prayed for — a spirit of revelation that would break through the little vicious circles that we get into. We need revelation that would split the atoms of our own thoughts and would get us out into a place where there is a tremendous energy release and you begin to think and feel the way the Creator does. That’s really what we’re trying to do here on Sunday mornings. You remember that last Sunday, we began to see that God made us and put us here really because he wanted our company. He put us here so that we would become like him and would be his friends forever. That’s the real reason. It’s so good to get out of that circle where they’re treasuring you because of the A grade or the B grade or the C grade or they’re treasuring you because you can move these books from this spot to that spot or because you can type so many words a minute. It’s so good to get outside that little circle and see, “Look it’s not even because my husband likes me or my father loves me or because my roommate can tolerate me. I am here for a bigger reason than all those things. The Creator of the world has made me because he wants me to become like him and he wants me to be his friend forever.” It’s really good to say that. You remember we saw that that was why God made us with certain capacities such as he had himself. He made us with a spirit like his. He made us with a mind like his, emotions like his, a will like his and a physical body, just as he has a spiritual body. We will have a spiritual body when this body dies, and it’s good to see that God governed everything to enable this plan to come about — that we would live with him forever as his dear friends. You remember the one vital thing that would make us exactly like himself, he left to our personal choice. The life, the very life that runs through the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit, the very life that makes the trinity family unique, that makes it eternal, that makes it able to fly through millions of miles of space in a second, the life that enables it to have continual forgiveness and continual gentleness and peace running through it, that life we had to choose for ourselves. You remember it was talked about in Genesis as a tree of life. God’s plan was that we’d have all the capacities to be like him but we ourselves would have to opt into his trinity family by our own free choice. It was up to us to be borne of his Spirit or of his life by our own will and our own choice. You remember we saw that the first man didn’t do that at all. He decided he’d live by his own wits about what was good and what was evil. He’d decide what was right and wrong for himself. He’d do without this unique, uncreated life that God offered him. When he decided to do that, God withdrew that life from him. He withdrew the offer of that uncreated Holy Spirit from him. Immediately the whole natural environment and man’s own personality deteriorated and declined into death. You remember we outlined what that death entailed. I couldn’t think of a high enough powered engine but I thought of a 289 engine and likened it to running a high-powered engine on regular gas. That’s what it was like when the Holy Spirit was withdrawn from the world because man decided to go it alone. It was like that. Immediately our minds began to be impaired, our emotions began to be unbalanced, and the body became weaker. As we lived like that, we began to spread that living for self throughout the world. It became a pro-self world, (living for itself all the time) and an anti-God world (working against God). Eventually the Holy Spirit was withdrawn even from the spiritual world, and the world filled with evil spirits. That’s what we mean when we say, “death began to work in us personally and in our environment”. That was the kind of situation that resulted at that time. Now, let’s pray that God’s Spirit would somehow be able to give you and me insights into that situation now. Let’s trust him that he’ll be able to do that and bring us into some new insights. I think a lot of us are experiencing that death and we don’t know why we’re experiencing it. The mind is impaired, the emotions are unbalanced, and the body is weak, sick and deteriorating. We find ourselves fighting an uphill battle against wrong dreams and against wrong thoughts day after day after day and we don’t know why it is. We seem to be living in death in the midst of life. I think there are real reasons for it. I think sometimes, it’s because we haven’t the same view of sin or of independence of God as God himself has. Would you look at that next verse that we’ll study this morning? It’s Romans 5:13. Maybe we could just take part “a” of the verse, the first half of it. Romans 5:13, “Sin indeed was in the world before the law was given.” That’s pretty obvious, isn’t it? You remember, in Genesis 3:6, you read how Adam declared his independence of God by going his own way. Genesis 3:6: “So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate; and she also gave some to her husband, and he ate.” Now that was the sin. Sin entered the world at that moment by Adam declaring, “I’d go it alone without your Holy Spirit.” Then look over to Exodus 20:1. That’s the moment that the law was given. It’s the first time that law came into the world. Exodus 20:1: And God spoke all these words, saying, “I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. You shall have no other gods before me. You shall not make for yourself a graven image.” All right, so that’s obvious. Sin was in the world before the law was given, you can see that. There are that many pages between the time sin came into the world and the time the law was given. If you allow for a gap between Genesis 1:2 and 1:3, during which the earth was without form and void, that gap may be thousands of years. And if you allow for the obvious gaps that the Bible details clearly exist in the genealogies, you can see that certainly thousands (maybe millions), but certainly thousands of years existed between the time that the first sin was committed and the time the law entered the world. Certainly the creation research people would say at least four or five thousand years, wouldn’t they? Some of us would say maybe even more than that. But certainly thousands of years existed between the time that sin entered the world and law came into the world. Now brothers and sisters do you see what that means? Sin is not primarily something connected with the breaking of a known law. Sin itself is a resistance or a rejection of God’s spiritual life. I think a lot of us get little legalistic, moralistic minds. (I’m being hard on the Baptists here) but we say, “Oh yes, sin is going to the theater. That’s a sin, don’t do that. Smoking, that’s a sin. Okay, don’t do that. In Methodism we had dancing too. We had six of them. I am not supporting those but I am saying that our main aim seemed to be to make life as miserable as we possibly could. It’s good the Baptists are catching up with the “no smoking” now and that God has given it to us for so long. But some of us tend to think of sin as just breaking one of the six cardinal commandments that we have in evangelical Christianity. Or some of us think, “Sin is just breaking any one of the Ten Commandments.” We get very moralistic and legalistic. As long as we’re not breaking any of those things, or we’re not doing any of the “no-no’s”, then we’re okay. We’re not sinning. But brothers and sisters do you see sin was in the world before there was any law? Sin is something that is broader than just the breaking of laws that you and I line up and list. You can see that sin for Adam was rejecting God’s offer of spiritual life. I think in our own lives we need to see that sin can be that too for us. I think there are times when we are actually sinning and we don’t realize it. Death works as a result of that in our lives but we don’t realize that we’ve sinned. We say, “Well, we haven’t broken one of the Ten Commandments today, we haven’t broken any of the commandments of the Sermon on the Mount today, no we haven’t sinned.” Brothers and sisters do you see that Adam sinned by resisting God’s Holy Spirit? God said, “Look, receive my life into you today.” Adam said, “No, I don’t want it.” Now that’s sin. Sin is just rejecting God’s offer of life through his Holy Spirit. Do you see since Jesus died, God has been able to replace the Holy Spirit among us in this world? The Holy Spirit is all around us and about us. He’s offering himself to us again and again every morning and every evening. If we’re resisting that offer, that little movement within us of God’s Spirit, then that is sin. That is sin for us and it will bring about death. Now, if you wanted to look at details, let’s take two or three examples. Some of us get into a disagreement with our roommate or with a friend. We really do feel that they have not treated us fairly. We find that they criticized us to somebody else or they talked about us behind our back. Resentment comes up in our hearts and we feel the resentment against them. Every time we meet them, there’s that resentment at the back of our eyes. They’re trying to be open with us and we’re trying to run a little sensitivity tea group with them, but at the back of our eyes is defeat, suspicion and resentment. And God’s Spirit comes into us, (maybe doesn’t use these words) but he brings home this truth to us. Maybe you’d look at Romans 12:19. You see the Holy Spirit is always involved day-by-day and moment-by-moment in trying to bring to us God’s own attitude. And in a situation like this, he’ll bring home to us this truth. Romans 12:19: “Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God; for it is written, ‘Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.’” And the Holy Spirit will come into us and give a little impression deep down inside of us, a little tiny impression to stop the resentment, just let it be. Just forgive the person as you would want God to forgive you. Brothers and sisters, if we would bow to that movement of God’s Spirit within us about the resentment, you’d find that Jesus would flood us with a Holy Spirit of love for that person. But so often instead, we do what Adam did. We resist that movement of the Holy Spirit within us. Nobody can hit us with a law. Nobody can say, “That’s the fifth commandment you broke.” Nobody can hit us with a law, yet we know we’ve resisted God’s generous Spirit. And to that extent, we grow smaller and death begins to work in our relationship with that person, doesn’t it? You know how many of us have death. Life is an interaction with the environment; death is the lack of that interaction with your environment. How many of us have ceased to have any interaction with certain friends because we’ve allowed death to seep in through resentment, through resenting and rejecting the working of God’s generous Spirit in us. So you see that’s what I mean, that some of us find death coming in different relationships and we wonder why? Why is there death here? Why is death working in me? Why can I not be open and loving to this person? So often it’s because we’ve resisted the offer of the Holy Spirit that has come to us. Dear ones, do you see this morning, the Holy Spirit is working on each one of you and me to make us more like Jesus. God’s Holy Spirit is flooding throughout the whole world. You remember Gerard Manley Hopkins said, “The earth is charged with the grandeur of God. It will flame out, like shining from shook foil; It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil crushed…. and all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil; and wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell.” And that’s it. The whole world is filled with the Holy Spirit and the Holy Spirit of Jesus is approaching each one of us trying to get us to respond to him. Again and again you have the same choices Adam had in the Garden of Eden. You can respond and go a generous way that is in line with the picture of Jesus in the New Testament — or you can resist it and go your own miserable mean little way. So, many of us you see have death working in us because we’ve resisted this life that God is offering to us. It comes in different situations. I can think of another one. You have a situation in the office. It’s just chaos and the whole thing has got utterly complex. She took your typewriter or didn’t send it for repair. Your boss is having trouble at home and he is really leaning on you, just leaning you into the ground. They’re on your back all the time. Or in the school situation you’ve had a cross-up with the professor. It seems you can’t get the line straight again and everything’s complicated. Do you see at that moment that the Holy Spirit comes down to you again in a hideous, impossible, difficult, domestic or professional situation and he brings home a truth? You can see it in Ephesians 2:6. “And God raised us up with him, (with God) and made us sit with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus.” Then Ephesians 1:21 tells where that position is: “Far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in that which is to come.” You know how the mind is tossing at night and worrying about the situation in the office or the school the next day. And the Holy Spirit comes down to us and says, “Look, you’re in Jesus, above all these things, at the Father’s right hand. Now just thank God that he is going to sort this thing out. Your job is just to take your position in Jesus and love. You are to be like Jesus and let him take care of the thing.” But Satan gets in and says, “Nothing is solved by that kind of unearthly behavior. You get down there and you fight it out, you slog it out and you worry it out.” Loved ones, do you see there are two ways to go. You can either receive the life of the Holy Spirit and say, “All right, it doesn’t make much sense to me to sort it out that way, but I’ll receive you and accept you.” If you do that, you release through Jesus, a flood of the Holy Spirit to go out and repair the situation in the office or in the school. But again there are two ways to go. If you resist the Holy Spirit, then death begins to work. In your mind at night, you lose the night’s sleep so that the next day you’re less able to deal with the situation. But it’s a resistance of the Holy Spirit that brings death. In other words, sin is resisting God’s will for you at that moment. The Father hasn’t put us all here to weave in and out each other’s life whatever way we want to go. The Father hasn’t set us all here and said, “Okay, you three and half billion, go”, and they just go. The Father has it organized. He has plans for each of us. He has a beautiful harmony. In classical literature they used to talk about the “music of the spheres”. Even in their pagan minds they have the image way back that God had put inside them that there should be a harmony in the universe. Brothers and sisters, God has plans for each one of our lives. He knows what he wants you to do tomorrow. He knows what he wants you to do on Tuesday evening. He has plans for us. He has a certain will for each of us at each moment. It was the same with Adam. There would come a time when it was God’s will for him to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Otherwise, why put it there? But he wanted him to eat of that tree after he had received of the tree of life. Then he’d be able to know good by experiencing good and evil just by seeing and understanding what it was. So, it was God’s will at that moment for Adam to receive of the tree of life, the Holy Spirit. Sin is resisting God’s will for you at that moment and that’s really what you and I often do. When we do that, death immediately sets into our lives. Here’s an easy example that many of us face. You come home at night, the highway was packed, and it was nose to tail traffic. All the way people were screeching to a stop. The road was slippery. You get home and you’re worn out and the Holy Spirit comes through to you. You can see it in Psalm 46:10. He may not put it in the words of the Bible but it’s there in Psalm 46:10. The only reason I am quoting God’s word, brothers and sisters, is that that’s the way you care whether it is the Holy Spirit speaking to you or not. You just check what the Holy Spirit wrote in the Bible. Is this consistent with what he wrote? That’s the way to keep yourself clear from deceptive spirits. So at that moment you come home, you’re worn out and the Holy Spirit comes through, “Be still and know that I am God” (Psalm 46:10). The Holy Spirit just says to you, “Sit down, be quiet, and just rest. Just know that I am God. Just receive my life into you.” But your mind works, “Yes, but I have assignments to do tonight. I have to get some food, I have to do this and I have to wash and iron some clothes.” So we don’t sit. We resist the Holy Spirit who is saying, “Be still and know that I am God.” One gurgle from our stomach and we decide, “No, no, no. That’s not spiritual food we need, we need real food.” We get up and go to the kitchen. The sparks are flying as we’re getting the TV dinners into the oven. Then we decide we’ll turn the TV on as we’re waiting. The TV goes on and you hear all the mess that is in the world. Before you know it, death settles in on you. Your spirit becomes utterly dissipated and you find that the evening is lost and wasted because there’s no sitting still and knowing that he is God. Everything is taking control of you from that moment on. Now brothers and sisters, do you see that is rejecting God’s will for you at that moment? The Holy Spirit is good to us. The Holy Spirit will keep us in psychological and spiritual and physical balance if we will listen to him. But sin is resisting the Holy Spirit’s will for you at that moment. Those of you who are away from home remember home situations where you got into ridiculous tangles because you spoke just what you thought. You resisted the Holy Spirit saying, “Shut up.” But you just wanted to lay the whole thing out and clear it. Loved ones, do you see that’s what we’re doing. Many of us are experiencing death in ourselves because we’re really sinning. Sin always brings death but it isn’t a sin that can be lined up under one of the Ten Commandments. It is sin that is resistance to God’s Spirit, and that’s the heart of sin. It’s independence of God. It’s the resistance to his Spirit’s will for you at that moment. We get it in the mornings you know. We get it again and again in the mornings. We waken up and the Holy Spirit comes right through, whatsoever things are lovely and true and of good report, think on these things. The Holy Spirit comes through and says, “This is the day that the Lord has made. We will rejoice and be glad in it.” But we don’t go with him. We resist him and we sink back into our own indolence and our own lethargy and we sink back into our own emotional and physical depression. And before 15 minutes have passed, we’re in the depths of degradation. We’re either in depression or in physical degradation or we’re in an intellectual depression of some kind. Brothers and sisters, do you see the Holy Spirit will always come to you at the right moment? If you’ll accept him and receive his life, he will take you up the way he’s going. The Holy Spirit is only going one way, always only one way. He is going up to the Father. The Father is there and Jesus is there. The Holy Spirit comes through Jesus and goes back up to the Father. That’s what’s happening all the time whenever we look at him. But instead of that we often let the Holy Spirit ride up to those sunlit uplands of the spiritual life while we stay down here without him and with death working in us. Now brothers and sisters do you see a wee bit what death is, and what sin is? Sin is resisting God’s Spirit as he comes down to you at a certain moment. Now you don’t get all shook up. You don’t need to walk tentatively saying, “Am I hearing the Holy Spirit or am I not? Am I hearing that?” No. Just walk believing that the Father is your loving Father that loves you with all his heart, that you can trust him and that he’ll tell you what to do when you need to do. Then respond to him immediately. Don’t wait for the thing to work itself out into some sinful act, thought or word. Sin is not basically an act or thought or word. Sin is resisting God’s Spirit when his Spirit first comes to you. As a result of that you eventually move into acts; sinful thoughts and words. But dear ones, I think really, a lot of us would escape death if we would treat the Spirit as our guide. By all means, look at the laws as a guide to what the Holy Spirit has written in the past but look to the Holy Spirit as he witnesses God’s will to us and respond to that. Would you pray that God would give you an insight into it? Maybe some of the things that I shared are some of the things that you have trouble with. But do you see that isn’t important? What’s important is that the Holy Spirit could show you why you’re experiencing death in your life. It’s that he could show you why you are experiencing an emotional death or a mental death or a spiritual death by pointing out as clearly as he pointed out to Ananias and Sapphira. “Look, this is the point. Will you stop resisting me here?” Shall we pray? Dear Father, we thank you for your goodness and for your kindness. Thank you Father that you’re the God of order and the God of harmony. We thank you that you have a definite plan for our own lives. Father, we trust you, now to find in us a ready heart and a sensitive spirit that is anxious to go your way. So Holy Spirit, will you point out things to us in these coming days of this week? We tell you we want to respond on the first second. We want to respond to you immediately and receive you. We want to walk clear of sin and clear of death. We trust you Father for revelation during this week so that you’ll be glorified in us and death will be driven out, for your glory. Amen.

Sin and Death Romans 5:14 Sermon Transcript by Rev. Ernest O’Neill Have you ever found your mental capacities or your emotional capacities or your physical capacities just suddenly failing? You’re in an exam and the old mind just fails completely — you can’t remember the fact and it’s vital to get it if you’re going to write anything. Or, you’re at a time when you really need absolute calmness, quietness and concentration but the old emotions become ragged and on the edge. You can’t do anything with them. Or, you get up some morning — you’ve had eight hours of sleep (so you ought to feel great) but the old body feels weary and worn. And you just feel you can’t make it. Now, why is that? Were you and I made like that? Were we made with bodies that got weary without any reason or with minds that couldn’t remember the fact at the right moment or with emotions that just got ragged at any time without our knowing it or being able to control it? Obviously we weren’t. It says in Genesis at the beginning of the creation of the world that God saw everything that he had made and behold it was very good. So brothers and sisters God didn’t make us like that. God didn’t make us with ragged emotions. He didn’t make us with minds that couldn’t remember facts when we wanted them to remember them. He didn’t make us with bodies that were worn and weak physically. God made us with beautiful, whole, complete bodies and with good minds that were sharp and alert and with emotions that were balanced absolutely. And really what we found last Sunday was that the reason all this deterioration took place, was because the first man and woman refused the one essential factor that would make the mind and the emotions and the body work perfectly. That one factor was God’s own uncreated life, the life of the Holy Spirit. Immediately when the first man and woman rejected that life, rejected God’s will for them at that time and decided to go it on their own, immediately there took place a great deterioration throughout every part of their personalities. You remember we saw that the old mind became impaired and the emotions became unbalanced, ragged and on edge, and the old body became weak and worn. Without the Holy Spirit the whole world began to be infested with evil spirits that worked all kinds of lack of harmony in the universe itself — earthquakes and volcanoes — and brought about all kinds of strange dreams and nightmares into us men and women. Then, even as that took place, we began to live more and more for ourselves and we found ourselves living in a pro-self, anti-God world. Really that kind of death spread throughout the universe and that’s why many of us experience this kind of death in our minds and emotions today. I had an electric razor when I was in Ireland that ran on 220 volt current. All the current in Britain is 220 volts. But if you go to Europe, as I did one summer on the motorbike, (youth hostelling), you come to all kinds of 110 volt outlets. I had my 220 volt razor and I didn’t know anything about the 110 volt. I didn’t think that a whole nation would be stupid enough to run on 110 volt. But I went to the first youth hostel in France, stopped, in the morning got up, plugged the Remington shaver in and you should have heard it, it was miserable. It had just a little bit of “burrrr” but nothing else. So I grew a beard that summer. Now, that’s what it’s like. Without the Holy Spirit, everything just runs on half or a third speed. The blood doesn’t flow the way God meant it to flow. The mind doesn’t work the way it was meant to work. The emotions aren’t peaceful and at ease the way he meant them to be. And that’s what we mean by death coming into us. That’s really what it means when it says in Romans 5:12. It was the verse we studied last day. Romans 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.” And it’s that death that spreads. It spreads because of sin. Many of us, as we saw last Sunday, tend to think of sin as just disobedience to the Ten Commandments. What we began to realize last day was that sin is any resistance to God’s will for us at that time. You remember, Romans 5:13 says, “Sin indeed was in the world before the law was given.” In other words, sin existed whether the Ten Commandments were there or not. Sin is not just an immorality. It is not disobedience to the Ten Commandments. It is a refusal of that Spirit of life. Brothers and sisters, every time we refuse that Spirit of life today in our life, we experience death. You remember we saw that last day that you don’t have to be disobeying one of the Ten Commandments, “Thou shalt not steal” or “Thou shalt not kill” in order to experience death. Sin is not just immorality. It is not just disobedience to the Ten Commandments. Sin is any resistance to the movement of God’s Holy Spirit inside us. Do you see that in a thousand ways this morning, the Holy Spirit is trying to bring life to each one of you? The Holy Spirit is alive in the world today. God made him available to us again because of the death of Jesus and so the Holy Spirit of God is moving in you in a thousand different ways. And when you resist him, you experience more and more of the death that sin brings. So this morning, we are either responding to life and developing the inner spiritual body that will, at the last day, break through this physical body and transform it and take us up to the Father’s right hand — or today, we are responding to death inside us and accelerating the death that is already taking place in our mind and our emotions and our bodies. Brothers and sisters, that was where we got to in our study last day. Sin is resisting God’s will for you at this moment. Sin is resisting the moving of God’s Holy Spirit inside you at this moment. An example of it is this: you get up in the morning, the Holy Spirit comes to you and applies the truth that is written in the Bible, “whatsoever things are lovely and of good report, if there be any virtue, if there be any praise, think on those things.” The Holy Spirit is in all of us reinforcing the will of God for us that first moment when we reach out, hit the alarm, fall down to the floor and we’re awake. At that moment, the Holy Spirit in all of us is saying, “Whatsoever things are lovely and of good report, think on those things.” At that moment, you can resist the Holy Spirit — in which case you move into death. Or you can respond to the Holy Spirit — in which case you move into life. You can either accept his prompting at that moment or you can go on and think about the day ahead. “Three assignments not done — I have to get them done before 10 o’clock. What am I going to do tonight? I am not ready for tonight and what about tomorrow?” Satan never leaves them one-by-one, he throws the whole lot at you. Before you know it, you’re thinking ahead a month, two-months and then — who will I marry? But dear ones, do you see the Holy Spirit does not prompt you that way. The Holy Spirit is prompting you, “Whatsoever things are lovely and of good report, think on these things. This is the day that the Lord has made, let us rejoice and be glad in it. This is a good day. It’s your Father’s world. He knows what you’re going to do today and he has his arms right under you. Now bless him and praise him and thank him.” But do you see you can go either way. You can go into the depths of self and of degradation and before you know it, the emotions are unbalanced, the body is being abused, and everything is falling apart. Do you see that’s what we mean by sin being in the world before even the law was given? Sin is resistance to God’s will for us at this moment, whether it’s written in the Ten Commandments or not. Whether it actually says it or not, if you’re resisting God’s Spirit within you, then that’s sin and sin brings death into your personality. That’s one way in which many of us fall into death. Many of us fall into death because we have too narrow a view of sin. We think that sin is just immorality or sin is just disobeying the Ten Commandments. We think we can disobey that secret voice within without incurring any death, but you can’t. So many of us fall into death because we have too narrow a view of sin. Now, here’s the strange thing, the opposite is true. Many of us fall into death because we have too broad a view of sin. Many of us define sin like this, “Sin is any lack of conformity to absolute perfection.” Many of us have that definition of sin. Sin is any lack of conformity to absolute perfection. Sin is any deviation at all from the absolute mental and emotional and spiritual perfection of the one God of the whole universe. So, dear ones, many of us move in continual sense of condemnation by God because of that definition. We all know we’re imperfect in many ways. There are many ways in which our mind makes mistakes. There are many ways in which our emotions are on edge, there are thousands of ways in which we are not like God. We know we’re imperfect, so we come into this terrible bondage where we say, “Oh well, I sin in act, word, and thought every day in life because I am imperfect in so many ways.” The result of all this is two-fold. One, there comes a dreadful lack of any motivation to be like God. All motivation to be like Jesus is drained from us. We reckon to ourselves “I’m imperfect and that’s sin. I am sinning every day. I can’t do anything about it. If God holds me responsible even for things that I don’t know about, then I have no hope.” So we fall into a pattern of, “We’re doing our best.” The second result is that we fall into such hypocritical lives that the only difference between Christians and non-Christians is that Christians think they can continue to sin with impunity because of Jesus’ death. Whereas non-Christians think every time they sin, they feel real guilt. Do you see those two results come about if you ever fall into the unscriptural trap of defining sin as any deviation from absolute perfection or any lack of conformity to the absolute perfection of God? Now loved ones, that is not sin. That is just the creature in us. There are many ways you can’t fly up to that roof, God can. You can’t go to Mars this second, God can. You can’t do a mathematical complicated sum being sure that you won’t make a mistake, God can. You can’t judge everybody in this theater perfectly, God can. You and I will make a thousand different mistakes. We will again and again fall short of God in many ways that we don’t know about, but that is not sin. Sin is knowingly, consciously, disobeying God’s will for you at that moment. Now that’s why it’s important to look at the second half of that verse, from last day. Romans 5:13, “Sin indeed was in the world before the law was given.” So Paul says that. Sin, resistance to God’s will and refusal of his Spirit, existed in the world before the Ten Commandments were given. But, sin is not counted where there is no law. Now, do you see that? Unless a person knows they have disobeyed God, God does not count that as sin. Now that’s what that means, you see. Sin is not counted where there is no law. In other words, if you don’t know that you’ve disobeyed God, then God does not count that as sin for you. Now you remember that’s stated very plainly and maybe it would be good to look at it because I think a lot of us have labored under this false condemnation in our lives. If you look at, it’s very plainly put in James 4:17. It’s a fact that sin is resistance to God’s Spirit, but it is a KNOWING resistance to the Spirit, it is conscious resisting to the Spirit. James 4:17, “Whoever knows what is right to do and fails to do it, for him it is sin.” Now, do you see that? Whoever knows what is right to do and fails to do it, for him it is sin. But God will never witness guilt to your heart through the Holy Spirit unless you know that he has willed something for you and you have resisted that will. The only one that will witness guilt to you in that situation is Satan who will impart to you all vague senses of guilt. You’ll get up and you’ll feel, “Oh, I have a vague sense of guilt. I don’t know what I have done wrong but I know I am wrong, I know I am wrong, I know I am wrong.” Now brothers and sisters, that is of Satan, it is not of God. When God witnesses a sense of conviction to your conscience, it is definite and plain. He says, “This is wrong or that is wrong.” The guilt brought by the Holy Spirit always leads us to life. The guilt brought by false condemnation and Satan always brings more death. Now do you see that many of us experience death in our own Christian lives because we have a too narrow view of sin? We think sin is just disobedience to the Ten Commandments that it is not also resistance to God’s Spirit inside us. But many of us also live in death because we think God has condemned us when he hasn’t. We have too broad a view of sin. We think, “Oh, I have a false, vague sense of guilt so God must have condemned me.” Brothers and sisters, there is all kinds of false guilt that we come upon but the guilt that the Holy Spirit brings is always about something definite. It is always a conscious disobedience to God that the Holy Spirit brings to your mind. You’ll find that clearly if you look at just a couple of instances in the New Testament. It’s there in Acts 5:3. You remember we read it last Sunday. Acts 5:3; “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?’” That’s pretty definite. Now loved ones, that is sin. Sin is knowing conscious resistance to God’s will. It’s something you know you’ve done. It’s not that the Holy Spirit comes and says, “Now you’ve done something wrong. I want you to try to guess, I’ll give you three guesses what it was.” I used to teach in a kind of “Good Bye Mister Chips” school. It was a kind of public school in Ireland – a boarding school. We wore robes and gowns and all the members of the faculty sat at a big dining table in front of a massive dining hall. It was that kind of place. We used to have one master who had great trouble with discipline with the boys because he never tied them down. He would catch them running in the corridor. (That was a heinous sin in that school, to run in the corridor). He would catch them running in the corridor and then would say, “You did something wrong. What did you do?” Of course, they would never confess what they did. So he never got anywhere with discipline. Now brothers and sisters, God’s Spirit does not deal that way with us, do you see that? The Holy Spirit doesn’t play games. When you have a vague sense of guilt, what you need to do is say, “Holy Spirit is there some way in which I have resisted you and haven’t known about it? If there is, will you show me?” He will show you it and expect you to apologize or to repent or to make restitution and to receive him again to command your life. But sin, real sin is resistance to God’s will inside you and it is a knowing resistance. Now loved ones, would you look with me at an empirical fact that is stated in the verse that we’re studying today, that brings up a problem in the light of what we’ve shared. Now the empirical fact is this one stated in Romans 5:14, you remember that Paul has just said, “Sin existed in the world before the law was given, (before the Ten Commandments were given), but sin is not counted where there is no law.” So here’s the problem. Romans 5:14; “Yet death reigned from Adam to Moses”, (that was the time during which there was no law), “even over those whose sins were not like the transgression of Adam, who was a type of the one who was to come.” So that you don’t get lost in it all, I’ll try to make the point clearly so that you can all see it. Paul has just said sin was in the world before the law was given, but sin is not counted where there is no law. Yet he says, “During that time when there was no law and when sin was not counted, death reigned from Adam to Moses.” Now how can that be? If God did not count their sin as sin in those days, because there was no law, how then could death ever reign from Adam to Moses? You remember death did reign increasingly as the years went by. Death spread throughout the world and it became more and more chaotic as we read in the lesson this morning earlier on in the service. Now how does death reign from Adam to Moses if sin is not counted when there is no law and there was no law in those days? Well, there are two ways, brothers and sisters. One is that death is passed on from father to son even if the son does not sin. There’s a sense in which the effects of death are passed on to us even if we haven’t sinned. Now you may say that’s utterly unfair but let’s take an instance of it. Adam, you remember, set a poor example to his son Cain. He lived a life independent of God, Cain began to live the same kind of life and you find the result there in Genesis 4:8-9. You find that the death that existed in Adam was passed on to Cain just through the simple fact of his father’s example. Genesis 4:8-9; “Cain said to Abel his brother, ‘Let us go out to the field.’ And when they were in the field, Cain rose up against his brother Abel, and killed him.’” Now you get the same death being passed on in Genesis 6:5. It’s a summary of the way that the effects of the father’s sins were passed on to the children even though they themselves had not sinned. Genesis 6:5; “The LORD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.” Do you see that there are three deaths? There is a physical death that we are even now experiencing today. There is an eternal death that is forever separation from God. And there is a second death that is being cast into that lake of fire where we burn in our own selfish lusts. Now do you see that the death that we experience today can be passed on to us even by our parents? The strange thing is that, far from God being unfair in that, he is actually being fair. In other words, if one of us is promiscuous and we develop venereal disease, it is a very strong chance that the child that the mother bears will have deformities of some kind. Now the death is passed on. The effects of the death are passed on. Do you see that God cannot step in there without destroying our free will? Do you see that? God cannot keep intervening every time one of us goes wrong in order to prevent the effects of that being passed on to our children or to our friends. If God did that, he would be just a God who came down from the sky every now and again to deliver us from the consequences of our own free will. Now do you see that in a real way, death is passed on even though the children haven’t sinned? Nevertheless it is true that the only way we can experience the second death or final death is by knowingly resisting God’s will ourselves. Now how did the people from Adam to Moses do that if there was no law? How did they knowingly resist God’s Spirit and his will if there was no law? Well, the answer is in Romans 2. Romans 2:14-16; “When Gentiles who have not the law do by nature what the law requires, they are a law to themselves, even though they do not have the law. 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 on that day when, according to my gospel, God judges the secrets of men by Christ Jesus.” Really we are back to the first thing that Jesus taught us last Sunday. Even though they didn’t have the Ten Commandments available, men have within them the moral law of conscience that is continually prompting them to respond to God’s Spirit of life. The men and women from Adam to Moses had that law. They had a law written in their conscience as have every primitive tribe that we have not even touched with our civilization. They have a conscience inside them that is continually reinforcing in them the ancient racial memory that has been passed down through the years of God’s judgment through the flood, his judgment through the catastrophe of the tower of Babel and all the other judgments that he had brought about down through history. The conscience of every man is reinforcing that sense inside that there is a Creator who wants him to go a certain way and that is ready to forgive him if he will turn to him and come to him. Now loved ones, the people from Adam to Moses had that kind of law inside them. It was in resistance to that that they brought death upon themselves. Even though there was no law in those days, the conscience inside was a law that they could recognize. If they don’t respond to it, then death comes about. Now you may say, “Oh, could you prove that that law was there?” Yes, there were people who followed it. Even though there was no law, there were people who followed it. Genesis 4:26 outlines one of them. In other words, there was life. There was the life of the Holy Spirit available even in those chaotic, savage days and there were people that were responding to that voice within. Genesis 4:26; “To Seth also a son was born, (Seth you remember was Adam’s son) and he called his name Enosh. At that time men began to call upon the name of the LORD.” So there were men even in those days who responded to that conscience within. Genesis 6:8 talks about another of those men. Genesis 6:8-9; “But Noah found favor in the eyes of the LORD. These are the generations of Noah. Noah was a righteous man, blameless in his generation; Noah walked with God.” So there was the life of the Holy Spirit available. And you’ll find it again in Genesis 12:1-2; “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.’” So there were men in those days that were responding to the inward law in their hearts. Now dear ones, do you see it gets back to the central point that real sin is not disobeying all the “don’ts” of evangelical Christianity. Real sin is not just murdering, it’s not just killing, and it’s not just committing adultery. Real sin, the very heart of sin, is resisting God’s will for you at this moment today. You see, it’s because of the failure to see that that our churches are filled with very respectable moral people who are very unlike Jesus. Really loved ones, the only hope for you and me to avoid that kind of hypocrisy ourselves, is to really treasure this little voice of the Holy Spirit within us. He may ask us to do things that the Bible apparently does not ask us to do, but that is in line with the picture of Jesus that we get there. It’s up to us to respond to that. If you don’t respond to it, death begins to move and expand inside your own personality. If you do respond to it, life begins to flow and increase inside you. So brothers and sisters, it is really true that all of us in the theater this morning are moving in one way or the other. You really are. You are moving into more of those old wrinkles, because it all shows up in your body. God is so good, he lets it show. With worry, if you’re not responding to the Holy Spirit and you’re really not trusting Jesus for the exams and for the future, the old worry begins to show up in wrinkles on the forehead. The body begins to weaken and to wear out. On the other hand if you move in the other direction towards life, each time you sense the movement of God’s Spirit within you to trust your dear Father in heaven, you’ll move towards life. Loved ones, it’s not chance that some of us can look young for many years. It isn’t chance. It isn’t chance that some of us appear to be always sick and always worn out, it isn’t. If you’re moving towards life, there is a life developing and growing inside you. If you’re moving towards death, there’s a death growing and developing inside you. It’s utterly down-to-earth — not just one of going to hell but the mind becoming more and more impaired, the emotions becoming more and more shattered, and the body becoming weaker and weaker. Or is it the mind becoming renewed every day and the emotions experiencing the peace of Christ ruling them and the body being completely transformed into his image? Well, dear ones, I really trust Jesus will show you the truth of it. I think a lot of us are tied up with psychiatrists and the power of positive thinking, when we should just listen to the voice inside — just listen to the Holy Spirit’s promptings and begin to respond to him. So would you think about it this week? Especially at those crucial moments when you know there are two ways to go and Satan gets in and says, “Well, there’s nothing in the Bible that says, don’t take five minutes more in the morning. Oh there’s nothing in the Bible that says don’t think another moment about that thing.” Reject that and say, “No, but the Spirit of God within me is telling me what to do.” Let’s begin to move towards life. If you have real problems with some area in your own life and would like to talk, stay behind afterwards. A number of us gather in the front here. You can talk to me or there are some other brothers and sisters who have at last begun to move away from death and move towards life and some of them could probably help you. So you should, if you want to talk about things, don’t go out and struggle for another week. You should just stay around and talk about it. Or if you want to come during the week and see me or see some of us, that would be good. But it is God’s will that we should move in life in the midst of life and not in death. Let us pray. Holy Spirit, we have often sensed the movements that you have prompted inside us. We have often sensed those little impressions that you’re making on us. But we’ve grown so used to ignoring them as old fashioned inhibitions or as remnants of a past that we’ve had, that we have not responded. Now Holy Spirit we tell you, we want to be people who walk sensitively with you. We want to be people who do not resist you but respond to you. Holy Spirit, we want to move into life. We trust you now for this coming week. We tell you now Holy Spirit whether we’re Christians or not Christians, if you move inside us, we’re going to move with you. We’re going to respond to you whatever it costs us; we’re going to move in your direction. Lord Jesus, we trust you that you’ll be able to transform our lives with your life, that we will begin to be those radiant people that walk as princes and princesses on God’s earth and begin to have the dignity and the beauty and the royalty of the Son of God and King of kings. Dear Father, we know we weren’t made to crawl and to scrabble in the dust and the dirt with Satan. We know we were made to fly and we trust you to bring us into that experience during this week in every area of our lives. We ask this for your glory, Lord Jesus. Amen.

Condemned or Justified? Romans 5:16 Sermon Transcript by Rev. Ernest O’Neill Would you support the death penalty? You remember during the elections they asked California to vote on the death penalty. I think at a ratio of 2:1 they demanded the death penalty. The nation really is split on the whole issue. I think there are 35 states that are required to rule on the Supreme Court’s decision about the death penalty and perhaps 17 states have agreed with the Supreme Court that the death penalty is unconstitutional. But there are still about 18 states that have not made any decision. Some of them, like California, seem to be going in the other direction. You know if we were to ask each of us here in the theater, we would differ very much. That’s because Christians have finite minds. Some of them will interpret God’s way one way and some of them another. Some of us will say, “Well, punishment should be remedial and therefore the death penalty is not right.” Or some of us will say, “But punishment needs to be retributive and therefore the death penalty is right.” I think, whether we differ on the death penalty or not, we’d all agree on this: that it is a shame to inflict uncertainty like that on about 607 men on death row. We would agree upon that. It’s terrible to keep men hanging, not knowing whether they’re going to be executed or not, month after month after month. And yet do you see that it’s that position that most of the world lives in itself? Most of the world and most of the people in it have a sense that something terrible is going to happen to them. They’re very unsure about whether they’ll escape it or not. Most of the world really feels that it is condemned. People will try to laugh it off and pretend it isn’t true but most people live under this terrible threat of condemnation or final execution. And this, dear ones, is the source of all our ills. It really is. It’s the source of all the neurotic behavior in the world. It’s the source of all our lack of full, complete joy. This terrible uncertainty we have that something is wrong in the world and something bad is going to happen to it and to us too. You can see it right throughout the world of nature. Lake Superior looks beautiful from the scenic drive. But the mud, the dirt and the destruction that came with the floods this year plus all the heartache that was caused by them reminded us that water can look very beautiful but like many things in our natural world, it has not been tamed. It can destroy. We see beauty in one part of nature but we see something wrong in the other part. We see a terrible trauma in nature that suggests that something is wrong in the world and that in some way it must be a world condemned. Probably here in the States, we have more control of nature than any other nation. Yet you know there’s no news forecast that goes by but we hear reports of flooding, hurricanes or tornados. We’ve done our very best to tame nature, to bring it into order and to make it a world that is good and happy. Yet there seems to be something in nature that brings about this trauma and strain that suggests to us that all is not as right as we think it is. There are beautiful parts in the world. But there are also parts that are ugly and make us feel that somehow the world is out of control and that’s in the States here. If you go to the rest of the world, they’re in no doubt. The rest of the world is in no doubt that we live in a sick world. If you go to India or Africa, they’ve never had a rainy season that hasn’t flooded thousands out of their homes and destroyed thousands of their cattle. They’ve never had a dry season when the drought has not dried up the lives of many of their babies. If you go anywhere in the world, you’ll find that people in the world generally say, “Yes, there’s something wrong with our world, that’s obvious.” Bombay and Calcutta have streets filled with people who live and sleep in the streets because the natural resources have never been sufficient to provide enough life for every man and woman in those countries. People there will have no doubt about it. They’ll say, “Yes, there are beautiful things in our world but there’s something wrong with it.” Of course many of them will say, “There’s no doubt in our minds that the displeasure of the gods is upon this world, otherwise why this?” Of course brothers and sisters, we live in the midst of the San Andreas Fault. That’s an outstanding example of the dolce vita being lived in the midst of what geologists say is going to be a tremendous disaster that’s going to come upon us. It seems you have that combination. Many of us will say, “Oh no brother, the world is a beautiful place.” Yes, but brothers and sisters, all around the world you can see that it is a world that is not at home with itself. There is a strain inside it that is filled with trauma, and seems to have the gods’ displeasure upon it in many ways. Now that’s really what Paul says in Romans 8:22. If you look at it, it might help you to see the thinking that God has presented in the Bible as a whole and where the verses fit in. Romans 8:22; “We know that the whole creation has been groaning in travail together until now.” And that’s what God means when he says that through Paul. We know that the whole creation has been groaning in travail together until now. There are actually parts of the world where you can almost hear the groaning, the crunching of the rocks and the falling apart of the tremendous pressures that are in it. Now here’s the strange thing. There isn’t one primitive people in the whole world who do not tie this trauma that the world experiences to man’s behavior. There isn’t. There isn’t a primitive people, however uneducated they are, however unsophisticated they are, that doesn’t say, “This is coming upon the world because of us men and us women and the way we have acted.” Whether you say they’re right or wrong, they make sacrifices of all kinds to try to appease the gods that are obviously angry with them and trying to destroy their crops with storms and earthquakes. All primitive people believe that the groaning of the natural creation is in some way tied to the way we men and women have behaved towards the Creator. We may say that’s ridiculous. But even in our sophisticated western civilization we believe the same thing. We ourselves are at the moment involved in trying to do something about the way we’re polluting our world. We tie much of the lung disease and much of the ill health and much of the problems we have with our food now to the way we men and women have polluted our natural world. There’s never a forecast that we don’t come out now with a pollution index. Obviously we believe in some way that our behavior is almost about to destroy our world. We too, even though we are not primitive tribes and don’t try to appease the gods, we do see that our behavior reacts upon our natural world. That’s why we have arguments over supersonic airliners. We are now concerned about the worth of getting a person across the Atlantic in three and a half hours if it’s going to cause all the trauma and pain here to the people on the surface of the earth. The Rand Corporation has come out with a report in California. They said that if they don’t cut their electricity consumption by 60 percent over the next 25 years, there’ll be tremendous electrical shortages in California. We’re beginning to see that the way we men and women behave reacts upon the world itself. In some way, brothers and sisters, we are bound up with the world. That’s what I mean by many of us feeling, “We’re condemned with the world.” There are many men and women today who say, “Yes, you’re right. That’s the way the world’s going. The world is condemned and we’re condemned with it.” There are many of us that live under that kind of pain and hopelessness as the years pass. Now it runs through all our literature. We no longer have that sort of bright eyed, open-eyed optimism. We no longer have that kind of naïveté that this is going to be a wonderful world. We had it but we gave that up 30 years ago. No longer do we say with Swinburne, “Glory to man in the highest for man is the master of things.” No longer do we feel man is the master of things. Our particular generation looks just a little sceptically even on the idea of the American dream. We no longer have that kind of happy-go-lucky naïve optimism that it’s all going to be wonderful. Through our life and through our literature there runs the same kind of consciousness that we’re a world condemned. You know there’s the loneliness of the condemned man on death row. And there’s that about our lives today. Tennessee Williams said in the preface to “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof”, “We all have been condemned to solitary confinement within our own skins.” What he has said in writing, you and I have often felt. It is true, isn’t it, that as we squeeze together in cities to be closer to each other, we’ve locked more and more doors against each other. It’s strange that we’re a people that act like condemned people. We have the loneliness of condemned people. We part from each other like condemned people. We are alienated from one another like condemned people. It runs through even people like H.G. Wells. He was really the prophet of that optimism at the beginning of the century. Wells was a man who believed the world was going to be perfect some day until near the end of his life when he wrote “The Fate of Homo Sapiens”. He wrote this, “But quite apart from any bodily depression, the spectacle of evil in the world – the wanton destruction of homes, the ruthless hounding of decent folk into exile, the bombings of open cities, the cold-blooded massacres and mutilations of children and defenseless gentle folk, the rapes and filthy humiliations, and above all, the return of deliberate and organized torture, mental torment and fear, to a world from which such things had seemed well-nigh banished has come near to breaking my spirit altogether.” That’s the kind of atmosphere whether you’re a Christian or not, that runs through our literature today. Our philosophers share that same terrible hopelessness. Every psychologist knows that if he writes a book about psychology, he has to deal with the one great mark of a condemned world, guilt. That’s what fills our psych wards today, people who have tremendous guilt that they can’t get rid of. Guilt is so persistent that after electric shocks have worn off, the guilt still comes back. When the division between the memory and the conscience has been at last restored after the shock has worn off, the guilt is so persistent it comes back. So whether you go to philosophers or psychologists, they all agree on that same thing. Winston Churchill you remember talked to Billy Graham near the end of Churchill’s life. He said, “Well, do you see any hope?” Billy Graham, of course, talked about Jesus. Churchill said, “Well, if that’s the hope, that’s the only hope because I see no hope. I see nothing but hopelessness and despair in international politics for the rest of our century.” Manow in France did the same thing. I heard him on a TV program in London, and he said, “Well, if there is no hope, there is no hope.” That is the decision of even the foremost of our scientists. You get the same thing from Bertrand Russell. “All we can do is take up a position of unyielding despair.” Now that really is the situation if you live in this world without any other message. Why I shared it all with you today is that it seems to me there’s a reason for it all. You see it in Romans 8:20 where that’s indicated. Romans 8:20; “For the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of him who subjected it in hope.” You see what God tries to tell us? “I have subjected the creation to this kind of futility as a result of your actions and your independence of me. I have subjected it in hope.” Now what’s the hope? Well, brothers and sisters the hope is that we would see where Adam led us in rejecting the Holy Spirit of God’s uncreated life. God is hoping that you and I will look around this creation and see there’s something rotten in this whole setup. We’ve missed something and God wants us to see that this is what happens when you live independent of his uncreated life. When you reject the Holy Spirit that was available in the tree of life, this is where it takes us. It takes us east of Eden. It takes us into all the marks of condemnation. Do you see what God is saying to us this morning? The world itself cannot turn back. It’s going on down. Even the Second Law of Thermodynamics says that every process has a tendency to run down. The world is going that way and you can’t turn it back. But God has said, “You, each one individually, I do not condemn. That’s because my Son has been condemned in your place. And you, each one individually, I am ready to deal with apart from this world. The world — yes I have condemned it. But I condemned it so that you would see your own perilous state. You — each one individually, I don’t condemn you this morning. My Son was condemned in your place for all your independence and rebellion against me. I condemned my Son. You, I am willing to receive as if you had never sinned, if you will come and trust me.” Loved ones, do you see each of us here this morning will not experience eternal death because we have been condemned with the rest of the world, we won’t. You and I are not condemned with the rest of the world. If we experience eternal death, it will be because you individually have refused to receive God’s Holy Spirit. You’ll die because of the lack of the eternal Holy Spirit. You won’t die because God is out to condemn you this morning. You won’t die because he is condemning you at this moment. In other words, you won’t die because you’re condemned. You’ll die because you haven’t taken this opportunity to receive his Holy Spirit into you. So brothers and sisters, that’s what it means if you look at Romans 5:16. Romans 5:16; “And the free gift is not like the effect of that one man’s sin. For the judgment following one trespass brought condemnation.” And that’s what the world experiences at this moment. “But the free gift following many trespasses brings justification.” But the free gift to bring justification in your own life has to be received. That’s the heart of it. You can agree with all that I said this morning, because it’s pretty logical. You couldn’t go much any other way in interpreting reality as we see it in the world today. But you could listen to it all and agree to it. Do you see that you are not justified until you actually take the step and receive this free gift of the Holy Spirit for yourself? In other words, you are back in Adam’s position. You’re in the position that Adam was in. The Father is saying to you, “Look, I can give you my uncreated life of the Holy Spirit that will enable you to be like me. It’s your choice. Will you take it or will you not?” Really that’s the only thing that will bring you into eternal death and alienation from God — your refusal of that gift. But you can see how important it is, loved ones, to be able to look at this miserable world and see that you are not condemned along with it. The real reason God has allowed this to take place in our world is to show you what happens if you continue to go with it. You’ll die in the midst of its pollution, its alienation and its loneliness. You would. I mean you’ll just go down like that. What you see around you is a picture of your own future. I’ll just refer again to that play by Sartre. Jean-Paul Sartre wrote the play “No Exit”. You see the homosexual and the lesbian. Now I forget what the third person is but somebody in the same kind of psychotic situation. There’s one electric light bulb burning in the room and gradually it dawns on them as they burn against each other, wear each other down and tear each other apart by their criticism and their hatred – gradually it dawns on them that the light never goes out. The light is on all the time and gradually they begin to realize this is hell. Hell is being together like this forever with no possibility even of escape into darkness. Now loved ones, that’s why God has allowed these things to come — to show you what it’s like if we don’t receive the life of his Holy Spirit. That’s presumably something of what hell will be like. It will be a place more polluted than our world, in greater trauma than our world, in greater alienation and loneliness than our world. But you still have a free will. That’s why you can’t say, “God’s forcing me.” No, you can still choose. You can still choose to your own disadvantage. Really that’s what I am urging you to think about. Are you really moving in the direction of life in your own life or are you moving in the direction of death? Are you beginning to receive this Holy Spirit that Jesus sent? Is he beginning to influence your life? Is he beginning to make it like Jesus’ life? Or are you in fact becoming more like the world of which you’re a part? That’s part of what God meant when he said, “Save yourself from this untoward generation.” Brothers and sisters, you have to step out of it in order to live. So will you think about it and pray about it? Which way are you moving in your own life? Are you moving towards the death that the world is going to experience or are you moving towards the life that is possible in the midst of death? Let us pray. Father, we know these are important and vital things. Father, as we think over them and we pray about them, will you show us individually how we are responding to your gift of the Holy Spirit? Are we moving towards it ourselves or making the same choice as our forefather Adam did? Show us whether we’re moving into the same kind of savage microcosm inside ourselves or whether we are in fact moving into the great macrocosm of love that exists in your Son Jesus. Father, we would trust you to give us revelation about this so that we may take the action that is necessary and the action that you want us to take — that of receiving your Holy Spirit and allowing him to rule our lives and change them. We ask you to do this Lord, whatever it costs us and whatever it costs you to bring us to that place. We ask this in your Son’s name. Amen.

Death of Life in the Mind Romans 5:17a Sermon Transcript by Rev. Ernest O’Neill Could you imagine going into an automobile showroom with your battered old VW (Volkswagen) and trading it in, in that great moment when you graduate or something happens like that? You trade it in on a shiny bright new Thunderbird and the salesman starts to explain to you the kind of oil and the kind of gas you should use in this kind of a high powered engine. You stop him and say, “No, no. I have always run my VW on regular, low octane gas. I only use four spark plugs. I know the kind of oil. I am just going to run it the way I always ran my VW.” And the salesman can’t do anything with you. You go out and run the Thunderbird that way and you come back in a month’s time, if you’re lucky. The thing is pinging on the hills, it won’t start in the winter and it’s just an absolute mess. And he says to you, “Well, that’s to be expected. That whole system is different from your old VW system and it only uses a certain kind of gas and a certain kind of oil. You have to put eight spark plugs in whether you like it or not because it has eight cylinders and it won’t work right unless you use the right power and the right fuel. You’re going to destroy the whole system if you use the wrong power in it.” And that’s what we’ve been saying week after week. That’s what happened at the beginning of the world. Our personality was made to run on a certain power and a certain life that the Creator made at the beginning. If it doesn’t run on that power or that life, the whole system begins to break down and deteriorate. You remember the power is very plainly stated there in Genesis 2:9. The power was made available out of the ground. Genesis 2:9, “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.” By the tree of life God made available to us this supernatural, uncreated, dynamic life that is really like premium gas to a high-powered engine. God said plainly what the salesman said to us, Genesis 2:17, “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.” In other words, if you decided what is good for this engine and what is bad for it on your own, (according to your own knowledge of good and evil), you’ll find that the whole system will break down. And that in fact is what Adam did, you remember. He just decided to do it his own way. He decided that he would run his personality with the ordinary, natural, psychological and physical life that he had received. He would do without this supernatural uncreated life. And the same thing happened. The whole system began to deteriorate. It was gradual at first. You can see that in Genesis 6:3. The deterioration was gradual. All of us die at age 70, 80 maybe 90 at the most. That’s about as old as we get. Now obviously the deterioration was gradual in the early days of the world. Genesis 6:3: “Then the LORD said, “My Spirit shall not abide in man for ever, for he is flesh, but his days shall be a hundred and twenty years.” So obviously even though the life was no longer present and flowing through the body, yet still the bodies lasted longer than they do today. So the deterioration has increased as the years have passed and the centuries have gone. You can see it there in Genesis 4:22. The deterioration in the mind was only gradual, you only have to look at the pyramids in Egypt or the Aztec or Inca civilizations or Chinese civilizations to realize that at an early time in life’s history, men were able to do much greater things. They had minds that were much more alert and sharp. Genesis 4:22- “Zillah bore Tubal-cain; he was the forger of all instruments of bronze and iron.” Obviously they were able to do remarkable things in the early days. So though the deterioration was gradual, yet it was definite and you ended up in the situation described in Romans 5:12. That determination in Adam to do it his way rather than God’s way resulted in this kind of atmosphere in the world. Romans 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.” All of us lacked this power of the uncreated life of the Holy Spirit, and so death spread to all of us. That’s what God says again in Romans 5:14: “Yet death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over those whose sins were not like the transgression of Adam, who was a type of the one who was to come.” So, that kind of death — in our bodies, our minds, our emotions, and our spirits — reigned throughout the world. That’s the kind of situation into which we have arrived. And you know that it was all because of God’s word. It was really all because of God’s word. God said in Genesis 2:17 — maybe you should look at it and then we’ll talk about it a little. It was God’s word really that brought us into this situation. Genesis 2:17 – “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 said that. God said, “If you don’t receive the life of my Holy Spirit into you, you’re going to die.” And God was bound by his own word you see. He had to keep it. You can see how he kept it in Genesis 3:24. 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.” So God said, “You need this life — you really do. You can’t live without this uncreated supernatural dynamic life and if you determine to live without it, I have to withdraw it from you. You’ll no longer have access to it.” And that’s what God did. We live in a world that does not really have access to that Holy Spirit. You know that anybody in North or South Vietnam will agree with you, death reigns. Death certainly reigns today in their world. And the little child you remember that had all the burns from napong, (you remember it was the South Vietnamese I think that dropped the bomb on the village) and that little one, even though the pain has gone now after a month, will certainly say, “Yes, death reigns. Death reigns in our world.” And you go to India or Africa, any of the underdeveloped countries, and you’ll find people will say, “Yes, because of the floods and the droughts, death certainly reigns in our country.” But even we brothers and sisters, even we in our nation will say that the fear of death reigns. The fear of death reigns even among us, the fear of terrorism. The fear of death reigns in other countries with the fear of the secret police. The alienation of death reigns. Alienation of death certainly reigns in our society. Fifty percent of our marriages end up in divorce. Certainly our lives are filled with that sense of alienation from one another. We find it even in the loneliness of death. The loneliness of death as far as singles living in apartments in the large cities. That’s what’s killing many of us. They live in apartments in the great metropolises that we have in the nation. And death reigns in that we’re lonely, we’re cut off from each other, we’re alienated. Most of us would agree, “Yes, death reigns, it certainly reigns.” Do you see brothers and sisters; it reigns because of God’s word. God said, “If you do not receive the life of my Holy Spirit, death will reign in your land and in your life.” And that’s the way it has to be. The only way God could ever remove the flaming sword that guards the way to the Holy Spirit and make the Holy Spirit available to us is if somebody else died the death for us. And that’s what enabled God to take away the flaming sword from the Holy Spirit. That’s what happened. You see it in Romans 3:25-26. It was this man Jesus who really stepped forward and paid this death penalty to God’s justice so that God could keep his word and could punish our rebellion in an ordinary man and yet could replace the tree of life for us. It was Christ Jesus — Romans 3:25 —“whom God put forward as an expiation by his blood, to be received by faith. This was to show God’s righteousness.” And his righteousness was in question if he simply removed the flaming sword without anything happening. Then we would have said, “Did you really mean that you are a righteous God at all?” This was to show God’s righteousness because, in his divine forbearance, he had passed over former sins. It was to prove at the present time that he Himself is righteous, in spite of the fact that he let the Holy Spirit again come among us and that he justifies him who has faith in Jesus. Now dear ones, it’s really the situation that results now among us that I’d like to talk about this morning. The Holy Spirit is really alive among us, today. Adam, the first progenitor of the race, passed death on to you and me. He passed an impaired mind on to us, unbalanced emotions on to us, and a weakened body. He passed on to us a world that was infested with evil spirits, that was pro-self and anti-God and that lacked the Holy Spirit. He brought death to us. He passed death on to us. The second progenitor of the race, Jesus, started all over again. He is starting a new race and he is passing life on to us. This life makes a vital difference to every part of your personality and mine. I’d like to talk a little bit about the difference it makes. You know one of the problems that we have is our impaired minds. You have a mind that fails you at times, doesn’t it? It makes mistakes. It makes wrong judgments. At times the old memory falters. You have a mind that wanders away in wandering thoughts that at times you can’t control. It even keeps you awake at night when you want to get to sleep. The mind is churning over and over. Now that impaired mind is one of the parts of death that our forefathers passed on to us. As they lacked the Holy Spirit themselves, so their mind became impaired and weakened and they begot children whose minds were weakened and impaired. And you know the kind of way that death expresses itself in a mind that works without the Holy Spirit. God’s original plan was that the mind would be empowered by the life of his Holy Spirit and would simply be used to understand his plans for the universe and to work them out in deductive detail. He would give us his desire for the world through the intuition of our spirits and we would use our minds simply as a machine to work out and understand what he had told us to do. We would work it out in deductive detail and apply it to particulars. Now when we lacked the Holy Spirit, the mind realized that it had to work on its own. Instead of the mind being used to understand God’s will, the mind started to try to make sense of the plurality of factors in the world on its own, by the scientific method. It started to look at all the many particulars in the world and to try to draw them into some kind of order and harmony. But the mind was working from a self-preserving kind of motive that in fact caused it to be unbalanced. It looked at all these particulars and tried to harmonize them under principles by trial and error. But it would at times make mistakes. It would draw them together wrongly at times. This is why we ended up with many scientific theories that did not last. The mind was working independently on its own, saying, “Yes, we’ll draw together a 4 and 5 in the theorem of Pythagoras. Yes, it will work there. Then we’ll draw together these in the Archimedes principle. Okay, it will work there.” But at times they would draw them together in the wrong combination. And so we ended up with wrong scientific theories at times that had to be changed. That’s why science is all the time in a state of movement and development. It ended up at times in oil spills in the ocean. It ended up in decisions that actually contorted the world. Now as the mind began to do that, so the mind began to come under adverse judgment from other human beings. That’s because other people would look at the man who decided to drill an oil well off a California coast and would say, “That was a stupid decision.” Men began to judge each other for the wrong judgments their own minds were making. Gradually, brothers and sisters, our minds began to be preoccupied not with the discovery of truth, but with defending ourselves against other people’s judgments. We began to be more concerned with defending ourselves by our minds than with discovering the truth of how the universe works. As this increased, you can see our minds began to be more and more paranoid. We began to retreat more and more from the discovery of truth and to be more and more concerned with justifying ourselves. Now brothers and sisters, as that developed, you can see the situation that we have in many of our colleges. You know fine well that many faculties are preoccupied with proving that they’re valuable to the university rather than preoccupied with discovering truth. Many members of faculties are more concerned with defending themselves against their fellow members in the faculty than they are with discovering truth. So, instead of the mind being used to understand God’s will, the mind began to be used to discover harmony in the world as best it could and then to defending its judgment and its harmonizing of the world’s many particulars against other people. And the mind began to defend and justify itself against each other. Now as it went on, you can see that the mind discovered its own inadequacies and frustrations. It became more and more disappointed in itself. It became more and more uncertain and unsure of itself. And as that happened, it became more and more unbalanced. The mind began to make judgments that were quick and hasty – “publish or perish.” You had to bring a decision out early. You weren’t sure whether the vaccine really worked, you weren’t sure whether Thalidomide really did the job but you had to bring it out fast against your competitors. And so the mind was driven by the sheer pressures of other people’s opinion upon it. It was driven into wrong decisions and wrong judgments. It was driven into prejudiced judgments. The mind began to be unbalanced itself. It began to make mistakes. It began to lack the ability to concentrate because it was thinking of what other people were thinking of it. It began to worry. It began to come into all kinds of tensions. Now brothers and sisters, that’s how the mind has come into the kind of death that you experience today. You and I have minds that don’t seem part of us. We don’t seem even able to control them. They at times run away with us. Now loved ones, that’s because the mind started with the lack of the Holy Spirit. Now what was God’s plan? It was absolutely the other way. God’s plan was that we would receive through the intuition of the spirit God’s own plans to develop his world and his universe. We would use our minds just to understand those principles and to apply them in detail to life. The kind of wisdom that that produced was utterly different and utterly peaceful compared with the other kind of wisdom. You can see those two wisdoms if you like to compare. James 3:14-15 describes the kind of earthy wisdom that comes from what some of you philosophers will recognize as the inductive method — as opposed to what God’s plan was, the deductive method. So if you look at James 3:14-15, you find the kind of chaos that resulted from the mind working backwards trying to harmonize the world according to its own judgment and coming of course into mistakes and into tension. It’s interesting how it describes to a great extent the academic world. James 3:14-16; “But if you have bitter jealousy and selfish ambition in your hearts, do not boast and be false to the truth. This wisdom is not such as comes down from above” — it comes up from underneath in an inductive method – “but is earthly, unspiritual, devilish. For where jealousy and selfish ambition exist, there will be disorder and every vile practice.” Some philosophers may be wondering, is there not a place for the inductive method? Yes, but we would have been guided to use the inductive method as God guided us to use it. He would have pointed out the possible harmony in the universe. You must admit that even the inductive method requires that man set up hypotheses that they prove. If we had our minds working the way God wanted us to, we would see those hypotheses revealed by God to us and we would simply apply them. The wisdom that comes from God is utterly different. James 3:17; “But the wisdom from above is first pure,” — because it has only one single desire: to find out truth and discover God’s plan – “then peaceable, gentle, open to reason, full of mercy and good fruits, without uncertainty or insincerity.” That’s the kind of wisdom that God intended us to receive as we allowed the Holy Spirit to come down to our minds. Our minds then would have been taken up with discovering God’s mind. That’s it, brothers and sisters. The top scientists among us, the top philosophers among us would have been concerned with discovering God’s mind and the principles that govern his mind. When our mind is working the right way and the life of the Holy Spirit is flowing through it, that’s what we’re preoccupied with. We’re preoccupied with discovering the plans for the universe from the very mind of the Creator of the universe. You get that kind of emphasis there in Psalm 139:14. This would have been the preoccupation you see, with the mind that is governed by the Holy Spirit. Psalm 139:14-15: “I praise thee, for thou art fearful and wonderful. Wonderful are thy works! Thou knowest me right well; my frame was not hidden from thee, when I was being made in secret, intricately wrought in the depths of the earth.” See, you knew everything. You had it all planned so if I discover what is in Your mind, I’ll discover the meaning of the world itself. Verse 16: “Thy eyes beheld my unformed substance; in thy book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there was none of them.” That’s good too, incidentally, for those of us who don’t like the way our nose goes, or who don’t like the way our hair goes. Don’t you look down on something that God has planned so carefully. God designed you carefully before you were born. He is pleased with what he made, so don’t disagree with God just because your nose has a bump in the middle. This would be the attitude of a scholar whose mind is governed by the Holy Spirit. Psalm 139:17-18, “How precious to me are thy thoughts O God”, not my own guesses about whether light is rays or particles but thy thoughts. “How precious to me are thy thoughts, O God! How vast is the sum of them! If I would count them, they are more than the sand.” Of course, that presents to you the sheer difficulty that a mind working from the other direction has to try to harmonize the thoughts that are more than the sand on the seashore. Now, brothers and sisters, when you begin to allow the Holy Spirit to come into your mind, (to work through it the other way and allow it to be preoccupied with God in His thoughts in His mind and stop this business of using your mind to defend yourself against other people or defending your judgment against other people) then you’ll find the Holy Spirit will begin slowly to bring that mind back under the control of God. And he will begin to take away all the limitations and the frustrations that the mind has. A man called Simpson said this about his experience of the Holy Spirit working in his mind, “I had a poor sort of a mind, heavy and cumbrous that did not think or work quickly. I wanted to write and speak and to have a ready memory so as to have the little knowledge I had gained always under command. I went to Christ about it and asked if he had anything for me in this way. He replied, ‘Yes, my child, I am made unto you wisdom.’ I was always making mistakes which I regretted and then thinking I would not make them again. But when he said that he would be my wisdom, that we may have the mind of Christ, that he could cast down imaginations and bring into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ, that he could make the brain and head right, then I took him for all that.” He actually received by faith the mind of Christ through the Holy Spirit. And the Holy Spirit began to give him that mind. “And since then, I have been kept free from this mental disability and work has been rest. I used to write two sermons a week and it took me three days to complete one. But now in connection with my literary work, I have numberless pages of matter to write constantly besides the conduct of very many meetings a week and all is delightfully easy to me. The Lord has helped me mentally and I know he is the Savior of our mind as well as our spirit.” Now dear ones, I know that a lot of you who are involved in studies are troubled because the mind is just in bits and pieces. Now dear ones, do you see that the life of the Holy Spirit can integrate your mind? If you begin to trust him and ask him to give you light (on the ways in which your mind is impure, in which it is double minded, in which it’s trying to manipulate other people and circumstances, in which you defend yourself against others and at the same time with the time that is left try to discover truth) — if you allow the Holy Spirit to reveal that to you he can expose to you why your mind is disintegrated and fragmented. Loved ones, I tell you the Holy Spirit is able to change and renew your memory. The Holy Spirit is able to bring you into such a place of rest that your judgment is unimpaired and balanced. The Holy Spirit is able to clear your mind of those prejudices that are so deep that you don’t even know they’re there. The Holy Spirit is able to give you rest at night when you go to sleep. He is able to give you rest from vile imaginations and from wild thoughts. He is able to bring you into rest in your mind. I only got a third of the way through the sermon so you can see that there’s a lot to talk about in regard to the emotions and the body but there’s a lot more even to say about the mind. I’d ask you to begin thinking about it. Would you begin praying about it? Above all, would you begin to see that if your mind is under the control of death, then your mind must be in a mess? I’m afraid that’s true, isn’t it? Most of our minds are terrible messes that we manage to collect together long enough to do an examination and then they go to bits again. We haul them together again for a great decision on which car we should buy and then they go away again. But most of our minds are not really under our control. It is the Holy Spirit’s will that you should have your minds under the control of God and working in the right direction. So maybe you’ll begin to think about it. I think those of you who are interested in philosophy at all you know that there’s a lot more to work out there. That’s only the brief outline of a possible approach. But most important is that we let the Holy Spirit work it out in us personally. Let us pray.

Death of Life in the Emotions Romans 5:17b Sermon Transcript by Rev. Ernest O’Neill Are you good at math? Or do you have a kind of mechanical aptitude? Do you like poetry or painting? Now if you have children, do you think they like poetry if you like it or that they’ll be good at math if you’re good at math? There is psychological evidence to suggest that it’s really possible for you to transmit traits like that of your personality to your children. And you’ve probably seen it yourself. You can see some things in your own personality that you’ve got from your mom or your dad. We talk at times about people having the same quick wit as their mother or we talk about them having their father’s eyes. It’s obvious that you can transmit to your children qualities of your mind and your emotions and your body. You can transmit it by heredity not just by environment. Now, do you lose your temper? Do you have trouble with pride? Do you have trouble with anger? If you have children, will you transmit those traits to them? The psychological evidence that we have suggests that you won’t. You don’t, by heredity, transmit moral traits or qualities. It is true that you are influenced by the environment in which you’re brought up. If you’re a person that is always escapist about your responsibilities, then your children will grow up seeing you escaping again and again from your responsibilities and seeing you lapse into melancholia every time you have something that you should do. Of course, they will learn to take the same kind of attitude, but you see they learn it by environment and by example, not by heredity. Now, brothers and sisters, it’s those two kinds of transmissions that you and I have experienced from the first man in the world. The first man in the world, you remember, transmitted in those two ways something of himself to us and that’s really what the verse that we’re studying this morning says, maybe you’d look at it, Romans 5:17. Romans 5:17: “If, because of one man’s trespass, death reigned through that one man…” And that’s really what it means, you see. The one man’s trespass was that he refused to live off God’s Holy Spirit. He refused to receive the uncreated life that God had to give him. He decided to go it alone and live it on his own. As a result of that, because he didn’t receive the Holy Spirit into him, his mind and emotions and his body underwent deterioration. His mind became impaired and made mistakes, his emotions became unbalanced and his body became weakened. Now brothers and sisters that, he passed on to you and me. Our bodies are not nearly the bodies that God made them in the very beginning. Our minds aren’t the clear thinking machines that God made them at the beginning. Our emotions aren’t the beautiful balanced things that God made at the beginning. So in a way, Adam has passed that on to us. And then you see that as he lived in the world independent of God, so we all learned from his example. We learned to live as if there’s no Creator. So that today, the great mass of people in the world live as if there is nobody taking care of the whole thing and as if everybody has to make his own way. That’s really what that means, you see. Because of Adam refusing to receive the Holy Spirit into himself, he passed on to us his impaired mind, his unbalanced emotions and his weakened body. He created a pro-self world, a world that existed for itself, an anti-God world, a world that was filled with many evil spirits along with anger and envy and jealousy. We entered into that environment. And it’s in that sense that we have kind of original sin passed on to us. It’s not that we can’t avoid being evil. It’s not that because Adam was evil, we are evil. But it’s because Adam refused the life of the Holy Spirit. It affected his personality and his body in certain ways and he passed those traits on to us. And that’s our situation today. You remember the beauty of it is that we are all living in this kind of death life unnecessarily. We’re all living this way unnecessarily. Because in fact, God put us all into Jesus in pre-creation eternity and he destroyed us all there. Actually we don’t have to die today. We’re under the misapprehension that we do. We are under the misapprehension that God has kept his Holy Spirit from us and will not ever more give him to us. But actually that’s wrong. God destroyed us all in his Son Jesus and so God is actually this morning willing to give us his Holy Spirit. Our situation today is not that we cannot get at the Holy Spirit. Our situation is that we have a choice this morning. You can either live receiving the Holy Spirit into you and allowing the Holy Spirit to influence your personality or you can refuse him and live in the midst of the death that Adam lived in. That’s really our choice. Each of us is deciding today whether we’re living in the midst of death or in the midst of life. You remember two weeks ago, we looked at some of the effects of that death on our minds. This morning I’d like to look for a few minutes at the effect on our emotions. God’s plan was this, that we receive the Holy Spirit of uncreated life into our spirits. That Holy Spirit contains his own genes. It contains the joy of our Creator and the love of our Creator and the peace of our Creator. His will was that we should pass that through our wills, through our minds, through our emotions out to our bodies. The emotions would be the link for that life between our minds and our bodies. The emotions would be used to express that love and joy and peace to the whole world. As the joy, love and peace that came from the Holy Spirit passed through our emotions, our emotions would automatically get satisfaction themselves. They would just enjoy it and that was God’s plan. It’s a bit the same kind of experience you have when you do a job that you’re utterly taken up with. You probably have done that. Brothers, we have done a piece of carpentry or some electrical work or something on the automobile that has really given us satisfaction and our emotions are utterly satisfied. It’s because we’ve really been utterly taken up with the job. Or sisters, I think when you’re doing something that utterly occupies you and satisfied you, your emotions are satisfied. They are not all frustrated and pent up. Now, that was God’s plan that we would receive this love and joy and peace from our relationship with him through the Holy Spirit. Our emotions would then be used simply to express all that to the world. Now when we refused to live off the Holy Spirit, we found that we had emotions on our hands that had no satisfaction. And dear ones, when we live in death, that’s what we find ourselves. We find ourselves with emotions that aren’t satisfying. And so men began to dedicate their whole lives to getting satisfaction for their emotions. They felt emptiness in the world. They felt an emptiness each day. They felt there was something not satisfying. They wanted to try to get that satisfaction from the only source they could — from the world. It’s really terribly frustrating. However brilliant an ad man you are it is extremely difficult to convince people that by buying a “Cutlass” [a type of car] that you can absolutely be flying high every moment of every day in your life. Or by buying a Mustang, [a type of car] you can solve once and for all, all your needs for emotional satisfaction or exhilaration. It is extremely difficult. But do you see, we’re committed to that. We’re committed to trying to satisfy emotions that are terribly unsatisfied and frustrated. We really do lack the sense of excitement and exhilaration that God’s Spirit would bring us, and you know that. You know there are days when you just wonder, “Oh, this is just blah. There’s just nothing.” You feel, “Oh, I want to do something. I want to do something to get excitement.” Brothers and sisters, that’s what we experience when we aren’t receiving this supernatural life from God. We find we have emotions on our hands that are just miserably unsatisfied and frustrated. The only thing we can do is try to get excitement and satisfaction from the world. And so we do it. You buy a faster car to see if you can go faster. But after you get past 80 and you’re used to 80 miles an hour, it’s no longer very satisfying. So okay, we’ll try to do it on skis. All right, then we’ll try to do it on a snowmobile. Okay, then we’ll try to do it on water skis. We go up and up and up until most of us come to the place where we can’t find anything else to excite us enough. We find that we’re then beginning to use people to satisfy our emotions and you know that. So often you’ve used the girl friend or the boy friend, not to express love to them but to get exhilaration, to get excitement, to get satisfaction from them. So often you know that’s why our jobs are frustrating because we’re demanding from our jobs, a satisfaction and excitement that a job cannot give you. And so, many of us live in the midst of death. The death that Adam experienced has been passed on to us. We have emotions that just can’t get enough excitement and that are continually frustrated. You know that if you try to find the exhilaration that God’s Spirit alone can give you, in sex there’s a tremendous anti-climax, isn’t there? If you try to find the sense of transcendentalism that only God’s Spirit can give you, through drugs there’s a tremendous anti-climax after you’ve tried it. So, many of us live our lives in the midst of anti-climax. We try to get satisfied with the emotions, but they won’t go. That’s one way in which our emotions become unbalanced. At times we’re trying to get elation for our emotions. At other times we’re trying to get stability. At other times, we’re depressed in our emotions. At other times we’re utterly exhilarated so that we can’t control them. Sometimes we’re utterly insensitive to people. At other times we’d shake at a shadow. We find our emotions are going back and forward, trying to get the exhilaration that God’s Spirit alone can give us and trying at the other end to get the peace that God’s Spirit can give us. We find our emotions are unbalanced. There’s another way dear ones, in which our emotions are unbalanced. You can find it there in Genesis 3:8-10. “And they heard the sound of the LORD God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the LORD God among the trees of the garden. But the LORD God called to the man, and said to him, ‘Where are you?’ And he said, ‘I heard the sound of thee in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself.’” Now you can see in Adam, “I was afraid” — and there’s fear there. And, “I was naked and I hid myself” — there’s the stealth and the furtiveness. Now dear ones, we entered into that kind of emotion too. Many of us are dominated by a self-doubt and by a fear that we will not be accepted. Many of us live our lives in that way. We wonder, “Will we be accepted?” And really our problem is we’re not sure whether the Man behind the whole universe will accept us. We’re in great doubt about whether we’re fitting into any plan or not. We have a great problem with our own identity and why we’re here. And you know what we do. When we lack a sense of satisfaction and acceptance in our emotions from God, we try to gain it from other people. That’s what most of us are involved in. We’re trying to make up for the lack of acceptance with God (because our consciences are not clean towards him) by trying to get acceptance from everybody else. And so our emotions are all bound up with almost draining other people of love. You know we do that, don’t we? We’re almost draining others of love. We want them to accept us and we want them to give us signs that they accept us. Isn’t that the whole sensitivity group circle, the whole T-group trip? We’re trying to tell each other that we accept each other and we’re just draining energy and love from other people to try to satisfy these emotions that are demanding acceptance. And you know what happens then? You see other people who are gaining more acceptance than you are. And so, another emotion comes up inside you: envy and jealousy. You’re jealous of them because they’re gaining more acceptance in the public eye than you are. It’s great I suppose to have movie stars but really it’s part of the expression of a sinful world. So many of us when we see the movie star with his two or three cars or we see him with his big house or with all his fame and his respect that people are giving him, it really just produces in us an envy and a jealousy that is restless and makes us dissatisfied. Now in that way too you see we’ve entered into unbalance in our emotions. Our emotions are unbalanced because we’re often trying to use them to give ourselves a sense of acceptance. So brothers and sisters, most of us live lives full of opposite kind of emotions. Our emotions are almost apart from us. Many of us feel, “These are things that we cannot control.” At one time they’re elated, at one time they’re depressed. At one time they’re happy and one time they’re sad. At one time we’re outgoing to our friends and another time we’re all closed in on ourselves in introspective gaze. Our emotions are up and down in all kinds of ways. At times we’re filled with envy, at times with anger that we cannot control. At times we’re filled with strain and nervousness. All these things eventually bring hypertension to the body. We find really that we’re people who are almost being whipped along by our emotions. Now, brothers and sisters, those are some of the things we mean when we say that we have entered into the unbalanced emotions that Adam experienced through lack of the Holy Spirit. Now dear ones, that all changes completely when you at last choose life in Jesus. It really does. When you at last believe that God destroyed you in Jesus and that he no longer hates you or no longer is demanding anything from you, there comes into your own conscience, into your mind and spirit, a great sense of acceptance. There is a great peace that comes into your mind and your emotions. At last, instead of doubting acceptance, instead of wondering if everybody else accepts you, instead of running these kind of popularity contests in your mind with other people, suddenly you come to the place where you have a quiet assurance that the Father in the back of the universe, loves you with all his heart, thinks the world of you, accepts you fully as his child, as his son, as his daughter and watches you every moment of the day. There comes a great sense of peace into your emotions. Then God begins to give you his Holy Spirit. And the Holy Spirit begins to fill you with outgoing love for other people. He gives a joy and a peace that suddenly makes you independent of faster cars and makes you independent of a vacation. So often we say, “I just have to have a vacation. I am falling apart.” Brothers and sisters, I say this in love to us all, we should be able to live without vacations. I know that sounds mad but do you see, that’s the Father’s will. We shouldn’t come to Christmas and say, “I’m worn out. I just can’t wait till I get home”, or “I can’t wait to the summer time till we get a vacation.” It’s the Father’s will that we should live continually in peace and in serenity with him. We are continually receiving strength in our emotions from him. Now brothers and sisters, it is possible to enter into that kind of thing. Jesus expressed it there, it’s in John 14:27. John 14:27; “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you; not as the world gives do I give to you. Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid.” Now brothers and sisters what happens when you really accept that you’ve been destroyed in Jesus and that your Creator accepts you because of that? That peace becomes a reality. You can’t produce that peace by meditating on those words. All you get is a psychological and emotional lift. That peace is actually given to you miraculously by the Holy Spirit. It brings a serenity and a quietness inside. The exhilaration that we so often demand from things like motorbikes, snowmobiles, boats and fast cars, that peace is meant to come to us from the mind-expanding transcendental experience of being in touch with the Creator of the universe. And that begins to be a reality when you accept that position in Jesus. Paul talked about it in 2 Corinthians 12:2-4 and it’s just one of the experiences that he had but it gives you some sense of it. He’s talking about a personal experience that he had in a personal relationship with the Maker of the universe. 2 Corinthians 12:2-4; “I know a man in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven – whether in the body or out of the body I do not know, God knows. And I know that this man was caught up into Paradise — whether in the body or out of the body I do not know, God knows — and he heard things that cannot be told, which man may not utter.” Now loved ones, do you see that in a sexual experience and a drug experience and in a faster motorbike, we’re looking for a substitute for that kind of exhilaration. It’s madness and you never get it. It always bursts as a bubble in your hand. You have the experience and the anti-climax. The only way to come into that is to enter into it by an experience with God in Jesus. Then it becomes possible to experience that exhilaration in the way you are meant to experience it. And your emotions become satisfied. At last you cease to be a parasite. You sisters, you know the way you drain your poor roommate. “You never pay any attention to me. Why don’t you pay attention to me?” Or brothers, we drain our brothers by competing with them in rivalry to try to prove that we’re better than they are. Husbands and wives, we drain each other. We demand love from that wife. She won’t give us attention. We demand love from that husband; he won’t give us attention. But then it carries on as we drain our fathers and mothers, or we drain our sons and our daughters. Now that isn’t the Father’s will. The Father’s will is that we should come into absolute balance in our emotions through a full experience of relationship with him. And that’s part of the way life comes to us. That’s why Paul says there is life to be experienced. Romans 5:17; “If, because of one man’s trespass, death reigned through that one man, much more will those who receive the abundance of grace and the free gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man Jesus Christ.” It is really possible to reign above unbalanced emotions. It’s really possible to enter into a world of real balance, real peace and real joy. That’s what God wants for us. So will you see that all the effects of death can be reversed? But it’s all conditional on you and me entering into Jesus and accepting that God has destroyed us in Jesus and received the new life that He rose to give us.

Death of Life in the Body Romans 5:17c Sermon Transcript by Rev. Ernest O’Neill Have you ever thought about dying? It used to be popular for people of our generation to say, “Oh, what a morbid thought.” But I think we’re different now, aren’t we? We really do feel that we ought to be able to face that, whether we’re Christians or not. I think everybody is beginning to sense, “Yes, I should be able to face the thought of death and think what I would do with death.” So really I am pushing you on it. I am asking you, have you ever thought about dying or about death? Have you ever thought about the way you’ll meet it? Some of you will know Dylan Thomas, the English poet. You remember he was watching his father dying and he wrote a poem. It was a raging rebellious poem. He said, “Do not go gentle into that good night. Old age should burn and rave at close of day. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” And Thomas’s whole poem was that — that everybody should rage against the dying of the light. Noyes is a psychiatrist from Iowa University. You may have read two weeks ago in “Time” magazine that he interviewed different men and women who had almost died in mountain falls or in parachute jumps where the parachute failed. He said that there seemed to be three stages. In the first stage, the person seemed to rebel against the whole thing and resist it. Then in the second stage, the person tended to have a real review of their own life and to look for a moment at all the things that had happened — especially the pleasant things. Then in the last stage they really seemed to embrace death and surrender themselves to it. Now what do you think? If you say to me, “I mean in spite of all that you say, I kind of recoil from the whole idea. I don’t like to think of death. I don’t feel I need to and I don’t like to think of it.” I think that that’s right, brothers and sisters. We were made not to have to face death originally. Really, God made us to live forever. That’s part of the reason we recoil against it. You can see that in Genesis 3:22 that we were really originally made never to die. Genesis 3:22b – “…lest he put forth his hand and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever.” Obviously the Creator had put the tree of life in the world. He had made the Holy Spirit because he is the tree of life. He had made the Holy Spirit alive in the world so that we could receive of that Holy Spirit and live forever. That was God’s plan. God planned that our bodies would never grow old, that there would never come wrinkles, that our hair would never go gray. Rather we would live on and on forever and would come into his immediate presence and would just be like that forever. You remember the whole problem came when the first man refused the tree of life. He refused to live dependent on the Holy Spirit and decided to live his own way by trial and error. That’s what it means to eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. It’s to live by trial and error, to do what you thought was right by your own muddled attempt instead of receiving God’s Holy Spirit into you by faith and letting that express itself through you. So the first man refused to receive this uncreated, supernatural life and immediately he did that, his whole body began to experience the effects. The mind began to be impaired, the emotions became unbalanced and the body itself began to be weakened. That’s really now why we have weakened bodies. At that time even the body became temporary. The body was made to be permanent but when the Holy Spirit ceased to flow through it, it began to be temporary also. You’ll find that if you like to look at it in James 2:26. “For as the body apart from the spirit is dead, so faith apart from works is dead.” But you see the first statement, “As the body, apart from the spirit, is dead.” When the Holy Spirit was no longer flowing through us, our bodies became temporary. They immediately came into a position you remember where at the beginning of Old Testament times they seem to live for about 120 years. Now they live for maybe an average of 70 years, don’t they? And even that varies from country to country because there are places where people only live on average 45 years. The whole body suffered because of the lack of the Holy Spirit. That happened to even good men, men who were walking in obedience to God. Even their bodies (that they inherited from the first man that came into the world), were temporary. But worse things happened as men began to behave like Cain and Abel. You remember the way Cain behaved if you like to look at it. It’s in Genesis 4:6-8. As men began to try to prove that they were worth something, because they lacked God’s approval on their lives, so they began to compete with each other. That of course, brought a death of its own. Genesis 4:6-8: “The LORD said to Cain, ‘Why are you angry, and why has your countenance fallen? If you do well, will you not be accepted? And if you do not do well, sin is couching at the door; its desire is for you, but you must master it.’ Cain said to Abel his brother, ‘Let us go out to the field.’ And when they were in the field, Cain rose up against his brother Abel, and killed him.” Now as man began to share Cain’s sense of insecurity and began to try to establish their security by driving everybody else away from them and putting everybody else under their feet, so of course, men and women began to hurt each other. Not only did the body become temporary but we began to injure each other. In a real way brothers and sisters, every automobile accident is connected up with if not anger, that sense of insecurity or impatience or lack of love and concern for our brothers and sisters. In other words, it is God’s will that there should never be an accident. This is another way in which death came into the world. As men and women began to be selfish, angry and irritated with each other like Cain, they began to commit injuries against each other. That of course, brought death as well. There was another way that death was brought. As men and women lacked love for each other, so they began to be careless about their own habits, their own habits of hygiene. As they began to be careless about those, so germs began to be created in the world. That was not God’s original plan at all. But germs began to be created and they began to transmit disease. You get that kind of teaching if you look at Leviticus 11: 31-34. Even back in Old Testament days, God was trying to teach them what in fact we only learned in the 18th or 19th century in New York. That is, the way to stop plagues was really to be clean in your own habits and to be clean about washing. Even in these days, maybe 1500-1600 BC, God was trying to stop the spread of germs. Leviticus 11:31-34; “These are unclean to you among all that swarm;” these certain insects and animals – “whoever touches them when they are dead shall be unclean until the evening. And anything upon which any of them falls when they are dead shall be unclean, whether it is an article of wood or a garment or a skin or a sack, any vessel that is used for any purpose; it must be put into water, and it shall be unclean until the evening; then it shall be clean. And if any of them falls into any earthen vessel, all that is in it shall be unclean, and you shall break it. Any food in it which may be eaten, upon which water may come, shall be unclean; and all drink which may be drunk from every such vessel shall be unclean.” Now of course, the reason God said that was because men weren’t behaving that way. Men and women were becoming careless about themselves, about their friends, about their neighbors and so germs and disease began to spread in the world. Sickness came into the world as a direct result of man’s lack of love for God and lack of love for his neighbors. Then men and women began to hate each other yet pretend that they loved each other. That’s how sexual intercourse, as we know it apart from Jesus and apart from his Spirit of unselfish love, that’s how that began to be treated in the world. That brought its own problems. You remember you have it outlined in Romans 1:26-27. The whole question of birth defects did not begin simply with Thalidomide [a drug prescribed to pregnant women in the 1950’s] and that kind of problem which you know is another example of man’s lack of love and selfishness. Birth defects began to come because of men and women’s dealings with each other. Romans 1:26; “For this reason (because they rejected God) God gave them up to dishonorable passions. Their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural, and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in their own persons the due penalty for their error.” And of course this was not only in their persons but in the persons of the people that they bore. So the illegitimate child received some of the sin of the father or mother. The illegitimate child, with a sense of insecurity and a feeling that nobody wants them, often passed this on to other people unless they had really dealt with God. That is part of receiving in your person the due penalty of your error. Or the child that is born with a deformity on its face because of VD [venereal disease] in the parent — that kind of thing comes directly from man’s sin. So brothers and sisters, God had to watch as men did without the Holy Spirit. As they lacked the Holy Spirit, their own bodies began to produce not only the anger that injured others, not only the selfishness that destroyed others’ bodies — but also disease through their habit and then deformities that they passed on in birth defects. Then you see another set of diseases altogether. It’s the set of diseases that we call psychosomatic. If you go into any psych ward, most of the people suffering there are suffering from guilt or from the high cost of retaliation. People in psych wards are normally suffering either from guilt or from a terrible, burning, deep sense of resentment. And really all psychosomatic diseases can be traced back to the work that God purposely calls “the works of the flesh”. That’s one of the reasons he calls them the works of the flesh. It’s not only that they come from preoccupation with your own body, but that they actually produce results in your body that are disease and sickness. You see those in Galatians 5:19-21. As men and women lacked the Holy Spirit in their own lives so they began to produce these feelings and attitudes in themselves. Each one of these produces a tension in the muscle that begins to produce diseases or certain secretions in the glands that begin to produce disease. Or it affects the flow of blood which produces disease. You can see how close these things are. If you are embarrassed, you know what happens, you blush. It’s because the embarrassment can affect the flow of the blood to your face. Or you are nervous when you are standing up in front of a crowd of people and you find that you could drink a gallon of water. Your mouth is all dry because the nervousness and the fear of men affect the secretion of the liquids and the fluids in your mouth. Now you can see that the psychosomatic diseases all come from this fact — that these works of the flesh: resentment, hatred, fear, worry, nervousness — always affect either the flow of your blood to different parts of your body, or the secretions of your glands or it affects the tension in your muscles. And those are all the things that begin to produce sickness and tension in your body. Now you can see them there in Galatians 5:19. 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.” And this is really why William Penn explained to a person who asked him, “You never get angry with anybody. Why not? Is it just for their sake?” He said, “No. I am my own worst enemy when I get angry with anybody.” Even he, in those days, realized that anger destroyed the person who is angry far more effectively than it destroyed the people against whom it was aimed. So dear ones, this is part of what we mean when you read Romans 5:17 and it says, “If, because of one man’s trespass, death reigned through that one man…” That’s part of what we mean by that. Death really did begin to reign in our body. And the body that you have received is a body that has been acted upon in thousands of those ways that we’ve just discussed this morning. Part of the body that you have received, you received from a mom that has in some way, at some time or other, had some of those works of the flesh in her life. The body that you’ve received has come from a dad that in some way has not dwelt completely in the peace of God. And you, yourself will multiply that and compound it if you live the same way. Now you know that when God looked down upon us, we must have looked like such a bundle of poor cripples who were determined to spread our hatred and our sickness throughout the universe. He must have felt tempted just to destroy the whole lot of us and start all over again. But you know that he didn’t do that. Instead, he took us all and put us into Jesus, his Son. He destroyed us all there on the Cross. It’s a miracle that you and I don’t understand, but he did that. In God’s own eyes, as far as he is concerned, he has destroyed us all in Jesus. He has destroyed all our weakness in Jesus, all our sickness in Jesus, all our impaired minds and our unbalanced emotions. He has destroyed them all in Jesus. That is why Jesus was able to tell us that he could give us the Holy Spirit again. Because God has worked out his justice on Jesus and so he was free to make the Holy Spirit available to us. That’s really what we need in order to reverse the terrible effects of this lack of the Holy Spirit in our bodies. We need the Holy Spirit. Brothers and sisters, in your bodies this morning, you don’t need more medicine and more drugs. You don’t need more hospitals. You really need the Holy Spirit of God’s uncreated spiritual life. That’s the only one really who will make a permanent change in not only your mind and your emotions but in your body. This is why Jesus laid such emphasis on the Holy Spirit. He knew that he had died in our place so that God was satisfied as far as his justice and his holiness was concerned. He could now make available to us the Holy Spirit again. That’s why Jesus said that, you remember, in Acts 1, where he is talking to the disciples. We often think, “Oh, after Jesus died that was all he had to do. Why does he make such a big deal of this commandment?” But you can see why the whole purpose of Jesus’ death was so that God could make the Holy Spirit available to us again. Acts 1:4-5 “And while staying with them he charged them not to depart from Jerusalem, but to wait for the promise of the Father, which, he said, ‘you heard from me, for John baptized with water, but before many days you shall be baptized with the Holy Spirit.’” Now dear ones, we were never meant to live without the Holy Spirit. We weren’t made to live in these bodies without this supernatural power of the Holy Spirit. This is God’s oxygen and without it, you will not breathe and you will not be healthy. Without it, you’ll always be doing a patch-up work on your own body. Now you can see that immediately Jesus came into the world with this Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit began to reverse the effects of that death. For instance, men then who died with the Holy Spirit available were actually sleeping. And that’s what happened. When you receive the Holy Spirit into you, though to us you’ll look as if you’ve died, you’ll actually be sleeping. Now that’s true if you’d like to look at it in Matthew 9:24. We often like to interpret this allegorically and say, “Oh, Jesus was just being nice and kindly. He was trying to comfort the rest by saying, ‘Don’t worry, he is just sleeping.’” But Jesus doesn’t tell lies just to comfort people. In Matthew 9:24 you remember they all said the girl’s dead. “He said, ‘Depart; for the girl is not dead but sleeping.’ And they laughed at him. But when the crowd had been put outside, he went in and took her by the hand, and the girl arose.” This kind of proved that she was sleeping. So when the Holy Spirit comes death, physical death, is not death. It is a passing from this existence into a new spiritual existence and we actually are just sleeping. So the Holy Spirit when he comes into you, so makes your body alive that when you come to the time of death that God has allowed to continue to come to us for his own plan, then it is a sleep, it’s not a death. You get that you see, in even our own language. Cemetery comes from the Greek word “koimeterion” which is a sleeping chamber. The old Christians who were able to influence our English language way at the beginning, they purposely called the place where we put people after they died, a sleeping chamber. That’s because in their eyes, it was just sleeping until they would rise up the next day. That’s why when people who have received the Holy Spirit die, it is a great time — it is a real rejoicing time. I remember when my dad died in Belfast. Oh, it was great. We sang that lovely hymn, “In heavenly love abiding, no change my heart shall fear. And safe is such confiding for nothing changes here. Green pastures are before me which yet I have not seen. Blue skies will soon be over me where the dark clouds have been.” It was great to sing it and I know that he was singing it too, up there while we were looking at the old dead body. I remember my wife, touching the old body and saying, “It’s not him at all.” And right enough, I could see it. It wasn’t him. It was the body that he used while he was here but it obviously wasn’t him. I didn’t sense at all that he was there and it’s that kind of experience that you have when you begin to receive the Holy Spirit into yourself. Death itself, you see, is transformed into just a sleeping. It becomes something that you do not fear at all and something that you only accept when it is God’s good permissive time to let it come to you. But God will keep you from it until you achieve what he wants you to achieve. That’s why God said in Isaiah 53:4-5, that when Jesus died, he actually destroyed sickness and pain. And as far as God is concerned, he only lets those (sickness and pain) continue within us as far as they will serve his purposes to bring us closer to Himself. Isaiah 53:4-5 – “Surely he has borne our griefs (in Hebrew the word “grief” means “sicknesses”) and carried our sorrows; (“sorrows” in Hebrew can be translated “pains”). So that verse is, “Surely he had borne our sicknesses and carried our pains.” And so it is with our sins. If he has carried them we don’t both need to carry them. We don’t need to carry our sicknesses and our pains if Jesus has borne them for us. That’s what happens when you begin to receive the Holy Spirit into your own life. The Holy Spirit begins to remove your sicknesses and pain. He begins to take the health of Jesus’ body and imparts it to your body. That’s what those verses mean in Romans 8:10-11. Many of us I think have not really entered into this normal state of those of us who have received the Holy Spirit. I think we need to see that God expects us to enter into this. Romans 8:9-11: “But if Christ is in you, although your bodies are dead because of sin, (now your body may still have some of the symptoms of disease) your spirits are alive because of righteousness. If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also through his Spirit which dwells in you.” That Spirit that raised Jesus from the dead will give life to your body. Brothers and sisters, I really mean that it works today. If you’re sitting there and saying, “Do you mean it works sometime in the future — maybe when I die?” No, it works today. It is not God’s will for us to live in sickness. It is not God’s will for us to live in pain and ill health. It is God’s will for us to learn how to receive his Spirit into our bodies for real health. That is the Father’s plan. Now, how do you do it? Well, first sickness is a work of Satan. It’s not God’s work. God only allows sickness to continue in you as long as he can achieve something through it. So if ever sickness comes upon you, what you need to do is go to God and ask him, “Lord, do you want me to see something that I haven’t seen before, either about myself or about you?” Then let God show you what that is and simply receive God’s health by faith. In other words, it’s true that you have not sickness today because of your sins. Say, you have the flu today. You haven’t the flu because of sin. Right enough, your resistance has probably been lowered by all kinds of things. You have sickness because a germ has come to you. Or you haven’t trouble with your appendix because of your sin. We have trouble with those things because of the corporate sin of mankind. But it is true brothers and sisters that God can keep sickness from you, if he wishes. The only reason he lets sickness come to any of us, is to bring us into a new place in our relationship with him. So the first thing we should do when sickness comes is not try to believe. “I believe Lord, I believe. You bore my sickness. You bore my pains” and kind of auto-suggest yourself into health. No, our first job is to say, “Lord, why have you allowed this to come? Is there something you want to teach me about yourself or about me? I know once you have taught me it and once you have seen that I have realized it, you’ll remove the sickness.” And that’s true, dear ones — that will happen. Now, the teaching for that is in First Corinthians 11. It’s the teaching that sickness does need to be dealt with first by confession and by allowing God to show you. I think there’s a lot of foolish talk among us where we say, “You haven’t enough faith if you’re not healed.” Well that’s not true. God has plans and purposes for allowing sickness to continue as you can see with the Apostle Paul. He sought the Lord three times but the thorn remained there in his flesh. But it is connected in some sense with a readiness to confess. 1 Corinthians 11:30: “That is why many of you are weak and ill, and some have died. But if we judged ourselves truly, we should not be judged.” Paul says that there’s a place for asking God to show you if there’s any way in which you are bringing this sickness upon yourself — if there’s any real sin that you’re walking in or if there’s any way in which you have not entered into the beauty and the Christ-likeness of Jesus. I think a lot of us say, “I know God put me into Christ and he destroyed me there”, but we are not actually willing to be destroyed in Jesus. We’re not really willing to die to ourselves. Often God allows a sickness to come to show you that you’re not really willing to die to yourself. He wants to show you that there’s anger in your life that should not be there. There’s resentment against a friend that should not be there. There’s a grudge that you’ve been bearing for years that should not be there. There’s retaliation and a desire to payback that should not be there.So God will often allow this sickness to come in so that you’ll see that you have not really died to self. There is a good book that you may want to get from the bookshop called “None of these diseases”. McMillan is a medical doctor and wrote the book to show how our own inner attitude again and again affects our outer attitude and brings disease upon us. He talks about this business of dying to self’s right to get your own back, have your own way and dying to self’s right to resent and retaliate. He said this, “At the beginning of each day, consider yourself a sheep that is going to be abused even to the extreme of being slaughtered. If you take that attitude of mind then nothing that comes up should frustrate or disturb you. A man awaiting death is not disturbed by many stress factors that upset people. He is not upset because his neighbor’s chickens are scratching up his flowerbed. His arthritis is not worsened because the taxes on his house have been raised. His blood pressure is not raised because his employer discharged him. He doesn’t get a migraine headache because his wife burned his toast. His ulcerative colitis doesn’t flare up because the stock market goes down 10 points. The crucified soul is not frustrated. The man who willingly, cheerfully and daily presents himself as a living sacrifice can excellently adapt to the severest situations and with Paul be more than conquerors.” Dear ones, it is true you see. A lot of us live in constant strain and tension. Dear ones, even as you’re sitting in your seat this morning you probably have strain and tension in a thousand different places in your body and your face that you do not realize. And do you see it’s that that predisposes your body to accept the germ when it comes? But there is a place where you can rest in absolute peace. It’s the place where you’re willing to be crucified with Jesus. You’re willing to accept that God has destroyed you in Jesus and that you don’t have rights. You don’t have rights to tell your mom where to get off. You don’t have rights to be treated by the professor in a different way. You don’t have rights to have your own way rather than your roommate have her way. You don’t have those rights. It’s beautiful, brothers and sisters, when you come into that kind of death to self. It’s beautiful, the freedom from strain that you can live in. You are free from blood flow being restricted, free from the muscles being tensed, free from glands putting out secretions or failing to put out the secretions that God wants. It is possible then to begin to live in real peace. One of the beautiful things that McMillan shows on medical evidence is that the healthiest attitudes of all are those described just a few verses from the sick attitudes in Galatians 5. It’s the attitudes that the Holy Spirit brings about in a person. McMillan says, “If a person was to try to live the healthiest psychological and physical life they could live, this is the way they ought to live.” And this is the kind of fruit you see that the Holy Spirit brings about. This is how he brings health. Galatians 5:22-23: “But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such there is no law.” Brothers and sisters, those are the attitudes that the Holy Spirit produces inside you when you really begin to receive him into yourself. That’s why we have weakened bodies — because we lack the Holy Spirit. But as soon as we begin to receive the Holy Spirit into us, these bodies begin to be strong. Loved ones, there are a lot of details in the teaching on healing that I would urge you to follow up on. There must be 3 hours of teaching on health and sickness in our library. I do urge you to go and listen to those tapes rather than just take this morning’s brief presentation. There are many details that have to be filled in. Nevertheless, it is the Father’s will for us to live in health and it is possible to live in health. I remember A.B. Simpson describing this way in his own experience. “Then the body broke away in every sort of way. I had always worked hard and from the age of 14 I studied and labored and spared no strength. I took charge of a large congregation at the age of 21. I broke down utterly half a dozen times. At my last, my constitution was worn out completely. Many times I feared I should drop dead in my pulpit. I could not ascend any height without a sense of suffocation. This was because of a broken-down heart and exhausted nervous system.” “I heard of the Lord’s healing, but I struggled against it. I was afraid of it. I had been taught in theological seminaries that the age of the supernatural was past. I could not go back from my early training. My head was in my way. But at last, when I was brought to attend ‘the funeral of my dogmatics’, the Lord whispered to me the little secret, ‘Christ in you’. From that hour I received him for my body as I had done for my soul. I was made so strong and well that work has been a perfect delight.” “For years, I have spent my summer holiday in the hot city of New York, preaching and working amongst crowds as I never did before (besides the work of our home, college, an immense mass of library work and much besides). But the Lord did not merely remove my sufferings. It was more than simple healing. He so gave me Himself that I lost the painful consciousness of physical organs. That is the best of the health he gives. I thank the Lord that he keeps me from all morbid, physical consciousness and a body that is the object of anxious care. Instead he gives a simple life that is a delight and a service for the Master that is a rest and joy.” Maybe that’s the secret. Health is received by faith, not by sight. “Have you healed me? I don’t feel healed. Have you healed my headache? No, you haven’t.” Health is not received by sight, it’s received by faith. God’s health and strength is made perfect in the presence of your own weakness. But brothers and sisters, it is not God’s will that we should live in sickness. If you don’t catch any of the other nuances besides that truth, it would be good to hold on to that this morning. Satan has persuaded so many of us that we’re just a sick kind of people. We have three colds every winter and we need to rest a lot after a hard day’s work. Dear ones, Satan just pre-disposes us to sickness. Loved ones, that’s not God’s will. God’s will is health, so would you let Jesus come into your body for health and strength? Don’t just keep him to the spiritual things but ask him, “Lord Jesus, I believe your Holy Spirit is here to bring health to my body. I want to die old and well.” And that is God’s will, for us to die well. It’s not to die of sickness or disease, but to die of healthy old age after we’ve done what God planned for us to do. So will you think about it over Christmas and asked yourself, “Am I giving ground to the whole lie that I am just a sickly person? Am I really living in all the health that God has for me?” I know that many of you are sitting there with pains and sicknesses of all kinds so I think we should be serious and pray for a time. Let us pray.

Luke 18:18-23: “And a ruler asked him, ‘Good Teacher, what shall I do to We don’t If I push you and said, “Do you know Now, why is that? Remember a few Romans 5:18 Sermon Transcript by Rev. Ernest O’Neill When you come to an A New Start anniversary, you tend to look back on things. And so when you come to the last Sunday of a year, you tend to look back. This is the last Sunday of 1972. Some of you have been coming for a year and some for two years. Yet I know that some of you are in the position that if I ask you, “Are you still afraid of what people think of you?” You’d say, “Yes, a bit”. that if you died tonight, your Creator would really accept you?” You would be tempted to say, “Well, yes I think so.” If I pushed you and said, “Do you really know your Creator in a personal way?” many of you would say, “Well, yes I hope I do.” Yet you know in your heart that even though you’ve listened to this message for one or two years, you still haven’t the certainty of a real personal sense of God in your life. You’re still trying to get at it. Sundays ago, we discovered one plain reason why many of us are in that position. Many of us think it’s simply a case of believing it all and suddenly God makes himself real to you. We have the same trouble as the young businessman that met Jesus. You remember he is described there in Luke 18. Some of us have realized that the reason God isn’t so real to us is because we have the same problem as this young businessman. inherit eternal life?’ And Jesus said to him, ‘Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone. You know the commandments: ‘Do not commit adultery, do not kill, do not steal, Do not bear false witness, Honor your father and mother.’ And he said, ‘All these I have observed from my youth.’ And when Jesus heard it, he said to him, ‘One thing you still lack. Sell all that you have and distribute to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me.’ But when he heard this he became sad, for he was very rich.” Many of us are in that kind of position. realize that God will not make himself real to us unless we stop doing the things that our conscience tells us is wrong. We keep on pretending that we’ve stopped them but we haven’t really. Or we stop them all but the ones that particularly come up against our own personal preferences. So we are ready to obey God everywhere but where his will cuts across our personal preferences. There we refuse to obey him, and because of that reconciliation with God is always an academic issue with us. in our own lives. Now I think brothers and sisters, that’s one reason why we said many of us do not enter into a real relationship with God at all. In other words, we never really repent. We’re in the same position as Jesus described when he said, “I tell you, unless you repent, you will all likewise perish.” You can listen to this explanation Sunday after Sunday for years and years, 1972, 73, 74, 86… (I am going to be still here in 2010 I think), but up to the year 2010 you can listen to this, agree with it and think it’s good but unless you stop doing the things that God has told you destroyed his Son Jesus, you’ll never have any experience of God in your life. You know that we’ve said that. substitute an intellectual assent to the fact that Jesus has died for our sins, for actually stopping crucifying him in our own lives. Now what I’d like to talk about this morning is another thing that we substitute intellectual belief for. Many of us are in the position this morning that we’ve listened to this for two years or more and yet we still have no immediate sense of God in our lives. We’re in that position because we’re trying to substitute intellectual belief for actual receiving of Jesus. Romans 5:18. It appears as many of Paul’s verses in Romans appear to do to repeat themselves. But God’s word is so good and deep that he is always saying something different in the next verse. Romans 5:18: “Then as one man’s trespass led to condemnation for all men, so one man’s act of righteousness leads to acquittal and life for all men.” anymore than it fascinated my wife when I told her. But many of us are in this difficulty in our relationship with God (and I hope all the Greek scholars will immediately say, “Yes, you’re right” and all those persons who don’t know Greek will be like my wife), because we don’t understand the difference between the word “dikaiosis” and the word “dikaioma”, okay? It’s always something that we go to listen to some man describing on Sunday but it’s never real Many of us are trying to substitute intellectual belief for repentance. We’re trying to Now, you’d see that clearly dear ones if you just looked at the verse today, Now this probably won’t fascinate you We don’t understand the You remember God made us because he wanted men and women to love and to Therefore, he didn’t make us gentle, kind and Now there is a difference. Reprieve, according to the dictionary, is delaying or difference because that’s the word that’s used in that verse. We don’t understand the difference between acquittal and reprieve. Many of us are in this position this morning where we have no real relationship with God and no experience of him in our lives because we don’t really see the difference between those two Greek words. We don’t see the difference between reprieve and acquittal. suspending a penalty, just delaying it or suspending it. Acquittal is absolute removal of the penalty. It’s completely pardoning the prisoner. Now many of us are in this position where God is not real to us because we still think we’re acquitted when we’re simply living in a state of reprieve. I think I could explain it if you would just be patient with me as I go through what happened at the beginning. share the fellowship that he had with his son Jesus. He wanted us to share that fellowship and to love him freely. He made us with free wills. He didn’t make us people that were gentle, kind and loving. He didn’t want a group of people who were gentle, kind and loving because he had made them that way — so that they couldn’t be anything else. loving. He made us like Himself with the same capacities as he had. And he made available to us the life that made him gentle, kind and loving. That is, the life of the Holy Spirit. He gave us the free will to choose that life so that we would become like him or to reject it. You can see the reason for that. He didn’t want a bunch of robots that were gentle, kind and loving because they didn’t know how to be unkind or unloving. He wanted a group of people that chose to be like him. And so he simply made that life of the Holy Spirit available to us. You remember in Genesis it’s presented as the tree of life. You know what happened. Adam and Eve decided to go it alone. They decided they would do without this life. They would do without this life of the Holy Spirit. They would use their own native wit and by experience of trial and error, they would gather and collect the knowledge of good and evil. And so they decided to do it on their own. saw them doing that, he knew that they would bring his universe into absolute disintegration. Without the life of his Holy Spirit they would become haters. They would become rebels. They would become people who consumed each other. So he knew that if he let them go, they would soon disintegrate and pollute his universe completely. So he withdrew the infinite life and power of the Holy Spirit from them. And he condemned them to the helpless strivings that have resulted in our present international, national and personal chaos. let’s not describe it as it occurred in his great infinite mind. You can see for God, the whole thing occurred in one moment. He conceived the problem and the solution all at once. Let’s take it as it’s described in Genesis. You can look at Genesis 6:5-7 and see what God’s reaction was. He saw that we men and women without the life of his Holy Spirit were about to bring the universe down around our ears. They were just about to destroy the whole thing. God saw that. Genesis 6:5, “The LORD saw (and he determined of course that he had to end the chaos and the corruption) that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And the LORD was sorry that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart.” destroying all disorder and all hatred. And so in Genesis 6:7 we read,“So the LORD said, ‘I will blot out man whom I have created from the face of the ground, man and beast and creeping things and birds of the air, for I am sorry that I have made them.’” (obviously according to Einstein’s theory of relativity), saw the whole thing take place in one great moment in the infinite mind of God. Genesis shows us that God saw the corruption and the chaos and resolved, “The only thing I can do as a God of justice and holiness is to destroy this. Otherwise it’ll overwhelm me and anything that I love or that I respect.” destroy the whole earth with the flood. Now then you see as Genesis described it, what he then saw. He determined in fact never to do that again. Genesis 9:8-11: “Then God said to Noah and to his sons with him, ‘Behold, I establish my covenant with you and your descendants after you, and with every So he knew that as a God of order and a God of love, he was committed to God, as it’s outlined in Genesis, So God resolved to Now immediately when God Now what was God’s reaction to that? Well, He didn’t say, “You’re all okay because I have destroyed my Son in your But brothers and sisters, do you You say, “Well then, his arms are open to me.” You’re right; his arms are open to you. living creature that is with you, the birds, the cattle, and every beast of the earth with you, as many as came out of the ark. I establish my covenant with you, that never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood, and never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth.’” Now how did this God of holiness and justice who was committed to punishing disorder, rebellion and sin, how was he able to determine never to destroy the earth again? It’s because he destroyed Jesus in its place. Jesus was the lamb that was slain from the foundation of the world. God destroyed Jesus instead of destroying the earth. Now do you see what God did? He gave the earth reprieve, brothers and sisters. He gave us a reprieve. He did not acquit us. He simply agreed to let us continue to exist. place.” He said, “You’re back in the position that Adam and Eve were. You have the tree of life available; you’re back in their position.” Now that’s the state in which all of us have existed since that day. All of us have been in a state of reprieve. Muslims, Buddhists, skeptics, agnostics; the only reason all of us are still alive and God has not destroyed the whole place and wiped it out is because he destroyed Jesus in our place to give us a reprieve — to delay or suspend the sentence of death upon us to give us the opportunity to receive his life. see it is a state of reprieve? We are back in the position that Adam and Eve were in. The only thing that will justify us in God’s eyes is if we do what he asked Adam and Eve to do, “Eat of the tree of life”. Now here’s the position many of us are in. We listen to that gospel and we say, “You mean Jesus was crucified instead of us? Then God no longer has anything against the world.” That’s right, he hasn’t. “Well then, 72 is not on my back?” You’re right, 72 is not on your back. Anything that you’ve done in 1972 has already been borne by Jesus. God has destroyed Jesus for those things that you did. You’re right; you will never be rejected by God because of your sins. As far as God is concerned, he has suspended and delayed all judgment. But do you see you still have to eat of the tree of life? Now many of us are trying to substitute a belief in our reprieve for a receiving of the Holy Spirit that alone brings acquittal. You see, God can really only justify us, he can only give us a sense that this is our right place on the earth, he can only give us a sense that he no longer rejects but accepts us and is fully pleased with us, if we do what he put us on the earth to do originally. And that is to eat of the tree of life. Now what many of us are doing is we’re saying, “Oh, Jesus has died for us so that judgment is suspended. I don’t need to eat of the tree of life. God justifies me because of Jesus’ death.” No, there’s only one thing that will justify you in God’s eyes and that is receiving of the tree of life into yourself. In other words, it is not a matter of simply believing that because of Jesus’ death we’re all still alive. We’re all still alive only for a temporary period to give us a second chance to eat of the tree of life. Now do you see the difference, loved ones? Many of us think, “Jesus has died, so all I have to do is repent and believe that. Then God immediately acquits me.” No, what you have to do is repent and then go back to the position of Adam and Eve (that we’re all in) and receive of the Holy Spirit — of the tree of life. In other words, unless you receive Jesus into yourself, you will never experience justification with God. You’ll always find yourself trying to justify yourself in men’s eyes by your grades, your job, your achievement, and by your protest. Unless you actually eat of the tree of life, unless you actually receive Jesus into your spirit by faith, you will never experience real justification of God. Now do you see brothers and sisters, the difference? I’d love to ask each one of you if you really understand it. It’s not enough simply to repent of your sin and to believe that Jesus has died for you. You have to repent and Jesus’ death brings you back into the Garden of Eden. Then you have to do what Adam and Eve were originally planned to do; you have to eat of the tree of life. You have to actually receive Jesus. you remember, Jesus emphasized that it’s not just a question of repenting. It’s not just a question of believing but it’s actually a question of receiving. John 1:12; “But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power (or he gave the “right”) to become children of God; who were That’s why Jesus emphasized that, you see. In John 1:12, You get it I suppose I I was prepared to change my life when I saw that that was needed. Morally, you born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God.” emphasized in Revelation 3:20, it’s that verse that a lot of us know off by heart. Revelation 3:20; “Behold, I stand at the door and knock; (and this is the spirit of Jesus speaking), if any one hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and eat with him, and he with me.” say it because so many of us are from an academic atmosphere. Many of you might have lived in the purely intellectual sphere in which I lived for a long time in regard to God. I think it’s very easy brothers and sisters for you to see the sheer logic of the Gospel, (because it is very logical) and to see that you can’t keep doing the things that crucify Jesus in your own life and expect him to deal with you. And so you need repentance and to stop doing the things that your conscience tells you are wrong. But I think a lot of us tend to take the immediate step and say, “Oh yes, well Jesus has died for us, so we’re acquitted. We don’t need to do anything else”. So we go off each Sunday with no dynamic power within us to make us different. Now brothers and sisters, you are not justified by God unless you do what he put you on the earth originally to do. And that was to receive the life of his Holy Spirit from the tree of life that is Jesus. In other words, you need to receive Jesus into yourself. I think that strikes at the pride of the academic. It certainly struck at the pride in me. can see the sense in changing your life, improving it and becoming a better man or a better woman. But to actually do this business of “into my heart, into my heart, come into my heart Lord Jesus” and to actually go through what seemed a little childish exercise, that struck at my pride. Now brothers and sisters, unless you receive the Spirit of Jesus into you by faith, God cannot justify you. That’s why many of you are still walking, trying to justify yourself. You’ll repent of your sin, you’ll believe that Jesus died for you but you won’t receive Jesus by faith into yourself. Now this is the last Sunday in 1972. I am suggesting to you, if you have walked in an unsatisfying experience for a year, would you consider taking a step this morning on this business of receiving Jesus by faith? emotion. It’s not that we sing an emotional hymn here and you try to feel the emotion of Jesus coming in. It’s not a feeling. But you can see too, it’s not an intellectual assent to truth. Receiving Jesus is you personally taking a step and saying, “Lord Jesus, I can’t see you, I can’t feel you, but I believe from what I have read in history that you are really God’s Son, that you really overcame death. Therefore you must be alive this morning. Lord Jesus, I ask you in whatever way you think is appropriate for me, to come into my life. Will you live inside me?” unless you take that step, you will not be justified in God’s eyes. You will find yourself continually being afraid of people and trying to justify yourself by doing the job well, getting a good grade or satisfying your relatives. But, if you receive Jesus by faith, whether you have feeling or not, you’ll begin to find God giving you a sense of peace with himself. You’ll begin to sense that you are reconciled to God personally. want to ask about that? I feel for the men and women here who are trying to get into the thing intellectually but just can’t make it and don’t know what to do. the things. That’s the only answer. A lot of people say, “Oh I cry, I try to feel sorry, and I make resolutions.” No, you stop doing the thing. If it’s criticism, you stop criticizing. If you’re selfish with your roommate, you stop being selfish and you say to God that you’re determined to stop it. His Holy Spirit knows whether you really mean it or not. do it, but I want to do it.” You can do it, if you really want to do it. The Holy Spirit will give you the grace to actually bring it about in your life. The Holy Spirit knows when a person is real and honest about the repentance. The heart of repentance is “metanoia” in Greek which means “changing your mind”. You stop doing the thing. Satan has persuaded us for years that we can’t do it because we’ve such poor, weak things. The psychologists have brainwashed us with that. You can’t stop it so you evade the problem. No, you can stop it. Repentance is stopping. You’re putting a sword into Jesus’ side every time you criticize somebody. You stop it, you pull the sword out and You say to me, “What is it like?” I know it’s not like feeling. It’s not like Now dear ones, Dear ones, is there any question anybody would How do you repent? You stop doing You see all of us think, “Oh I can’t I know those are hard words, loved ones, but we need more backbone. We Receiving Jesus is just what I said, it’s receiving by faith. If you ask me, “Did you don’t put it in again. need the backbone that God has given us. We’ve had it undermined for years. We’ve become soft in our attitude to will. you have any great feeling?” No, I didn’t. I had no great feeling and I didn’t walk down the aisle when we were singing “Just as I Am”. No, I just said, “Lord, I believe on the basis of the history in the New Testament that you’re real, that you’re God’s Son. You blasted through death once, and so as far as I am concerned by my own logic, you can come through at any time. Therefore you must be here today. Lord Jesus, I ask you now to come into my life and I am receiving you by faith.” Then brothers and sisters, the miracle begins. But until you take that step, no miracle can begin. You’re purely an intellectual, academic spectator until you take that step. Let us pray. those of us who know you would pray now for our brothers and sisters here this morning, who are struggling with intellectual and emotional problems and never really coming into a spiritual transaction with you. Lord Jesus, from the historical evidence we believe you are real. We believe that you are different from Mohammad and Buddha because of the resurrection. really God’s Son, we would want to receive you into our own lives this morning. Father, if you put us here on earth in order to eat of the tree of life, you’ll never be satisfied until we’ve done that. We do that this morning by faith. Father we know you don’t ask us to do what we can’t do. You don’t ask us to do something that is impossible. But you do ask us to take a step of faith and act on the basis of the substantiating evidence. We would do that this morning. ask you as a Spirit to come into our spirit and to live inside us and be whatever you want to be in our lives. Father, we thank you that now, not only have you nothing against us for our past, but you are pleased with us now and you accept us as your own children because your Spirit of life is within us. We thank you for that and trust you now for this coming year of 1973. We trust you Lord Jesus, to be able to be yourself in us. We trust you Father God and Creator, to be satisfied and pleased with lives that have order and meaning during these next 12 months. We leave all that is past behind. We forget those things that are behind. Now we look forward to this year, to live it a day at a time for you, to be victorious just for today. We want to get to the end of 1973 and look back on a year of victory because of the Spirit that has come within us this day. We commit ourselves to you now Father. Use us for your purpose, for your world, to bring order and sense into it through our lives. We ask this for your glory and your pleasure. Amen. Dear Father, Lord Jesus, if you’re Lord Jesus, we would

Jesus in You Romans 5:19 Sermon Transcript by Rev. Ernest O’Neill Tomorrow is Jesus’ birthday. It’s very hard to believe that he’s a myth. Every time you try to dismiss him as a myth, you kind of “bark your shins” on Christmas. The human race is pretty stupid at times but it’s unlikely that for 2000 years, we’ll observe the birthday of a man who never existed. So Christmas is great proof that Jesus really did live. Yet this morning I’d like to ask you the question and try to answer it: “Why is it easy to believe in Him and yet very hard to believe in Him? Why is it easy for us to believe in Him in our heads and yet very hard for us to really believe in Him in our hearts? It’s easy to believe in him in our heads because of the historical evidence. Here is a piece of it. I have a picture here. This is Bruce’s books – “The Parchments” it’s called. I have a picture here of a manuscript that is in the museum in Manchester, England. It’s dated both on the basis of its writing style and on the basis of the content of the Papyrus itself. It’s dated 125 A.D. and this is part of the Gospel of John. This is the way it reads; it’s these few verses, John 18:31-33, “Pilate said to them, ‘Take him yourselves and judge him by your own law.’ The Jews said to him, ‘It is not lawful for us to put any man to death.’ This was to fulfill the word which Jesus had spoken to show by what death he was to die. Pilate entered the praetorium again and called Jesus, and said to him, ‘Are you the King of the Jews?’” And that piece of manuscript is dated 125 A.D. Now John wrote his Gospel not earlier than probably 90 A.D. and not later than 100 A.D. So that manuscript is just 30 years later than when John wrote the Gospel. And you can see how difficult it is for anybody to change that manuscript over a period of just 30 years. There were people alive who read it when it was first written. Now that’s good evidence for Jesus’ existence. Is it as reliable as the evidence we have for Julius Caesar’s existence? Well, I’ll tell you how good it is. Caesar wrote his “Gallic Wars” about 50 B.C. It’s about 50 years before Jesus was born. Now the oldest manuscript we have of Caesar’s “Gallic Wars” is — 30 years later? No. 50? No. 90? No. 200? No. 300? No. 400? No. 500? It is 900 years later that we have the oldest manuscript of Caesar’s “Gallic Wars”. Now you can see how much better is the historical manuscript evidence for Jesus’ existence than for Caesar. It’s really easier to believe that Jesus really did live than to believe that Caesar lived. It’s the same wherever you go in the ancient history. It doesn’t matter whether you take Homer’s poetry, whether you take Plato’s “Republic”, or whether you take Livy’s histories. All of them have a gap of about 1300 years between the time they were written and the first and oldest manuscript we have of them — whereas with Jesus, the manuscript is only 30 years later than when it was first written. You can see that classical scholars would need to give up belief in the classics before they would refuse to believe that Jesus really did live in the first century. You may say, “Do we just depend for our knowledge of Jesus on one manuscript dated 125 A.D.?” Well, that’s what you do with Homer’s poetry. We believe Homer’s poetry as it was written, on the basis of one manuscript that is dated about 1100 A.D. With Caesar’s “Gallic Wars” we have 10 manuscripts. With Tacitus’s histories we have two manuscripts — yet we accept them without any question. How many manuscripts are there for Jesus’ existence and for the history of his life? 10, 20, 40, 60, 100, 200, 400? No. 4000. Between the year 1 and the year 1100 A.D., there are 4000 different Greek manuscripts that reinforce the documented history of Jesus’ life and they each confirm one another, however old or young the manuscripts are. Now brothers and sisters, that’s why it’s really difficult to refuse to believe in Jesus as an historical figure. You can see that. It’s because the evidence for his existence is far beyond existence of any figure in ancient history like him. He is so certain and sure compared with Mohammad or Buddha, with Caesar, with Homer, with any of them. That’s why it’s easy to believe in Jesus. Especially when you take into consideration the archaeological evidence for the New Testament events, when you begin to take into consideration the sufferings and the reliability of the eye-witnesses, when you begin to take into consideration lectures like Karlis Kaufmanis on the Bethlehem Star which proves scientifically that the star must have been at that particular year when Jesus was born. When you begin to go into the reinforcing evidence, it’s impossible to refuse the fact that Jesus really did live. That’s why it’s easy to believe in him. That’s why most of us here in the theater probably do believe in Jesus. It’s easy to believe in Jesus in your head as a historical figure. And most of us do. I think that’s why most of us regard ourselves as Christians here this morning. We say, “I believe in Jesus”, and isn’t that what you’re asked to do? You know where we get it from — John 3:16. If you look at it, it says it plainly. John 3:16; “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.” And most of us feel, well, there it says it. “I believe in Jesus. I believe in him as an historical figure. I believe he really existed. I believe in some sense he exists today. Yes, I believe in Jesus.” And so, most of us feel, “Therefore we’re Christians.” But brothers and sisters, if you go into the original Greek of that verse, you’ll find that the word we have translated “in” is the Greek word “ice” and it means “into”. The verse really means, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, that whoever believes INTO him should not perish but have eternal life”. So God really says, “I have sent my Son so that you can believe into him”. Now that’s something you can’t do with Caesar. You can’t believe into Caesar, he’s dead now. You can’t believe into Plato. You can believe in Caesar, you can believe in Plato, but you can’t believe into them. They aren’t real living people now that you can believe yourself into. And that’s what God says we are to do with Jesus. You can see that that’s why it begins to be hard to believe in Jesus in that sense. You believe in Archimedes principle. Do you believe in Pythagoras’s theorem? Do you believe in Einstein’s theory of relativity? Most of us have to examine and are competent to examine some of these. We say, “Oh yes, I believe in them”, because they don’t affect our lives. We’re not being asked to believe INTO them. But you see that part of the problem we have with Jesus is we’re being asked to have a relationship with him that is not simply the mental assent of our minds to his existence. It actually involves something about believing INTO Him. Brothers and sisters, that’s why God sent his Son Jesus. It’s so that we would psychologically and spiritually enter into his Son Jesus. It’s so that his Son would psychologically and spiritually enter into us. And that’s what it means really to be a Christian. It means to believe into Jesus. If you take the face value of his words, “Abide in me and I in you”, that’s what it means. And when you talk about believing in Jesus, you really mean entering into him spiritually and psychologically and allowing him to enter spiritually and psychologically into us. Why? Because he’s still alive. Caesar isn’t still alive. Plato isn’t still alive. Homer isn’t still alive. Einstein isn’t still alive. But this person Jesus is alive today. And God sent him to us so that he would enter into us spiritually. That’s the importance of the birth with Mary. You may have wondered, “Why did God make such a great deal of Him being born inside an ordinary woman?” It’s because God was illustrating physically and graphically what is to happen with each one of us. His Son is to be born again inside us. He’s to come up fully and grow in us until suddenly the world will begin to see him instead of us. All eyes will turn upon him and not us. That’s what becoming Christian really is. And it’s in that sense that it’s hard to believe in Jesus. To enter into him that way and to allow him to enter into you, that’s difficult. For Jesus to be born in you, he begins to meet a whole lot of obstacles and difficulties. You may say, “Oh, what are they? I have no obstacles to him being born in me.” Well dear ones, they are the same obstacles that he met when he was going to be born into our world, just the same obstacles. Would you look with me at the Christmas story and you’ll see them. God is so good in making it so plain and obvious to us. See Luke 2:7 there. Luke 2:7; “And she gave birth to her first-born son and wrapped him in swaddling cloths, and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn.” And Jesus found one of the obstacles to him being born into our world was there wasn’t room. The inn was crowded with other people, and there was no room for this baby to be born. That’s the same difficulty. A lot of us wonder why this Spirit of Jesus has not come alive inside us. A lot of us believe all the things that I have said. You have examined the historical evidence and you believe Jesus is really alive. And yet he hasn’t come alive inside you. And that’s why — there’s no room in your life for him. Your heart and your mind are like an inn or a house. It’s crowded with all kinds of things and you have never given him room. It’s crowded with first of all, yourself and your own happiness. Most of our lives are filled with a desire for our own happiness. Then it’s crowded with your job and the success of your job. You’re always thinking of your job. You’re crowded next with your family and with their happiness. Your mind is always preoccupied with those things. You might never have enough room in it to give Jesus the quietness that is necessary for his Spirit to come alive inside you. Then, after that, your mind is crowded with your future and with insuring financial success and security. Now that’s why, brothers and sisters, many of us never experience the reality of this Spirit of Jesus coming alive inside us. We look at other people who seem to experience it more vividly than we do and we don’t understand why. Loved ones, it’s because we never have enough room to give any time or place to dealing with Jesus. Blaise Pascal was a leading scientist you remember, in the 17th century in France. He took that passage in Isaiah and put it in Latin. “God is a Deus absconditus.” God is a hidden God and those who want to find Him must want to find Him. We’re so unused to that attitude. We feel, “No, no, it’s up to God. He ought to hit us over the head, strike us with lightening or show us Himself plainly.” But dear ones, God is a hidden God. Some of us never are prepared to take half the trouble for Jesus to be born in us than any mother takes before the baby comes out of her own body. But that’s part of the problem. We don’t have enough room. Pascal puts it strongly. He talks about such people and he is talking of course from the point of view of a Catholic. He says this, “They believe they have made great efforts for their instruction when they have spent a few hours reading some book of scripture, and have questioned some priest on the truths of the faith. After that they boast of having made vain search in books and among men. But verily I will tell them what I have often said that this negligence is insufferable. We are not here concerned with the trifling interest of some stranger that we should treat it in this fashion. The matter concerns ourselves and our all.” That was a scientist of the 17th century speaking. Brothers and sisters, many of us fail to experience Jesus coming alive inside us because we don’t give him room or time. We really don’t give any time to thinking about him or dealing with him and yet it’s the most important thing in the world. We are crowded out with a lot of other concerns. If you look at the Christmas story you can see something else. It’s in Matthew 2:1-3. You will see what I’ve mentioned, that the reason Jesus has not come alive inside many of us is exactly the same reason that almost prevented him coming alive in our world. Matthew 2:1-4, “Now when Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea in the days of Herod the king, behold, wise men from the East came to Jerusalem, saying, ‘Where is he who has been born king of the Jews? For we have seen his star in the East, and have come to worship him.’ When Herod the king heard this, he was troubled, and all Jerusalem with him.” You remember Herod was so troubled that he killed all the one and two year old babies to make sure that this Jesus was not born. It was because this Jesus was reckoned to be the king of the Jews and there wasn’t room in Jerusalem for two kings. Now, that’s it with us. Jesus will not come in to be a subject. He will not come in to be your servant. He will only come in to be your king. The reason why he hasn’t come into many of our spirits is that we want to be king and to remain king. We will not give up the kingship of our own lives. Brothers and sisters, every time we have a problem with finding Jesus real inside us, it ends up being a problem of kingship, not of intellectual difficulty, but of kingship. It’s amazing that even the most intellectual of the agnostics among us confess that that’s the real reason why they refused to believe in Jesus himself. There’s a revealing piece in one of Aldous Huxley’s books, who talks about his own philosophy and why he is rejecting Christianity. Brothers and sisters, this is finally the real reason why Jesus does not come alive inside us. He says, “The philosopher who finds no meaning in the world is not concerned exclusively with a problem in pure metaphysics.” (In other words, he is not concerned with just an intellectual problem.) “He is also concerned to prove that there is no valid reason why he personally should not do as he wants to do.” That’s amazing coming from someone like Huxley whom we regard as being so honest intellectually. He says that a philosopher who pleads that the world is meaningless is doing it because in a meaningless world he can do what he wants. “For myself, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation — sexual and political.” He says in essence, “the reason why I believe that the world is meaningless is that it enables me to do just whatever I want sexually and politically.” Brothers and sisters, that’s the real reason why Jesus cannot be born in many spirits today. He demands that we obey him. He demands that he be crowned king in the life in which he comes to dwell. We refuse to do that and so we keep on pleading intellectual difficulties with people like Huxley. But the real reason is that we don’t want this man to rule over us. Brothers and sisters, the Spirit of Jesus will not come to be your prisoner or to be your subject. But so often we will not allow him to be king over our marriage desires. We will not submit our career plans to him. We will not submit our bank accounts to him. We will not submit our futures to him. We say, “We are kings of those things”, and we intend to remain so. And that really is why Jesus is not born in many of us. If you are having difficulty allowing Jesus to be real in you, deal with some of those issues that you are arguing with him about. You’ll probably find him beginning to be real inside you. The last difficulty I’d like us to look at this morning is in the Christmas story, as it’s told in Luke 1. It’s part of the lesson that we read. Luke 1:31-34, “’And behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus. He will be great, and will be called the Son of the Most High; and the Lord God will give to him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over the house of Jacob for ever; and of his kingdom there will be no end.’ And Mary said to the angel, ‘How shall this be, since I have no husband?’” And Mary became immediately caught up with just sheer human difficulties because she was looking at it in a human way. She said, “I am not even married. I couldn’t have a baby. There is no man that could put the sperm into my body so that the baby could be born, so this could not be.” And many of us fail to experience Jesus coming alive inside us because we’re always looking at it from a human angle. We are always wondering, “Surely you mean when you talk about Jesus being born inside me, that I experience more intensely the concept of his teachings or that I experience more completely the reality of his existence.” Many of us fail to allow Jesus to be born in us because we think that a king being born in us is just a metaphorical way of saying that you’re more intensely related to his ideas or to his existence in your mind or in your emotions. So we tackle it the way Mary does, we try to produce it humanly. We think, we read, we pray, we meditate, and we introspect. We do anything to try to produce the reality of Jesus’ existence somewhere in our psychological beings. And, brothers and sisters, we will fail continually because we’re thinking all the time in terms of human experience. We’re thinking of a greater intensity of a human experience that we’ve already had in regard to some other person or some other thing. So, many of us are still thinking in terms of relating to the principles of Jesus. Brothers and sisters, do you not see that it is a miracle? It is something that is deeper than your mind or emotions. There is only one answer to every “how” question. Mary says, “How can this be?” The answer is a supernatural answer and it’s in Luke 1:35. “And the angel said to her, ‘The Holy Spirit will come upon you.’” Every time you ask “how” in Christian experience, the answer God gives is the Holy Spirit. How can I tackle this? – By the Holy Spirit. Brothers and sisters, don’t you see it’s a supernatural experience? It’s a supernatural work that God does in your spirits. That’s why when Jesus comes into your spirit it’s a more comprehensive experience than the latest philosophical notion. That’s why when Jesus comes into your spirit, it’s a deeper peace than the withdrawal from the world that eastern meditation produces inside you. That’s why when Jesus comes into your spirit, it’s a more permanent exultation and exhilaration than you get from drugs. It’s because it’s a Spirit of Christ coming into your spirits deeper than your mind and your emotions. It’s a work that God’s Spirit does inside you. That’s why it’s such a miracle. Loved ones, Jesus will never become real in you unless you really do come to the point where you see that it’s God doing something inside you that is supernatural. It’s something deeper than you or I can produce inside ourselves. All we can do is to fulfill the conditions for it. A mother has to fulfill certain conditions for the baby to be born. But the baby being born is a miracle. Do you see that? There was no man to put the sperm inside Mary’s womb. Do you see that the Holy Spirit did it? Out of nothing, he put something inside her. Now that’s what he’ll do in you. Inside, in your spirit, there’s a place where God can work a miracle. You cannot touch that place. Mary couldn’t touch her womb. She couldn’t govern what went on in the womb. The thing had to happen almost apart from her. She fulfilled certain conditions but then it was a miracle work inside. Now that is so with you and me. You can’t touch your spirits. You can touch your mind by meditation. You can touch your emotions by feeling. You can touch your body. But you can’t touch your spirit. In that place, only God can do the work and it’s there that he creates Jesus inside you. All you and I can do is to fulfill the conditions. The conditions are plain there if you’d like to look at them in Luke 1:38. Luke 1:38, “And Mary said, ‘Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word.’” All we can really do is say what she said. “Behold Lord, I am your servant. I am your subject. I want Jesus so badly that I will do whatever you want me to do in my life or with my life, if you will only bring him alive inside my spirit. Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord. Behold I am your servant. Whatever you want me to do, I’ll do. I’ll stop the things that you want me to stop.” Brothers and sisters, a lot of us will miss Jesus’ birth this Christmas because we’re still wanting certain things that we want and we won’t give them up. We need to fulfill the conditions and say, “Lord, I’ll do whatever you tell me to do.” And then you see what she says, “Be it unto me according to your word.” We need to believe what God has promised. He will send the Spirit of his Son into your heart if you really submit yourself to the Father. You need to believe that. Then you need to behave as if you carry the Christ child inside you. That’s really it, loved ones. You know all the excitement of today and tomorrow. You know all the preoccupation with the Christmas tree and the food. But do you see that it will only be a mental, emotional experience of happiness that we transmit to one another and that will end on Tuesday morning? Unless — we begin to come before God and say, “Lord, I want your Son alive inside me. I don’t want any of this historical society stuff. I don’t want any of this looking back to a figure in history and worshipping a myth. I want your Son alive inside me. Now, what do you want me to do in my life to make that possible? I believe you can do it by your Holy Spirit. Now, will you show me?” Really brothers and sisters, that’s what we need to do. That’s what I need to do in my home and that’s what you need to do in yours. Then you’ll find that a beautiful experience takes place, just like Mary. He comes in so quietly. The baby is suddenly inside you and you’re hardly aware yourself. But other people see and other people can tell that there is somebody different inside you. Jesus comes as quietly as that into anyone who is prepared to fulfill the conditions. So will you look into your own heart and see really if you do believe in Jesus or if you just believe in Jesus. See whether you really believe INTO Him or whether you just believe IN Him. Let us pray. Dear Father, we would trust you to give us revelation about this. Father, we know that there is gruffness and harshness in our voices. We know that there is often impatience and irritability in our actions. We know that there is often selfishness dominating our thoughts. All of these things show plainly that we are not only kings in our own world but that Jesus has little or nothing in us. Oh Father, we trust you this Christmas to lead each one of us into such knowledge of our own kingship that we will at last be willing to give it up and to submit our lives completely to you so that you can work this miracle inside us as you worked it in Mary. On Tuesday morning we can be different people — people in whom the Son of the Most High God lives and works, speaks and thinks. Lord Jesus, we trust you to come into each one of us at this time and to stay with us. We ask this for your glory in our lives and for our experience of the purpose for which you made us. Amen.

Cleansed From All Unrighteousness Romans 5:20a & 1 John 1:9 Sermon Transcript by Rev. Ernest O’Neill I think Jesus would want us to share a few things brothers and sisters rather than the message that I prepared. I think it might be good to see what we’ve been dealing with on these Sundays and to stand back from it a little. Maybe you’d look at the verse in First John and that would point it out. 1 John 1:9, “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just, and will forgive our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” Now really what we talk about these Sunday mornings tends to be more for Christians. I have to apologize to those who aren’t Christians for the Sunday morning sermons because “Romans” has brought us to that point where God is dealing with the problems in Christians’ lives. Many of us as Christians have entered into part of that. “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just, and will forgive our sins.” Many of us have entered into that. We really do know that our sins are forgiven. We do know that we’re children of God. We do know that we’re going to go to heaven and we have the peace that the brother and sister were singing about. But, the second part of the promise has not been made complete in us – “and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” There are many of us who know we’re children of God, we know we’re going to go to heaven, we know God has forgiven us — but we are not cleansed from all unrighteousness inside. Now, that is the state of a carnal Christian. The typical scripture we use to express that state is, “The good that I would I cannot do and the evil I want to avoid, that’s the very thing I do.” (Romans 7:19) And one of the real problems with many of us is we’ve been brought up in environments that have encouraged us to believe that that is the fight of faith that you have to put up with forever, until you see Jesus face-to-face. Now the truth is in fact utterly different from that. The Bible repeatedly says that God can cleanse us from all unrighteousness. Acts 15:9 talks about it in a different way if you look at it. Paul is talking about the Gentiles and why we should accept them into the Christian body without first requiring them to become Jews. He looks back to what God has done with the Gentiles and refers incidentally to what God has done with them. Acts 15:8, “And God who knows the heart bore witness to them, giving them the Holy Spirit just as he did to us; and he made no distinction between us and them, but cleansed their hearts by faith.” Repeatedly brothers and sisters, in the New Testament and in the Old Testament, you find that God emphasizes, “I cannot only forgive the things you’re doing against me. I can actually cleanse you from the thing inside you that makes you want to get angry, that makes you want to be lustful, and that makes you want to be irritable. I can cleanse you from that.” What we have been really sharing dear ones is that you’re cleansed from that through being filled with the Holy Spirit in response to your readiness to die to self with Jesus. That’s really what we’ve been saying. The problem with many of us who are living defeated Christian lives is that we have always thought of Jesus as dying for us but not us dying with Jesus. So that piece you remember in Second Corinthians was absolutely new to us — we judge that if Christ died for all then all died. We have never thought for a moment that we died or that we had any need to die. So for many of us it’s a new revelation –i.e. the whole idea of dying to self with Jesus so that the Holy Spirit can fill you with himself. A lot of you even after listening Sunday after Sunday will still ask me, “How do you come into this?” Loved ones, I can only share with you that it is a matter of real submission to the Holy Spirit and real believing. That’s what it is. It’s “trust and obey, for there’s no other way to be happy in Jesus.” You trust what God says he has done in Jesus – i.e. that he has crucified your old self with Jesus. And you obey the Holy Spirit completely in your own life. If some of you say, “Oh brother, I have tried that. What’s the problem? I still have this anger rising up inside me.” Then dear ones, you have been unable to believe that you were crucified with Christ because there’s a bit of you that doesn’t want to be crucified. So that’s the problem with many of us. We keep on believing, believing and believing. We say, “Yes, I was crucified with Christ. I was crucified with Christ.” But it’s autosuggestion we’re involved in. It’s not real honesty with the Holy Spirit. So for many of us, a first step to being able to believe that we were crucified with Christ is simply to ask the Holy Spirit, “Holy Spirit, where am I not willing to be crucified with Christ? Where am I not willing to die to self? Where am I not willing for you to do whatever you want with me?” Many of us need to come to the ground of our heart before we can really believe that we were crucified with Christ. Some call this by different names — don’t get involved with whether Campus Crusade agrees or whether The Navigators agree or whether the Baptists agree or the Presbyterians or the Methodists. That’s not the issue. In Baptists circles, we would probably call it full consecration. It’s a place where you absolutely surrender everything and you are willing for Jesus to do what he wants with you. You are willing to be crucified with Christ absolutely and not to live for yourself at all. Then the Holy Spirit baptizes you with himself. He fills you with himself and brings about in you a love of people that you’ve never had before. So dear ones, those are the two steps. It’s real believing that you have been crucified with Christ. And in order to do that, many of us have to come the point where we’re willing to believe that. Many of us will believe that up here in our heads but we’ll be lusting away down here while we’re saying, “I am crucified with Christ. I am crucified with Christ.” Yet, there’s a whole area of our sex lives that we haven’t submitted to Jesus. So that’s where many of us come into trouble. We try to believe over the top of a whole lot of un-confessed sin and a whole lot of un-surrendered areas of our lives. On the other hand, some of us really do believe. But then when it comes to the business of obeying the Holy Spirit, we just won’t. Someone was asked, “How do you stay in victory?” And this woman said, “Instant obedience, instance obedience. The Holy Spirit tells me to do something I do it immediately. I don’t negotiate or discuss.” Now dear ones, maybe it’s good that God gave us a shorter time this morning so that I could bring the real guts of the thing home to you again. The way to enter into victory is belief and submission, or trusting and obeying. The trusting with many of us is impossible because we believe it up here in our heads that we’re crucified with Christ — but we haven’t allowed the Holy Spirit to show us down here in our hearts. We’re not willing to be crucified with Christ. Loved ones, I want to stop so that you can question. I know it’s shorter but sometimes it’s good. God knows the way we should deal with each other Sunday by Sunday. Brother says, “Does it mean that we’re cleansed from all unrighteousness, whether it’s realized or not?” It seems brother that righteousness in the Bible is essentially a conscious thing. In other words, God holds us responsible for the sins that we know we’re committing. There may be a mass that we’re committing that we don’t know about and his blood covers that. This may be the unconscious sin that is talked about in Leviticus. But the sin that brings guilt to our hearts and an inability of the Holy Spirit to fill us is conscious sin. It would seem to me brother that the Holy Spirit cleanses us from all conscious unrighteousness. On the other hand, the Holy Spirit fills a lot of other areas in our lives. So who can say? I am sure you can’t say, “He doesn’t cleanse you from the unconscious sin.” But it would seem to be the conscious sin that causes us the problem. He cleanses us from that. Then it seems to me as we live on under the Holy Spirit, he brings us more light. He may make you realize that we talk too much and we have never seen that before. We may not have realized that we were talking about other people but the Holy Spirit shows us that we talk about others. Many of us have attitudes to our moms and dads that we don’t realize because they’re so unconscious. When the Holy Spirit brings them into the light, then we need to submit on those areas too. Now if you say, “Brother, is this a crisis experience or is it a gentle, gradual experience?” For many of us it has been a crisis experience. For some of us it seems to come so naturally that we don’t think of a crisis. The heart of it is when the Holy Spirit asks you, “Are you willing to do anything?” and you’re immediately willing. Then you know that you’re in the right position with Jesus. So it’s like conversion itself. It’s not a matter of looking back to some great experience that you had. The proof of the pudding is in the eating. The proof of what you’ve experienced in the past is your present attitude to God’s will. Now there would be other advantages and other benefits of being filled with the Holy Spirit. Many of us have found a new life of prayer – an absolute new vitality in our prayer lives. All of us I think have found our witnessing lives being just effortless. We have found all parts of our lives coming into line with scripture and it seems almost an effortless way to us after we come into being filled with the Holy Spirit. It’s good to keep clear of denominational questions because they’re not always the most edifying but are there any denominational questions? It seems to me if we look into all our denominations at the bottom of all our hearts is the yearning for this life of full surrender. They all teach it in one way or another. Sister says, “Am I speaking of being filled with the Holy Spirit in the same sense as baptism of the Holy Spirit?” Yes. It seems to me if you look at the New Testament, baptism with the Holy Spirit is both an inward and an outward work. It is an inward cleansing from inward sin: from anger, jealousy and envy by being filled with the Holy Spirit. And it is an outward anointing with the Holy Spirit of the nine gifts of the Spirit for power and witnessing in a ministry. It is all one experience. Maybe if we were more like the New Testament people, we would find that conversion and being filled with the Holy Spirit was more one experience than we really believe. I think with many it was and with many it could be. It seems there’s no reason why if we lived as an obedient group of people here, that our children might come into everything that God has for them and not have to come into it in two stages like many of us. But yes, I would feel that the New Testament preaches a complete work, a baptism of the Holy Spirit that is an inward filling and an outward anointing. I know that the dear Pentecostal brothers and sisters have tended to emphasize the outward anointing with the ministry of the gifts. I would just suggest that we all go astray when we put more emphasis on the victory or on the ministry than on the Holy Spirit. It seems to me it’s not the gifts or the fruit that is vital but it’s the Holy Spirit Himself. Are we in a completely submissive relationship to him? Brother asks, “How do you discern guidance from the Holy Spirit from your own personal motives?” Brother, it seems to me that I had most problems with guidance in my own life when I was like a radio that was tuned in to several stations at once. Only one of them was coming through and it was coming through faintly. I found that before I settled things with Jesus about living for his glory alone, when I was seeking guidance about a job, I was half alive to my own wishes for finances. I was half alive to my own wishes for success, for fame, and for all those other things. It seemed to me when I died to those and tuned out from those other things, then the voice of the Holy Spirit began to come through strong and clear. I think that’s part of the answer. I am sure it’s not all of it but I think that’s part of it. I think another part of it is coming into a place of real neutrality about what God wants you to do. “Lord, I am willing to go there or go here. I am really willing.” Allow the Holy Spirit to search you to show you if you’re in a real place of neutrality. Then when you are, the Holy Spirit comes gently through. It seems brother that God said, “I will guide you with my eye.” You see it if you have a dad and a little son and he is guiding with his eye. I can do it with my little dog. He knows fine well what to do and what not to do by the way I am looking at him. Now, I am afraid most of us are looking everywhere else except God. And so we are not able to be guided by his eye. We want him to guide us with a loudspeaker and he won’t. He says, “No, if your eyes are upon Me, I will guide you; if they’re not, the guidance is worthless anyway.” One of the greatest difficulties is to see a brother or sister that is terribly critical of everybody else and yet they come week after week and say, “Oh I am praying to get the Holy Spirit to show me what’s wrong with me, but I can’t see it.” It’s coming out in their lives moment-by-moment and it seems to me, the Holy Spirit will allow symptoms to express themselves inside us. Many husbands and wives here who have tried to come into an awareness of the Holy Spirit have found that they’ve become harder to live with. That’s because the Holy Spirit has allowed them to come into situations where the self expressed itself more than ever it had before at home so that it became obvious to them. “Yes, now I can see what part of self I have trouble with. I now have no doubt.” Dear ones, praise God that we can converse like this. I know we can only converse as long as the Holy Spirit enables us to converse and be interested. We really need to thank him for being gracious to us this morning. I’d like to try to preach this Sunday’s sermon next Sunday. Let us pray. Lord Jesus, we thank you for the way you’re bringing us into a real family relationship with each other where we are at ease with each other and willing to go with each other in things. Lord we thank you that this is so different from Watergate. It’s so different from the distrust that seems to rule our society. We do thank you for bringing us into a body and a relationship with other brothers and sisters where we can really converse, discuss and share together. We thank you Lord Jesus that you are able to bring absolute victory into all our lives. We would trust you Holy Spirit to show each one of us this week new places where we are to find our place on the Cross with Jesus — new areas of our lives that we’re to walk into obedience. Lord Jesus, we trust you for that. We trust you for a good day today — a day when we live above ourselves and live for you and for each other for your glory. Amen.

Purpose of the Law Romans 5:20b Sermon Transcript by Rev. Ernest O’Neill Really it isn’t very difficult to believe that the capacities that we have are purely temporal. I think you will agree with that. The physical and the mental abilities that we have this morning are not going to last forever. If you were to look at LBJ or at Harry Truman or at a relative as they lie in a casket, it’s very easy to believe that the abilities that we have ourselves are going to end up like that also, and that they just are not going to last forever. Yet the strange paradox is, that there is probably not one of us here in the theater this morning who doesn’t feel that we ought to last forever. Isn’t that true? It doesn’t matter how cool or how cynical you are about life, the idea seems somehow ridiculous that this complicated personality that we have and this intricate world in which we live is all going to end after 70 or 80 years. The idea seems illogical, doesn’t it? That’s the strange thing about us. The abilities we have seem to be purely temporal and yet there is something inside us that makes us feel we ought to live forever. We are made to live forever. You remember Kant, the philosopher said. “The sight of the starry skies above and the experience of conscience within me yearning for something higher convinces every man that there must be some kind of life after physical death.” When you think of the accounts of civilizations that most of us have studied through the years, you remember that there isn’t a civilization on the globe that has not had literature connected with this kind of thing. Every one of them has had literature or stories about someone who was trying to get some substance that would enable them to live forever. And almost every civilization, almost every literature, witnesses to that fact that men feel they ought to live forever. Ponce de Leon you remember discovered the island of Puerto Rico. When he discovered it, he was not looking for a paradise island. He was out looking for that elixir of life that would rejuvenate him and keep him continually young. And if you remember the stories in classical mythology, every mythology that you read, whatever nation it’s connected with, has a hero of some kind who spent years and years searching for the fountain of eternal youth. It does seem that we men and women have always had the feeling that there is something more than what we have. There is something better in life than what we possess at this moment. You know that what we have discovered in our studies of the presentation of the creator of the world that we get through Jesus, that in these studies we have begun to see that all this wishful thinking and this desperate yearning has really a basis in reality. That in fact, God did give us these physical and mental temporal abilities but he also gave us another kind of power or substance that actually goes beyond the temporal and that actually does last forever. Do you see brother and sisters that it’s because that is reality that we have so many corrupted versions of the search for that reality in the mythological looking and investigating after an elixir of life? We men and women do not normally go off on some fairy tale unless there is some basis and reality for the kind of search that we are engaging upon. That search is found back in Genesis if you like to look at it — Genesis 2: 7-9. And really all these ancient stories that we so often smile at and even the sublimation of these stories in our present desperate attempts in medicine (because medicine in our day has now taken over the function that those mythological stories performed in ancient times) is now engaged in trying to prolong at all costs the functions of the body for as long as men want. That’s why we are involved in transplants of all kinds. We are now in medicine after the same thing. They are trying to satisfy the desire that all of us have that we should live beyond the 70 or 80 year period. You get the basis of all that search in Genesis 2:7-9. “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.” The Hebrew word is “nephesh”, “soul” you remember. And that refers to the physical — you see the dust. The soul is the Greek word “pseuche” (the Hebrew word is “nephesh”) and that really means the psychological part of us. And so God gave us a physical and a psychological part, both of which were temporal. And then in verse 9 you see he made another kind of life available. “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.” That tree had the quality that is described there in Genesis 3:22. Genesis 3:22 describes the quality of that tree of life. “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.’” And the quality of that second kind of life that God made available is that it enables us to live forever. That’s one of the things it does. And really you see that the Creator of the universe gave us this physical and mental life that is purely temporal. But he also made available another supernatural life force that would transform these abilities that we have and would enable them to actually go on forever. And that’s why so many of us have this yearning. And it is reasonable dear ones, that’s the way we were made. We were made to sense that we were more than just temporal creatures. Now God of course, makes a complete distinction between those two kinds of lives. He makes that an absolute dichotomy between the temporal kind of life that he provided and the supernatural kind of life that he provided. In fact so strong does he make that dichotomy that he calls one “life” and the other he calls “death”. And he says that’s the choice that you people have actually before you. You can make do with this temporal life that is actually in my mind only death and will be death for you after 70 years, or you can begin to receive this life that is life indeed, that enables you to live like me forever. Now, you find that choice presented clearly in Deuteronomy 30:19 right near the beginning of the Bible. And you see there the clear statement of our Creator to us, in Deuteronomy 30:19. “I call heaven and earth to witness against you this day, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse; therefore choose life, that you and your descendants may live.” And that was really the choice that the Creator has set before us. Now, choosing life, that supernatural life force that he provided, did mean exerting dependent loving intercourse with our Creator. You see that in the next verse there in verse 20; “loving the LORD your God, obeying his voice, and cleaving to him; for that means life to you and length of days, that you may dwell in the land which the LORD swore to your fathers, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, to give them.” So receiving that supernatural life does mean a loving dependence on the Creator. Now, it was that very thing that the creator of evil laid emphasis on when he persuaded us to make do with the physical and mental life that we have. It was that desire for independence that seems to be inside us, that the creator of evil emphasized when he persuaded us to make do with just the physical and temporal and mental life that we possess. And so, what happened was, most of us believe that we have all the life we need, when in fact we have only this temporal, physical and mental life. We were persuaded of that because we thought it was sufficient for us at the time and would be sufficient forever. And you can get that kind of approach by really the great deceiver in Genesis 3:4. There is no point in just looking back to this purely as a historical event. It is that. But the fact is, this deceiver is still involved with most of us today, and is still urging the same thing. Genesis 3:4; “But the serpent said to the woman, ‘You will not die.’” And really that has been his approach to us all through the years. This physical and mental life is all you need; it’s enough for you. It’s keeping you alive today, that’s all you need. You don’t need any more than that. And brothers and sisters, that’s the problem with most of us. We really do think that what we’ve got is all we need. That’s it. That’s really what sin is; sin is not just wanting to be independent of the Creator of the galaxies and the Creator of the rivers and the mountains — sin is also a real deception. It’s a real deception that we have all the life that we need. That’s really the problem with many of us in the theater this morning. It’s really not that we don’t believe a lot of the right things. But many of us here are absolutely convinced that we have all the life that we need this morning. There is nothing deeper than the physical and mental life that we possess this moment. That talk about spiritual life is just — mythology. And many of us are utterly convinced that the life we have now is the only life we need. We are really a bit like somebody going into the garage, turning on the engine, and sitting there with the window open. You can’t smell the carbon monoxide. You can’t sense it coming in but it’s filling the car, and you are becoming fainter and fainter, wearier and wearier. And you don’t know but it (death) just comes like that. It’s a bit like that. We are involved in breathing in the kind of life that we don’t know is death and that is in fact bringing us gradually to death. But we don’t know it, and we are walking around thinking we have it. This applies even to those of us who know the rest of the story. There are many of us here this morning who know that God, when he was faced with a bunch of rebels like ourselves refusing his supernatural life force, we know that he determined there and then to destroy us lest we destroy his universe forever. And we know that at that moment his son agreed to face that death penalty of destruction on our behalf. And for that reason God has made available his supernatural life force of the Holy Spirit to us again. But there are many of us who believe all that and yet still have not received that life. Loved ones, do you see it is possible to believe all the right things and yet still not to be receiving that supernatural life force of the Holy Spirit that enables you to be an eternal supernatural being. That is possible. The tragedy is, that many of us who have great pride in our intellects are absolutely convinced that if we believe all that about Jesus dying for our sins, and we believe that God is willing to forgive us then we must have received this life. No, loved ones, no. It is possible to believe it all and yet not to receive that life. And so it is vital to see that that’s why God set forth the verse that we are studying today. And that’s why he did what this verse says. Maybe you would look at it in Romans 5:20. “Law came in, to increase the trespass.” Now that’s why God made laws of life. It was as if many of us were living without the right vitamins. And you know many of us do that. We live and eat the old greasy food (I better not use any trade names), and fill up the cholesterol. We aren’t eating the right food at all. It’s as if God was looking at many of us not eating the right vitamins. He comes down and says, “Look, the only way to persuade you people that you are not eating the right vitamins is to tell you here are some of the laws of life. If you are eating the right vitamins, you will have 20-20 vision. If you are eating the right vitamins, your pulse beat and your heart beat will be such and such. And if you are eating the right vitamins this kind of thing will happen.” And that’s why God made the laws of life. He said “Listen. Many of you believe the right things about me but you still haven’t received my supernatural life force of the Holy Spirit. Now look, if you receive this life force, these are the actions and the words that this life force produces in your life. Would you look at these laws of life and see if they describe the kind of life that you live. If they do, then you probably are receiving my supernatural life force. If you are not, then you are not receiving the life force.” And that’s why law came in. It came to increase the sin in that sense — to let us know that we were sinning. In other words, sin is independence of God. It’s not depending on God. And as a result of not depending on him, you don’t receive the supernatural life force that he can give you through the Holy Spirit. You go on believing that you have it even though you haven’t and that is sin. Now, God said, I want to show you that you are living in the midst of sin. I want to increase your sense of sin by showing you the kind of life that people live who have this life force. Now, that’s why law came in. Law came in to increase the sin. It was to make our independence of God more obvious to us so that we actually realize what it was. Now, brothers and sisters, do you see what our attitude would be to one another if we did that in regard to leukemia? Let’s say some of us here had leukemia this morning, and we just wouldn’t believe it. We didn’t know that we had leukemia, we wouldn’t seek any cure and we wouldn’t seek any treatment. We just said, “No, I am okay.” Then others of us find a book that outlines the symptoms of leukemia. It says, “If you have leukemia you will have this and you will have this.” Now, brothers and sisters, can you sense our attitude to one another in that situation? Do you see that it wouldn’t be one of condemnation? Don’t you see that? It wouldn’t be me going to John or Connie and saying, “Look, you have got leukemia and I am condemning you. You shouldn’t be here at all. You just don’t fit in with these symptoms of healthy life.” Do you see there would be no place for condemnation? Don’t you see that we would be loving towards each other? We would be doing our best and praying for the other person that they would see their true state and they would see that they really have leukemia, so that they would seek a cure and get some kind of life into their bodies that would drive out the disease. Do you see that would be our attitude? There would be no attitude of using the laws of healthy life to condemn other people, make them feel uncomfortable or inferior. Rather, there would be an attitude of love towards each other that urged each other to see our true state. Now brothers and sisters, do you see that that’s the attitude God wants us to take to the law? He wants us to use the law as a diagnostic tool to see our true state. God’s law says, “Thou shalt not covet.” You know fine well that you’re coveting that sheepskin coat — or you’re coveting the Duster — or you’re coveting the Triumph 600 [a car]. Your mind is set on that, running round-and-round as to how you will get another $50 to buy that thing. Let’s not get all academic about coveting. It’s when your mind is on the thing again and again every time you have any leisure. Now if you find yourself coveting, what you ought to do is look in and say, “Now, is my attitude to possessions the attitude of Jesus?” The spirit of Jesus sits very loosely by possessions because he is aware that all the possessions of the world belong to his Father, and his Father can give them to him at any time that he thinks he needs it. Now, is my attitude to possessions, the attitude of the spirit of Jesus? Or, am I in fact grasping at these things because I feel I have to get them because I’m not sure whether God knows I need them and I’m not sure whether he could get them for me? Brothers and sisters, the approach should be, look in and see: is my attitude to possessions the attitude of the supernatural spirit of Jesus — or the supernatural life force that God gives me? And if it isn’t, then that life force is not working in me — at least in regard to my possessions; and possibly not working in me at all. But certainly it’s not working in me in that regard. Do you see, that — that’s the attitude, loved ones. The attitude is not, “Oh well, I don’t have a pale face, I don’t have the symptoms of leukemia, no I don’t — I don’t have those symptoms.” That’s a silly attitude where you pretend, “No, I don’t covet. I may just be a little interested in that motorbike but I don’t really covet.” No, be sensible. The law came in to increase the sin — to make it obvious where you stood. That’s the beautiful thing about Christianity. You don’t need to be in doubt. You don’t need to say, “I think I’m a Christian or I’m not sure I’m a Christian. Sometimes I am, sometimes I’m not. Now I was feeling pretty good yesterday, but don’t feel so good today.” It just is not that kind of deal, you see? It’s not that kind of deal. It’s not, I’m a Christian because I don’t wear cut-off’s at summer camp. Or I’m a Christian because I don’t go to the theater. It’s not that kind of deal. It’s a straight, plain system. The life of the Holy Spirit is described in the laws of life. God says if you’re filled with the life of my Holy Spirit, then you’ll have no other gods before me. You won’t take my name in vain. You won’t covet. You won’t commit adultery. These are promises — these are things that will automatically happen if my life force is running through you. And so, our attitude should be: “Is this life force in me?” Let’s say you come to the business of envy. The Bible says that envy is obviously a work of the flesh and is not God’s will for us. Then what you ought to do is look inside and say, “Is my attitude to my friends and to others, the attitude of Jesus of Nazareth? Do I want the best for them? Do I want them to be better than me? What is my attitude to their achievements? What is my attitude to their successes or to their failures? Am I willing to be nothing compared with my friends? Am I willing to be what Jesus was, a complete failure, so that my friends really should succeed? Ask yourself loved ones; is the Spirit of Jesus moving within you? Because here’s the fact: if that spirit is moving within you, you won’t envy. The thing is not to say, “I do envy, I do envy, so I mustn’t envy, I must stop envying. I am not going to envy today, no envy today.” No, that’s silly because you’re trying to persuade yourself, God and everybody else that you have this life force within you when obviously, the symptoms of your own life show that you haven’t. It’s the same with all those sins that you can think of. It doesn’t matter which one you take — coveting, envy, ambition, or greed — don’t look at them as something that you try to avoid. Look at them as symptoms of purely temporal life within you. See that if they’re there, you’re going to die anyway after 70 years. And what you need to do is to get down to receiving this life force that God has. Now I think this is utterly opposite to the attitude that the law causes in many people. In many people, the law increases sin in a different way. Many people look at the laws and they say, “Well, I don’t have those things in my life — but I can be that if I want to on my own without God’s help. And I’m going to be that.” And they begin to be self righteous. That’s the only thing worse than pretending that you haven’t leukemia. That’s the only thing worse than avoiding the fact that you have leukemia — putting cosmetics in your face and trying to make yourself look healthy and pretending that you’re deliberately healthy when you’re not. That’s what many of us do with the law. That’s why Christianity for many of us becomes a terrible burden. It becomes a great sack that we carry on our backs where we try to obey all the laws to prove to ourselves, to God and to our friends that we’re Christians. Don’t you see it’s getting it backwards? You don’t tackle the law like that. You tackle the law as laws of life and laws of death. If I commit adultery, if I lust, if I envy, if I covet, then there’s some of temporal life running through me that I need to exchange for God’s life. Every time that independence and rebellion threshes inside you, remember that God is more gracious than all your independence and your rebellion. God will always be willing to give you that life force but it is vital for you to ask. That’s really what today’s verse is about, if you look at it. Romans 5:20; “Law came in to increase the trespass, but where sin increased, grace abounded all the more.” The Father above us and the Father around about us and within us today is willing to give you the life of the Holy Spirit if you will admit that you do not have him and that you need him. But the law is here to undeceive us. It’s not to get us to try to pretend that we’re alive when we’re not. And do you see what our attitude should be towards one another? I can’t stand up here and condemn you and say, “Oh, you have envy, or you’re jealous, you’re worse than me.” That isn’t the attitude we take. If we really love each other, we’ll be saying to each other and praying for each other, “Look, that’s temporal life that you have within you. It’s going to go out after 70 years. You need to receive the eternal supernatural power of the Holy Spirit. Now, don’t you see that you need it?” And it’s that kind of attitude we take to each other. But, the thing is not to talk to each other even like that. We should have that attitude to each other, but we should not preach to each other. We should live healthy lives so that anybody who’s sick can see they’re sick and can begin to seek that life and heal us. So brothers and sisters, do you see that the law is a friend, a dear friend to us? The laws of life that God has given us are good and are to be loved by us. Let us pray. We thank you Father for listing the symptoms for us so clearly and showing us that the answer is to go to you, a loving Father, gracious beyond anything that we could imagine and to ask you again for that life and to receive the life of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Death of Sin and Life of Grace Romans 5:21 Sermon Transcript by Rev. Ernest O’Neill Would you take a Bible, dear ones, and look at Romans 5:21. And you can see it’s the last verse of the chapter and it summarizes the first section of one of the most important presentations of reality that we have in our world. That’s what you have to call Romans — and 5:21 summarizes it. “So that, as sin reigned in death, grace also might reign through righteousness to eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.” Really — it speaks of two forces at work: a force of life, and a force of death. And the force of death always works where people live as if there’s no God; and the force of life always works where people live as if God is the Father of Jesus. And so, what Paul is really saying is, “Wherever you find death, there has also been right alongside it, the power of life.” And you find that right from the beginning of the world. Wherever men have lived by their own wits, according to their own ideas of knowledge, there has always been death working. Wherever people have really believed there was an infinite wise Creator, and lived by his guidance, there has always been life. In 1552 in Egypt, which is about 3500 years ago, there was a book that was the epitome of medical knowledge at that time. Egypt of course, was leading every other civilization in medicine. The book was called “The Papyrus Ebers”, and that book has some recommendations for people who are losing hair. And this is the height of mental wisdom that men can produce on their own at that time. When hair falls out, one remedy is to apply a mixture of six fats; namely those of the horse, the hippopotamus, the crocodile, the cat, the snake, and the ibex. To strengthen it, anoint with the tooth of a donkey, crushed in honey. Now that’s as high as medicine at that time could take you. And for embedded splinters, they applied worm’s blood and ass’s dung. Since dung is loaded with tetanus spores, McMillan says, “It is little wonder that Lock Jaw took a heavy toll on splinter cases.” Now at the same time, as men were living independent of God by their own wits, (and therefore obviously spreading death), there was a man called Moses in the wilderness desert of Sinai. He was not in the colleges and schools of Egypt, but in a wilderness desert with a little group of nomads following him. And because he was trusting in the Creator he was given by inspiration a different kind of wisdom. So at the time when that ridiculous kind of witch doctor nonsense was being practiced and was bringing death, Moses was writing things like this found in Numbers 19:14-15. You’ll see that he was in fact outlining some of the best laws of hygiene that have ever been devised. Numbers 19:14-16 “This is the law when a man dies in a tent: every one who comes into the tent, and every one who is in the tent, shall be unclean seven days. And every open vessel, which has no cover fastened upon it, is unclean.” And then, he goes on down to 18 and 19. “Then a clean person shall take hyssop, and dip it in the water, and sprinkle it upon the tent, and upon all the furnishings, and upon the persons who were there, and upon him who touched the bone, or the slain, or the dead, or the grave; and the clean person shall sprinkle upon the unclean on the third day and on the seventh day; thus on the seventh day he shall cleanse him, and he shall wash his clothes and bathe himself in water, and at evening he shall be clean.” The amazing thing is that it was these laws of hygiene that were discovered in the 19th century, and were used to put at last an end to the terrible infections and plagues that destroyed people’s lives in the hospitals in Europe. It was eventually a return to the sprinkling of water that at last put an end to those plagues and infections. So at the same time, brothers and sisters, as men by their own wits, were producing this death that we read about in “Papyrus Ebers” in Egypt, this man was producing, by divine revelation and inspiration, laws of hygiene which were not accepted by us until 3300 years later. In fact, there were many doctors who lost their jobs because they were trying to bring this kind of practice in the hospitals. The New York Department of Health as usual, was a little behind everybody else. In 1960 they issued a handbook after 86 of their patients had died in one of the hospitals on the East Coast. They issued a handbook outlining carefully the method to be used in washing hands. It’s almost exactly a copy of the method that Moses detailed in Numbers 3400 years earlier. Now, that’s what I mean when I say, wherever there has been this death that has come from living as if there was no God, there has always been a stream of life in our world that has come because people were prepared to believe that there was a God and to trust him. You see, it’s the same in our own personal lives, in our national lives, our international lives and our economic lives. There are two forces at work. There’s a force of death at work when we live as if there’s no God and there’s a force of life that begins to be released into our lives when we live as if there really is a God whom we can trust. And those forces are always coming against one another. Sin is really independence of God. It’s rejecting the idea that there is a Creator at all. And what Romans 5:21 is saying is, wherever you live as if there’s no God, sin reigns in death. It sets forth a death that is not only mental and emotional, but it actually becomes physical. But wherever people live in dependence upon God, there is released God’s generous power of life. That’s what it means by saying, “his grace.” His grace is released to anyone who receives his righteousness. That is, to anyone who allows God to make him right with themselves, through trusting in Jesus’ death for them. To them, there is released the power of life. And that’s really what Paul is saying throughout the first five chapters. You know it is very sophisticated today to say, “Well Brother, I would believe in God and I would trust him and live that way if I really had enough data to decide that there was a God. But frankly, I haven’t enough information. And that’s why I live as an agnostic. I’m just not sure that there is a Creator to trust.” And you may say, “I’m experiencing death in my own life, but I’m experiencing it through ignorance — not through determined rebellion against this God.” Now, brothers and sisters, Paul called that a cop out at the beginning of the letter to the Romans. He said, “That isn’t true.” He said, “The idea of God is an innate primary truth that most of us are born with.” It’s reinforced every time we read ancient history. Every time we look at the universe and see its order and design, it is borne in upon us that there must be a God. And when we read of Jesus and of his resurrection from the dead, we become convinced that there must be a Creator. And Paul says, “A person who doesn’t believe in God is one who has chosen not to believe in God.” You remember he puts that in Romans 1:19 if you’d like to look at it. Because I think a lot of us like to pretend in a sophisticated way that if we have the information, we would then be prepared to believe in God. But really, Paul says, “No, you have the information if you look at it.” It’s Romans 1:19, “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.” I honestly think brothers and sisters that most of us are a bit like Aldous Huxley. We have enough information to begin to treat God as if he’s really there. But we have a vested interest in living our own lives as we want to. We have a vested interest in believing that there is no God. We want to live our lives not under someone else’s authority, but under our own authority. The kind of death we first experience therefore is the death of mindlessness. That’s the first kind of death that sin begins to reign in, in people who reject the idea of God. It’s mindlessness because you have to be educated to reject the idea of God. It is so obvious, the idea of God — it is so plain and obvious. It is so obvious that there must be a being who created all this and who made us like ourselves. You almost have to be perverted intellectually to reject it and that’s what happens. We reject the obvious, and our minds become mindless. That’s what Paul is saying when he wrote the next verse. In verse 21, “For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God, or give thanks to him; but they became futile in their thinking, and their senseless minds were darkened.” That’s really the first kind of death that hits you when you refuse to treat God as being a real person. Your mind becomes really confused and illogical. “Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man or birds or animals or reptiles.” And we say to ourselves, “No, we couldn’t become as ridiculous as that.” Until you look at our society and you see how we are prepared to kill and divorce and murder in order to get another car, or in order to get another piece of clothing, or another house. Brothers and sisters, when we look at our society, we see a society that is experiencing the death of mindlessness. We let the murderers out a couple of days after we’ve arrested them and then we hold up our hands in horror because we have such a violent society. Or, we fill the mass media with a pre-occupation with sex and then we are surprised that Venereal Disease is on the increase in our society. It’s a kind of mindlessness, isn’t it? We do what would produce the result and then we stand back horrified. It’s utterly illogical and we are surprised that the result comes about. It’s the same in our schools. From high school right on up, we regard the school as a kind of soft, easy place where we divert the children. And so, we’ve softened the whole emotional and intellectual discipline in our high schools, in our colleges, and then we’re amazed that our adults seem to be judging things so poorly when they grow up. There’s a kind of mindlessness that runs through us. The energy crisis is another example. We know fine well, that there’s plenty of oil to be received and we don’t want to hold the prices up there. But we hold the prices up, and we’ll even cause deaths in hospitals and cause deaths in homes in order to get that greed satisfied. So the first kind of death that begins to spread among people who live as if there’s no God is a certain illogicality that begins to run their lives. And you can see that death present in our societies. Now, don’t sit there and say, “Brother, you mean I’m being illogical and I’m being illogical on the rest of my life because I don’t trust God?” No. But if you look at society, you’ll see that that’s where it eventually leads you. You have to be illogical to reject the idea of God. That illogicality continues to spread in your life, and will eventually express itself in your life if it hasn’t already. So first of all, sin reigns in the mindlessness of death. I think there is another problem. When we refuse to acknowledge God as the Creator of the world, he is put in an impossible position Himself. He is the supreme ruler of the universe. And here are we, little flies, and we say, “We don’t believe in You.” Well, God has obligated Himself to accept that rejection and say, “Well, I can’t force you, but I have to reject you also.” And so, that’s really what happens. We reject our Creator, and so, he gives us up. And that’s what Paul says, “So God gives us up.” That results in that terrible sense of vacuum that many of us experience. That’s the reason why many of us experience the loneliness of death in our lives today. We reject God and he gives us up. Then suddenly we feel we have nobody that cares. We suddenly begin to wonder why we’re here at all. We wonder what place we have here and who put us here, because we’ve rejected the one significant other who did put us here. And so, we’re left in an absolute vacuum. Many of us live from day to day in that vacuum. We’re strangers among a mass of strangers. We’re people who don’t know who we are, or why we are. We’re people who can’t find a reason to justify our own existence. And through that comes a great sense of the death of separation and alienation. And you know it loved ones; many of our roommates here are experiencing that terrible loneliness. What is the question that we’re asking in all our seminars in school? The whole question is, “Who are we?” When I first heard that question, I thought, “Who are you? Well, check your passport and you’ll know.” It seemed such a strange question when it first became popular. But that’s the popular question. A deep answer for a Ph.D. candidate as to why he’s doing his degree is, “I’m trying to find who I am.” And you feel that if he doesn’t know who he is he’s in real trouble, starting out in the doctorate. Yet, that’s the point we’ve come to. And part of your slowness to laugh at the thing at first, is that we’ve all been brainwashed into it, isn’t it? We’ve been taught to believe, “That sounds a very intellectual, deep question for a logical person to ask.” But it’s really only a question that is asked by a person who doesn’t believe there’s a Creator; who doesn’t believe there’s any purpose in the world. Then he’s left in that absolute vacuum and he enters into the death of separation and alienation. And you don’t have to read many of our playwrights to see that that is the disease that is spreading through our world — a terrible sense of loneliness. It’s a terrible sense that nobody cares for me. It’s a terrible feeling that there’s no reason for me being here, that there’s no point in me being here at all. And there is no point apart from a Creator. So, when you reject the Creator, there is no reason for being here. And you know what that results in. You find yourself in a very vulnerable position. You find yourself — one little fly, of three and a half billion flies, on one of billions of spheres, that are whirling through billions of square miles of space. Now that’s a pretty insecure position to be in. And it’s not long before you begin to feel it’s an insecure position. And you begin to feel, if I’m to retain my sanity, I must find a reason for being here. I must prove to myself and to everybody else, that there’s some reason for me being here. I must justify my own existence in some way. And you know what results. We enter into that miserable rat race where we feel we have total responsibility for our marital and career status. It’s a massive responsibility that we were never made to bear. But we begin to take that as our responsibility and the result is that we begin to worry. We worry, and the glands in the stomach that create acid, create excess acid. The acid produce ulcers and the death becomes a physical death. Or we determine we must prove that there is a reason for us being here; we must justify our existence, and we enter into that terrible competitive academic or professional world. We try to beat other people to it. We try to hold other people down. We begin to resent other people who seem to be doing better than we are at proving that they have a right to be here. And the resentment grows up within us into bitterness. The bitterness begins to produce effects on the blood supply to our brains. It begins to produce effects in our muscles and we begin to end up with colitis and heart attacks. And death again becomes physical. Now brothers and sisters, that’s something of what it means when Paul says, “Sin reigns in death.” Living as if there’s no God eventually results in death. There is death in a sense of mindlessness with an illogicality and intellectual confusion. Then there is sin, in the sense of an alienation from all the other people in the world and with it a sense of terrible loneliness. And then comes death, (in the sense of real physical death) as our bodies begin to deteriorate and to break down under the strain of the psychosomatic diseases. And loved ones, here’s what Paul is saying. In the midst of all that, there is a stream of people who do believe that there is a Creator and who live as if that Creator is really alive. There are a number of us who have accepted the conclusions of our common sense; and who have accepted the conclusions of history. We’ve accepted the conclusions that we have come to from studying the life of Jesus in the first century. And we do really believe that there is a Creator, who is what Jesus said: the Father of Jesus Christ. He is loving like Jesus and is kindly like him and we’ve begun to live as if that Creator is really alive. As a result, our minds have come into some grasp of logic and some kind of control of themselves. And so, you begin to see that the business of letting murderers out two days after being arrested, is not kindness to the criminal. That’s not what law is all about. Law is not concerned with being kind to the person who has done wrong. Law is concerned with upholding God’s sense of justice and holiness by exercising a justice itself. And we begin to see that our schools are not there to be a diversion for our kids. They are not there to be a method of getting better paying jobs. They are there to help us to understand God’s plans for bringing the world and the universe under his control. And we begin to see sex not as a substitute for the exhilaration that the Holy Spirit alone can bring, but we begin to see it as part of what is a real married relationship. The mind begins to come into order as we begin to live on the understanding that there is a God who really does love us and care for us. Maybe one of the greatest signs of life is the change it brings in our attitude to ourselves. It’s so good to feel that the Creator of the universe really knows you. It is really exciting to know that He knows my name and that He has numbered the hairs of my head. And suddenly, I don’t care what you all think of me. I don’t care what the professor thinks of me or what somebody else thinks of me. My Creator knows me — I’m his son and he’s my Father. I can trust him. What does it matter what the ratings say? What does it matter whether I am up or down? If my Father thinks the world of me, he’s the only one that counts in the universe. It’s hard for even [President] Nixon to have more power than him. And so, there comes a great relaxation in my relationships. I no longer feel I have to beat all of you down in order to prove myself to myself. I no longer feel I have to scramble to the top of the heap in order to justify my existence. I no longer feel I have to be the best in the world, or I have to be like Muhammad Ali, the greatest. I no longer feel that pressure. I feel, “Father, you know why I’m here, you know what I’m here for. I thank you. You think the world of me, and so I don’t care what the others think. I’m going to do what you’ve put me here to do.” So there comes a great sense of peace, dear ones. There comes a great sense of peace in your body as a result of that; because you’re no longer straining. If somebody does something against you, you don’t feel the need to bear resentment against them. No, you say, “Father, you saw what he did, but you are in control of my life; you are in control of my failures; you’re in control of me losing my job even; you’re in control of my failures in examinations. You can work all those into your plan for me, so I don’t need to resent them or worry about them or be concerned about them. Father, I thank you that you’re in control.” And loved ones, there begins to come a great relaxation into your body. No longer do you toss at night worrying about what’s going to happen the next day. Why? Because your Father knows it and he has already made plans about it. You no longer worry, “Am I going to get married next year? Will I ever get married?” The Father knows he has a plan for you. And you know he’s going to work everything according to the counsel of his will. And even when it seems certain that somebody has upset that beautiful plan, it’s good to be able to look up and say, “Father, to me it seems the whole thing has fallen apart, but you know exactly where I’m going. And I know you’re going to work this into the plan.” And so, brothers and sisters, there comes a real peace; a real freedom from worry, a real freedom from strain, resentment and bitterness. The body begins to work better and you begin to find life taking back the death that has begun to spread in your body. Your body begins to experience that life. And eventually, God had promised that life will overcome death. Death itself actually will be lived through by us because of this power of life within us. Now that’s really what Paul is saying. There are two forces at work today. There is a force of death at work in those who live as if there’s no God. This is an utterly illogical and insane position to undertake and no human being is made to bear the strain and the pressure that that brings. And then there is a force of life that is released by the Creator, if you are prepared to live as if he is really there and to begin to treat him as a dear Father that really does love you. Now, we’ll see, in the coming months and years — from chapter six on, what this life does inside us when it comes to us. But I think what Paul wants to get home to us now, in these first five chapters is, that there are two ways to live; and you have to choose which. I suppose, because I really do love you, I’d ask you — it’s hard to speak to you personally except that God can make you know that I am speaking to you — would you really think, brothers and sisters, about it? Would you decide which way you’re living? Don’t be foolish. Don’t live that life of strain and stress. Loved ones, there is a God. The arguments are too strong; the order and design of the universe, the existence of Jesus and the innate primary idea you have in your own mind that there’s a God. The arguments are too strong. The question really is: ”Will you let him be your God, or do you want to be your own God?” That’s really the issue and it’s one that brings tremendous strain. Because how can you as God guide your little ship among the other three and a half billion that are trying to guide their ships? There’s a dear Father, who knows where your ship ought to go. He knows exactly what your life was created for. He will bring a freedom from strain into that life if you’ll begin to treat him seriously. So will you think about it? It really takes a decision. It’s not something you waffle into or fall into by osmosis. You really do have to decide; “I’ve been living as if there’s no God up to now, I’m going to start living as if God is my Heavenly Father and as if he is like Jesus and as if he did let Jesus die for me.” And then you really take up an attitude towards it in your mind. Let’s pray. Dear Father, I would trust you for quiet wisdom and peace to think for each of us this morning. Father, I trust you for brothers and sisters among us who have brainwashed themselves for so long to believe that you do not exist. Father, I would trust you to show them that you respect them and you love them. Father, I would trust you to enable them to deal with their intellectual difficulties and the intellectual problems; and to deal with them honestly, and then to be prepared to put their life where their head is. And to be prepared to put their will where their mouth is; and to be prepared to submit to you if they do come to the conclusion that you are God. Father, we would pray for each other here in the theater this morning. We all know the pressures we’re under and the subtle forces that have worked within us. We would pray for each other this morning. We pray for clarity of thought, and also for a will that is willing to submit, to obey, to trust and love you. I trust you for these things Father; for the sake of my brothers and sisters and for your sake and your authority. Amen.

The Guilt and Power of Sin Romans 6:1 Sermon Transcript by Rev. Ernest O’Neill I’d like to try to share a little this morning about our response to God’s offer. So that’s why we’re reading this parable of the vineyard in Mark 12:1. Mark 12:1-8: “And he began to speak to them in parables. ‘A man planted a vineyard, and set a hedge around it, and dug a pit for the wine press, and built a tower, and let it out to tenants, and went into another country. When the time came, he sent a servant to the tenants, to get from them some of the fruit of the vineyard. And they took him and beat him, and sent him away empty-handed. Again he sent to them another servant, and they wounded him in the head, and treated him shamefully. And he sent another, and him they killed; and so with many others, some they beat and some they killed. He had still one other, a beloved son; finally he sent him to them, saying, “They will respect my son.” But those tenants said to one another, “This is the heir; come, let us kill him, and the inheritance will be ours.” And they took him and killed him, and cast him out of the vineyard.’” May God help us to see that we’re facing the same offer this morning. Amen. Suppose you had a term paper of 10,000 words that you had to complete before the end of the quarter in order to get credit for the course. Okay? So a paper of 10,000 words, you had to complete it to get credit for the course and you had to get it in before the end of the quarter. The end of the quarter comes and you haven’t even started the paper. Now, there are two problems. There’s a problem in the professor’s attitude in that situation and there’s a problem in your attitude. The professor, if he wants to offer you another chance at all, has to find some way of dealing with the unalterable regulations that he is faced with; regulations governing the course. He has to find some way of satisfying those requirements or those demands, if he’s going to try to give you another chance. And then you yourself, if he gives you that second chance, have to respond to it with a different attitude yourself than you had when you failed to produce the paper. Now you can see that the one change in attitude is no use without the other. Now it’s the same in any situation where there is a break in personal relationships. Any situation where there’s a conflict between two people has exactly those two problems. There’s the problem of the offended person who has to find some way of meeting the requirements and the demands of his nature if he’s going to give the offender a chance to make things right. And the offender must on his part change his or her attitude in order to take advantage of the second chance. In other words, there’s really no point in you simply accepting the new arrangement the professor has made. There’s no point in you going around and telling all your friends “You know I didn’t get that paper in, but he tells me that if I do a paper of 15,000 words and get it in, in two weeks time, I’ll be okay.” There’s no point in you continuing to tell that and believe that and five years later you’re still saying it. “You remember that paper? Well, you know he made a new arrangement for me. Yes, he said that if I did the paper for 15,000 words and got it in, he’d accept it.” Ten years from now, you’re still telling the same thing. In other words, no agreement, no easing of tension, no reconciliation is possible unless you change your attitude. It’s not enough for you to say, “I believe and accept the new arrangement. And I think it’s a good one, Professor. I really do believe it.” It’s no use. There’s no point in you continually saying you accept and you believe it unless you actually respond to it in some way. You can see that clearly. Now, six years ago, believe it or not, I started Romans. Six years ago, even the Vatican was in great doubt about authority as far as certain statements that we never questioned concerning the Maker of the universe. Six years ago, the Vatican was beginning to question itself and to have its doubts. And that was perhaps the great characteristic six years ago. We were all very uncertain about everything. We were all living in insecurity and very conscious of our own insignificance and very aware of the meaninglessness of our lives. Even the Vatican itself was thrashing around saying “Well, we’re not quite sure if we believe the things we used to believe. We’re not sure.” And there was a great crisis of confidence as far as authority was concerned. Everybody was giving their own version of why we were all feeling insecurity and insignificance. And that’s why I felt God prompting me to start trying to explain the problem from the viewpoint of the Creator of the universe. And that’s why we started Romans. Because we felt that in Romans, God — the Creator of the universe — was explaining from his point of view what had gone wrong with all of us and with society. And that’s what we began to do at that time. We began to explain how the offended person felt. We began to explain how the professor felt and what requirements and what demands he had to face if he was going to open the way for any reconciliation. You remember the way we describe it. We describe it often in this kind of term: God made us so that we could share the life and love that he already enjoyed with his Son. He made us first with physical life. He didn’t give us the spiritual life that would make us like him and his Son. He just made that spiritual life available in the Holy Spirit or the Tree of Life. Remember how often we’ve shared, that we decided that we’d do without that. We’d live independent of it; we’d live our lives by our own wits and decide what was good and evil for ourselves. You remember that as a result of that, God who is the only one who really knows how the universe will work, was forced to reject us and to condemn us to separation from that supernatural life. And he had to condemn us to a life that would end after 70 years. That was his only way of preventing us from spreading our chaos and turning his universe into a hell by using our own contorted, perverted knowledge of good and evil. You remember that as a result of that, we all began to experience a great sense of alienation from the Center of the universe. We began to experience great frustration and great loneliness. And this produced in us the psychological and physical symptoms of strain, stress and anxiety. And then you remember, we’ve shared often how the great professor started to look at the demands that he was facing and how this mighty Creator of ours, for no reason at all, (he had no reason to step back from his condemnation of us to death, except for a love that you and I can’t even begin to understand), this Creator began to make an arrangement whereby he would be able to maintain his own justice and holiness in rejecting us and condemning us to death and yet would be able to give us another chance to receive that spiritual life that he had made available at the beginning. And you remember how we’ve often talked about how God had to find someone who would face the penalty that we should face. If he hadn’t been able to find that, if he had changed his mind, it would seem to us he was just being easygoing or soft. If he had suddenly said “All right, I told you, you couldn’t come and receive my Holy Spirit; now I tell you, you can come.” We would say “Oh, God cannot be trusted, he’s fickle, and he changes.” But God, in order to prevent us feeling that there was no justice or holiness in him, required his Son to die that death and face the death of separation and alienation for us. So never again could we question that he was really a holy and just God. And yet God opened the way for us to move towards his Holy Spirit and to receive the Holy Spirit. Now that’s the burden of the first five chapters of Romans. That’s the burden of those first five chapters. The whole point of those five chapters is to point out that God is no longer hostile to us. Despite the fact that we’ve lived independent of him, been indifferent to him and ignored him, he is not hostile to us. Because of his Son’s death on our behalf, despite his holiness and justice, he is able to open his arms towards us. That’s really what all those five chapters are saying. Even though we’ve offended him mortally, Jesus’ death has enabled God to open his arms to us and to say, “Look, I will give you the Holy Spirit of my uncreated life. I’ll offer it to you if you’ll receive it.” Now that’s really what those chapters are saying. They’re saying that God found a way to do it. That’s the point of Romans 3:25b, it’s the second half of that verse. It really states that through Jesus dying and paying our penalty to God’s holiness and justice, God has found a way to forgive us without compromising his holiness and justice. And you see it there in the second half of verse 25 of Chapter 3. You see the new sentence begins… Romans 3:25b: “This was to show God’s righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over former sins.” It was to prove at the present time that he himself is righteous. Even though he has passed over our former sins he is still righteous and just; he justifies him who has faith in Jesus. And the whole purpose of those first five chapters of Romans is to show us how this mighty Person who is in a position of authority has found a way to give us another chance to receive his life. And that’s what it means in Romans 3:24. They are (or we are) justified by his grace as a gift. Actually we have no right to be here on earth after God condemned us to death. And that’s why we felt loneliness, frustration and such a sense that this was not our place — a stranger in the world. But Jesus’ death meant that we had every right to be here, every right to be here for at least 70 or 80 years. And that’s really what justification means. In other words, we’re really exactly in the same position as the student. The professor has made an arrangement whereby we have another chance to get the paper in. That’s it. We have another chance, brothers and sisters, to receive the uncreated life of God’s Holy Spirit. But that’s exactly the spot we’re in. Jesus’ death has taken away the sense of condemnation and guilt that we felt and so we feel that this is our home, we have a right. The moment we believe that Jesus has died for us, we begin to feel at home in the world. But do you see, we’re at home only until the 70 or 80 years are up. We’re here only long enough to give us another chance to do what God originally wanted us to do. Now that’s all that Romans Chapters 1 to 5 is really saying; it’s giving us God’s attitude. Everything after that concerns our response. And that’s really what we’ll be doing for the next few of years. We’ll be dealing with the rest of Romans and with what our response to that offer is. And that’s what determines what you will do after this life ends. It’s not that you believe that God has made that arrangement. You see the silliness of it? It’s not that you believe he has made that arrangement. There’s no question he’s made that arrangement. The moment you believe that, you feel a sense of being justified in being here. But that’s only a first step. What we need to do is what God originally wanted us to do: receive the life of his Holy Spirit. In other words, he’s still making the offer. Now we’re in a position to receive it but it will depend on what we do with the offer whether we go into outer darkness at the end of this life — or whether we really go into a life that is far, far better. It’s important to see it, because the bulk of our churches have never emphasized that at all. Most of us who have listened to preachers have found that the Gospel ended at Romans Chapter 5, that’s it. For most of us, all we have heard is justification. We’ve heard “Look, you don’t need to feel you shouldn’t be here on this earth. You don’t need to feel you have no right to be here. Jesus has died for you. That’s why God has not destroyed the world again with a flood. God is satisfied and happy that you’re here. He loves you and his arms are open towards you.” But brothers and sisters, do you see why God’s arms are open towards you? It’s because he’s offering you a life of his Holy Spirit. That’s why. But the great mass of Christians have never gotten beyond Romans 5. We’ve never got beyond justification. We think that justification is enough. But do you see what justification is? Justification means because of Jesus’ death, God justifies us in being here at all. That’s where our sense of guilt and alienation came from before. We felt we had no right to be here because God had already condemned us all to death. Now Jesus died in our place, so the moment we believe that, we have a great sense of justification. We stop justifying ourselves, we stop trying to prove ourselves to other people. We feel “No, this is really our home. We have a right to be here.” But brothers and sisters, that is only a preliminary step. We are back in the position of Adam in the Garden of Eden. We are back in that position of innocence because of Jesus’ blood. And we are now in the position where we can receive the Tree of Life or we can reject the Tree of Life. But do you see, dear ones, the tragedy that most of us have been taught to believe? It’s that, “Look, it’s enough to be in the presence of the Tree of Life. This is great. I am back in the Garden of Eden; there is the Tree of Life. We have the Tree of Life here, and I’m justified in being in the Garden. Isn’t the Garden beautiful?” It is beautiful and God is offering us the Tree of Life again. That is no big deal. Adam was in that position. The deal is, are you taking of the Tree of Life. Are you receiving it? Are you accepting the offer? Or are you really continuing to reject it? Now do you see that’s what we’re beginning to come into then in Romans 6? It is our response to God’s offer. Maybe you’d look at it there and you’ll see it very plainly, even in the phrases that Paul uses. In Romans 6:1 he says, “What shall we say then?” He says, in the light of this attitude that I’ve described your Creator has taken towards you, “What shall we say then?” He’s really saying that everything that happens to you is going to depend on what you say. But you see many of us say “No, no, it doesn’t matter what we say. This is what God has done.” It’s like saying, “No, no, it doesn’t matter whether I get the paper in or not, the professor has given me another chance to get it in.” But brothers and sisters, that’s only a preliminary condition that opens the way of access to the Tree of Life. Everything depends on how we respond to it. That’s why Paul says, “What shall we say then?” You remember God gave us free wills. He made available his Holy Spirit which contains the genes of himself and his Son and makes anybody who receives that Holy Spirit like the Trinity Family. And that was why God originally made us. It was so that we’d live with him forever in the Trinity Family. And the only way to become like the Trinity Family was to receive that inimitable, uncreated life of the Holy Spirit that makes the Trinity Family what it is. That was God’s original and ultimate intention for us. Now the whole purpose of making the Tree of Life available to us is so that we should receive it, allow that life to come into us and through us, and sanctify us. It was to make us like God and make us like his Son Jesus. Therefore salvation is composed of justification and sanctification. But do you know that most of us have only heard of justification? We’ve heard of Romans 5, the first five chapters. We’ve heard that God justifies us in being alive here on earth because of Jesus’ death. But brothers and sisters, the whole purpose of that is that we might receive this life of the Holy Spirit and allow that life to make us like God and like his son. Now that’s what Paul is really saying if you look at Romans 6:1. “What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound?” Are we to continue to refuse his offer of the Holy Spirit so that he may continue to offer it again and again and again? Paul purposely puts the question in a ridiculous manner like that so that we’ll see the absolute stupidity of it. But do you see, “What shall we say then? Are we to continue to reject this offer of the Holy Spirit so that God can show forth his grace by continuing to offer it to us again and again and again?” Part of the reason why it’s absolutely stupid is that that offer will cease after you and I die. We’ve been given a respite. We’ve been given a reprieve. We have 70 years maybe 80 — I’m going for 90. But we have 70, 80, 90 years. It’s a respite during which time we can receive this life of the Holy Spirit and allow it to transform us and make us like our Father and our Creator — so that we can really be at home with him forever. Or we can continue to reject it with a silly kind of idea that it’s okay, we’re justified. Loved ones, it’s madness. God does not want in Heaven, a mass of people who are running around offending each other, hurting each other, criticizing each other and saying, “It’s okay, God forgives us.” You can’t have fellowship in that kind of situation. So the whole purpose of God sending Jesus at all was so that the “tree of life”, the life of the Holy Spirit, could be opened to us. God does not want us to live in Romans Chapters 1 to 5. He wants us really to begin to live in the midst of the offer. And it’s silly for us to think, all we need is to believe that God forgives us and that he’s made the offer of the Holy Spirit to us. That’s all we need — to believe. That’s silly and it achieves nothing. I don’t want to bore you with it but it’s like the student who says, “The professor has made a new arrangement for me.” But he never does get the paper in. And therefore he never does get credit for the course. And therefore the tension never is released. And it’s the same with us. Here’s what happens if you stop short of Romans 6. You end up with a bunch of hypocrites in churches; people who continue to say, “I can sin with impunity now. It doesn’t matter. Jesus has died for me and God has justified me. Jesus has borne all my sins. I can continue to do whatever I want and God will accept me.” The result is, you have masses of people who live hypocritical lives, who aren’t at all like Jesus or aren’t at all like God. And let’s be straight — that’s one of the reasons we’re together in the theatre this morning. That’s one of the reasons that put us off the church. Many of us were tired of those churches that were filled with hypocrites. Now loved ones, the reason many churches, (not all churches), are filled with hypocrites is because they have stopped short at justification. They have gone up to Romans 5 and they have said, “You are justified in being here because of Jesus’ death.” But they have not seen why they’re here: to receive the Holy Spirit. I’d like you to be clear on that, that I’m not even saying the Baptism of the Holy Spirit. I’m just saying that if you come through a real New Birth experience, you actually receive the Holy Spirit at that moment. That’s how you’re born of the Spirit. And that Holy Spirit will continue to make you like God. And what we’re going to be talking about for the next number of years from Romans 6 on is how that Holy Spirit expects us to respond to that offer. Loved ones, it’s such a new thing for many of us. I’ll just stop there. Does anyone want to ask a relevant question? Maybe no one does and that’s all right, but it’s good to be clear. Our brother suggests that we don’t only listen to the theory of the thing but that we actually make some notes ourselves. That’s really why I share at all on Sunday mornings. You cannot become like God through mental exercise. It is through actually receiving that Holy Spirit. So this is a big exciting moment for me. For six years I’ve slogged away at Romans 5 to get to Romans 6, 7, 8 and 9 because it is really great. It’s the part of the Gospel, the part of reality or the part of truth that we have all been ignoring for years. And that has resulted in powerless and pitiful Christians in our chaotic world. So I’m trusting that God will really transform our lives during these next years. What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound? Well, that’s the question for you. What are you saying to God’s offer? Are you saying, I’ll continue to refuse it so that God can get the satisfaction of continuing to offer it? Well, that’s ridiculous. It’s just being cruel to God. It’s being obtuse to our Maker. Let us pray. Dear Father, we thank you for setting the thing so plainly before us. Thank you Father for showing it all so clearly to Paul and then for giving us your Holy Spirit so that we can begin to see the plain truth about ourselves. And Father we can see, that the big issue is not what your attitude is. We are glad that your attitude is one of love towards us. We are glad that Satan is deceiving us, when he says you are condemning us. We are glad, our Father, that there is no condemnation in your heart at all towards us. And that the reason we will die eternally is not because you have rejected us, but because we have rejected your second offer, the offer of the Holy Spirit. So Father, we thank you that your arms are open to us this morning and will be until the moment we die. And in them is this supernatural, uncreated life of the Spirit that can transform us and make us like you. Father we trust you over the next years to begin to delineate clearly for each of us, how we can enter into the full acceptance of this offer. We trust you for a good day today and a consciousness that the offer is open to us every second. All we have to do is look up in faith and receive. We thank you for that, in Jesus’ name. 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 until we see Jesus face to face. Amen.

Universal Atonement – Conditional Justification Romans 6:2 Sermon Transcript by Rev. Ernest O’Neill Let’s pray. Dear Father, we thank you that you are renewing everything. You’re transforming everything that our hands touch. You’re going to create for yourself a harmonious community that is a picture to the world of heaven here on earth. We trust you to continue it in each one of us, for your glory, Amen. It really is amazing that we’re all here alive today. You may say, “Why is it amazing that we’re alive?” Well, because by rights we should all be dead. We really should. We should all be absolutely wiped out. That’s exactly what happened, maybe 4000 or 5000 years ago. That’s exactly what happened. The Creator looked down and the whole thing (the earth) was much as it is today. And he just decided, “I’ll just wipe it out and start all over again.” You remember it’s in Genesis 6, if you’d like to look at it. It was the same situation dear ones, as we have today. Genesis 6:5-8; “The LORD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And the LORD was sorry that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart. So the LORD said, ‘I will blot out man whom I have created from the face of the ground, man and beast and creeping things and birds of the air, for I am sorry that I have made them.’” And he carried that out. It’s what’s recorded there in Chapter 7. Genesis 7:21-23: “And all flesh died (as a result of the flood) that moved upon the earth, birds, cattle, beasts, all swarming creatures that swarm upon the earth, and every man; everything on the dry land in whose nostrils was the breath of life died. 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. Only Noah was left, and those that were with him in the ark.” And the reason God got rid of everything was because they refused to treat him as their Creator. They refused to treat him as a loving Creator who was in control of everything. They refused to receive the miraculous life power that he offered them. And so, God being a holy and just God had to destroy it before they spread that same kind of spirit throughout the world and throughout his universe. God just wiped us all out. And brothers and sisters, we’re in the same situation today. Many of us don’t treat God as our Creator at all — you know that. Otherwise, why do we worry so much about jobs, about the future in our jobs and about our marital status? It’s hard to get around you sisters and brothers too without finding somewhere in the back of your mind a fair little bit of worry or anxiety about, when am I going to get married? Whom am I going to marry? When am I going to get a job that I really enjoy? And really, that worry and anxiety is because basically we don’t trust that God can handle the situation. Or we don’t trust that he will handle it the way we want him to handle it — that he won’t pick the kind of girl or the kind of fellow that we want to pick. Basically, loved ones, it’s an attitude to God that is the same as took place 4000 or 5000 years ago. We refuse to treat God as our Creator and it goes into all sorts of things. It’s the reason why we live so much in the future. It’s because we don’t really trust that God can take care of the future. In fact we’re not quite sure that he has it organized for us or that he has any purpose or plan in having us here at all. That’s why most Christians as well as most humanists live a third of the time in the past and regrets, a third of the time in the future and worries, and part of the next third, they live in the present. But really, we only live about a third of our lives here in the present. And the basic reason is because we don’t treat God as our creator and as a loving Father who has all that organized. And so we don’t simply take care of our end of it today and trust him to take care of tomorrow. Do you see that’s the same kind of attitude that meant that God had to destroy the world and all the people in it, 4,000 or 5,000 years ago? As a result of that attitude we all become expert manipulators. You know that we manipulate. We manipulate people, and we manipulate circumstances. We regard ourselves as gods of our own lives and gods of our futures. Our job is to try to ensure that it goes the way we want it to and this is despite the fact that we can ensure nothing. We spend most of our lives trying to be gods, controlling things and making them go the way we want them to go. And that’s exactly the same reason that made it necessary for our Creator to destroy everybody 4000 or 5000 years ago. The reason is plain. If you have a lot of gods, three and a half billion gods, (as there are three and a half billion of us), all trying to run their own lives in the way that pleases them, you’re bound to have — one or two collisions? No, you’re going to have a couple of billion collisions. And if you let that continue for long enough they will eventually tear themselves apart. That’s why God had to come down and just destroy the whole thing the last time. Now, why didn’t he do it this time? It’s because he found a way of giving us a second chance to receive this miraculous life power that he had offered us originally and yet remain a just and a holy God. He found a way in which a holy God and a rebellious wild earth and people could live in peaceful coexistence for at least another few years. His way was this. He allowed his Son to be destroyed for us so that his justice and holiness could never be called in question. It would be obvious that it had reacted against someone, and someone had taken the brunt of the death penalty for us. And so God was able to give us a reprieve for another few years on earth, to give us a second chance to receive the life power that he had made available originally. But really that’s it, loved ones. It is a reprieve. It’s just a reprieve and it’s in that sense that Jesus has died for the whole world. He has died for the whole world in the sense that he has died so that the world could have another few more years of life — another little opportunity to receive the gift that God had originally offered. That’s why we talk about a universal atonement. We say that Jesus by his death atoned for all your past rejections of God’s life and all the sins that stem from those rejections. So in that sense, Jesus paid for or atoned for all the things that should have brought your immediate death. But he could only atone as far as putting off the eventual death. All he could buy for us was a reprieve. Now that’s the meaning of that verse in 1 John 2:2. 1 John 2:2 –“and he (Jesus) is the expiation for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world.” Even the prostitute in Paris that is having intercourse at this moment; Jesus has died for her sins. That’s why God does not strike her dead immediately or bring another flood upon the earth. It’s because Jesus has died for her sins. She will never be expelled from God’s presence because of his condemnation of her, nor will you or me. God really has nothing but love towards you and me at this moment. Whatever you have done, whatever you did last night, whatever you did yesterday, God already has received payment for that through his Son’s death. So he has no reason to condemn you. That is why you’re alive here on earth. That’s why you’re justified in being here on earth. That’s why God is justified in allowing you to be on earth and does not destroy you immediately. It’s the same with that prostitute. It’s the same with the two fellows that are at this moment emptying an office in New York somewhere; it’s the same for them. God actually has nothing but love towards them at this moment. He forgives them utterly because Jesus has died for that sin that they’re committing. So in that sense Jesus has died for the sins of the whole world. In that sense, he has enabled the whole world to continue living at this moment. Now here is the tragic mistake most of us make. We interpret God’s justification for suspending the death penalty (that is, Jesus’ death) and giving us a reprieve and a respite; we interpret our justification for being alive here on earth instead of being destroyed by a flood; we interpret that, which is part of justification, as the whole of justification in God’s eyes. Now, that’s the tragedy. Many of us say, “Brother, I believe what you have said. I believe that Jesus has died for my sins and that’s why I am alive here today. I believe that God is justified in forgiving me, so therefore I am a Christian.” But brothers and sisters, do you see that that’s only half of justification? The only thing that will finally justify us in God’s eyes is if we take the opportunity that he has offered us in these few years more on earth. If we take advantage of that opportunity to do what he originally asked us to do — receive the life of this Holy Spirit — then we will be fully justified by God. Do you see there is a distinction? It is important because I think a lot of us, both Christians and humanists alike, mistake God’s justification for suspending the death penalty (in Jesus’ death) and our justification for being alive to remain here on earth for another few years, we mistake that as our justification in God’s eyes. It is not. The only thing that will justify us in God’s eye is eventually doing the thing that he originally asked us to do — receive of the Tree of Life. You remember I shared it with you last Sunday. Many of us are like Adam in the Garden of Eden. We’re saying, “I am back in the Garden of Eden, and the Tree of Life, the Holy Spirit, is there. This miraculous life power that will make me like God, it’s there now. I am back here, I have the opportunity, I am glad I am right with you, Lord.” But God is saying, “You’re not right with me until you eat of the Tree of Life.” And we’re continually saying, “No, no I am right if I believe that because of Jesus, you have made the tree of life available to me again. I am right if I believe that because of Jesus’ death, you have let me into the Garden of Eden again.” And God is continually saying, “No my son, no my daughter — you become right with me when you do what I originally asked you to do — because that’s the only thing that will make you like my son and like myself.” In other words, many of us try to substitute an intellectual assent to the fact that God is justified in allowing us to remain alive for another 70 years. We tend to substitute the assent to that truth for really receiving the life of God’s Spirit. And so many of us, in church and outside church, are trying to believe away our guilt on the basis of our mental assent to the fact that God is justified in allowing us to live another few years. We’re trying to believe away our guilt and we can’t do it. We’re trying to find real justification and many of us will say to me, “But Pastor, I still find myself trying to justify myself. I still find that I am trying to prove myself by the grade I get. I am trying to prove myself to my professor. I am still trying to prove myself to my wife by the way I carry out my job. I am still trying to prove myself to my parents. I am still trying to justify myself in the eyes of my peers.” Loved ones, you do that because you haven’t entered into real justification. Real justification is not believing that God is justified in forgiving you. Real justification is not in believing that Jesus’ death has enabled you to be here alive on earth for another 70 years. Real justification comes when you do what God asked you originally to do — receive the life of his Holy Spirit. Now, you see there is a vast gap there. That unreal justification will never bring a sense of real peace. You are right that there is a universal atonement. Every prostitute, every thief, every critic among us, every person among us who has been sarcastic, those things have been atoned for by Jesus’ death. God will never separate us from himself because of those sins. They have been paid for by Jesus’ death. But all Jesus’ death can do is keep us from being destroyed at this moment. The only thing that will enable us to live forever is if we receive of the tree of that eternal life. In other words, justification includes receiving of the Holy Spirit. That’s really what God wants us to do. Now, it’s emphasized in all the pieces of God’s word that talk about justification — this importance of us actually receiving something into ourselves. You can see it in Romans 3:24-26. They are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption, which is in Christ Jesus — whom God put forward as an expiation by his blood. And then here it is — to be received by faith. In other words you have to receive Jesus’ life by faith. You simply haven’t to receive the concept that they have stated there by faith. That’s only the intellectual belief part of faith. You have to actually receive the life that has been offered. This was to show God’s righteousness because in his divine forbearance he had passed over former sins. It was to prove at the present time that he Himself is righteous and that he justifies him and then again any who has faith in Jesus. And faith in the New Testament is not just belief that Jesus’ death enables us to live for another few more years here on earth. But it means that Jesus himself is the life. He is the Tree of Life and when we receive him into ourselves as a spirit of supernatural life that will make us like God. That really is what God wants us to see plainly: only He can justify. You see it says that God justifies him who has faith in Jesus. God is justified in forgiving us. We’re all justified in being alive on earth. But God can only justify us in his own eyes when we do what he asked us to do: receive of the Tree of Life. You get it again in John 1:12. It’s a well-known verse that we have used often. It shows again that it’s not enough to be alive in the Garden of Eden but we have to choose to eat of the Tree of Life if we’re going to be justified in God’s eyes. John 1:12 – “But to all who received him, (notice it’s received not believed. Belief is part of it but receiving is the vital part) who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God.” And then these who received the Spirit of Jesus are people who are born not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God. Now brothers and sisters too many of us are trying to be born of the will of the flesh or of the will of man instead of, of God. And God can only justify us in his own eyes when we actually receive this life. Why? Because it’s the only thing that will make us like God. That’s it. And the whole purpose God had in putting us here was not to allow us to live in peace for a few years, but to allow us to receive his supernatural uncreated, inimitable life that makes us like Himself in a miraculous way. That’s why we have to receive the life of the Holy Spirit — because that’s the only one who makes us like God. He’s the only one who sanctifies us. Sanctification is making you holy. Justification is treating you as if you are holy. God justifies us. He treats us as if we’re holy – i.e. he doesn’t destroy us, we’re alive here. He should really have destroyed us all because we’re unholy, but he has left us to be alive. So, he has treated us as holy. Now, he wants us to receive the life of his Holy Spirit so that he can make us holy and sanctify us. And loved ones it’s the reason why many of us have difficulties with this second part of Romans, which for the next few years we’ll find teaches us the whole effect that this supernatural life has in our day-to-day lives. The reason some of us who call ourselves Christians have trouble with the second part of Romans, the reason many of us who call ourselves Christians have trouble with the whole idea of Sanctification, the reason many of us who call ourselves Christians have trouble with this business of being filled with the Holy Spirit, is because we have never actually received the Holy Spirit. We have never actually been born of the Holy Spirit ourselves. We have entered into a mental kind of belief in justification but we have never actually been justified in God’s eyes through receiving the Holy Spirit into ourselves at the New Birth. Many of us have nothing inside us that makes us love God’s will. What happens when you receive the Holy Spirit is that the Holy Spirit makes your heart like God’s, he really does. He gives you a heart that is like God’s. You find you have a heart inside you that wants God’s will. You have a heart inside you that is glad every time the Lord reveals something of yourself that is not like him. It’s a heart that wants to go after God, that wants more and more of him. And so when you come to subjects like sanctification or crucifixion with Christ or being baptized with the Holy Spirit, that heart that has been changed by the Holy Spirit coming into you yearns after those things. And so really initial sanctification takes place the moment you are really justified. You are justified in God’s eyes the moment you do what he asks you to do. He said, “Look, I have offered my Holy Spirit to you because that physical life that you have isn’t enough. It will die out after 70 years. I have offered my Holy Spirit to you that will impart to you my mind, the spirituality of my mind, the blessedness of my emotions, and the liberty of my will. That will impart to you a supernatural body that will enable you to live with me and the Trinity family forever. Now, will you receive that life?” And the moment we go over and receive that life into ourselves, that moment we’re justified in God’s eyes. We have a sense of peace with him. It doesn’t matter how justified HE is in forgiving us or how justified HE is in making the tree available to us again. We’re only justified when we eat of that tree. Brothers and sisters do you see there is a vast difference between those two things. That’s why Paul asks that question in Roman 5:2. It seems almost the same question all over again that he asked in the verse that we studied last week. So you can see how important he feels it is. Romans 5:2; He answers the previous question, you remember, “Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound?” By no means, not at all. And then he asked this question; “How can we who died to sin still live in it?” Now sin, brothers and sisters, is rejecting the Holy Spirit. It’s being independent of God and that’s rejecting the Holy Spirit. It’s resisting God — and Paul says, “How can we who have stopped rejecting the Holy Spirit still live apart from the Holy Spirit?” You can’t do it. It’s impossible. In other words Paul says, “Everyone who is justified is a person who has received the Holy Spirit.” And once you have received the Holy Spirit you can’t continue to reject him. There is some logic in language and you can’t reject and receive at the same time. And if you have received the Holy Spirit then you can’t reject the Holy Spirit. If you have received the Holy Spirit to depend on and to lean on him then you can’t be living apart or independent of him. It’s a contradiction to say that you can and that’s what Paul is saying. Sin is resistance to God’s will and independence of his Spirit. Once a person has received the life of the Holy Spirit that person begins to have a heart like God and begins to depend on God and finds himself living dependent on the Holy Spirit. In other words — living free from that sin of independence. Now, that’s the kind of a truth that is stated in Romans 8:14, if you’d like to look at it. It states those two parts in a sense. Whenever the Holy Spirit comes into you he makes you like God and that those are the only people really who are sons of God. Rom 8:14 – “For all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God.” And that’s really how you tell a son of God. You could believe all that I have said for months and for years. You could believe it all, and understand it better than I understand it. But do you see, it’s not believing at all that counts? It’s receiving the life that has been made available. Believing that God is justified in offering you that life doesn’t mean that you have received it. Believing that you are justified in being alive here on earth and not being destroyed by a flood does not mean that you have received that life. The heart of justification and the beginning of sanctification is receiving the life of the Holy Spirit. And that is what the New Birth is. That’s why we talk about the New Birth being believing that Jesus has died so that God could offer us the Holy Spirit and then receiving that Holy Spirit. Many of us are trying to substitute intellectual assent and emotional regret for real believing and receiving. Many of us are trying to substitute believing and being sorry, for repenting and actually receiving — because to receive the Holy Spirit means you have to make room for him. The Holy Spirit will not dwell with sarcasm. He will not dwell with a critical attitude. He will not dwell with a heart that is bent on making as much out of other people as you can. So when the Holy Spirit comes in, he demands that you deal with those other things that are not like him. That’s why he is called the Holy Spirit. So really brothers and sisters, to be born of God or to be justified in God’s eyes, we need to repent and receive the Holy Spirit. Now don’t get all worked up over, do I mean by receiving the Holy Spirit being baptized by the Holy Spirit? NO, we haven’t come to that at all. I am just talking about becoming a Christian. Being justified in God’s eyes means you repent, you stop doing the things that the Holy Spirit doesn’t want you to do, and you receive the Holy Spirit of the super natural life of God into yourself. And that begins to make you like God and to sanctify you. I’d like to stop and pause for a moment so that you can ask a question. If the Holy Spirit doesn’t want a question asked, then we can just have a moment of silence. I am so anxious, loved ones, that you will see that the height of becoming a Christian is much higher than what we have imagined. I am anxious that you will see it and that you will know if you are a child of God or not, and not be in any doubt about it. Question from Audience: (Inaudible) Reply from Rev. O’Neill: The brother asks, “If living apart from the Holy Spirit is sin, does that mean when you receive the Holy Spirit you will not sin anymore?” The answer is, if you will submit to the Holy Spirit, listen to his voice, and listen to his promptings there is no reason why we should sin in the sense that sin is conscious disobedience to God. Now if you define sin as any deviation from absolute right then we sin day after day because we have imperfect minds and unbalanced emotions. But if you mean by sin, knowing, conscious disobedience to God’s will, then no, that is right — if we will submit to the Holy Spirit once we receive him, we will walk into our life of victory. Question from Audience: (Inaudible) Reply from Rev. O’Neill: The brother asks, “Isn’t walking with the Holy Spirit then a lifetime thing?” Yes, it is. Brother what many of us have found, however, is that we learn to walk rebellious to the Holy Spirit, or walking kind of beside him early on in our Christian lives so that we ran a kind of Christian life. So many of us found that not only had we to start walking in the Holy Spirit but we had to die and deal with a whole lot of that independence that we have bred within ourselves. That’s why Paul talks of this crisis in Roman 6. If we would walk on after the Holy Spirit fully and freely, we would walk into victory. But many of us have sunk into compromised self controlled surrenders and that’s why we have troubles. Question from Audience: (Inaudible) Reply from Rev. O’Neill: God said he would send the spirit of his Son into our hearts. The problem is and why I emphasis receiving the Spirit is because so many people talk about accepting Christ. They don’t mean to receive the spirit of Jesus into themselves. They mean “I accept Christ, I accept Buddha; I accept that this world is spinning around in space.” They accept the intellectual concept of Jesus. That’s why it’s so important to see dear ones, that it’s not just accepting the idea. It’s not just believing in the concept of justification. It is actually receiving the life of this man into us. Do you see that’s why there seem to be two kinds of Christians. You know it as well as you are sitting there. There seem to be Christians that know it all, believe all the right things, go to church, sing all the gospel hymns but they are not like Jesus. They aren’t like Jesus. Then there are others that don’t know about it at all, but they have received the spirit of Jesus into them. There is a gentleness, softness and a teachability about them that immediately makes you sense you’re with brothers and sisters. Question from Audience: (Inaudible) Reply from Rev. O’Neill: Sister asks, “If you’re not sure you’re a Christian, how do we go about receiving Jesus?” I think many of us when we listen and see a little deeper into God’s word begin to wonder — just where am I? Brothers and sisters it’s just a straight deal — you repent and receive. You ask the Holy Spirit to show you, “where have I been living apart from you?” And then give him time to answer because he will. Don’t speak to him and then do up a ventriloquist job where you speak back to yourself. Just speak to him, ask him, and don’t put a deadline on him. Don’t say you must answer before I have breakfast. No. Ask the Holy Spirit, “Holy Spirit show me, I really want to know where I am walking independent of you, where have I started to walk in the strength of my own mind or in my intellectual belief? Where have I become just an intellectual Christian if there is such a thing? Where have I become just an intellectual believer?” The Holy Spirit will begin to show you. He may show you the next day a little more. He may show you something in the Bible that will show you a little more. But usually for many of us when we open our consciences to the Holy Spirit, a lot of things will flood in upon us –- things we know we are doing against God’s will. Now, you’ll repent of those dear ones, and you stop doing them. You don’t cry, you don’t say you’re sorry, you don’t say I am going to try harder the next time. You stop doing it. That’s it. That’s what you do to a man whom you have crucified. You don’t keep pushing the sword in and say, “I am sorry I am doing it.” You keep the sword out. You say, “I stop this.” And secondly you receive the spirit of Jesus right there. You say, “Lord Jesus, I have done what you asked me to do. I have stopped crucifying you in my life by stopping my sins. Now I receive you in.” And stopping sins, loved ones, is an honest determination to stop them. You can only stop them today. You can’t stop them tomorrow. You can only say, “Lord as far as I am concerned I am stopping those things now.” Audience: (Inaudible) Rev. O’Neill: Sister asks, “Can you actually stop doing the things by nature under our own power?” You can set your will. God can see your will and he knows whether you’re really willing to stop those things. If you’re really willing to stop those things he gives you the grace to actually do it. You can be willing to stop and the Holy Spirit is able to tell whether you’re willing or not. Loved ones, I ran that game with God for a long time. I said, “Yes, I’ll repent. I’ll say I am sorry and I’ll stop them. But, really he won’t know but I kind of think I might try it again later on.” It was so stupid to think that the infinite God could not see every thought that was in your mind. That’s the way to receive the Holy Spirit. God will only give the Holy Spirit at the New Birth or at justification to those who have actually determined to have done with those things. And God can tell whether you’re willing or not. He can tell whether you really mean or not. Question from Audience: (Inaudible) Reply by Rev. O’Neill: That’s it brother, that’s the battle. I think that’s been the problem with a lot of us. Some of us have been humanists and agnostics for years and have never been involved in churches, but many of us have been involved in churches and have tried to seek God and tried to receive him and I think that’s the problem. We have said, “We on the whole want to have done with these this.” But, there are a few things that we negotiate with God about. We try to receive the spirit of Jesus in and on top of all this manure. You can’t do it. The Holy Spirit will not come in on top of a lot of things. You have to fight your way through. “Am I all the way with you God or am I not?” That’s it. Question from Audience: (Inaudible) Reply from Rev. O’Neill: I won’t repeat the question because I think my answer will probably re-state it. It seems to me there is no question that the Holy Spirit can only be received by a person who totally submits to him at that moment. There aren’t Christians who receive the Holy Spirit without completely submitting to him. Those who receive him completely submit to him. It seems at the moment of justification, at the moment of the New Birth, at the moment of our forgiveness of our sins, the moment we become Christians, (not talking about baptism of the Holy Spirit at all), we must be totally submitted at that moment to the Holy Spirit. The problem is that there are some of us then who cease to be submissive to the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit then witnesses that to our conscience. He witnesses that he is grieved. Then we sometimes ask forgiveness for it and we are back under him again. But sometimes we don’t ask forgiveness and we don’t yield to him. And so there are many children of God walking in various degrees of resistance to the Holy Spirit. And this is where you get what is called carnal Christians. People who were alive but now live as if they are not. [end of sermon is cut off at this point]

Atonement Means Identification Sermon Transcript by Rev. Ernest O’Neill Romans 6:3 Genesis 6:5-7; “The LORD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And the LORD was sorry that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart. So the LORD said, ‘I will blot out man whom I have created from the face of the ground, man and beast and creeping things and birds of the air, for I am sorry that I have made them.’” And then you remember, in Genesis 7:21-23 is the historical event of the flood. Genesis 7:21-23; “And all flesh died that moved upon the earth, birds, cattle, beasts, all swarming creatures that swarm upon the earth, and every man; everything on the dry land in whose nostrils was the breath of life died. 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.” Why did God react that way? I ask that because we ourselves are living in a society whose Supreme Court has described that kind of action as a cruel and inhuman punishment. So that’s why I think it’s a problem to many of us, why God reacted that way. When our own Supreme Court describes capital punishment as an inhuman punishment, then why did God react that way? You know that most of us, who have come through our educational system recently, have been encouraged to think in that way. You must admit, most of us have the kind of predisposition to believe that there is no evil so absolutely evil that the only thing you can do is destroy it. We really have been encouraged not to think that way. Yet you must admit that in practical affairs that concern our own lives, we do believe that there is some evil that is so bad that the only thing you can do is destroy it. For instance, we believe that certain clothing that are impregnated with any plague or contaminated with any disease, all you can do with that clothing at times is to burn it and destroy it. We obviously believe it with much of our radioactive material. That’s why we dump a lot of it in the deepest depths of the ocean. It’s because we believe that there is certain material and certain things that are so bad that you can’t do anything but destroy them. It is interesting that certain governors and presidents, who are responsible for deterring society from destroying itself, obviously think in the same kind of way. They think that there is certain evil that is so bad that you have to destroy it before it destroys us. Yet you know that we have been encouraged to think that there is no evil that is so absolutely exclusive of good that all you can do is destroy it. You know we have been encouraged to think that it’s kind of primitive and bourgeois to believe that you have to destroy something — that you cannot actually redeem it. We have begun to think that there is no black and white, that there are shades of gray and that there are no things just as bad as that. Yet, we can see that if you carry this to its ultimate conclusion, eventually society itself would not exist if we continue to think in these terms. We have begun to see that there must be something that is worth preserving. There must be a moral authority somewhere in the universe that you have to try to preserve if we’re not all to take part in the destruction of one another. There was a really lovely, one of the most beautiful movies that has taken off much faster than “Deep Throat”. It’s just one of the beautiful movies with Walter Matthau and it was called “Kotch”. It was the story of an old grandfather. It’s just beautiful and really was a great help to us. Kotch at one point remembered some lines of Latin that he learned at school and it ran, “Quis Custodiac custodiace”. It means, who will protect the protectors? And I think that’s it, dear ones. Obviously a man like Nixon and Rockefeller, however much we may disagree with them on other issues, obviously they have begun to see that if you don’t protect the law enforcers then eventually you come to a place where anything goes. If you don’t make the destruction of policemen and prison guards an absolute “no-no” that receives punishment, i.e. the capital death penalty, then eventually you get into a society where nobody cares about anything. So obviously, brothers and sisters, somewhere along the line you have to get the buck to stop being passed. Somewhere along the line you have to settle and decide, “Look, there’s something that is so bad that you have to stop it however you stop it.” And I think many of us are slowly beginning to see that. Even the psychologists are beginning to see it too — that there are some things that are so bad that you really have to act to stop them. Now if you want to see the disease that you and I are in at the moment, you only had to watch “Archie” [TV sit com] last night and you saw the disease, didn’t you? We will look after ourselves. The girl was almost raped but we will look after her reputation. Okay, the fellow may go out and rape others but we want to keep the dignity of our own family intact. That’s how far this kind of disease is gone. We have lost the sense of absolutes and the feeling that there’s anything worth putting your life on the line for. Now we’re being driven back in our cities into apartment blocks where we have security systems on them and we just lock ourselves up in our little caves. We’re getting back to the caveman mentality. You lock yourself up, keep your gun on your bedside table and you don’t let anybody in to you. Now loved ones, do you see that that comes when we believe that there is no evil so absolutely evil that it has to be destroyed. Now obviously God did not think that way at all. You can see that on the basis of that piece of history that we’ve just read, on the basis of the evidence of an alluvial layer of rock throughout the world, i.e. geological evidence for a flood, and on the basis of the attitude of Jesus to the Old Testament history. Obviously there came a time when God decided, “This is so evil that all I can do is destroy it, if I am going to preserve anything at all.” That’s really what we’re reading about when we read about that flood. God obviously believes there is some evil that is confrontable only with destruction and that’s the only way you can deal with it. Now what is that evil or what are those attitudes? Well, the attitudes that God felt were so bad that they had to be destroyed were summed up by the writer of an article in the “Minneapolis Star” newspaper last year. He did an article on a survey that he carried out on students at the University of Minnesota who were graduating that year. He was trying to find out the motives that were guiding them in their choice of jobs and he summarized the motives under three categories: profit, power, and success. Those were the three things that were guiding the majority of students who graduated from the university last year in their choice of jobs. They were going for jobs to give them profit. Or they wanted a job that give them power and influence. Or they wanted a job that gave them a feeling of success and enjoyment. Now those are the three attitudes that the Creator of the world set out to destroy by that flood. Those are three attitudes that deal with the three areas of our soul: the will, the mind and the emotions. Those are the three attitudes that, if they’re allowed to wildcat throughout the universe, will eventually destroy the universe and destroy all of us. They are the attitudes mentioned in that verse that we’ve looked at often, you know if you refer back to Genesis 3:6. And these are the attitudes really that the psychologists confirm, make the wheels of industry and commerce turn. Most executives are governed and driven by these three desires or these three needs. You find them there in Genesis 3:6. Genesis 3:6; “So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate; and she also gave some to her husband, and he ate.” Now, it was because of those three motives or desires that we decided to set up our own standards of good and evil and decide what was good and evil for ourselves. Now you can see them there in verse 6. “The woman saw that the tree was good for food.” This is the desire to have our own way, get what we want, whatever it costs anybody else. It’s the desire to get things. “And that it was a delight to the eyes.” It’s the desire for enjoyment and happiness whatever it costs anyone else. “And that the tree was to be desired to make one wise.” It’s the desire to use our minds to manipulate people and circumstances to our advantage. Those are the three same motives — the need for profit, power and success. Now the reason those drives are so powerful is that God did make us with a need for security. We really do have a need for security. We don’t need all the food in the world but we do need security. We don’t need all the clothing in the world but we do need security. He made us with the need for security. So that is God-given. He made us with a need for happiness. So that is a thing that’s God’s gift. That’s why it’s such a strong desire in each of us. He gave us a desire to use our minds to bring things into order. So that is a God-given thing. Now brothers and sisters, that’s why those drives are so powerful in themselves. But it was God’s intention to satisfy all those by giving us the supernatural life-power of his Holy Spirit. He planned that we would have all those things satisfied by that. But we determined to do it without his life-power and so we began to try to satisfy these things by our own wits. Many of us have dedicated our lives to achieving security for ourselves. We’ve given ourselves over to getting all the food, clothing and shelter we can possibly need in this life. Many of us, by excessive life insurance policies, are determined to try to insure it for not only our children but our grandchildren as many generations after that as possible. As a result of the way three and a half billion people in the world have given vent to that desire, there is an absolutely unjust and unfair distribution of wealth and food. And it’s because we’re driven by that desire to achieve security in the way that we want, to get what we want, when we want it. We’re the same with the desire of happiness. We have such a desire to enjoy ourselves that we don’t care who else we destroy. We don’t care who else has happiness destroyed, as long as we are happy. We’ll do anything for an extra kick, an extra thrill or some sense of exhilaration. It doesn’t matter who suffers or what person has their own emotions destroyed. It’s the same with the mind. We’re so determined to use our mind to manipulate circumstances and people to our advantage that we leave everybody else without a free will except us. Now do you see that when you take billions of minds, emotions and wills that are bent on that kind of attitude, you’ve got a problem on your hands? If you’ve got three and a half billion minds trying to manipulate each other for individual satisfaction and happiness, you’ve got chaos. And when God looked at three and half billion of us using our personalities, our attitudes and our abilities in that way — he knew there was nothing to do but destroy us absolutely. So you remember what he did. He withdrew his Holy Spirit from us so that at least we would not be able to live infinitely and eternally. He did that so we wouldn’t be able to destroy his world and his universe continually. Then, he destroyed us by putting all those minds, emotions and wills, with all those drives for security, happiness and manipulation of others, into his Son Jesus and he destroyed them on Calvary. We saw last Sunday that that’s why he, as a holy God, is able to offer us again an opportunity to receive the Holy Spirit. It’s because his justice has been satisfied by destroying the evil that was in all of us. We call that the atonement. We said that Jesus atoned for all our rebellion against God by actually dying for us and allowing God to put all these tremendously strong drives into him and destroy them there. That made us at one with God. It put us right with our Creator so that we really felt a great sense of acceptance with him. At last, he had done what he knew had to be done. He had destroyed the evil that we had produced in the world and so he was free to accept us as his children. It brought a great sense of justification to us when we began not only to believe that but to receive the Holy Spirit into us — this life-power that he had originally given us. It has saved a lot of us from trying to get the acceptance of our peers any longer. Now here’s the problem that many of us face. Many of us here this morning really do know that God has forgiven us. We have received the life of his Holy Spirit into us. We do believe that we’re justified in God’s eyes. But, there are many of us here who have still incredible problems and troubles with those selfish willful desires for security, happiness and manipulation of others. We still have that problem even though we have received the Holy Spirit. There are many of us who are Christians here this morning that still find those drives are alive within us. We’re still driving to get security by other ways and means. We still have problems with greed and covetousness, about clothes and food. Many of us still have trouble with gluttony and sexual desires. Many of us still have trouble with a tremendous desire to enjoy ourselves emotionally whoever it hurts. Many of us still have difficulties with the desire of the mind to manipulate us to the top of the heap, whatever it costs anybody else, whoever we have to trample over to get the best job. In other words, there are many of us who really have received the Holy Spirit into ourselves but we still find we have problems with these strong drives of the selfish will. It’s outlined there in Galatians 5:17. It describes quite well the situation that many of us find ourselves in, in our own personal lives. Galatians 5:17, “For the desires of the flesh”, (The flesh is not the sexual part of us, or even the physical body. The desires of the flesh are the independent selfish will. If we leave out one of the letters of the word flesh you get the word ‘self’. It’s really the desires of the flesh, or the self.) “The desires of the selfish will are against the Spirit, and the desires of the Spirit are against the flesh; for these are opposed to each other, to prevent you from doing what you would.” And there are many of us who have received the Holy Spirit, are justified in God’s eyes, and yet we have problems in this area. These drives seem to be still alive and active inside us. That’s why Paul says a few verses later there in Galatians 5:25, “If we live by the Spirit, let us also walk by the Spirit.” Paul says, “If you’re born of the Spirit, if you’ve received the Holy Spirit into you, if you’re justified in God’s eyes, why not walk by that Spirit?” But many of us find that we cannot. We say, “Yes, I do want to walk by the Spirit. I want to depend on this supernatural life force of the Holy Spirit to give me all the joy I want. But I find something inside me wanting to get more joy. I want to trust the Holy Spirit to give me the food, clothing and money that I need but I find there’s another drive inside me that wants to get all that I want and more if possible than God even wants for me.” And so many of us have found that those kind of drives work against each other. We want to depend on the Holy Spirit but we find ourselves falling back into these old drives for profit, power and success that govern the ordinary person who has never received God’s Spirit. Now why is this? It’s because you and I think of Jesus’ death and of our being destroyed in him as a beautiful idea, that’s it. When we read about God destroying all those drives for profit, power and success in Jesus, we think of that as a neat little analogy. We say, “Yes, that’s a nice way to think about how a holy God had to get satisfaction for his justice.” Mind you, we think God a bit silly for accepting one man’s death for other people’s death. It seems unjust. Why punish one person for somebody else’s misdoing? So deep down we think, “We better humor him. This is a strange kind of justice he has but we’ll humor him. It’s a nice thought, a nice illustration. Yes, Lord, You’re right. You put us all into Jesus, we believe that. You destroyed us all there (in Jesus) and now you’re prepared to forgive us and to give us your Holy Spirit.” Now brothers and sisters, the tragedy for those of you who have been to church over a great part of your lives, is that most of us have heard that presented as a nice little illustration, a nice little method God has of giving himself an excuse for forgiving us. We don’t see that God really did destroy us in Jesus. God is one who lives in the world that Einstein describes– where there is no past, there is no present and there is no future. There is just one great present, eternity. There is just one great moment. We fail to see that that mighty God, (who is in a part of the universe, who can see all things as happening now, that happened three thousand, four thousand, five million years ago and that will happen fifty years hence) that great God actually did take your drive for profit, power and success and did put them into his Son Jesus and did actually destroy them objectively by the power of his Spirit. And that’s why he is willing to forgive us. Loved ones, God’s justice demands that those things be destroyed. He can’t just pretend. He is not a silly God. He can’t just pretend and say, “Oh yes, I’ll pretend that I’ve destroyed them in Jesus. Therefore now I’ll treat all these people as if they were really good even though they aren’t.” No, the only reason God can treat us as good is that he has already destroyed all the evil that we produced. And that’s what God tries to get over to us again and again in the Bible. But we keep saying, “It’s a nice illustration. Now obviously, if you live in the world of time and space, that couldn’t happen. He couldn’t destroy the selfish desire or the lustful desire that I have at this moment.” Don’t you see that it’s silly to think in terms of time and space? Don’t you see that even you yourself transcend time? If I ask you, can you remember a year ago? Can you remember ten years ago? Can you remember fifteen years ago? You know that there is really very little degree of difference in the vividness of your memory. You know that things ten years ago, if they were important things or had emotional import to you, you can remember those as well as you can remember things last week. Even in our own time-space lives, we can begin to see that time actually in a sense, does not exist. You know how difficult it is for you to decide whether last week went slowly or fast? You know that is purely relative. The clock says it goes at the same speed but you yourself know that it went faster or slower according to the things that you were doing last year. In other words, even we ourselves see that time and space do not exist. Now in God’s mind and in God’s eternal world, he is able actually to destroy the drives that are making mincemeat out of your lives at present. Now that’s what God said again and again through Jesus’ apostles. Look at just one of the instances in 2 Corinthians 5:14. 2 Corinthians 5:14; “For the love of Christ controls us, because we are convinced that one has died for all.” Most of us kind of accept that and we say, “Yes, Jesus died for us. That’s what enabled him to bring us the atonement to atone for our rebellion against God and to make us at one with God.” “Therefore, all have died.” That’s the second bit that we so rarely realize is true. When Jesus died for us, he was able to do that because we were actually all put into him and destroyed with him. That’s why God’s justice was satisfied. There are spiritual powers that God released, just as we release certain x-rays into a thing like cancer to destroy it. God released certain spiritual powers against the drives for profit, power and success that destroy our present lives. He destroyed them in Jesus. That’s what Paul is saying in this verse that we’re studying today. I explained it before I asked you to read it, because so many of us read it and we just immediately under-interpret it the moment we read. Romans 6:3, “Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?” Brothers and sisters, this was the beginning of light for me in my own Christian experience. This Romans 6 was the beginning of light for me, in a life that had been utterly unsatisfying and defeated as a Christian. Gradually, I began to see that this was true. Jesus atoned for my sins because he actually allowed me to die with him by faith. If I’d have had to die physically or eternally, I’d have been wiped out immediately. But God was allowing me to die by faith, to die as it were by proxy, in Jesus. The moment I was willing to enter into that and accept it, that moment the Holy Spirit was able to destroy those drives for profit, power and success that governed my whole life. But for years, brothers and sisters, I didn’t believe that we had anything to do with Jesus’ death. I knew that it was because of his death that God was willing to forgive us but I never saw that the real reason for that was because we had actually taken part in his death. Instead of sending another flood, God sent Jesus. He put us all into Jesus and destroyed us there. That can actually be made real in our own individual, personal, subjective experiences today, the moment we’re willing to let that happen in us. So brothers and sisters, this is some of the deeper teaching that God is beginning to take us into in Romans 6. It concerns the whole business of living like a Christian — not just being a Christian but how to live like a Christian. I think what God wants us to begin to do over these next years, is to begin to see in what way you and I are prepared to take Jesus’ death as a lovely analogy, or neat illustration of a holy God demanding satisfaction for his justice — or whether we’re really prepared to believe that God did actually destroy us in Jesus along with those drives for profit, power and success. Over these next years, we’ll try to elaborate and draw out all the meaning of this. It obviously doesn’t mean he destroyed our personalities. Obviously it doesn’t mean he destroyed our bodies. But obviously, he destroyed the things that are troubling you and me. And what is the proof that they needed to be destroyed? Your own failure to control your temper. How many years have you been trying to control your temper? How many years have you been trying to keep down lust? How many years have you tried to keep down that envy and jealousy in your heart? Isn’t that indication that this is something so powerful and so evil that only a Creator of the world can deal with it? You can’t suffocate those things. They really have to be destroyed. I thank God that he has done it and that it can be made real in our lives by the Holy Spirit. Let us pray. Father, we would trust you to give us the light of Your Holy Spirit as we can begin to go into the deep things that you want us to share. Father we remember that it was when Jesus started to talk this way that a great many turned away from him and stopped following him. Father, we do not want to be among that number. Father, we want not only to be Christians in name (only hypocrites) but we want to be Christians in life. We want your world to begin to see Jesus alive in us. Lord, we trust you to give us patience as we go into these deep teachings and these deep truths. We trust you most of all to show us the great need for them in our own lives this coming week. We ask this in Jesus’ name. Amen.

Identification is the Condition Romans 6:4 Sermon Transcript by Rev. Ernest O’Neill Most of us here this morning would probably differ on whether it was ever right to bomb Vietnam. I think we would. If we were to take polls or to begin a debate, probably all of us in the theater would differ in some way from each other. We have finite minds and we have different backgrounds. And it is possible for Christians who are really close together in the Spirit to honestly differ on issues that seem superficially to be very-very clear. Therefore most of us would probably differ on whether it was right to bomb Vietnam or not. Maybe a majority would feel in one way, but there would be a difference. However, I think I am safe in saying that all of us would agree that one of the problems in the bombing was bombing military supplies and avoiding the destruction of hospitals and schools. All of us would agree that even the selected bombing which had planned to do that, failed far short. I think all of us therefore in the theater would agree that that was wrong, wherever a hospital, wherever a home — whatever your political view is — it was always wrong to destroy innocent people. I think that’s one of the real tragedies we would see in the guerilla warfare that is so prevalent in different parts of the world today. It is this old business of the destruction of the military powers and the destruction of innocent powers along with them. Now brothers and sisters, that’s just a crude example of a problem that runs through the lives of all of us who are human beings and the life of the Creator of the universe Himself. The problem is this: how to destroy what is evil without destroying also what is good. That’s the real problem that the Creator of the universe faces every day and that you and I face and that medical people face. It’s the difficulty with deep ray therapy in connection with certain kinds of cancer. The problem is to find a ray that will pass through normal cells and tissues without destroying them at all and yet when it comes to the abnormal cells and tissue, will destroy them. The whole difficulty is to get some ray that will destroy the evil or the diseased part of the body while leaving alive the good or the healthy parts. Now that’s the basic problem of our dear Creator. You can see it in various places but you could see it in Genesis 18, if you want to look there. It’s stated very clearly by Abraham in that record of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. You remember God decided that the two communities had rebelled against him so much that there was just no point in letting them continue. He determined to wipe them off the face of the earth. And you get this problem of destroying the evil and preserving the good brought up in Abraham’s prayer to God. Abraham is praying to the Father. Genesis 18:22-26, “Then Abraham drew near, and said, ‘Wilt thou indeed destroy the righteous with the wicked?’ (You see that was the question, “Will you destroy the righteous with the wicked?”) Suppose there are fifty righteous within the city; wilt thou then destroy the place and not spare it for the fifty righteous who are in it? (And then this is God’s nature you see, and this is the dilemma that he faces), Far be it from thee to do such a thing, to slay the righteous with the wicked, so that the righteous fare as the wicked! Far be that from thee! Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?’ And the LORD said, ‘If I find at Sodom fifty righteous in the city, I will spare the whole place for their sake.’” So obviously, God did not have to think a second time. Obviously with an infinite mind such as he had, he had already decided this issue “in the lamb that was slain from the foundation of the world.” But he allowed this conversation to be recorded to bring before us men and women that this was a real issue that he had to face. There was a real difficulty that a holy and loving God had to face when he met evil. If he was really holy, he had to destroy the evil. But if he was really loving, he had to preserve the good. This was the difficulty that ran through all God’s dealings with men. If God was loving then he wouldn’t just wipe out the evil and the good together. He would destroy just the evil. Yet if he was really loving, he would want to destroy the evil for the sake of the others who had to be preserved. Now we saw last Sunday that again God faced that problem when we men and women decided to live independent of him for our own motives of profit, power and success. At that time God had to come down and destroy the whole place with a flood. And that same problem comes up in Genesis 6:6-8. Again there was the problem; there was some evil here but there was also some good. Genesis 6:6-8: “And the LORD was sorry that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart. So the LORD said, ‘I will blot out man whom I have created from the face of the ground, man and beast and creeping things and birds of the air, for I am sorry that I have made them.’ But Noah found favor in the eyes of the LORD.” You see that problem coming up again: how to destroy the evil and yet preserve what was good. I think all of us would agree that a holy and just God is committed to destroying evil. I think you’d agree with that. If you’re really a holy God then you destroy all unholiness. If you really think that holiness is the thing and is the thing that will make people happiest, then you’ll destroy its opposite every time you come across it. So I think most of us would agree with that. Don’t you think that all of us from our own subjective personal experiences would agree that there must somewhere be in the universe, a supernatural power that is able to destroy that evil will that we find so often inside us? I think most of us would agree with that. But there probably isn’t one of us here who has not found within us a selfish evil will that we cannot tackle ourselves. We know somewhere there has to be a power that is so supernatural, so mighty, so loving and so just that he’ll destroy this wherever he sees it and yet preserve me myself. I don’t think there’s one of us here that has not found resentment rising up inside us which knocks our stomach. I don’t think there’s one of us here that has not found anger flaming out against those we ought to love. We know, “Yes, somebody must be able to destroy that.” We’ve tried to destroy these things ourselves but we’re unable to. Or we’ve found sarcasm that drops so quickly from our lips when we’re in a debate or a discussion with somebody and we say, “There must be somebody who can destroy that rising sarcasm inside me.” Or we’ve fought lust that fills our minds with perverted thoughts for so long that we feel, “There must be somebody who can destroy that lust.” In other words, dear ones, there’s probably not one of us here this morning who wouldn’t say, “Yes, I’ve tried to destroy those things inside myself for years and I can’t. Those things are destroying my life. Yes, there must be some supernatural power who is able to destroy that.” But the problem is, to destroy it and preserve us. Now you may say, “Well, why if God is able to do this, why do so many of us, even those who call ourselves Christians, why do we live in the midst of lives that are limited by lust, in the midst of lives that are spoiled by sarcasm, in the midst of lives that are destroyed by our anger and our bad temper, why do we live this way if God Himself is actually able to destroy these things?” I think one of the reasons is that we have never really seen that that is the issue dealt with in Jesus’ death. We really haven’t seen that that’s the problem that God solved in Jesus’ death: how to destroy evil and preserve us at the same time, how to avoid wiping us off the face of the earth forever with a flood. That’s the issue that is dealt with in the death of Jesus. Of course for years, we have not been taught that. For years, we’ve been taught that Jesus’ death doesn’t deal with that at all. We’ve been taught that Jesus’ death enables God to love us. We’ve been taught for years, “God hated us until Jesus died on Calvary and then from then on he loved us along with our sin.” In actual fact, God has always loved us and he has always hated our sin. But for years we’ve been taught that Jesus died to enable God to love us because before he died, he did not love us. That’s why secular psychologists will often differ from the evangelical Christian world today. In some things they’ll be right. They’ll say, “That’s silly. Don’t tell people that God doesn’t love them. God loves them. God loves even the rebellious people.” And in that they’re right, the psychologists are right. God has always loved us. The purpose of Jesus’ death wasn’t to enable God to love us. It was to deal with the other issue that we mentioned at the beginning. The tragedy with the secular psychologist is, he says, “God not only loves you but there’s no evil in you that is bad enough to cause you any guilt. So you shouldn’t have any guilt.” It’s rather interesting, the evangelicals do the same thing actually because they say, “God couldn’t love you until Jesus died for you, but now that Jesus has died, God loves you and loves your sin as well. So you can come with your sin and God will keep loving you.” And so, both the secular psychologist and the ordinary evangelical end up producing the same terrible, unscriptural person: a person who lives without guilt in the midst of his sin. And so often that’s what has put us off churches and Christianity. We’ve seen a lot of people who’ve said, “Oh God has forgiven me my sins.” But they’re living in the midst of anger, in the midst of strife, in the midst of argument and in the midst of hatred. So many of us were put off churches because we found the official board arguing, disagreeing, hating, and talking about one another after service. Now that’s what results from thinking that the death of Jesus is there to show us the love of God. The death of Jesus isn’t there for that at all and yet we’ve been encouraged to believe that. The issue in Jesus’ death is not God’s love. God loves every one of us in this theater this morning. God loves the prostitute that at this moment is engaged in intercourse in some little apartment in Paris. God loves that dear girl, loves her with all his heart. God loves the member of the mafia who is at this moment, planning to murder someone else. God loves that man. Brothers and sisters, the issue is not God’s love. God loves us all. The issue is, how can a God who is loving accept rebellious people without destroying their rebellion? The answer is he has to find some way to destroy the rebellion in order to accept them at all. Now you’ll find that God was always loving. Even if you go back to the first murderer, you’ll see it. If you’ll look at Genesis 4, you’ll see that the Father never had trouble loving those of us who were sinners. You remember Cain was the first one to murder in the world. Genesis 4:10-13: “And the LORD said, ‘What have you done? (he said this to Cain) The voice of your brother’s blood is crying to me from the ground. And now you are cursed from the ground, which has opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand. When you till the ground, it shall no longer yield to you its strength; you shall be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth.’ Cain said to the LORD, ‘My punishment is greater than I can bear.’” But, in actual fact it wasn’t. God could have given him a punishment that was greater than he could bear. He could have destroyed him. Instead, he designed a plan whereby Cain could, if he wanted, come back to God. Genesis 4:14: “Behold, thou hast driven me this day away from the ground; and from thy face I shall be hidden; and I shall be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth, and whoever finds me will slay me.” God even showed his love in protecting him. Geneis 4:15 “Then the LORD said to him, ‘Not so! If any one slays Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold.’ And the LORD put a mark on Cain, lest any who came upon him should kill him.” And so God arranged for a plan that would enable Cain to come back to the Father if he wanted him to. Genesis 4:16: “Then Cain went away from the presence of the LORD, and dwelt in the land of Nod, east of Eden.” In other words, God did not fail to love Cain. He actually provided a way for Cain to come back to him. God does love sinners dear ones, it’s obvious. John 8:3 shows a kind of love that many of us would be slow to express primarily because we are so hyperconscious of sexual sins, I think unfairly. Therefore we often don’t see criticism of others as being as serious as it really is. John 8:3-11 : ”The scribes and the Pharisees brought a woman who had been caught in adultery, and placing her in the midst they said to him, ‘Teacher, this woman has been caught in the act of adultery. Now in the law Moses commanded us to stone such. What do you say about her?’ This they said to test him, that they might have some charge to bring against him. Jesus bent down and wrote with his finger on the ground. And as they continued to ask him, he stood up and said to them, ‘Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her.’ And once more he bent down and wrote with his finger on the ground. But when they heard it, they went away, one by one, beginning with the eldest, and Jesus was left alone with the woman standing before him. Jesus looked up and said to her, ‘Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you’ She said, ‘No one, Lord.’ And Jesus said, ‘Neither do I condemn you; go, and do not sin again.’” The issue dealt with at Calvary was not God’s love. God loved us. The issue dealt with at Calvary was how to destroy the evil in you and me and yet enable us to keep on living. Unfortunately, a total imaginary issue has been raised down through the years as the one dealt with at Calvary. That issue was that God couldn’t forgive us and didn’t love us until he was able to kill Jesus in our place. Then, after he killed the wrong person, he was suddenly able to love us. Even to a child this seems ridiculous. It seems that God is a petulant tyrant who won’t love until he gets a sacrifice offered to him. Now brothers and sisters, that wasn’t what happened at Calvary. What happened at Calvary was that God actually destroyed the evil in you and me in Jesus so that we would be able to stay alive ourselves. But this other idea is taught so much that we begin to feel that Jesus died so that God could love us. And so what happens when we come to a verse like Romans 6:3 is then we interpret it purely symbolically. Romans 6:3, “Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?” With our normal interpretation of Jesus’ death as being the step that enabled God to love us, we say, “Oh Paul, you’ve done it again. That’s a beautiful metaphor. We can see that we’re baptized into God’s family because Jesus’ death enables God to love us. That’s a lovely metaphor that you have. You’re just as cool as ever with your little illustrations. You’re saying in a kind of strange sense that we’ve been baptized into Jesus’ death. Oh that’s neat. We know it’s not true, but it’s neat because we understand Paul that of course, Jesus died instead of us, that was the whole point. Jesus died instead of us so that God would have his anger satisfied and he could forgive us. That’s a neat metaphor that you have, a neat little illustration.” And that’s really the way the greater part of the Christian world has looked at Romans 6. They’ve looked at it as a metaphor and as a symbol. They’ve said, “That’s a beautiful symbol. We know of course, we’re not baptized into Jesus’ death. We know we’re here, bright and alive and living. We know that Jesus died so that we wouldn’t have to die and so, we know it’s just a metaphor.” Yet it sticks in your throat, as you go on to the next verse. You feel that Paul is beginning to draw out a metaphor rather too far. He’s beginning to be a bit ridiculous about it. You can accept a metaphor but when you begin to build a whole truth of regeneration and sanctification upon a metaphor and its extension, then you begin to feel that the fellow must be illogical. And so he goes on in Romans 6:4 – “We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death.” Loved ones, I know it sounds ridiculous but the bulk of the Christian world has held up its hands in horror and said, “Now Paul, back off. Buried with him? Now don’t carry it too far. We can see that in some strange sense you can say that we’re baptized into his death. But don’t say now we’re buried with him because we know that didn’t happen.” In other words loved ones, you can’t interpret this symbolically. You can’t interpret these verses as a beautiful metaphor. You have to begin to see that what God did in Jesus’ death was to take the evil will, the evil selfish will that produces the lust and the anger and the pride in you and me, and God destroyed it in Jesus. That’s the only way a just and holy God could ever forgive people like ourselves. You see, God has always loved us. There’s no problem with that. But as a just and holy God, God can never forgive rebellion. You can see that in ordinary political affairs. You can’t forgive rebellion. You can forgive rebels after they lay down their arms but you can’t forgive rebellion. You can’t forgive a person who continues to be angry and continues to lust. That would be encouraging the very destruction that you sent the flood to stop and to limit when it first occurred in the world. In other words, God is loving to all of us. He loves every one of us in this theatre. He loves you whatever you’ve done. Brothers and sisters, there’s no problem with that. Nobody’s disagreeing with that. God loves every one of us with all his heart. He knows you by name. But he can never love the evil in you because if he does, he knows that will destroy his world. The only way God can ever forgive you is to put the evil in you into his Son Jesus and in a cosmic eternal event of Jesus’ death on Calvary, destroy that evil by the supernatural power of his Holy Spirit. That’s what Calvary is all about. God destroyed the rebellion there so that he could forgive the rebels. He destroyed the lust there so that he could forgive the prostitute. He destroyed the dishonesty and the lies there so that he could forgive the thief. He destroyed the sarcasm there so that he could forgive the shrewd. He destroyed the cruelty there so that he could forgive the tyrant. That’s what happened in Jesus’ death and that’s more and more the way we need to see it. That’s what you and I have not done for so long. We’ve taken a purely intellectual attitude to Jesus’ death and thought, “It’s a nice illustration that God loves us with all his heart and he’s prepared to forgive us.” No. Unless we come into a real, vital, subjective experience of Jesus’ death, God cannot eliminate the evil in us so that in fact he will be able to preserve the good. There is a real need to see that Paul means what he says, “We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.” You may say, “I still have lust. I still have envy and anger in my heart. It comes up again and again and I cannot control it. What do I do?” Well brothers and sisters, begin to see that God, by a miracle, dealt with that in Jesus. First of all, see that it has been destroyed by God. Then see that you need to enter into this experientially yourself and that it is possible. That’s why we talk about the victorious life. It is possible to live above lust, above anger, above pride and above jealousy, if you are willing to take part in actual fact, in the death in which you have taken part historically, as far as God is concerned. In other words, begin to ask the Holy Spirit. Ask him, “Holy Spirit, I can see that this was destroyed in Jesus’ death on Calvary but it hasn’t been destroyed in me. Now will you begin to show me? Will you begin to reveal to me how this can take place in me?” Just one other thing brothers and sisters — I agree with you that a lot of us have not known this light. I was not brought up in this. I was brought up to believe the old system that God didn’t love me until Jesus died for me. Then God was able to love me along with my sin. I wasn’t brought up this way. So if you say, “Now this is a shock to me brother, how do I face this?” Brothers and sisters, if you have really received Jesus’ Spirit in a new birth experience, then your spirit will rise to this. You’ll say, “Look, if this is what enabled God to justify me and to be justified in forgiving me through his destruction of evil in Jesus, then this is what I want in my own life.” But if you have not really received Jesus’ Spirit, then when you come to this truth, you’ll back off from it. You’ll call it an ascetic experience. You’ll call it extremism. You’ll say, “No, this isn’t the Gospel.” But if the spirit in you is really the Spirit of Jesus, then you will rise to this. You will say, “Well, it isn’t real yet in my own life but that’s what I want. Father, if you could only forgive me by destroying the evil in me in Jesus then I want that made real in my own life.” You know it appeals to you, doesn’t it? It appeals to you that a holy God can’t suddenly change his mind and say, “I don’t mind lust or anger or envy.” You know, he can’t suddenly change his mind because of even the death of his Son and say, “No, I no longer hate those things. I want a heaven full of people who lust, are angry, envious and jealous.” It just doesn’t make sense. It makes sense to us that a holy God has to find some way of destroying the evil in us and yet enabling us to stay alive. The way is, by entering into Jesus’ death by faith so that we don’t have to enter into a physical death such as was caused by the flood. I’ll stop there just for a moment. I know that sometimes you don’t want to ask questions and I understand that. But we would have maybe 30 seconds for questions. Now, we’ll be on Romans 6 for some time so you’ll have plenty of opportunity to begin to get the implications of it. Don’t be concerned if you don’t grasp it all this morning. Question from Audience: What about those who haven’t died understanding this light? Reply from Pastor O’Neill: I think of my dad who died as a Christian. He certainly knew nothing about the teaching of the Holy Spirit or the teaching of the Cross of Christ in this sense. He understood the forgiveness of sins. It seems to me we’re judged by the light that’s been given us. The Father lovingly accepts us according to the way we have responded to the light that he has shown us. In other words, we’re not teaching something extra above salvation. We’re saying this is what salvation includes; now let’s see all of what was entered into. Question from Audience: Then what does God do with the evil that is in man? Reply from Pastor O’Neill: He deals with it according to their reception of what he has already shown them. He begins to destroy that evil in them even now. It’s the same as he must have dealt with the Old Testament people before Jesus died. In fact, Jesus visited hell you remember to deal with those Old Testament people. Question: (inaudible) Pastor O’Neill: Sister says what I think many of us have been thinking. Surely in death you’ll never have all the evil destroyed in you and it’s a matter of just saying to God, “Well, I’ve tried to obey you and I know there’s a lot in me that is still wrong.” And that is some of what will be changed. You’ll never enter into perfection. Now, it seems brothers and sisters that Jesus plainly told us that there will be a mighty change that is wrought when we die. There will be many ways in which we have not entered into the perfection of God. We won’t have his perfect mind. We won’t have his perfect balanced emotions, though they should be much more balanced then they are by that time. The mind should be a little more balanced than it is at the moment. But you’re right that obviously we won’t be in the absolute perfection of God. There will have to be a mighty change wrought when we die. Nevertheless sister, it is false to claim that there is no degree of perfect obedience that can come about in this life. It seems that’s what Jesus meant when he said, “Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect.” He had just been talking about the love of God and he obviously meant, “Be at least perfect in love.” It does seem to us that as we go on through in Romans 6, we begin to see that God’s will is for us to be perfect in our obedience. We cannot be perfect in the sense that we conform absolutely to his perfection in every detail. We’ll still make mistakes. We’ll still do things by ignorance. We’ll still do things unintentionally. But we can come to a place where we can obey him perfectly. That is, we can do what we know we ought to do. That’s what we’re talking about. We’re talking about that anger that we know we shouldn’t have. That’s what brings guilt to our hearts and destroys our family life. We’re talking about those things that we know are wrong and that we cannot overcome. Those are the things that God can change in Jesus’ death. It seems to me for so long, we who have been in Christian churches have excused ourselves. We have said, “No, we’re only human. We can’t be free of these things.” While the humanist has been looking on and saying, “I live a far more ethical life than you do. Why should I want Jesus?” So I think it’s important for us to see that yes, there is some perfection that we can only enter into when we die — but there is a perfect obedience that is God’s will for us to enter into in this life. Yet, we are never justified by that perfect obedience. We are justified only by one thing, by the blood of Jesus. So brothers and sisters, will you keep thinking and keep alive on the issue so that you can push me either with written questions or in the coming meetings. Question from Audience: Does the perfect obedience contribute to our salvation? Reply from Pastor O’Neill: No. Otherwise it’s salvation by works. The perfect obedience is a result of salvation, not a condition of it. There’s only one condition of salvation and that is being willing to identify ourselves with Jesus. We should do as much as the Holy Spirit reveals to us. The Greek is “into Jesus”, to believe into Jesus. Loved ones, what we’re talking about now in Romans 6 is the result of salvation. What I am trying to say to you is, look you’ve entered into a great hall. Now let’s put on the lights and see what is in this hall. That’s really what I am saying. You’ve come into it; now let’s see what is in it. These are some of the beauties that I think we’ve missed. Let us pray. Dear Father, we thank you that there is only one reason why you can accept us and that is because Jesus has died. Father we thank you for that. We thank you that the reason that you are able to accept us because of his death, is that there in him, you destroyed the evil that is in us. By the power of the Holy Spirit you can graciously make that real in our own lives here today. Father, we know that we’ll always be on the way to experiencing this fully but we tell you, we want to experience as much of it as possible while we’re still alive here. Father we want others to see your Son Jesus and not to see our ugliness. We trust you by the Holy Spirit to begin to deal with us more and more so that we will seek and enter into the reality that we were buried with Jesus by baptism into death so that as he was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we might begin to walk in newness of life. We trust that this newness of life will fill the world with your glory and with your will. We ask this in your name. Amen.

Death to the Selfish Will Romans 6:6 Sermon Transcript by Rev. Ernest O’Neill Would you turn to Romans 6:6? It was really the truth in this verse that the Spirit used to transform my life after I had been a Christian for 12 or 13 years. Romans 6:6 – “We know that our old self was crucified with him so that the sinful body might be destroyed, and we might no longer be enslaved to sin.” For years I understood it intellectually but it wasn’t real inside at all. Have you ever received a newspaper from your hometown? I got one from Belfast, Northern Ireland just this last week. It really looks terribly provincial doesn’t it when you read back and find out what they’re arguing about. My newspaper was filled with the shootings and the bombings. There were several instances. Last month the terrorists set a building on fire and one fireman called Morrison was trying to put it out to prevent it spreading to other houses. He was shot in the back by other terrorists while he was trying to put the fire out. In another situation, a policeman called Douglas went out into the middle of the road to try to lift a lady who had been hurt in a car accident and take her over to the ambulance. A terrorist shot him in the back four times, as he was lifting her off the pavement. It’s that kind of incident that makes you realize that man’s inhumanity to man is almost beyond description. And you read of Lee Kessler, the prisoner of war, and the tortures he went through with the wire and the rope tortures. You remember the communist jailors beat him for three days solid. He had that broken leg, you remember, with gangrene setting in. And that kind of thing just seems unbelievable, doesn’t it? The thing is that kind of inhumanity of man to man that is making a lot of even humanist intellectuals begin to suspect that the power of evil in the world is really a hideous personal being of some kind. They were all very skeptical of that whole idea for a long time. But it seems it’s the only way now to explain it. Or you look at the whole Watergate affair [American political scandal] and you see the deviousness of it, whoever you’re supporting. The thing is full of lies and back room subterfuge of all kinds. You begin to feel that there’s such lying and deceit in our world that there just has to be a supernatural being of some kind that is bringing it all about. It just seems, brothers and sisters, that we men and women could not hate each other so much that we’d do these things to each other on our own. It’s just hard to know what to make of it. And wherever you look it seems that as evil works itself out more and more in our world we seem to realize repeatedly that it’s not just an absence of good in our world but it’s a real positive presence of evil. I am sure you felt the same when you’ve seen things with absolute foolishness and hideousness like “Deep Throat” [a pornographic movie] and that getting even as far as it has in our world. You begin to realize some of the most hideous things that go on in the world of the mafia, seem to be going on even in our own society. You begin to look at a case like the Charles Manson case, where ritual murder takes place and you think that kind of thing couldn’t happen in a civilized country. It seems, doesn’t it, that evil is a positive power. It seems it’s not just the absence of good or neighborliness. It seems that there’s a positive, supernatural being of some kind that infuses into us intense, overwhelming hatred for each other. Certainly in your heart and mine, even when we’re at our worst, it’s hard to work up that kind of hatred, isn’t it. It really does seem, doesn’t it, that independence of God, or sin, is an actual power in our world. Yet it’s hard really to know how it started at all, isn’t it? I mean the world was obviously good at the beginning. It was obviously planned in such a way that it would develop beautifully. You remember how God arranged it if you would like to look at Genesis 1:28. I know we’ve looked at the verse before but I think it’s good to look back to how things were. They seem to have got into such a mess today. Genesis 1:28 – “And God blessed them, and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.’” And obviously at the beginning it was really good. We all knew what we were here for. We were to be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion. God presumably directed us as to what we should do. He gave us tasks and responsibilities. Therefore we had a sense that we were accepted by him. We had a feeling of approval when we did these things. We had a feeling that the great Significant Other behind the universe recognized us and knew us. We felt that sense of approval. We knew what we were here for and we knew what we had to do. God arranged all provisions for us. In Genesis 1:29 God said, “Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food.” Obviously God provided for us. We had food, shelter and clothing as we needed it. At the beginning it was his plan that we would just rest in him, do what he had given us to do and he would provide the necessary shelter, food and clothing for us. We wouldn’t have to scavenge for it and we wouldn’t have to hoard it when we got it. So it was really a restful situation. God gave us tasks to do and he provided for our needs. Then you remember in Genesis 2:9, he went really even further. Genesis 2:9 – “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.” So that we wouldn’t have to try to produce emotional or spiritual thrills artificially, God provided His own life, the life of His own Spirit in us so that we really could have satisfaction deep down spiritually and deep down satisfaction emotionally. God gave us the life of that Holy Spirit to give us a sense of enjoyment, happiness, joy and peace. And really the whole thing was beautifully arranged. But, an alien power of some kind, a supernatural power of some kind suggested a whole new set of motives and desires that we should live by. That’s really where the thing went wrong. This power suggested to us, “Why be ruled by God? Why accept the task he gives you? Why don’t you command instead of rule? Why spend your life obeying God? Why not spend your life making other people obey you? Why spend your life doing what your Creator wants you to do? Why not spend your life making other people do what you want them to do? Why spend your life looking for God’s recognition and approval? Why not make other people approve of you by forcing them to do what you want them to do?” Gradually we began to work on that principle. We began to work on the principle that it was our right to rule over other people and that we ought to gain our approval from them by forcing them to obey us. And so, the desire for power began to become almost a personal presence of evil in our world. This supernatural being suggested to us, “Now listen, why depend on God for your food, your shelter and your clothing? Why wait for him to tell you what you need? Why not get what you need and what you want whenever you want it? Why not get the food and the clothing and the shelter that you want and take all of it that you need, whatever that means to anyone else?” And so the whole urge for profit, for getting the things that we wanted came because we no longer could trust God for it. This urge began to take over many of our lives. We began to live in order to get. That spiritual power suggested to us, “Listen, why depend on God for your joy and peace? Why not be successful in this world? Get success for yourself and force other people to give you enjoyment and pleasure when you want it. It doesn’t matter whose life you spoil, why not get enjoyment and satisfaction for yourself?” So, we went on that tremendous kick just to enjoy ourselves whatever the cost. Those motives and desires for profit, power and success have become the ruling passion of our world. They really have and you know it. That’s what has turned the place into a hell instead of the heaven that was planned to be. You know yourselves that most of us live for profit, power, and success. We’ll kill and we’ll shoot and we’ll bomb in order to get profit. You can see it. We look at the international affair. We tear President Richard Nixon apart and we tear anybody else apart but what the politicians do is an expression of what the nation is. You know in your own heart that often we will do anything for profit. We’ll do anything to get what we want and we’ll lie and we’ll deceive for power. We’ll manipulate other people to get a sense of controlling a situation. You know how often you have lied over an assignment because you want to be able to manipulate that situation as you want. You want to be able to miss the assignment and yet manipulate the situation so that you don’t suffer for it. We tend to see that in international affairs but we’re so slow to see it in our own lives. It’s the same for success. You know how many of us will scramble over the top of the heap any way we can, to get success. To get success in our wife’s eyes, to get success in our children’s eyes, our friends, eyes or our peers’ eyes. Now brothers and sisters, it’s that power that governs so much of the world, that the Bible calls sin. It’s that desire to live as if there’s no God. And once you decide to live as if there’s no God, you have to make some provision for your own needs, for your own physical needs, for your own emotional needs, for the needs of your own mind. Those were all provided for by God’s plan — but once you live as if there’s no God, those needs begin to dominate your life. And that becomes a driving personal power of evil inside you. And that’s really how it all came about. We took good needs that God had — needs of hunger and needs of propagating the race — and we perverted them into gluttony and into lust. We took a real need to obey God and we turned it into a need to command other people. We took a real need of having God approve of us and we substituted the need for having everybody else approve of us. And so many of us are governed by that. That’s what that verse means you see, in Romans 6:6. It’s at the end of the verse and it talks, you remember, about being enslaved to sin. Romans 6:6, “That we might no longer be enslaved to sin.” Many of us find ourselves totally enslaved to those desires and you know it. At times when you really want to love other people that old desire for profit gets hold of you and you just want your way whatever it costs to him. There are times when we really want to be willing to do without enjoyment and to receive the enjoyment that God gives us. But that old desire inside us says, “No, we want enjoyment.” And so that power of sin, wanting to live without God, enslaves many of us so that we’re not free people at all. You realize it every time you lose your temper. You realize it every time you’re envious, every time you’re impatient, every time lust gets the upper hand of you. You realize, “I am not a free man, a free woman. I talk a lot about free will but I am not free. I am enslaved to this power inside me.” Now it is interesting, isn’t it, to see that that power often uses the body to express itself, when you think of it. It seems that in order to get satisfaction for these things, we have often ended up with our bodies. We weren’t getting the thing from God through our spirit and so many of us ended up trying to get them through our body. For instance, exhilaration, the exhilaration and the sense of elation that the Holy Spirit gives, most of us have tried to produce that by working the system backwards through drugs. You try to pump certain chemicals into your body to give you a kind of emotional lift that will produce the elation and exhilaration that should actually come from God’s Spirit. It’s interesting how we’ve gone to our bodies to find that. We’ve done the same with alcohol. We’re meant to live in complete peace without a worry in the world, trusting the Father for every day’s need. But we found ourselves bound by worries and so we take alcohol to try to fly high and clear of it (the worries) for a little while. It’s interesting how we use our bodies to try to bring the substitutes for what we can get from God only. The body becomes almost a way of expressing this attitude of sin or independence of God. It’s the same when you think of food, clothing and shelter. Isn’t it true that rich and poor alike in our world, seem utterly preoccupied with getting what the cavemen were preoccupied with getting — something to cover our bodies, something to cover themselves from the rain (a shelter of some kind) and food to fill them and enable them to work the next day. It is strange, isn’t it, that even here in our highly prosperous society that most of us are still preoccupied with food, clothing, and shelter. It doesn’t matter if you’re Paul Getty. It doesn’t matter if you’re Onassis. It doesn’t matter if you’re the poorest person in the theater here, we all seem to be preoccupied with those bodily needs that we have. It’s interesting that the body begins to be the method we have of expressing this independence of God to the world and of fulfilling the needs. You think of it even as far as ruling other people. I know we stop clubbing our wives, (most of us?) but we haven’t stopped our B52s [a type of bomber plane]. It’s strange that in international affairs and certainly in some other subtle situations, the body is still the method. The might is still the right. We still use our bodies to make other people do what we want them to do in all kinds of subtle ways. Now do you see that’s why God called the body “the body of sin”? Because it is the instrument by which we express our independence of God. So often it has become our method of being independent of God and of getting what we need without God’s help. That’s why that phrase appears in Romans 6:6. Romans 6:6 – “We know that our old self was crucified with him so that the sinful body might be destroyed.” The Greek is “the body of sin” and it doesn’t mean that the body is sinful. It doesn’t mean that your body is evil. The Manicheans and heretics went away out in that direction. They said the body is evil. It isn’t. God is not teaching that the body is evil. He is teaching that it often becomes a body of sin. It’s often the instrument by which we express our independence of God. For instance, we’ve only to look at a person coming through withdrawal from drugs to see that the body has got used to doing something in a way that is independent of God. It almost has to have the whole process reversed. So the body has in a sense become a body of sin — a body used to fulfilling its needs independent of God. That’s why that phrase “body of sin” is used. Now why do we all get into this position? It’s because we want to. I know you’ll say to me, “Oh brother, I don’t want to. I don’t want to lose my temper. I don’t want to get angry. I don’t want to rule over other people. I don’t want to get what I want independent of what it costs anybody else. I don’t want to enjoy myself whoever else suffers.” But brothers and sisters, I say it in love, “You do and that’s why we do it.” There’s something inside each of us that makes us want to do these things. There’s a selfish will inside us that makes us want to be God of our own lives and do our thing the way we want to do it and have our own way and insist on our own rights whoever suffers. Really loved ones, there’s just something in each one of us that is a selfish will — an evil will. You may say, “I see that. That’s the very thing I can’t do anything about. I can’t do anything about that evil will.” Brothers and sisters, that’s what this verse says — that GOD has done something about it. You’re dead right. A selfish will can’t destroy a selfish will. You can’t make yourself good with all the willing in the world. But God has destroyed that selfish will miraculously in Jesus. That’s why he destroyed us all in Jesus. It’s the evil will that is the only truly evil thing in the world. Cancer is bad, promiscuity is bad. All those things are bad. But finally the only thing really evil is an evil will and that’s what God destroyed in Jesus. A lot of people have made the mistake that we ought to destroy the body, the body by which this independence is expressed. That led us into asceticism and all kinds of masochistic practices. We thought, “The body is an evil thing. If you can bring down the body, then you’ll be free from lust, and you’ll be free from gluttony.” Of course it was a heresy. The body was not the problem at all. A lot of people said, “Oh, if you can destroy sin, that’s the problem. Take sin out of the world and you’ll be okay.” Loved ones, you can’t destroy that personal power of evil in the world. It resides in thousands and thousands of people. You meet it every day you go out. You can’t destroy that. You see what God did. He destroyed the middleman. He destroyed the link that connects the power of evil up with your body — that miserable selfish will. Do you see the way the verse reads if you look at it now? Romans 6:6, “We know that our old self”, (the old selfish will, the old right to itself, the old desire to have its own way), “was crucified with him”, (with Jesus), “So that the sinful body”, (or the body that was used to being the instrument of sin), “might be destroyed”, (the word in Greek is ‘rendered inoperative’), “so that that the sinful body might be left unemployed”, (as far as sin was concerned), “and we might no longer be enslaved to sin.” Now brothers and sisters, that’s the beginning of the secret of victory in our lives. I know that God will elaborate it for us in these coming Sundays because Paul goes on to talk about this in greater depth. But do you see the heart of the answer to victory is, you cannot will it yourself, but you can be willing for God to destroy that selfish will in you. You can be willing for God to make that destruction real in you. About 10 years ago, my life changed. I am sure that in many ways my wife, who knows me well, can see I need to change further. But my life changed from being an out-and-out hypocrite — pretending all the time but never sensing the thing (old sinful nature) inside myself. I came to see that I could not overcome my own selfish will but God had already destroyed it in Jesus and he, by the Holy Spirit, would make that real in me if I was willing. The heart of it is, are you willing to give him the right to do that? That’s really it. Are you willing to give the Creator who made you, the right to destroy your right to your own way? That’s really it and that’s a pretty deep thing. It took me several weeks and months to think that over before I could decide who was going to be God. I think with most of us, that’s really what we need to do. That’s a big surrender. I would tell you this — that if you are willing, God actually does a miracle. God actually does destroy that selfish will, if you’re willing for him to do it. So it is a real miracle. Let’s pray. Dear Father, we thank you that you have done the impossible. You have done something about this will that wriggles and rebels inside us. Father we have been struggling for years to overcome it by will power and by substituting better habits. But Father we see now that we’ve been trying to change something that we are incapable of changing. We thank you Lord that you have brought an answer that is real. We thank you Father that you did not destroy Jesus instead of us. You destroyed us with Jesus. And you, by the power of the Holy Spirit, as the God of eternity, who sees the past and the future all in one great moment, you are able to lift us into that eternal place where there is no past and there is no future. And by the power of the Holy Spirit, you are able to make that death and destruction real in us, here in the 20th century. Father, we thank you for that. I pray Father for my brothers and sisters, to whom this is as baffling as it was to me at the beginning. I pray that you, by the Holy Spirit, will as the Sundays pass, make this more and more clear to each one of us. Father, above all I pray that we’ll see that when we give you the right to take away our right to our own way, in all kinds of little unimportant things and in all big things, then you’re able to fill it completely with your Holy Spirit and make the crucifixion of Christ real in us. Thank you Father that the work has already been done. Thank you that we don’t need to strangle the selfish will. Thank you that it has already been crucified in Jesus. We thank you for that Father in Jesus’ name. Amen.

Freedom From Sin Romans 6:7 Sermon Transcript by Rev. Ernest O’Neill You’ve just had one of those monumental battles with your roommate. Either he left his socks on the table for the 25th time or she left her stockings hanging from the light in the middle of the room. Tempers flew and everybody lost control. But there’s a little spirit inside you that is saying, “This is stupid. Go and apologize and make the thing up and make it right.” But there’s another power inside you that says, “No, I had a right to say what I said.” I don’t know that there’s one of us here in the theater who hasn’t experienced that. An explanation of it is that when Jesus died and was raised from the dead by God, his Spirit was let loose in the world. His Spirit is working in every one of us in situations that can be rectified. His Spirit is working in us trying to get us to be like Jesus himself was in his physical body. In other words, he is trying to get us to be kind to other people, to people who hurt us. He is trying to get us to be gentle with people. He is trying to get us to be understanding. He is trying to get us to defend others’ reputations even if it means losing our own. His Spirit is always trying to reproduce in you and me, in a critical moment, what he Himself wants to do. That’s the explanation of that Spirit inside us that says, “Look, apologize. Go and make the thing up. Don’t run a cold war for the next three days. Settle the thing and get it right.” It’s Jesus’ Spirit that is trying to do that in you and me. That can be with the roommate or it can be with our wives or our husbands or it can be with our moms or our dads. It can be with professors or teachers in school. There comes that critical moment when you could either go the way that Spirit is telling you — or you have this other spirit that seems at times almost an overwhelming force, doesn’t it? It is just determined not to let go. It says, “No. No, you have every right to do what you did. You have every right to say what you said and if you don’t say it they’re going to walk all over you. No, they’ll have socks in your soup. They’ll have stockings hanging all over the place. You have to put your foot down. You are right to express it to them the way you did.” And that force seems so powerful that it almost seems impossible to fight against it. It is a powerful force. It seems an almost supernatural power of independence and rebellion. It seems to be so all pervasive throughout the world that at times you can’t do anything about it. That’s obviously what is breaking out in the streets of our big cities. It’s that force that is also present in every one of us at a time when a situation could be rectified if we would only respond to this Spirit of Jesus inside. In fact some of our psychologists say the force is utterly impossible to resist. Tom Skinner would say that no man is free. He would say no human being is free to do anything. No human being is free to react against this determinism that is brought about by his hereditary environment. There are many psychologists who spend all their time not studying the perfect man but studying imperfect man. They come up with the conclusion, “You can’t do anything about this force, you just have to work with it, and you can’t do anything about it”. Now, brothers and sisters, Jesus died because God had to destroy that force in us. If God hadn’t destroyed that force in us, he would have been stupid to let us continue to live at all because that force is so ugly. That desire to be our own men and our own women, to have our own way whatever it costs anybody else; that determination to stand up for our own rights whatever it costs anyone, that would destroy the world if it was let loose in an unrestrained way. That’s why Jesus died. God had the alternative of wiping us all out with a flood or putting us all into Jesus and destroying that force in Jesus. And that’s what he did. That’s really why Jesus died — because God had to have some way of neutralizing that force if he were going to let us continue to live in his world. In actual fact that force has been utilized. That’s what it really means in Romans 6:6 you remember, if you like to look at it. Romams 6:6, “We know that our old self was crucified with him so that the sinful body might be destroyed, and we might no longer be enslaved to sin.” And that’s why Jesus died. That old self inside us that wants its own way, that insists on its own rights, that wants to walk over everybody else, that bursts out in temper, envy, anger and lust, that old self is so powerful and such a supernatural force of independence and rebellion against God that God had to destroy it in Jesus. That’s what that means. “Our old self was crucified with Jesus.” That’s why we’re so stupid when we try the cold showers for the lust or we try the power of positive thinking for envy and jealousy or we try some of Dale Carnegie’s tricks for the inferiority complex. It’s silly. It’s stupid. It’s like beating against a tank moving against you with little wooden sticks. You try to get it to stay back, but it’s moving on and on. It’s hopeless. It’s a supernatural force and you know it. Isn’t that right? When you lose your temper, there’s nothing that can hold it. There’s just nothing. Such a power of envy can come up inside us when we get a ‘D’ and our roommate gets an ‘A minus’ that we can’t hold the thing back. It just bursts out. You know you’re better than her, (she might not know it but you know), and it’s just an overwhelming force within you. Now brothers and sisters, it is a supernatural power of evil. We’re just stupid people when we continue to try to overcome this by the power of positive thinking. Or we say we’re growing in grace. We’re trying to grow in grace and meanwhile this thing is growing more subtle inside us as we’re growing in grace. No, this force is so powerful a supernatural entity that God had to destroy it in Jesus and he did. He really did. He destroyed all that desire for our own way and all our insistence on our own rights. He destroyed all that supernatural power that destroys our lives in Jesus, 1900 years ago. That’s why he has nothing against you and me this morning. Otherwise, he would wipe us right out this morning. But he knows that he has already destroyed that power and so he can afford to let us live for another 60 or 70 years for one purpose — so that we would let him make that real in us. That’s it. If you say to me, “Well brother, you’ve got us into an impossible dilemma here. If God has destroyed all that is wrong in us and has nothing against us, then why don’t I feel reconciled to him this morning?” Loved ones, it’s because reconciliation is a two-fold thing. God has made every arrangement necessary to reconcile you to himself — but until you say to him, “Yes Lord, I accept your arrangement”, you’ll never feel a sense of reconciliation. While you continue to keep that old self alive in you, while you play up to that old self’s need for pride and that old self’s need to have its own way, while you do that, there’ll be no sense of reconciliation between you and God. It’s not that God has anything against you. If you feel guilt this morning, it isn’t because of past independence. God has destroyed all that in Jesus. It’s because you’re saying to him, “Yes, I know what you’ve done but I don’t want that done in me.” That’s really why you feel guilt. In other words, there are two sides to reconciliation. One person can make all the necessary arrangements but unless the other person enters into those, there’s no reconciliation. Now that’s what Romans 6:7 is really stating if you’d look at it. Romans 6:6, “We know that our old self was crucified with him so that the sinful body might be destroyed and we might no longer be enslaved to sin.” We know that we’ve been crucified with Christ. We know that all the power of evil in us has been destroyed. Then in Romans 6:7 is the way to make that real. “For he who has died is freed from sin.” In other words, Romans 6:6 presents God’s solution and attitude. Romans 6:7 presents the change in our attitude that is required in the light of God’s solution. Romans 6:6 shows us how a holy God could forgive unholy people like us and let us continue to live in his universe — because he has already destroyed all the evil in us. Romans 6:7 tells what we unholy people have to do to take advantage of his action. Romans 6:6 would tell the cure and the remedy that the position has provided. Romans 6:7 presents the responsibility of we suffering patients to accept that cure and that remedy. Now that’s the relationship of those two verses. Romans 6:7 is the way to let this thing happen inside us. The only reason we have guilt is not because God has not provided a solution but because we will not accept that solution. We don’t want it. The only reason we have guilt is not that God can’t find a way to forgive us. He has already found a way but we don’t like it. It’s not that God has not done something to deal with that selfish will inside you that you cannot control but it’s that you and I won’t let him deal with it in us. He has already dealt with that selfish will. We just don’t like the way he has done it. That’s why we have guilt, dear ones. In other words, when you wrestle at home or in your room with your own jealousy or self-pity, you say to yourself, “I wish I could overcome this. I wish I could overcome it.” Or brothers, when we wrestle with the whole problem of unclean thoughts and we say, “I wish I could overcome this,” dear brothers and sisters, God has already destroyed those things in Jesus. You and I just won’t let him do it in us. That’s really it. You’re dead right. You can’t destroy them yourself by all the tricks in the world. By all the psychological or physical manipulations you cannot destroy that force inside you. God has destroyed it and will destroy it in you if you will become willing to that. That’s really it. Many of us, of course, continue to have guilt. Many of us even who believe John 3:16 continue to have guilt for this reason. We believe, “God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son that whosoever believes in him should not perish but has eternal life”, and we believe that and we accept it but we still continue to have guilt. Why? It’s because we’re saying to God, “Yes, we realize you’ve done everything in Jesus that is necessary to destroy this selfish will of mine. We believe you and thank you for doing it. But we don’t want you to make it real in us.” God is aware of your resisting his arrangement. That is why you continue to walk not only in weakness and moral impotence but continue to walk in increasing guilt. You see loved ones, it’s no use. It’s no use saying to a surgeon, “I believe you can take this cancer out of my body. I believe you are able enough to do this”, and then never go to him and let him do it. There’s no sense in it. You’re going to die of the cancer. Believing he can do it will change nothing. You have to be willing to let him do it in you. The fact is that only when we have actually died with Jesus do we experience a real freedom from sin in our own lives. Really that’s what is needed for all of us. We need to enter into this real death with Jesus in our own personal lives and then we begin to find ourselves freed from sin. Now, maybe it would be good to just ask, what do we mean “freed from sin”? Well, we mean freed from its power. That’s what Romans is talking about. Romans 6:1-2, “What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound? By no means, how can we, who died to sin, still live in it?” In other words, we’re talking about freedom from the power of sin — not freedom just from the guilt of sin but freedom from its power. What does it mean to be freed from the power of sin? Well, you see in the last part of Romans 6:6, “So that we might no longer be enslaved to sin.” Sin is that supernatural force that makes us want our own way, insists on our own rights, stick up for ourselves, and destroys everybody else in order to defend ourselves. That’s sin. That’s the power of independence and rebellion that wants to be God and wants to rule everybody else’s life and my own life. Now, to be “freed from the power of sin” means you’re no longer a slave to that force. A slave is one who has no rights to disobey the power that is over them. Now to be freed from that means you’re at last free to disobey that force that is working inside you. To cease to be a slave means that you’re at last free to do what you really want to do and what you know is best to do. That’s to be freed from the power of sin. It’s really being free to be able to disobey the force for selfishness inside you. If you say to me, “Is it that you never sin”? That’s not the issue — whether you sin. It’s up to you, and it’s your own fault. At the moment, you can’t help it because you just do it and do it and do it because you can’t disobey that power of selfishness inside you. You can’t stop being angry even if you wanted to. To be freed from that power is to be free to disobey that if you want. If you do sin, it’s your own fault after that. But you see the issue is not, “Does this mean you never sin”? The issue is, “Are you free not to sin if you wanted”? The killer with many of us sitting here this morning is, we’ll admit, “No, I am not free. When that envy comes up inside me, I can’t kill it, whatever I do. When that temper looses inside me, I can’t stop the anger whatever I do to try.” To be freed from the power of sin is to be free from having to sin. It’s to be free not to sin if you don’t want to sin. That’s what results when you at last come into a place where you’re willing for God to make Jesus’ death real in you. Now, what does it mean to die? A lot of people look at these verses and say, “Oh, he who has died is freed from sin. It means when you die physically and leave this world, then you’re freed from sin.” Well dear ones, God isn’t talking here about physical death. You know that. He has just being talking all the time about our death with Jesus. You see it there in verses 3-6 there. Romans 6:3-6, “Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life. For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his.” The whole talk is not of our physical death but of Jesus’ death. Then Paul says, “For he who has died, is freed from sin”. So it’s dying with Jesus that frees us from sin. Now, what would this mean? Let’s look just at one instance, one example of it. Would you look at John 19, back to Jesus’ own death. John 19:1-5; “Then Pilate took Jesus and scourged him. And the soldiers plaited a crown of thorns, and put it on his head, and arrayed him in a purple robe; they came up to him, saying, ‘Hail, King of the Jews!’ and struck him with their hands. Pilate went out again, and said to them, ‘See, I am bringing him out to you, that you may know that I find no crime in him.’ So Jesus came out, wearing the crown of thorns and the purple robe. Pilate said to them, ‘Behold the man!’” So they put a purple robe on him and the crown of thorns to try to say, “Oh you’re the great king. Okay, we’ll put a robe on you and crown on you so that you’ll be a king.” That was just making fun of him. And when Jesus died, he died to men’s respect. He died to his need for men’s respect. He died to his own reputation. He died to what the leading people in his own religion and the leading people in the political world of that time thought of him. He died even to what the prostitutes and the tramps were doing to him as he walked down the Via Dolorosa and they spat at him and struck him. When Jesus died, he died to his need for people to look up to him, respect him and think well of him. He was willing to be thought just a useless political criminal. He was willing to be thought even as someone who was sacrilegious — He, who was the very Son of his Father. Now brothers and sisters, do you see that he, who has died, is freed from sin. When he has died with Jesus and to his need for men’s and women’s respect that frees you from a whole multitude of sins that are connected up with your concern about what people think of you. Dying with Jesus means dying to what your friends think of you. You see our problem is this: that most of us are such miserable, petty men pleasers that we are not free from men’s respect at all. We are so anxious for everybody to think well of us, our parents to think well of us, our professors, our teachers, our peers, our colleagues at work, our girlfriends, our boyfriends, our husbands or wives. We are such miserable men pleasers that we have not died at all to men’s respect, we thrive on men’s respect. Don’t you see that’s why we get envious? That’s why we get proud? We are so concerned with what men think of us in our conversations, in our actions, in our relationships that we will do anything for people to think well of us. We will cajole and lie to become thought of as a swinger or to be thought of as somebody who is really “with it”. We will do anything to get people to respect us. We will cease to be our real selves. We will pretend. We will be hypocritical. You know it. We will put on fronts of all kinds. We will try to be a smoothie or try to be cool. We do anything to get people to think well of us. Now brothers and sisters, that’s what brings the whole series of sins with it. It brings lies. Think of how often you’ve given a better impression of yourself than is really true. Think of how often you’ve put your best side forward so that somebody would look up to you. Think of how often you’ve told lies about what you were really thinking just so that they would think you agreed with them. Think of how often you know you’ve exaggerated in your conversation just to get close to somebody else so that they would think well of you. Brothers and sisters, there is a whole series of sins that stem from the fact that we’ve never really died with Jesus to men’s respect. And when it says there, “He who has died is freed from sin”, it really does mean it. When you come to a place where through counseling with the Holy Spirit, you find out all that this dying with Jesus will mean for you and you really agree, “Lord Jesus, I really am willing for only you to approve of me. I really am willing to die to the respect that men and women have for me. I really am willing to die to my need to maintain a reputation of some kind. Lord Jesus, Your opinion is the only one that counts”, the Holy Spirit will meet you. Brothers and sisters, when you come to a deep place of honesty with God and with yourself where you’re really willing to die with Jesus to that need for respect, then the Holy Spirit will witness that you’re there. He’ll witness, yes, you’ve come to the ground of your heart in regard to this need for men’s respect. And the Holy Spirit will flow into you and will fill you with a joy, peace, assurance and confidence of God’s approval that will leave you free from envy, jealousy, pride and all the things that are connected up with what people think of you. It’s really true. It really works that way. God is really able to free you from that inward sin if you’re willing to die with Jesus to the things that he died to. In the coming weeks, we’ll see other things that he died to. But the Holy Spirit can show you this morning what you need to share with Jesus in his death. He can free you and that’s really the heart of victory. That’s kind of what we call “being filled with the Holy Spirit” or “having your heart cleansed by faith”, or “dying with Christ”, or, “crucifixion with Christ”. But you can see that it demands tremendous honesty on your part with the Holy Spirit. Because if you ask him to show you in what way you’re alive to men’s respect, he will really lay you flat. You will find things out about yourself that you never knew before with all your introspection. You will find hundreds of ways in which you are a miserable slavish man pleaser and in which you aren’t really yourself at all. It’s when you see all the mess that you’ll begin to realize why God had to destroy that force in Jesus and why He is willing to destroy it in you. Dear ones, maybe it would be good just to pray this morning but sometimes I think it’ll be good to have questions so that you can push me a little on the real inner meaning of this. But I think it will be good to get into it deeper during these Sundays. The heart of it is, what about yourself? What about your own temper? What about your own anger? What about your own envy and pride? Are you freed from it yet? What God is saying here is, you really can be. I’ve tried to write about it a little, and it’s with those books there that you can get. There are two little booklets that I’ve written – “How to Stop Sinning” and “Free to Live”. Then, Ted Hegre from Bethany Fellowship has written that book, “Freedom from the Power of Sin” plus there are lots of tapes available in the library either to listen to or to buy. Really this is why Jesus died — to free us from this. I really do pray that everybody in the theater would really come free. It would be magnificent. It would be a great change in the world if the five, six, or seven hundred of us came into freedom here. It really will be easier on your roommates. Let us pray.

The Resurrected Life Romans 6:8 Sermon Transcript by Rev. Ernest O’Neill This book contains the words of our Creator and there’s one part of it that almost everybody in the theater will be able to relate to, whether you’re Christians or humanists, it’ll seem real to you. So, would you look at it, dear ones? It’s in Romans 7:15. Romans 7:15-23: “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. Now if I do what I do not want, I agree that the law is good. So then it is no longer I that do it, but sin which dwells within me. 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. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I that do it, but sin which dwells within me. So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the law of God, in my inmost self, but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin which dwells in my members.” I think probably every one of us here has experienced that seemingly supernatural force inside us that surges up and that we cannot control. Over the years, we take one of two different attitudes to it. One attitude is that we keep bluffing ourselves like the alcoholic. We keep saying, “Well, I know that I don’t seem able to do what I want to do but I am really in charge. I know I seem to lose my temper whenever I don’t want to lose my temper but this isn’t a supernatural force that I can’t control. I can really be free of it when I want to be free.” That’s one attitude that many of us take. We feel, “Okay, don’t get upset. Just keep cool. This is something that I can get out of if I want to.” We live like that for 20, 30, 40 years, always deceiving ourselves with the idea, “I can really get free of this if I want.” The other attitude is just absolute despair. I think a lot of us come into absolute despair. It’s that kind of attitude expressed in Romans 7:24. We come into that position, “Wretched man that I am. Who will deliver me from this body of death?” Some of us have got beyond the stage of that naïve self-deception and we see, “Yes, this is something I can’t control and I am just going to give up. I can’t do anything with it. Let’s face it, human beings are meant to get angry. Human beings are meant to lust. Human beings are meant to be irrevocably and incorrigibly proud”. And we just give up. Now brothers and sisters, neither of those attitudes are right. First of all, you couldn’t get free of it if you wanted to. That’s the first thing and it’s pointed out in Romans 7:20 if you look at it. You couldn’t get free of it if you wanted to, simply because it isn’t you. Romans 7:20 –“Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I that do it, but sin which dwells within me.” The fact is your repeated failures to control your temper is just God telling you, “Look, this temper comes from a force inside you that is bigger than you are and you can’t get free of it, however much you try.” Isn’t it true that’s what comes home to you and me each time we’ve made New Year resolutions? We’ve resolved, “I will not lose my temper again. I will not be covetous as far as clothes and furniture are concerned.” Then we fall flat on our faces. And God allows us to make repeated New Year resolutions just to prove to us, “This thing inside you is sin. It’s a supernatural force of evil in the world that you cannot control.” Yet do you see the other attitude is equally wrong, the attitude of despair? A lot of people who are Christians think that an attitude of despair and of failure day after day is the normal Christian life. It isn’t. For years, many of us have been taught, “You just avoid sinning. You have to sin day after day after day after day, and just keep confessing the sin.” Many of us point to Romans 7 and we say, “There, Paul. Paul was a Christian, wasn’t he? Isn’t he describing the normal Christian life when he says, ‘The good that I would I cannot do, wretched man that I am. Who shall deliver me from this body of death?’” And they stop the chapter at verse 24. Now brothers and sisters, the final solution to that subnormal carnal Christian life is in Romans 7:25. Paul says, “Wretched man that I am. Who will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God, through Jesus Christ, our Lord.” Thanks be to God, he will deliver me and has delivered me. So then, I of myself in the old days working on my own, I have myself served the law of God with my mind but with my flesh I serve the law of sin. So, I of myself can do nothing about it but thanks be to God, through Jesus Christ, our Lord, who can do something. We’ve been sharing together over the past few weeks, God’s solution to that problem. We’ve been sharing how the part of us that links our day-to-day lives up with that supernatural force of independence and rebellion in the world, is best designated by the word “self”. It’s self that has to be dealt with. In other words, the part of us that is a traitor and opens the door to that supernatural force of rebellion and independence (that originates with Satan), the part of us that does that is best designated by the word “self”. Now you know it doesn’t mean personality. Self doesn’t mean our personality or our individuality. Our personality is not bad in itself. Our individuality is a gift that God has given us. So maybe it’s good first of all to see that when we talk about self being the problem and the culprit, we’re not talking about our personalities. We should thank God for our personalities and we should thank God that when he deals with us in the Holy Spirit, we are freer in our personalities than we ever were before in our lives. Loved ones, the problem is not your individuality or our personalities. That’s not what the Bible means when it designates self as the problem. Nor does it mean self-respect. Self doesn’t mean self-respect or self-love in the sense that we have a natural animal instinct to preserve ourselves so that when a car comes along the road, we do manage to get our foot out of the way before it runs over it. We have a desire to preserve ourselves and defend ourselves. No, that’s not what God says is wrong. That is good. It’s good to have self-respect and self-regard for ourselves. It’s good to have enough self-respect to wash in the morning and to use “Right Guard” [a deodorant]. It’s good to take care of your body and wear the right clothes and take care of the place where you live. That’s good and self doesn’t mean that. There is a right self-regard and self-respect (and if you like to put it self-love) that God wants us to have. Loved ones the self that opens the way to Satan is self-centeredness. It’s self-glory. It’s perverted self-love. It’s self-love carried to an inordinate degree where you love yourself before everybody else. Now that’s what God means when he tries to tell us that self is the problem. In fact, the heart of the attitude of self that opens the way to the power of sin coming into our lives is outlined there in the record of the first time that we ever rebelled against God. It’s Genesis 3. The heart of that attitude of self is outlined in Genesis 3:5. It’s as if God wanted to tell us (the very first time that our forefathers rebelled against him) and make clear to us why it had happened. Genesis 3:5 – “For God knows that when you eat of it (the tree of the knowledge of good and evil) your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” “Your eyes will be opened and you will be like God knowing good and evil.” The heart of this attitude of self is that we think we’re God. The real reason that Satan is able to infuse into us a spirit of envy or jealousy or criticism that we cannot control is because we have an attitude of self that thinks of us as God. We think of ourselves as God. It’s such a subtle, invisible, unconscious attitude that it comes as a shock to us if anyone charges us with it. If you think of it, isn’t it extremely difficult to put yourself in somebody else’s shoes? Isn’t there a terrible tendency in all of us to think that nobody is facing the same things as we are? We are uniquely different from everybody else. We are uniquely different as God made us, but isn’t it true that most of us think, we’re uniquely different and better than everybody else? We have the feeling that we have the right to make life and circumstances and other people operate in a way that will suit us. Now the Bible calls that “inward sin”. Inward, because it’s often very thoroughly disguised before it expresses itself outwardly — and sin because it’s challenging God. It’s challenging his right to be God and to control and operate things. And that’s really the attitude of self that opens the way to the power of Satan in us. It shows itself in different ways. First of all, it doubts whether God loves us with all his heart. It doubts whether God loves us with all his heart and it doubts whether he has a plan for our lives. And so it does three things on its own. It’s always trying to get its own way. Whatever it costs anybody else, this self believes that a god always gets its own way. And so this self is always trying to get its own way. It’s always trying to manipulate people or circumstances to suit us. This self is always insisting on its own rights because it sees other people treating us as if we aren’t God and that shocks and upsets us. Therefore we’re always insisting on our own rights. If somebody criticizes us, we insist on our right not to be criticized. We should not be criticized, we’re above criticism. You must admit, very few of us can accept criticism, isn’t that right? Most of us automatically resent criticism when it comes. Then thirdly, self is always trying to enjoy itself. Deep down we have a sneaking feeling that gods should always enjoy themselves whatever it costs their creatures. And so self is always anxious to enjoy itself. Now, brothers and sisters, those are the attitudes of self that open the way for Satan to come in and fill us with uncontrollable anger or uncontrollable lust. Our problem of course is that we go for the lust and the anger and we try to keep that stuff down. We can’t keep it down because that comes straight from Satan. But, we can change the attitude that allows that to come in and that’s the attitude of self. Now, you can find illustrations of it in the New Testament. You see it there in John 18:10-11, when they came to arrest Jesus at the Garden of Gethsemane. “Then Simon Peter, having a sword, drew it and struck the high priest’s slave and cut off his right ear. The slave’s name was Malchus. Jesus said to Peter, ‘Put your sword into its sheath; shall I not drink the cup which the Father has given me?’” Now, regarding getting our own way — we come into a situation like Peter and we decide we’ll tackle it our way. And so we’re always trying to get out of trials or difficulties our way. We don’t care much about how God wants to work it, we want our way. And that’s one of the marks of self — always wanting your own way. That’s why it causes such problems in the room with the roommate. There is no great reason why the books should be set the way you want them but you just want them set that way. You want it done that way. It’s the same at home for you dear husbands and wives. The issues, you must admit, are not massive ideological issues that divide us at home. It’s just that she wants it her way and we want it our way. It is because it’s such an illogical thing that we keep treating it as something unimportant or small, but it is the heart of Satan. When you look back, isn’t it the thing that causes all our unhappiness and unpleasantness with each other? You get one of the other marks in Matthew 20:20-21. This attitude probably rules most faculties, executive boards and most businesses. “Then the mother of the sons of Zebedee came up to him, with her sons, and kneeling before him she asked him for something. And he said to her, ‘What do you want?’ She said to him, ‘Command that these two sons of mine may sit, one at your right hand and one at your left, in your kingdom.’ But Jesus answered, ‘You do not know what you are asking.’” And it’s that desire to insist on our rights, to have our position and our place, and to get people to treat us the way we ought to be treated. Loved ones, think of how many times you have cried yourself to sleep. Or you’ve worried and strained yourself to sleep because of the way people were treating you. You felt they weren’t giving you the right sense of dignity, the right position or the right degree of respect. Now brothers and sisters, that’s self. That’s self wanting its own way and insisting on its own rights. Self — wanting to enjoy itself, you get it in Matthew 16:21-23, where Peter can’t bear the idea of Jesus having to be inconvenienced or having to suffer in any way. Unfortunately that’s the attitude that self takes to itself. Matthew 16:21-23: “From that time Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things from the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised. And Peter took him and began to rebuke him, saying, ‘God forbid, Lord! This shall never happen to you.’ But he turned and said to Peter, ‘Get behind me, Satan! You are a hindrance to me; for you are not on the side of God, but of men.’” If you think about it, we run our lives by convenience to ourselves, don’t we? If you think what you are going to do after the service this afternoon, most of it is connected with what is convenient for you, isn’t it? It’s about what we really enjoy doing. We really look upon ourselves as incredible martyrs if we put ourselves out for half an hour to drive somebody else home or to help somebody else. It is incredible the way we tend to run our lives for our own enjoyment. Now, dear ones, do you see that that attitude of self is what let Satan’s power and force of evil into our lives? What we’ve been saying the past two or three Sundays is that that attitude of self is such hostility to God that he cannot possibly let us live without destroying it. What he in fact did on Calvary, 1900 years ago, was to destroy that attitude in us. We read of that in Romans 6:6 if you like to look at it again. Romans 6:6 – “We know that our old self was crucified with him so that the sinful body might be destroyed, and we might no longer be enslaved to sin.” We saw that God had destroyed that old self in Jesus 1900 years ago and that that was an attitude that he had already neutralized completely by the power of the Holy Spirit. In Romans 6:7 we saw that unless you’re willing to let him do that in your own life, you won’t be free from that power of sin, “For he who has died is freed from sin”. We saw last Sunday that the only way we can enter into this deliverance from self in our own lives is to be willing to actually die to self with Jesus, because that’s what in fact happened. God put us into Jesus and destroyed all that desire for our own way, all that insistence on our own rights, all that desire for our own enjoyment, he destroyed that in Jesus. God can make that real in us miraculously through the Holy Spirit if you are willing to die to self with Jesus. Last Sunday, we saw some of the things that were involved in dying to self. We talked about being willing for people to think badly of you, being willing for people not to have a good concept of the kind of person you are, being willing to die to your reputation, being willing not to be a man-pleaser but to please God alone even if it meant hanging on a cross and being insulted and criticized by the riff-raff of Jerusalem. Yet if you’re willing to die to self in the way that the Holy Spirit is showing you, then the Holy Spirit miraculously neutralizes that attitude of self. When Jesus died to self and reputation by riding into Jerusalem on a donkey, (when they all wanted him to be a great military Messiah) and when he died to self (by allowing Himself to be destroyed on the Cross as a useless criminal), at that moment when he humbled Himself and didn’t claim anything for Himself, God not only sent forth his Holy Spirit to neutralize the self-attitude in you and me (because of our death with Jesus), but he gave to Jesus, the satisfaction and exhilaration that comes from being at the right hand of God. So when Jesus died to self on Calvary, he was raised by God willingly, voluntarily, lovingly and graciously to the right hand of the Father. He was given back far more than he had ever given up. Now brothers and sisters, that’s what it means if you look at Philippians 2:6-11. Philippians 2:6-11, “who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.” Now today’s verse says, “If we die with Jesus, we believe that we shall also live with him.” Brothers and sisters, here is the miracle. If you’re willing to die to self with Jesus, then God, through his Holy Spirit, not only neutralizes that attitude of self that opens you up to Satan’s power but the Holy Spirit fills you with the love that Jesus feels at this moment for his Father. In other words, you can die to envy but it’s really hard to do the opposite thing and praise people, isn’t it? Now the Holy Spirit will fill you with an attitude of praise and love for that person. It’s one thing to die to criticism but how do you produce an attitude of appreciation? Have you ever tried it? Maybe you try Andrew Carnegie’s psychological tricks, “Well, I ought to look at the good things in that person. Well, they’re quite talented or they’re quite kindly.” You try all those psychological tricks. It gets harder for you husbands and wives, with each other, doesn’t it? It’s hard to find their good points. There is no way that you can do it, loved ones. You can’t love each other truly by trying those psychological tricks. The truth is, if you die with Jesus, you live with him. If you’re willing to die to self with Jesus, the Holy Spirit fills you with a healthy, loving attitude towards people. It’s a miraculous thing. Our place is simply to be willing to die. God will take care of the resurrection. If you have impatience, you ask the Holy Spirit, “Holy Spirit, why am I impatient?” Well, you’re impatient because you think you’re God. You think everything should be done in your time and just as you want it to be done. You come into a place where you’re really willing to die to self and for things to be done even if in your opinion they’re late. You’re willing for them to be done the way God wants them. The Holy Spirit miraculously fills you with a patience and a gentleness towards your friends and relatives. It’s a miracle loved ones, but that’s what it means if you look at Romans 6:8. Romans 6:8, “But if we have died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with him”. The truth is that Jesus is at the right hand of the Father today. If you’re willing to die with Jesus, God raises you to that place (heaven) and that place is beautiful. No, I don’t go for the harps or the golden sidewalks but it is a beautiful place of peace and love. There the Father with Jesus, his Son, the angels and archangels and probably a lot of old grandmothers and grandfathers of ours, they’re all gathered together. And they are continually occupied in actual things that give them satisfaction in an actual love and light and enthusiasm and peace and understanding with each other. Now Jesus sends that kind of attitude down to you when you’re willing to die with Jesus. So it’s a real miracle. You just don’t realize where the love has come from. You don’t realize where the patience has come from. But it is a fact that if you’re willing to die with Jesus then you will start living with him and experiencing his resurrection life. The last thing I’d like to share with you is that there is no resurrection without a death. There isn’t. There is no resurrection without dying. Our place is to be honest with the Holy Spirit and ask him to show us where that attitude of self still rules us. Then decide whether we’re willing for that to be destroyed in Jesus. The moment you say yes, the Holy Spirit not only destroys it, but fills you with the fruit of the Spirit — the very opposite things to the vices that you felt inside for so long. I am trying to take as long over this as God has taken over it in writing Romans 6. Will you speak to God about it, loved ones? Let us pray.

The Death of Death Romans 6:9 Sermon Transcript by Rev. Ernest O’Neill Have you ever had the situation with your roommate or your friends — or those of us who are married, with our wives — where you’ve noticed a kind of strained relationship coming up between you and them? It’s getting more and more strained and there isn’t the openness that there was before. You think to yourself, “This is stupid. We’re supposed to be helping each other. We’re supposed to be close to each other. Tomorrow when I see them, I am just going to be like I was at the beginning. We’re going to be as open as we were at the start.” And so the next day comes and you try to stir up that old love for them but it just won’t come. There’s still the resentment and irritability inside and you can’t do a thing with it. You really want to make the thing right but somehow there’s a big lead lump of resentment and irritation deep down that you can’t get rid of whatever you do. Or, you’ve discovered that some of your friends are talking about you behind your back. When you meet them you just can’t feel comfortable with them. You feel that they’re lying to you straight, face-to-face. You know what they’ve said and you know the way they’re appearing to smile and be friendly with you. You have a tremendous sense of being the odd man out and you find it’s impossible to be open with them. You say to yourself, “This is silly. Whatever they have said about me behind my back, I have no right to have this kind of resentment against them.” And so you determine the next time you get into that group, you’re going to forget about it. You’ll joke your way out of it. You’ll laugh and pretend that it’s just like it was. You try to do it and it’s just like lifting up big heavy weights off your shoulders. Inside, there’s resentment, self-pity and a feeling that they’re being unjust to you. There’s a feeling that they’re just utterly deceiving you and being traitors. In those situations, you know what you want to do and you know what is right to do to prevent the situation deteriorating impossibly but you cannot do it. Now brothers and sisters, that’s the kind of situation we’ve been talking about during the past few Sundays. We know fine well what we want to do and we want to try to do it but somehow there’s a lack of power inside us to do what we want to do and to be what we want to be. Now, the reason for that is really very obvious. It’s presented in the Bible very plainly and maybe you’d look at the passage. It’s Romans 7 and in it, God expresses through Paul this kind of problem that all of us have – i.e. we want to do the right thing but we can’t do it. Now if you read it emphasizing what is the primary factor in this passage, you’ll find out very easily what the problem is inside us that makes us feel like that. I’ll emphasize what is in fact the primary piece of grammar in the passage and it’ll show you where the problem lies. (Rev. O’Neill reads the next verses emphasizing every “I”, “my”, or “me”.) Romans 7:15-19 – “I do not understand MY own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. Now if I do what I do not want, I agree that the law is good. So then it is no longer I that do it, but sin which dwells within ME. 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. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.” 35 times the personal pronoun or the possessive pronoun is used in 10 verses. And that’s the problem. That’s the problem with us in both of those situations that we talked about. You know what happens. We offend our friend or we take an action independent of them that actually causes them to resent us. That’s what sets up the strain in the first place. What sets up the strain in their mind is that we did something and didn’t consult with them. We maintain the strain by continuing to feel, “Well I have a right to do what I want to do. I had a right to do that independent of them. I had a right to say what I said.” In other words, what maintains that strain is the great ‘I’ inside. And that great ‘I’ feels it has the right to do what it’s doing. It’s the same if you think of the situation where they’re talking about you. You know how you just sink down in self-pity. You know it. You feel, “They’re all against me. I’ll be brave and courageous and will manage all right on my own.” And we feel self-pity and sorrow for the way that people are treating us. Of course they on their part are doing it to make themselves feel better. They talk about you because they think if they have confidence with somebody else about you, it makes them one better than you. They’re trying to elevate themselves by tearing you down. But whichever situation it is brothers and sisters, it results from this great ‘I’ inside us that wants its own way. Now that ‘I’ self-attitude runs through the entire universe and actually it has run through the universe for centuries. It probably started in the kind of situation that Isaiah described. He was talking about the king of Babylon. The old prophets were magnificent. They could talk about a situation in their time and then could telescope history to see back into the beginning of infinity and eternity as to what had caused the present situation to crop up. And so Isaiah does that at times. He’ll be talking about the king of Babylon — his pride and his resentment — and then he’ll go and talk about the power that made him resentful and selfish. That’s what Isaiah does on one occasion in Isaiah 14. He is talking about this king of Babylon, who was going to take over the land of Judah in about the sixth century. This hadn’t taken place yet but Isaiah was talking about it going to take place in about 150 years’ time. He is describing this king and then he telescopes history. He looks behind the power or the force that had made the king of Babylon as selfish as he was. He begins to talk about Satan and the origin of Satan. Isaaih 14:12 – “How you are fallen from heaven, O Day Star, son of Dawn! How you are cut down to the ground, you who laid the nations low!” And then this was Satan’s attitude. Satan was at one time a spirit created by God to serve him and God trusted him implicitly but then verse 13. Isaaih 14:13-15 –“You said in your heart, ‘I will ascend to heaven; above the stars of God. I will set my throne on high; I will sit on the mount of assembly in the far north; I will ascend above the heights of the clouds, I will make myself like the Most High.’ But you are brought down to Sheol, to the depths of the pit.” And Isaiah is indicating that it was that kind of I-me, self-attitude that caused Satan to rebel against God at the very beginning even before creation. Now brothers and sisters, it’s that force that gets inside us and makes us cry ourselves to sleep. It’s that force that makes us swell with pride and envy and jealousy. It’s a supernatural force that you cannot manage yourself. We’ve found that we can do nothing about it. We’ve tried our best but we can’t do it. This I-me, self-attitude wants its own way, wants to be God in every situation, wants to determine what it will do and what it will suffer. Loved ones, you can see it makes for chaos. There must be about six or seven hundred of us here in the theater and we’re only a fraction of the three and a half billion people in the world, but do you see the chaos that results if we all had this attitude towards each other? The only reason we have a real sense of love and harmony together this morning is that we all are submitting our own wishes to the wishes of Jesus and God. That’s why there’s a sense of harmony and peace among us. Now do you see that if there are seven hundred of us or three and a half billion of us, letting loose with that I-me self-attitude which insists on its own rights, wants its own way, asserts itself, and defends itself, that hell results? And that’s what you and I have found. But we’ve tried to overcome this but we cannot and that’s the problem. I don’t think there is one of us in the theater who have been here the past few Sundays, who cannot diagnose the problem. All of us would agree that it’s the I-me self inside us that makes us want to get envious, irritable, jealous and resentful. Yes, it’s the I-me self. But what do you do about it? Do you notice that’s the same problem the eastern religions have? Eastern religions emphasize that you have to negate the self and transcend the ego. Yet they have impossible problems ever succeeding in doing that. They always eventually sink back into abstraction or into a preoccupation with the ego itself. And so there are many people who have diagnosed that the problem is the ego or the self but they cannot tell us how you get rid of it. That’s because they cannot produce a power inside that transcends the self. Now brothers and sisters, there is a man that transcended that desire for self-glory and for self-will. There is one man who had such a dynamic power of love inside Himself that he destroyed this power of self. You can see it coming out in His life again and again. Would you look with me at John 13:21 to see an instance of it? This man would find Himself in a position where one of his specially picked followers had planned in cold blood to betray him to the religious powers and yet you find none of the resentment coming out of him that comes out of us for much less reasons. John 13:21-30 – “When Jesus had thus spoken, he was troubled in spirit, and testified, ‘Truly, truly, I say to you, one of you will betray me.’ The disciples looked at one another, uncertain of whom he spoke. One of his disciples, whom Jesus loved, was lying close to the breast of Jesus; so Simon Peter beckoned to him and said, ‘Tell us who it is of whom he speaks.’ So lying thus, close to the breast of Jesus, he said to him, ‘Lord, who is it?’ Jesus answered, ‘It is he to whom I shall give this morsel when I have dipped it.’ So when he had dipped the morsel, he gave it to Judas, the son of Simon Iscariot. Then after the morsel, Satan entered into him. Jesus said to him, ‘What you are going to do, do quickly.’ Now no one at the table knew why he said this to him. Some thought that, because Judas had the money box, Jesus was telling him, ‘Buy what we need for the feast’; or, that he should give something to the poor. So, after receiving the morsel, he immediately went out; and it was night.” This man Jesus was incredible. Faced with that kind of situation he did not rip off any anger at Judas. He did not try to stop him but instead continued to love him and to respect his free will. Now, this Jesus has that Spirit inside him. It’s a dynamic Spirit that can produce what the psychologists say we should have. You see that’s the problem. Even the psychologists are right in the picture they paint of the integrated personality. But how do you bring that about? How do you bring about an integrated personality? This Jesus had one inside Himself. There’s another instance you know, if you look at Luke 22. The religious leaders were making fun of his ministry and they treated him just like a lunatic. Yet he didn’t react but remained perfectly calm with them and was concerned only that they would hear the truth, whatever attitude they had towards him. Luke 22:63-70 “Now the men who were holding Jesus mocked him and beat him; they also blindfolded him and asked him, ‘Prophesy! Who is it that struck you?’ And they spoke many other words against him, reviling him. When day came, the assembly of the elders of the people gathered together, both chief priests and scribes; and they led him away to their council, and they said, ‘If you are the Christ, tell us.’ But he said to them, ‘If I tell you, you will not believe; and if I ask you, you will not answer. But from now on the Son of man shall be seated at the right hand of the power of God.’ And they all said, ‘Are you the Son of God, then?’ And he said to them, ‘You say that I am.’” There is just incredible peace and unbelievable freedom from resentment and from all the feelings that rise up inside us. And he just went on being like that. The amazing thing is that even after he died and was raised from the dead, his spirit continued to be like that. You can find it in Acts 9:1-6. If you remember Paul had led a vehement persecution of the followers of Jesus and had therefore actually been trying to destroy the Spirit of Jesus completely even though Jesus had died as far as his physical body was concerned. Acts 9:1-6 – “But Saul, still breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord, went to the high priest and asked him for letters to the synagogues at Damascus, so that if he found any belonging to the Way, men or women, he might bring them bound to Jerusalem. Now as he journeyed he approached Damascus, and suddenly a light from heaven flashed about him. And he fell to the ground and heard a voice saying to him, ‘Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?’ And he said, ‘Who are you, Lord?’ And he said, ‘I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting; but rise and enter the city, and you will be told what you are to do.’” Brothers and sisters, that Spirit is alive today. That Spirit is alive in our world. That Spirit can come into you and bring about those same reactions in you. That’s how you can be delivered from self. This Spirit of Jesus transcends circumstances and overcomes the old self. It produces in you a love in place of the resentment, and self-pity. The fact is, the Spirit of Jesus does not just destroy your anger, envy or your jealousy, but he brings about in you a positive love, a kindliness and a gentleness that is supernatural. And that’s the miracle of it, you see. Often I have looked up to him and said, “Lord Jesus, will YOU love?” And there has come out a supernatural love from my heart that I couldn’t produce for the other person. We’re all the same, loved ones. We all have petty little resentments towards friends. We all have little critical attitudes to those who are hurting and offending us. Yet, none of us have the power inside ourselves to respond any differently. Do you see that the Spirit of this man Jesus is still alive? He can respond differently inside you. And that can happen to you. If you say, “On what conditions?” You know them. You’ve to be willing to die to self with Jesus. But it’s not the readiness to die to self that produces the love. Do you see that? You could be ready to die to self, be nothing for him, be a failure for him and be treated whatever way people wanted to treat you, but that old self inside you would not produce love. It’s only his Spirit that is able to fill you completely; that produces a supernatural love and a supernatural gentleness. This is why some of you feel at times, “Some people are just different from me. They don’t have my hang-ups. They don’t have my critical attitude.” Brothers and sisters, we’re all out of the same mold. We’re all more or less the same this morning. We all, more or less, have the same kinds of problems and the same kinds of feelings of resentment and self-pity. The truth is that only if you receive and are filled with this new Spirit, can you ever transcend that. And if you say, “How?”, the answer is to be willing to die to self with Jesus. Let God destroy all the old self inside you and allow Jesus to take over. Now if you say to me, “How do you know it happened?” The Holy Spirit witnesses with you when you’ve really come to the end of self. He witnesses and then he fills you with his new love. You find yourself going into situations where you know people are talking about you. Yet there can come continual love and peace from your heart. It’s not a “put on thing”, but a real thing that comes deep down from inside you. You can come into situations with your roommate who may have done all the wrong things. You know how hard it is to apologize if you weren’t the one that did the wrong thing? We get self-righteous and proud. We’re glad they made the mistake and we didn’t. We say, “Well, it’s up to them to apologize.” It’s true, isn’t it, in the home or in the dorms or in your room. It’s easy to feel, “It’s their turn to apologize.” It’s so good to have a new spirit coming out from inside you that wants to put your arms around them, apologize, make the thing right whatever and absorb the wounds. And really that’s what we need. In our society, we don’t have a lot of perfect people. We need a lot of people that will absorb a lot of punishment and respond with a lot of love. And that Jesus himself did and is able to do in you. That’s why I urge you that the only answer to the old self is really allowing that old self to die and letting Jesus’ Spirit take over. He will produce a miraculous love inside you. Let us pray. Dear Father, You know there are countless situations in our lives where we have been unable to produce love. We’ve tried and we’ve wanted to. We’ve wanted to be magnanimous and big-hearted and generous but we just hadn’t got it in us and we’ve sunk down in the midst of that impotence. Father, if your Son Jesus, if his Spirit is still alive and can bring about that love in us, then Lord, we want that. So Father, wherever you see our old self ruling our lives, wherever you see us wanting our own way or insisting on our own rights, will you reveal that to us during today and these coming days so that we can come into real freedom from self. Let us see how bad we are inside and that the only thing to do is not to patch our self up or improve it but to allow it to be destroyed with Jesus through the power of your Holy Spirit. We ask that you’d allow his Spirit to fill us completely so that his supernatural love comes about inside us – the love that is patient and kind, that is not jealous or boastful, that is not arrogant or rude, that does not insist on its own way, that is not easily provoked; that love that bears all things, believe all things and that never ends. Father we trust you to bring us into that however hard we have to suffer to come in. We trust you to bring us into that victory for your glory and for our own salvation. Amen.

In Christ Romans 6:10 Sermon Transcript by Rev. Ernest O’Neill Have you ever heard of Boswell? He was a famous biographer of Dr. Samuel Johnson in the 18th century. If you’ve done some of English literature you probably have come across him. Boswell was really a very honest man and tried to be very honest about his own weaknesses. He wrote a diary and this is the entry for Sunday, November 28, 1762. “I went to St. James’ church and heard the service, a good sermon on ‘By what means shall a young man learn to order his ways’. The advantages of early piety were well displayed. What a curious inconsistent thing is the mind of man. In the midst of divine service, I was laying plans for having women and yet I had the most sincere feelings of religion.” Now that’s the problem that we’ve been talking about where you are supposedly thinking the most holy thoughts and yet you find there’s another part of you deep down that is thinking the most unholy thoughts. Now, Dostoevsky talked about the same thing throughout all his novels, and he described it this way, “A man will talk to you with excitement and passion of the true normal interest of man. With irony he will upbraid the shortsighted fools who don’t understand their own interest or the true significance of virtue. And within a quarter of an hour, without any outside provocation but simply through something inside him which is stronger than all his interests he will act in direct opposition to what he has just been saying about himself; in opposition to the laws of reason, in opposition to his own advantage, in fact in opposition to everything.” Now dear ones, I don’t think there’s one of us here in the theater who would not admit that, “Yes, we know that feeling and we’ve had it inside.” And part of the popularity of the story of “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” [by Robert Louis Stevenson] is that there seems inside each of us to be a Mr. Hyde. We have real problems being consistent and maintaining what we believe is right for our lives. What do the psychologists call it? Today the psychologists are so baffled but they admit there is just a perversity in human nature that they cannot explain. They have at last got to that point. There was a time in the heyday of optimism when they thought they could explain it. Now they say, “No, there’s just a perversity in man that we cannot explain.” This Bible really does tie it down a lot better. It puts it into a definite category, if you look at it in James 4:17. It describes that situation exactly that we’ve been talking about. James 4:17, “Whoever knows what is right to do and fails to do it…” That’s the situation. Boswell is sitting listening to the sermon and he knows that he ought to be thinking pure thoughts, “Whoever knows what is right to do and fails to do it, for him it is sin”. So the Bible calls that kind of thing, sin. That force inside us that prevents us doing the best that we want to do, that’s called sin. Now, I think we need to see that that is sin. We need to get rid of all the brainwashing that we’ve had. We tend to say, “Drinking is a sin”, or, “Hopping into bed with someone who isn’t your wife, that’s a sin.” Now those are sinful acts. I agree with you. But do you see the heart of the problem is sin? It’s the force inside you that you can’t control. Often we think God is just trying to torture us by saying, “Oh, sin, sin, sin.” God is trying to show you that sin is the force inside you that you can’t control. God is not an unkind God. He doesn’t just give a name to an outward act that you know fine well as wrong. He gives the name to the INWARD force that prevents you being what you want. He’s trying to show you that there is an answer to it. Now, you can see that it’s explained again in Romans 7:20. You’ll see it’s exactly the same experience. First of all you see it’s, “Whoever knows what is right to do and fails to do it, for him it is sin.” Then he explains it a different way through Paul. Romans 7:20, “Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I that do it, but sin which dwells within me.” God takes us another step and says, “This sin is almost like a different person inside you. It’s something almost that you cannot control. It’s a supernatural force.” Now what do most of us do? We struggle and struggle and struggle — and try and try and try again. That’s what we do. We try to overcome that force. We know fine well that we’re only accepted by God because of Jesus’ death. We’re not accepted by God because of all the good works we do. So it’s interesting, we don’t try to get God to accept us because of our good works. Yet that’s the very thing we try to do to eliminate this evil inside us. We try good works. We try self-effort and strain and New Year resolutions. In other words, we’re ready to believe that we’re justified before God by faith and not by works. But the tragedy is that most of us try to be sanctified by works. Now that’s the real problem. That’s why there are so many hypocritical defeated Christians around. Many of us are prepared to believe that God accepts us only because of what he’s done in Jesus. But now that we’re accepted, we believe that we can become like him just by our own self-effort. We cannot. God is trying to point out to us that there is an answer for this evil force within us. Now, most of us haven’t found that answer. It shows itself in our lives as a kind of independence. Someone wrongs you at home or in the office or at school. They wrong you. They treat you absolutely unfairly and unjustly. You know that you should depend on the life that flows from God to deal with them. That’s what He says plainly in Luke 6:27-36. Or it can be the neighbor over the fence or in the dorm that does something against you. You know that you should take a certain attitude to them and let God’s life deal with them but you work independently of God’s life. Luke 6:27-36: “But I say to you that hear, Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you. To him who strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also; and from him who takes away your coat do not withhold even your shirt. Give to every one who begs from you; and of him who takes away your goods do not ask them again. And as you wish that men would do to you, do so to them. “If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love them. And if you do good to those who do good to you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners do the same. And if you lend to those from whom you hope to receive, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners, to receive as much again. But love your enemies, and do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return; and your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High; for he is kind to the ungrateful and the selfish. Be merciful, even as your Father is merciful.” You come into that situation and you know fine well, “That’s what I should do. That’s what I should be like.” Yet, you know fine well brothers and sisters, we decide we’re going to live independent of whatever life God puts forth to deal with that. We know in our hearts that his Holy Spirit will deal with the person if we simply love them but we determine we’ll go independent of that. We decide we’ll use our own weapons of resentment, sarcasm, criticism, hardness and unkindness. You know that all that stuff just flows out against the person; doesn’t matter what it is. It doesn’t matter if it’s a person next door to us who has dealt with us unkindly and unjustly or if it’s a relative that has been unfair to us. We know that we should love them and let God’s life deal with him but we live independent of his life. We decide we’ll deal with it our own way. In actual fact, what we’re doing is saying, “That God up there doesn’t know how to deal with this situation. But I do know how to deal with it and I am God in this situation and I am going to make it the way I want it and I am going to make it in my image, by my own force and by my own power.” And that’s what we do. Now that’s sin — a whole attitude that wants to put a wrong right by our own power instead of loving the other person. We are mad people. We live with roots of bitterness within us, don’t we? It would be interesting to find out how many of you have still got a root of bitterness against someone. Moms and dads, how often we’ve had roots of bitterness against the kids because they wouldn’t do as we said and we’ve never really forgiven them. And those of us who are sons and daughters, how often we’ve had a root of bitterness against our mom and dad because of some attitude years ago. We’ve long ago overcome the disadvantage but we still have a root of bitterness against them. It’s that old attitude you see, of wanting to put the thing right by our own power, by our own sarcasm, by our own resentment. Now Jesus was not like that. That’s the amazing thing. Almost every one of us is like that but he wasn’t like that. Now look at it in Mark 15. You see just a harrowing, provocative situation here. Mark 15:29, “And those who passed by derided him, wagging their heads, and saying, ‘Aha! You who would destroy the temple and build it in three days, save yourself, and come down from the cross!’” You must remember that Jesus said at another time when he was telling Peter to put away his sword, “I could call millions of angels to my aid.” And so he could have done it this time while they were jibing him and saying, “If you were really God you’d come down from the Cross.” Mark 15:31-32, “So also the chief priests mocked him to one another with the scribes, saying, ‘He saved others; he cannot save himself. Let the Christ, the King of Israel, come down now from the cross, that we may see and believe.’ Those who were crucified with him also reviled him.” Yet he held back from calling the angels to his aid. He held back from doing anything that would extricate him from the difficult situation. He trusted that God could even raise him from the dead if necessary, with God’s own life. You can see that this Jesus had an ability under the most provocative situations to stay steady and hold to the trust that his God would deliver him. Now dear ones, the only way you and I can experience the same victory is in having Jesus inside us completely. The only way you can ever come into that victory is to come into a real death with him to that right you have to deal with a difficult situation by sarcasm, by resentment, by criticism or by backbiting. And that’s what he did. He obviously came to a place where he said, “Lord, I do not care what they do to me. I don’t care how they jibe. I don’t care how they jeer. I am going to stay steady and love them and let you deal with them.” Obviously he died to any right he had to call angels, archangels, anger, resentment, criticism, or sarcasm to his aid. Now brothers and sisters, when you come into dying to those things with Jesus, then you’ll find that that amazing love inside him will begin to come out from you when you come into those situations. It’s really true but it’s only in Christ that it happens. It’s only in Jesus. You need a power greater than yourself that can produce that love. Now it is produced if you really cleave to Jesus. That’s why so much of Christianity just gets back to that. It means embracing Jesus. It means pulling this person inside you and letting everything that is not like him be expelled on the Cross. That can be yours. So it doesn’t matter who has a terrible anger or a terrible resentment or a terrible bitterness here today. If you are willing to die with Jesus to your right to deal with that difficult situation yourself and instead trust God to do it, you will find that God will not only deal with the situation but Jesus will bring forth in you, an incredible love. Don’t you see that that’s what the world wants to see? The world sees plenty of people being kind to each other. But the world sees very little of people being kind to people who are unkind to them. That’s what makes the difference — but it requires a real death. Dear husbands and wives, we’re at it too in silly little ways. We think we’ll put her right or we’ll put him right. We don’t put them right. We just mess it up all the more. It’s the same in every home situation. We should shut up and let God deal with the situation, but that requires a real death to our independence of God’s life and the substituting of our own methods. Here’s another obvious place that you see in regard to our status with other people. We’re full of ideas of our rights, aren’t we? We’re very full of our rights like what we have a right to expect from someone else in the way of respect, or what we have a right to expect from someone else because they’re our friends. We have a tremendous series of demands that we put on everybody. We feel we have a right to expect certain things from our mother and a right to expect certain things from our father. And he’s always a bad father if he doesn’t give us those. We have a right to expect certain things from our children, our friends, our girlfriends, our teachers and from our pastor. Our whole life is bound not so much by the things that they ought to get from us but by the things that we think we have a right to get from them. We talk a lot about Nixon’s political debts. We all know that because of the system that we have, his coming to power involved incurring many political debts for all kinds of groups and all kinds of interests. He has spent maybe too much of his time paying off those political debts. But our tragedy is we don’t spend our time paying off debts to other people. We spend time counting up the debts that they owe us. If the wife doesn’t behave in a certain way, you get resentful. You expect it from her. If the friend doesn’t come up in a certain way in a time of difficulty, you get resentful. He’s not being a true friend. We expect things from each other. It’s as if we’re gods and we have the right to receive all kinds of things from all the poor little minions that surround us in our life. Isn’t it true that a lot of our resentment comes because they don’t come through? And so we bind them and we bind ourselves. We don’t get a certain vacation that we think the friend or our parents should give us. The root of bitterness comes up inside and we feel that they haven’t paid us what they owe us. Now brothers and sisters do you see that lets loose a force of resentment. And what we’re actually doing is, we’re asking too much from the world. We’re really being utterly unfair to each other. We demand love and attention from our wives, husbands, brothers, sisters and friends that couldn’t give those things to us if they were the most loving people in the world. We’re demanding superhuman things from the world. We demand tremendous excitement and exhilaration either from sex or from the motorbike, but we want something exciting. We’re demanding incredible stimulation and exhilaration from poor things that can’t give it to us. And that’s a force of sin inside us. Now Jesus was free from that and you can see it if you look in John 13. He just did not have this attitude that he was master of everything and that everybody should give things to him. He was not continually defending that position. John 13:1-5 – “Now before the feast of the Passover, when Jesus knew that his hour had come to depart out of this world to the Father, having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end. And during supper, when the devil had already put it into the heart of Judas Iscariot, Simon’s son, to betray him, Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands, and that he had come from God and was going to God, rose from supper, laid aside his garments, and girded himself with a towel. Then he poured water into a basin, and began to wash the disciples’ feet, and to wipe them with the towel with which he was girded.” John 13:12-14 – “When he had washed their feet, and taken his garments, and resumed his place, he said to them, ‘Do you know what I have done to you? You call me Teacher and Lord; and you are right, for so I am. If I then, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet.’” This man obviously did not take the attitude that they owed respect, love and service to him. He obviously didn’t feel anybody owed him anything. Now, do you see that the only way to come into victory is to live that way? The reason why we have long wars of attrition on this is because we decide we’ll do it gradually. We gradually get over the idea that people owe us things and we’ll begin to give to others. But it will never come about. You’ll never get rid of the resentment and bitterness that way. It can only come the way it came with Jesus. Let’s look at Romans 6:10, the verse that we’re studying today. Romans 6:10 – “The death he died he died to sin,” (that is, the sin of that independence or the sin of these rights that we feel we have). “The death he died he died to sin, once for all, but the life he lives he lives to God.” Now do you see the three words, “once for all”? The only way to come into victory over that attitude is to be willing to die with Jesus to our rights to have anything from anybody. Now that’s it, brothers and sisters. It needs a crisis experience or a crisis decision. It’s no use saying, “Oh well, I’ll keep on expecting things from my mother because that’s fair enough. After all, she has Mother’s Day when we give her presents. We ought to get things from our mother. But, I’ll try to ease off demanding things from my friend.” No. It has to be a death to your right to expect anything from anybody. The only way to do that is to come into the death that we suffered in Jesus. It is a fact, that God destroyed us all in Jesus. And once you’re dead, you can’t really look around expecting too much. Corpses don’t drink too many sodas and they don’t ride too many motorbikes. When you come into a place where you’re willing to be crucified with Jesus and you say, “Yes Lord, I see that what you did was destroy me in Jesus”, then suddenly you are free from having rights and demanding things from people. It is a miracle. You find instead that Jesus lives his life through you and begins to look to God for everything. It’s a great thing for a husband and wife in bed together, when the husband is receiving from the Father all the love that he needs. Then it’s a beautiful experience because suddenly he is not trying to get love from his wife. He is able to give her love. It’s great when two friends in a dorm look to God for all the encouragement and help that they need in their examinations. Then the night before the examination they aren’t demanding notes from each other or they aren’t feeling resentful against the other person for not giving them this kind of help. There’s a great freedom that comes when you are willing to die with Jesus to getting things from the world or from other people and are prepared to live to God alone. I have found in my own life that it required a crisis time. It was a time when I really did decide and said, “All right Father, this I am not going to do anymore.” Just one more little thing loved ones that I’d like you to look at for