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 Signs?
Sermon Transcript by Rev. Ernest O’Neill
Some of us aren’t really absolutely sure of God’s existence this morning, I know that. And some of
us aren’t sure why we have a problem with anxiety or restlessness. But there are many of us here
this morning who do know that the reason for the restlessness and the anxiety that we have is
because we aren’t sure of our Creator’s approval. And really it’s because we’re not sure whether
we’re right with him or not, and we don’t quite know how to get right with him.
Now that’s what righteousness means. Righteousness means being right with our Creator, or it means
getting right with him. I think many of us have mistaken it for morality. It isn’t morality first
and foremost; it is being right with our Creator. It’s like an ordinary relationship between you
and your girlfriend, or you and your boyfriend. It’s just an unclouded communication between the
pair of you, and there’s no shadow in your relationship. You are absolutely at home with each
other. That’s what righteousness means. It means being absolutely right with God, having no doubt
of him and him having no doubt of you.
Now many people, including Satan, have tried to change it into morality. Now, you remember that
happened in Genesis 3:5 if you look at it for a moment. Genesis 3:5, you remember, Satan suggested,
“For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing
good and evil.” And ever from that time many people have been suggesting to us that righteousness
is knowing the difference between good and evil and it’s being good and avoiding evil.
Now, that isn’t righteousness brothers and sisters, that’s morality. And that results usually from
receiving the righteousness of God and being right with God. So normally, morality results from
being right with God. But being right with God itself is not involved in morality. It is concerned
with having an unclouded relationship between ourselves and God. I think a lot of us this morning
may say, “Well now Pastor there’s really a good reason for us thinking that righteousness is being
moral, because you know the whole testament is filled with, ‘Thou shall not steal, thou shall not
kill, thou shall not bear false witness.’ And no wonder so many of us think that righteousness is
being right with God.”
Yes brothers and sisters, I think that is true but God has never changed from the very first man
that he made right with himself. And he did not make that man right with himself through morality.
God has never changed. People have misused the law and tried to contort us into all kinds of golden
rules, and doing good to your neighbor, and being good enough so that God will accept you, but that
was never God’s basis for getting right with himself from the beginning of creation. God has never
changed he has maintained the same system for getting people right with himself right down the
years.
Now what is that system? Well, it’s the one you remember he used with the man whom we often regard
as the father of legalism and the father of law, Abraham. Abraham didn’t get right with God because
he was good enough to be accepted by God. He got right with God by another means. You can find it
there, Genesis 15:4-6. We have read it before. Genesis 15:4, “And behold, the word of the Lord
came to him, ‘This man shall not be your heir; your own son shall be your heir.’ 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.’ And he believed the Lord; and he reckoned it to him
as righteousness.”

Now ever from the beginning of creation that has always been God’s way of making us right with
himself. Whenever he found a man or a woman who believed him, who believed that he was the God of
the universe, that he was a loving father, that he didn’t hate us, that he really did love us and
wanted to be close to us — every time a man or a woman believed God and acted upon that belief, God
made that man or woman right with himself. He gave them righteousness; he made them right with
himself. And that’s always been God’s way.
I think a lot of us really get caught up because we say, “Well, wouldn’t this mean that all men
ought to become Jews? We all ought to become like Abraham? We all ought to become Jews. We all
ought to do the same kinds of things as the Jews did.” And you remember what that was if you’d like
to look at it in Genesis 17. It certainly includes at least that physical sign that they put on
their bodies. It’s Genesis 17:9-10, “And God said to Abraham, “As for you, you shall keep my
covenant, you and your descendants after you throughout their generations. This is my covenant,
which you shall keep, between me and you and your descendants after you: Every male among you shall
be circumcised.’” And then in Verse 12, “He that is eight days old among you shall be circumcised;
every male throughout your generations, whether born in your house, or bought with your money from
any foreigner who is not of your offspring, both he that is born in your house and he that is bought
with your money, shall be circumcised. So shall my covenant be in your flesh an everlasting
covenant. Any uncircumcised male who is not circumcised in the flesh of his foreskin shall be cut
off from his people; he has broken my covenant.”
And many of us say, “Well, shouldn’t we make sure that we have that cutting in our body, and that
would enable us to be right with God?” Now brothers and sisters when was Abraham made right with
God, before he was circumcised or after he was circumcised? And you know the answer. You actually
turn back [meaning the event in Gen. 15:6 took place before that in Gen. 17] in the Bible to get to
Genesis 15:6 and read, “And he believed the Lord; and he reckoned it to him as righteousness.”
In other words, you don’t need to become a Jew. You don’t need to cut your body to be right with
God. You are right with God the moment you believe that God is your loving Father, and that he
really does love you, and that you can trust him. And then you act on that in your own life. And
you no longer fear, and worry, and are anxious but you trust that God is in charge of you as he is
in charge of the sparrow. And that makes you right with God. As a result of that your life
naturally becomes more like his. But that’s the way you get right with him.
You may say, “Well alright Pastor but where does the circumcision come in? What’s the purpose of
circumcision?” And you can see it there in Genesis 17:11. “You shall be circumcised in the flesh
of your foreskins, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and you.” It was just a sign.
It didn’t cause faith, it didn’t create righteousness. It was a sign of the righteousness that
Abram already had because he believed God. It was like the covenant God made with Noah. God made a
covenant with him, “I’ll never again wipe out the earth with a flood, and I’ll put a sign in the
heavens, a rainbow. And whenever you see that sign you’ll remember the covenant that I made with
you. But I made it with you out of sheer grace. The rainbow didn’t make me make it with you. I
made it because I loved you and I want you to trust me.” So it is with circumcision.
Now brothers and sisters, you may say, “Well, I mean, thank goodness there is no way in which we
could pervert that sign.” And there was no way in which the Jews could pervert it. But brothers
and sisters, the Jews ‘did’ pervert the sign. The Jews took the sign and regarded it as more
important than the inward faith. And you’ll see that if you look at Acts 15:1. They had a whole

discussion and a whole disagreement in the early church over this silly sign. Acts 15:1, “But some
men came down from Judea and were teaching the brethren, ‘Unless you are circumcised according to
the custom of Moses, you cannot be saved.’”
Now we would say, “That is ridiculous.” How could they take what is purely an outward sign and make
it the very qualification for being accepted by God. And look in verse 5, “But some believers who
belonged to the party of the Pharisees rose up, and said, ‘It is necessary to circumcise them, and
to charge them to keep the Law of Moses.’” And you see that this wasn’t God’s plan at all.
The verses that we’re studying today make that clear. If you want to look at them they’re Romans 4.
And it was plain that this wasn’t the way God wanted people to misuse the sign. Romans 4:9, “Is
this blessing,” that of being right with God, “Pronounced only upon the circumcised, or also upon
the uncircumcised? We say that faith was reckoned to Abraham as righteousness. How then was it
reckoned to him? Was it before or after he had been circumcised? It was not after, but before he
was circumcised. He received circumcision as a sign or seal of righteousness which he had by faith
while he was still uncircumcised. The purpose was to make him the father of all who believe without
being circumcised and who thus have righteousness reckoned to them, and likewise the father of the
circumcised who are not merely circumcised but also follow the example of the faith which our father
Abraham had before he was circumcised.”
Yet in spite of all this the early church came along and said, “No, you need the sign. It doesn’t
matter if you believe in Jesus, it doesn’t matter if you believe God has forgiven you, it doesn’t
matter if you believe that you can trust him as your Father, you need the sign. Otherwise, you
can’t be accepted by him.” And do you see brothers and sisters how ridiculous that was? The sign
was only a sign of a relationship that already existed. In other words, Abraham was only
circumcised because he was already right with God. And of course, you know, we say, “Well, that’s
interesting but really it has very little to do with us today. We would never make that kind of
mistake.”
Well, would you look at 1 Corinthians 1 and see the first miserable little bickering church?
Really, it’s incredible how foolish we men can be. 1 Corinthians 1:11-13, “For it has been reported
to me by Chloe’s people that there is quarreling among you, my brethren.” Maybe they’re quarreling
over whether Jesus has risen from the dead, or whether God is the loving Father? Something big!
“What I mean is that each one of you says, ‘I belong to Paul,’ or ‘I belong to Apollos,’ or ‘I
belong to Cephas,’ or ‘I belong to Christ.’ Is Christ divided? Was Paul crucified for you? Or
were you baptized in the name of Paul? I am thankful that I baptized none of you except Crispus and
Gaius; lest any one should say that you were baptized in my name.” And the miserable church was
beginning to fall out over a sign.
And we say, “I’m glad we don’t do that.” And you know it. “Well, I was baptized, and I was
confirmed, and I was received into membership therefore, it doesn’t matter whether I experienced any
conviction of sin in my life. It doesn’t matter whether I ever repented of my sins. It doesn’t
matter whether I ever gave my life to Jesus. I’ve received the sign, so I’m a child of God.” And
brothers and sisters, you know so many of us labor under that. We make the sign of baptism the very
basis of our righteousness with God when it isn’t at all. It is a sign of something that has
already happened to us.
In other words, you can only be baptized into a state in which you already are, as Abraham was
circumcised because of a relationship that he already had with the Father. And you know that some

of us well, we don’t say that but we say, “Yeah, that’s right. That’s right, that kind of thing is
stupid and naïve. That’s not the important thing, that you’re baptized and confirmed, it’s that
you’re baptized as an infant. That’s the vital thing. If you’re baptized as an infant you’re a
child of God.” And you feel you know, at least the Jews only misused the sign but here we are we
tear apart the body of Christ on how we administer the sign. And then somebody comes along and
says, “Yeah, that’s stupid. Boy it’s not baptism as an infant that’s a nothing.” And we say, “Ah,
good somebody with sense at last.” And they say, “Yeah, you must be baptized as an adult, that’s
the vital thing. And you must be baptized in a certain way as an adult.” And we say, “Really?
That’s senseless that we fall out over the sign.” And then some person comes along and says, “Yeah,
it’s vital you mustn’t pour the water on, you mustn’t immerse them, you must just sprinkle them.”
And then another group says, “No, you mustn’t sprinkle them you must pour the water over their head
when they’re three months old.” “No, that’s madness you must immerse them when they’re at the age
of discretion.”
Now brothers and sisters do you see? Ah the Father must look down upon us – we’ll deal with the
issues in a moment, but do you see the Father must look down upon us and say, “Well, the Jews I
thought were bad, but at least they agreed on how to circumcise.” So loved ones, do you see that
we’re in danger here. We’re in danger of making the sign the cause of our relationship with God
when it is not. It just isn’t.
Now you may say, “Now Pastor, alright, but we don’t want to just laugh at the thing. Is it really
as unimportant as you are implying? Is there not clear scriptural direction about baptism?” And
yeah, brothers and sisters, I think really it is not as important as we make it. I think for
instance the scriptural attitude is there in 1 Corinthians 1:14. I think the attitude of an apostle
to this is found there in Verse 14, “I am thankful that I baptized none of you except Crispus and
Gaius; lest any one should say that you were baptized in my name. (I did baptize also the household
of Stephanas. Beyond that, I do not know whether I baptized any one else.)” I think that is the
attitude of a mature apostle to baptism, that baptism is not the big deal. Baptism is a sign and
there is something more important than baptism.
But, let us look at some of the scriptural teaching about it. I think we find some of it there in
Acts 2:38. Acts 2:38, “And Peter said to them, ‘Repent, and be baptized.’” There’s an order of
events; the Bible tells us that. There’s an order of events in connection with a sign. The inward
attitude of trust to the Father must be there, otherwise, there’s no point in giving any sign. The
sign won’t create the faith. The inward attitude of the heart is what is important, and it must
come first.
Now you get it again in Acts 8:12. “But when they believed Philip as he preached good news about the
kingdom of God and the name of Jesus Christ, they were baptized, both men and women.” And you see
the adverbial clause of time, “When they believed Philip,” then they were baptized. So, there is an
order of events. The inward experience must be there otherwise, baptism is just a mockery.
Now, maybe we should look at what that inward experience should be. And you see it there in Acts
10:44 and 48. Acts 10:44-48, “While Peter was still saying this, the Holy Spirit fell on all who
heard the word. And the believers from among the circumcised who came with Peter were amazed,
because the gift of the Holy Spirit had been poured out even on the Gentiles. For they heard them
speaking in tongues and extolling God. Then Peter declared, ‘Can any one forbid water for baptizing
these people who have received the Holy Spirit just as we have?’ And he commanded them to be
baptized in the name of Jesus Christ. Then they asked him to remain for some days.” The inward

experience, and trust, and reception of the Holy Spirit must be there. We must be born of the
Spirit before we can be baptized and before baptism means anything.
Now some of you may say, “Well, brother, what about the mode and the time? Is there no direction in
scripture about the mode of baptism?” Well you see, many brothers and sisters here this morning
would say, “Yes, there is.” So let’s look at this piece in scripture that points to that. It’s
Acts 8:38, “And he commanded the chariot to stop, and they both went down into the water, Philip and
the eunuch, and he baptized him. And when they came up out of the water, the Spirit of the Lord
caught up Philip; and the eunuch saw him no more, and went on his way rejoicing.” It does seem that
often in the New Testament people went down into the water and probably most of them experienced it
the way Jesus did and was right immersed in the water and that signified for them the burial with
Christ.
There are many people that became Christians without being immersed in water. For one thing, it was
a real practical problem with the amount of water around Jerusalem when you were baptizing 3,000
people. So let’s be sensible about it. Let’s say, “Yes, it does seem on reading that it is
believers who are baptized. And it does seem on plain reading of scripture that they went down into
the water and were immersed. But let’s face it that many, many of them must often have been in
positions where there wasn’t the water to be immersed and they weren’t immersed and that didn’t
prevent them entering into all that God had given them.”
I think it’s important too to see that old Paul does mention in 1 Corinthians there a certain phrase
that indicates that there was some practice in New Testament times, of baptizing the whole family.
And you have it in 1 Corinthians 1:16, “I did baptize also the household of Stephanas.” And I don’t
think one can afford cynically to look at all us poor Lutherans and Methodists and say, “Oh now,
that doesn’t mean he baptized the children as well.” I think brothers and sisters that in that
early time they had to signify this family was going to be brought up as a Christian family. I
think that often the children were just included in the baptism. It wasn’t believed that they were
regenerated at that moment or that they had received the Spirit of Christ, but it was believed that
they would no longer be brought up as pagan children but as children under the covenant of Jesus,
and that later on they would enter into it by their own volition when they came to the age of
discretion.
And I think it’s important to see though the New Testament lays down broad lines, which really we
should follow as God gives us grace, yet we should not look down on dear ones who interpret it in
another way, because at the end of the day, all you’re talking about is how you’re going to cut the
flesh. And whatever you do to the body, you will not create an inner attitude to God in the heart.
It is just a sign.
Now maybe it would be good to look into the real meaning of baptism. So, could we just do that for
a few minutes for the rest of the time? Let’s go back to Jesus’ words when baptism is first
mentioned by him. It’s Matthew 28:19, “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing
them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” Now those of you that know
Greek know that the word in is really ‘eis’ ‘into’. And it means baptize them into the name of the
Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
Now what does it mean to be baptized ‘into’ the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit?
Well ‘eis’ obviously means that you enter into those three persons. That you are entering into them
by actual experience. Now, how do you do that? Do you send up a rocket with a man in it and send

him up to the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit? How do you enter into the Father, the Son, and the Holy
Spirit? Now that’s what we’re really talking when we’re talking about baptism.
Brothers and sisters, baptism is not first a matter of water. Otherwise, Jesus would not have said,
“I have still a baptism to be baptized with.” Because he was not meaning water, he was meaning the
whole experience of Calvary. And again, and again, and again in the New Testament baptism is used
as different experiences not water.
Now, what do we mean when we mean to be baptized into the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit? How are you
baptized into those three persons? Well God made it very plain to us in scripture with the use of
the word. Romans 6:3-5, this is how we are baptized into the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
Romans 6:3-5, “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.”
You are baptized into Jesus’ death and burial and Jesus rises from the dead and takes you up with
him into his Father. And that’s how we are baptized into the Father and the Son. But it’s by being
willing to enter into Jesus’ death to himself. And it’s in view of that baptism into spiritual
experience of Jesus’ death, that God raises us into himself and then we are justified in being
baptized with water. But the outward baptism with water is a sign of the inward baptism into the
Father and the Son.
Now you may say, “Well, can you be baptized with water and not experience that?” Yes, you know you
can. It happened often. It happened for instance in Acts 19 if you’d like to look at it. Acts
19:1-4, some people were baptized with water and knew nothing of that baptism into Christ’s death.
And so they had the outward sign but they had not the inward reality, the inward baptism. Acts
19:1, “While Apollos was at Corinth, Paul passed though the upper country and came to Ephesus.
There he found some disciples. And he said to them, ‘Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you
believed?’ And they said, ‘No, we have never even heard that there is a Holy Spirit.’ And he said,
‘Into what then were you baptized?’ They said, ‘Into John’s baptism.’ And Paul said, ‘John
baptized with the baptism of repentance, telling the people to believe in the one who was to come
after him, that is, Jesus.’ On hearing this, they were baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus.”
Many of us have been baptized into the repentance of sins and we are good Jews. That’s it. We know
that our sins are forgiven but we have never been baptized into Christ’s death and so we have little
or no experience of victorious or pure life. We walk periodically in and out of obedience, because
we have been baptized into a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of our sins. And I know
brothers and sisters if I ask many of you do you believe you’re right with God? You would say,
“Yes, but I have great trouble because there are days when I live in continual defeat.”
Do you see that many of us have been baptized into repentance for forgiveness of our sins but we
have not been baptized into Jesus’ death? And so the outward sign signifies more than actually
exists in our own inward lives. What is the result of that? Well, many of us regard our lives as
the norm for the Christian life. And then you see you get into all kinds of problems. Then people
say, “Ah, well I was baptized so I must be a Christian, mustn’t I?” Well, you can only be as much
of a Christian as you believed for. You can only be as much of a Christian as you’ve been willing
for God to make you. But do you see what happens? We have some of us who are baptized with water,

yes by immersion, and do not enter into Christ’s death so we walk defeated Christians lives. But
everybody says, “Well, they have the outward sign, they must be Christians.”
Loved ones, the outward sign is only as meaningful as the inward experience is. And you see this is
where we brothers and sisters, get into all kinds of contortion over what a Christian is. If we
experienced a full baptism into Jesus as Christians, we would know there is only one kind of
Christian. That is, a Christian that has been baptized into Christ’s death and his burial, and has
been raised into the presence of the Father at his right hand.
Now there is the other part of the baptism, that of the Holy Spirit. And you see it there, it’s in
1 Corinthians 12:13. 1 Corinthians 12:13, “For by one Spirit we were all baptized into one body –
Jews or Greeks, slaves or free – and all were made to drink of one Spirit.” And the second part of
baptism is being baptized ‘by’ the Holy Spirit, and being baptized ‘with’ the Holy Spirit. In other
words, when you enter into Christ’s death and his burial and rise with him in his resurrection, what
happened to him happens to you. The Holy Spirit anoints you with himself and brings to you the
purity and the power of Jesus’ life.
Now that is a whole Christian baptism. Now you see where we get into troubles, we try to divide the
thing up. We try to say, “Well, I can be baptized for the forgiveness of my sins without being
baptized into his death. Well, I can be baptized into his death without being baptized with the
Holy Spirit.” And then we get John arguing one side of it and Intervarsity arguing another and the
Baptist arguing another and the Pentecostals arguing another. Brothers and sisters, let’s stop
trying to justify ourselves. Let’s go to the Father and say, “Lord, I’ve been baptized, but I want
to enter into all that you have for me.”
Do you see brothers and sisters that it’s time we stop this business of saying, “No, you’re not a
Christian because you’re not baptized with the Holy Spirit,” or, “You’re not a Christian because you
aren’t walking in the victorious life.” Brothers and sisters, we should be encouraging each other
to enter into all that our baptism signifies, and stop this business of saying, “I’m here but I’m
not there.” We should be looking to the Father and saying, “Father, I know that baptism, whatever
mode it is, baptism means baptism into the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. It means baptism
into Jesus’ death, and into his burial, and into his resurrection at your right hand, and then it
means being baptized with your Holy Spirit. Father, I want all that you want me to have.”
But dear ones, that’s it. It’s not the outward sign that’s important. And loved ones, I say that
to you in love, the immersion party. I’m for it, I’m with you. I haven’t baptized an infant since I
came to the Campus Church and for a Methodist that is heresy. But do you see that it’s time for
love. It’s time for good sense. It’s time for stopping this arguing over a silly sign, because all
we’re doing is encouraging each other to be preoccupied with the external instead of with the
internal.
Now here’s what I’m asking you, have you been baptized into the Father, the Son, and the Holy
Spirit? And I’m not saying you’re a second class citizen if you haven’t been but I’m saying have
you been baptized into Jesus’ death and into his burial? That is, have you been willing to die to
self with Jesus? To suffer all that he wants to suffer in your life, to face the kind of future
that he wants for your life? And have you been baptized into his resurrection so that at this
moment you dwell at the right hand of the Father far above all those petty little concerns that you
used to have? And have you been baptized with his Holy Spirit? And don’t you say, “Do you mean
have I spoken with tongues?” – don’t get into all that stuff. I’m asking you have you been willing

to obey the Holy Spirit fully in your life? Are you willing for the Holy Spirit to give you
whatever gifts, or whatever fruit that he wants to give you? Well, that’s what the Father wants.
Loved ones, could we get back to the simple gospel that the apostles preached, and stop trying to
divide the thing up and let’s see that outward baptism is a sign of a whole complete inward baptism
into Christ’s death, and resurrection, and into the Holy Spirit himself. And then you’ll begin to
really experience the victory and the power-filled witnessing life of a child of God.
So really, are you depending on the sign? Are you sitting there and saying, “I’m a Lutheran and I
was baptized as an infant so I must be there. I don’t feel I’m there and I have none of the marks
of being there, but I must be there.” And brothers and sisters, those of us who were immersed are
we saying, “Well, I immersed as a Baptist and I know that’s the one true gospel in the whole world
and I know that I must have everything. I don’t experience the fruit of the Spirit, I don’t
experience victory in my life, I can’t witness, I’m miserable in my home, but I was baptized and I
must be there.”
Loved ones, let’s forget that silly kind of argument, and let’s go to the Father and say, “Lord, I
want to experience all that you want me to experience.” And really loved ones, as we let down those
old silly defenses and stop straining and following our fathers and our forefathers down those
labyrinthine endless arguments, as we stop following out in that direction and begin to attend to
the inward reality, you’ll see that God will form his body into a unity and into a oneness that will
reveal him to the world.
Brother and sister, if you’re sitting there and it’s all new to you and all you know is, “Well, I’m
a Lutheran,” or, “I was confirmed.” Well, will you begin to ask? Or if you’re a miserable old
Methodist like me who was baptized as an infant and you don’t know exactly where you stand, will you
begin to ask the Father, “Father, show me have I really been baptized or have I just had an outward
sign?” And God will show you. As we attend to reality, he will reveal truth to us, so I pray he
will with you.
Some of you may want to talk afterwards or pray, and really we’ll be staying, some of us here, after
the service. And I would ask you as brothers and sisters, if you could sit in your seats until the
rest get out then you could come down to these front rows and just pray. And I’ll be glad to talk
or pray with you, my wife will, and some of the brothers and sisters will be here. And if we come
over to you and you just want to pray and we ask you do you want to talk or pray just you say what
you want you see. Don’t feel you have to talk to somebody. Just stay. But if you have some
feeling in your heart that you should get things straight, well this is a good place to do it. It’s
an easy place. Let us pray.
Father, we thank you for delivering us from the foolishness that we have walked in for so long all
concerned with outward signs and with churchy symbols. Father, we thank you for showing us that it
is the inward reality that counts, and all the signs in the world won’t create that inward reality.
So Father, we want to stand on that inward reality ourselves. And if we have not been baptized into
Jesus’ death and into his burial and his resurrection to your right hand, if we have not been
baptized with the Holy Spirit in the way that you want us to, Father, will you reveal that to us?
We will listen to you.
Lord, we won’t listen to any man; we won’t listen to churches; we won’t listen to groups who tell
us, “This is what to believe, or that.” We want to listen to you. You know our condition you are

able to tell us. But Father, we want to please you we want to be right with you inside in our
hearts. We trust you to bring us into that this day for your 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.

Jesus Meets Our Needs
Romans 4:15
Sermon Transcript by Rev. Ernest O’Neill
Would you open the Bible please at Romans 4:13-15 and you could see there the verses we have been
studying these two Sundays, last Sunday and this Sunday. Romans 4:13-15, “The promise to Abraham
and his descendants, that they should inherit the world, did not come through the law but through
the righteousness of faith. If it is the adherents of the law who are to be the heirs, faith is
null and the promise is void. For the law brings wrath, but where there is no law there is no
transgression.”
Have you ever told a lie and then you’re caught out in it and you know that the immediate reaction
of our old human nature is to try to prove that we had a very, very good reason for telling that
lie. And we’re convinced in our own mind that, “Okay, it may be wrong. On the highest level of
morality it may be wrong, but I had really a very good reason for telling it.” And the whole
response of the human nature is, “Okay, let’s explain to them why we told that lie.” And it’s just
us, you know.
We just immediately want to justify ourselves. We miss an assignment, we know it’s through our
laziness and indolence, or because we went to a party, or because we didn’t bother with doing the
work, but when the lecturer catches us, the old human nature wants to justify, and rationalize, and
excuse. And that’s the attitude we often have to the Creator.
We know we’re really very insecure in this spinning world and it’s really because we have no idea of
who the Creator is or what his attitude to us is. But our own tendency is always to justify
ourselves. Instead of getting in touch with him and finding out what he’s like and what he thinks
of us, our own tendency is to establish our self righteousness in some way. And the normal way we
do it is we try to become the kinds of people that he could not possibly reject. We just try to
become those people that he couldn’t possibly reject. We’re so good and we abide by so many laws,
and we are so self-righteous, and we have so many good reasons for the things we do. And really
brothers and sisters, a lot of us get into the confusion in our own minds because instead of ever
dealing with the Creator we’re always trying to persuade ourselves and everybody else, that we
really are very righteous people and there’s no reason on earth why a Creator who is at all fair
would possibly reject us or make us feel insecure.
Now you know that last Sunday we saw that that isn’t the way to get secure with your Creator, or to
get right with your Creator, that righteousness is being right with God. It isn’t establishing your
own morality. It is getting right with God in the way he wants you to get right with him. And
that, we saw last Sunday, was through trust. You start trusting your Creator. You start treating
him as though he is your own loving Father and as if he’s concerned about every hair of your head as
he is about the Milky Way and you just start trusting your God and start trusting him as your
Father. And you remember what we said, ‘that faith’ or ‘that trust’, God regards as righteousness.
And he looks maybe upon your morality; maybe it’s not good, but he looks on your trust of him, and
he knows that sooner or later if you keep trusting him, you’re going to become the kinds of people
that he will be proud of. And so he makes you right with himself, and he treats your faith as if it
were righteousness. In other words, he makes you right with himself through you trusting him.

You remember that last Sunday we talked about what you trust. You trust his promises. God, the
Creator who has never broken his word down through centuries, gives certain promises to us men and
women. And if we trust those promises God makes us right with himself. Trusting the promises means
not only saying, “Oh yeah, I trust. I trust that that [indicates the end of the stage] side of the
stage will not fall down when I step on it. But will I step on it? No, but I trust it. Yeah, I
trust it absolutely, but I’m not going to try it.” But trusting is really doing that, and trusting
is really stepping out on what you know he has promised he’ll do for you.
And I think a lot of us, you see, would get free from a great deal of striving and straining, and
trying to prove ourselves to our Creator, and trying to justify ourselves to him by being good, if
we would trust his promises, and we would sort of lay back and just sort of breathe at last, and
just accept that what he has promised is actually going to come through.
Now, you know, those promises are very plain. Romans 5:9, is one of those promises, “Since,
therefore, we are now justified by his blood,” by Jesus’ blood, “Much more shall we be saved by him
from the wrath of God.” And God has given us that promise. And you can either keep trying to prove
yourself to your husbands, and your wives, or you can try to keep justifying yourselves to your
parents, or you can keep trying to prove to yourself that you’re really a very good person in spite
of the kind of life you live, or you can trust that you’re justified by the blood of Jesus, that God
actually has nothing against you at this moment, and he has certainly reconciled to you as far as he
is concerned, because Jesus has died to pay the debt that you owned to God’s law of justice. And
the moment you trust that promise, that moment there just comes a great sense of rightness with God.
And then God is able to give you his Spirit which produces a dynamic, a moral dynamic in your life.
But you see, it is trusting the promises of God.
Or there’s another one there in Romans 3:24-26, “They are justified by his grace as a gift.” You
don’t need to justify yourself by trying hard, or proving that you’re good, but as a gift, “Through
the redemption which is in 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; it was to prove at the present time that he himself is righteous and that
he justifies him who has faith in Jesus.” And that just explains that you should die because you’re
not good and that Jesus has died in your place and so God is justified in forgiving you and God is
willing to forgive you.
And loved ones, for those of us who are going around the campuses with a chip on our shoulder,
always trying to prove ourselves to somebody, always trying to strive, and strain, and justify
ourselves in other people’s eyes, and rationalize away our wrongs, what God is saying is, “Look,
would you stop all that charade? Would you stop playing around? I know what you are and despite
that I love you and I’ve forgiven you because of my Son Jesus. Would you stop pretending that
you’re not a sinner and start telling me the things that you’ve done wrong and let’s get them out of
your life?” And that’s the Father’s attitude loved ones.
You see, Calvary is really the Father holding his hand up to guard his face from the effects of our
sin and you can see the marks on his hands and the marks of Jesus’ hands. And Calvary is his other
hand reaching out and saying, “Come on, I want you. I want you.” But it’s him that wants us. And
trusting God is a method by which God establishes our rightness with himself and so we need to just
trust God.
We see of course, that if you begin to trust his promises in all areas of life, it saves you from

works of law. Works of law are doing what everybody is telling you, you ought to do to please
somebody else or to get some result.
So I mean for years I was like that woman, you remember, that had the hemorrhage. I mean, you can
look at it if you’d like to. It’s Mark 5:25-29 and this works, you see, in every part of life. If
you trust God his promises are made real to you but only if you trust him. His promises don’t
become real to people who are trying by works of law to prove themselves, or justify themselves, or
get certain results, but those who trust him. Mark 5:25, and there was a woman in the crowd, you
remember, “And there was a woman who had had a flow of blood for twelve years, and who had suffered
much under many physicians,” that’s you physicians, “And had spent all that she had, and was no
better but rather grew worse.”
Now I had often been in that situation and I think some of you have been. “She had heard the
reports about Jesus, and came up behind him in the crowd and touched his garment. For she said, ‘If
I touch even his garments, I shall be made well.’ And immediately the hemorrhage ceased; and she
felt in her body that she was healed of her disease.” Now, I would certainly like that in my own
physical life and I was trying to do all the things that I could read that I should do to keep this
sickness away. And then at last I trusted what the Psalmist said, “Bless the LORD, O my soul, and
forget not all his benefits, who forgives all your iniquity, who heals all your diseases.” And I
saw that that was a promise that God had given me, that he would heal my disease. And I stopped
striving and straining and obeying all the things that I was trying to obey to get rid of the
sickness, and I trusted God, and the promise was made real. But you see brothers and sisters, the
promises of God are made real to people who are right with God through faith not to people who are
striving and straining all the time.
Now that’s, you see, what the verses say that we looked up today, and maybe you’d just look at it
again now that we’ve said that. It’s Romans 4:13, “The promise to Abraham and his descendants, that
they should inherit the world, did not come through the law but through the righteousness of faith.”
And that’s what God is saying. And then you see in Verse 14 he says, “If it is the adherents of
the law who are to be the heirs,” if it’s to be the Jews who are obeying all the works of the law
and who are not exercising the faith and trust that Abraham their father had then, “Faith is null
and the promise is void.” You can’t inherit and come into the reality of the promises of God through
works of law ‘and’ through faith. It’s either through one or the other.
And then the question comes, “Okay, what’s the big deal with the law? What is the purpose of the
law? Why did God give us the law at all if it’s through faith that the promises are made real?”
And do you see in the next verse what God says the Lord does, “For the law brings wrath, but where
there is no law there is no transgression.” So the purpose of the law is to bring wrath and where
there is no law there is no transgression.
Now does that mean that the law was bad? We’ll come back to that verse in a moment, but does that
mean the law is bad? Does that mean we should ignore the law, that we should defy the law, that we
should cut the law apart and say, “That’s the Old Testament dispensation? You don’t bother with the
law now we’re living by faith and trust in God”? Well, that is not what God’s word says. Romans
7:12, “So the law is holy, and the commandment is holy and just and good.” No, God’s word doesn’t
say the law is bad.
How then does the law bring wrath? Well, this way: the law says, “I’m going to describe to you the
life of a man who trusts God implicitly. A man who trusts God implicitly will have no other God

before God the Father of Jesus. A man who loves God implicitly will not commit adultery. A man who
trusts God completely will never steal. A man who trusts God completely will not covet anything
that is his neighbors. A man who trusts God completely will not bear false witness against his
neighbor.” In other words, the law reveals to us what the life of a man who trusts God is like so
that we come to the law and we see, “Ah, I have that kind of life so I know I trust God,” or, “I
have not that kind of life so I know I don’t trust God.”
But the purpose of the law is to bring to our consciousness the fact of whether we’re trusting God
or not trusting God. That is its purpose, brothers and sisters. It is not to make us right with
God. It is not that we may try to obey the law in every little issue and therefore please God. The
law is there to examine our lives in absolute detail to bring home to us whether we’re trusting God
or not. Otherwise, you see what we would do: you know us human beings, we say, “You make yourself
right with God by trusting him.” We say, “Oh yeah, I’m trusting God. Trusting God? Yeah, inside
of my heart I’m trusting him like mad. Really I am. It may not look like it, but I’m trusting God.
Yeah, trust God that’s what we do. Trust in the Lord and don’t despair.” And we just wander
around in generalities and vagueness and we say, “Are you a Christian?” “Yeah, yeah, I trust God.”
We wouldn’t know whether we trusted God or not.
Now, God has given us law to describe the life of a man who trusts him completely. But that law is
not something that we should strive to obey. But it is a diagnostic tool that will set before us
plainly whether we’re trusting God or not and that will, in fact, drive us back to God.
Now you can see that if you look at Romans 7:7. “What then shall we say? That the law is sin? By
no means! Yet, if it had not been for the law, I should not have known sin.” That is, I should not
have recognized it. Sin is ‘not trusting God.’ Let’s get away from that deal that sin is drinking
too much alcohol, or sin is swearing. That is a sin but, deep down the attitude that is sin is a
lack of trust in God. Now what Paul is saying is, “I should not have recognized sin within me. I
should not have been able to see that I’m not trusting God if it hadn’t been for the law. I should
not have known what it is to covet if the law had not said, ‘You shall not covet.’ I’d have gone on
coveting and I wouldn’t have been trusting God but I’d have made coveting the norm for my race.”
And that was the situation with us men and women.
We had gotten so far away from trusting God or depending on him that we had made the norm what a
‘distrusting’ man would have in his own life. But it was only when the law came that we saw this
was a life that does not trust God. In Verse 8, “But sin, finding opportunity in the commandment,
wrought in me all kinds of covetousness.” In other words, the lack of trust that I had in God
brought all kinds of covetousness out in my life. The law showed me that that was covetousness,
showed me that therefore I wasn’t trusting God. “Apart from the law sin lies dead.” And brothers
and sisters, we could live a life trusting only ourselves and depending only on ourselves and we
would never know it if it weren’t for the law. “Apart from the law sin lies dead. I was once alive
apart from the law, but when the commandment came, sin revised and I died.” And so it is, a brother
and sister who does not respect his conscience or does not respect the law, whatever it is, a Hindu
law, or an Islamic law, or the law of God, that person would be very, very happy, you know.
Some people say, “Oh the way I know that I’m Christian is that I’m content, and quiet, and
satisfied.” And remember what John Wesley said, “So was a cow chewing grass in the field.” And so
it is, you see, with a non-Christian, with a person who doesn’t know any law and doesn’t bother with
the law. That person is really very happy and he doesn’t know that he’s not trusting his God and
will never know until he eventually meets him face-to-face on the last day. But the purpose of the

law is to expose our lack of trust in God to us. It exposes sin to us which is a lack of trust in
God.
And you see what the verse says that we’re studying this morning in Romans 4:15b, “But where there
is no law there is no transgression.” And that’s true, if there were no law we would never know we
weren’t trusting God. We would never know we weren’t pleasing him. And though there is no law
nobody knows they’re doing wrong. And above all sin, distrust in God, rebellion against God lies
hidden and unrecognized.
But it’s still there and it’s still going to destroy you at the last day because it’s that lack of
trust in God that prevents him giving you supernatural, eternal, uncreated life. And without that
trust he cannot give you that life. And without that life you will die at the end of this life and
go into outer darkness. And you see, you never know any of that unless there’s a law.
My wife said that she’s glad that we got a dog because it takes the illustrations away from her.
I’m sure she’s miserably embarrassed, yeah she is. So, we’ve a little dog, a little Yorkshire.
I’ve told you about him. And he’s that size, [with his hands shows about 6 inches (15 cm) high] a
miserable little soul. And at the beginning — I think he’s six months old — we’ve had him I think
about a month now. And at the beginning my wife would call him and he would go trotting over to
her. And it seemed, boy, he was really very obedient: he’d go just when she called him. And I
would call him once or twice and sometimes he would come and sometimes he wouldn’t, but I thought,
“Well, that isn’t important. I mean, she gives him the food that’s why.” And then it began to come
home to me, “but he has a little miserable rebellious will that really we’re just allowing to
develop and lie there.” And so I began to try to teach him obedience, and I got the lead, and said,
“Choux,” — that’s his name, it’s a wild name. Choux, it’s French for cabbage and it’s what a lover
– yeah. (Gentlemen, don’t marry an Irish lady.) When a French boyfriend loves his girlfriend he
says, “Mon Choux je t’aime.” “My cabbage I love you.”
We call him Choux, and I would pull the old lead and say, “Choux!” And he would stand there and
wouldn’t move. And you could see the rebellion in his eyes. And I’d call him again and he wouldn’t
move.
And loved ones, really the old independence and rebellion was there but it never came out until I
began to give him some commandments. And it was lying there all the time. And I think many of us
do this with old Spock’s [Star Trek character] help. I think many of us do this with our children,
we let the old rebellion and independence lie there and we never really bring it out, or expose it
by ever telling them to do anything. And it was only when commandments began to come that I began
to see that the little animal wasn’t obedient at all. He was doing what suited him. He just went
to the person that he wanted to go to at that time.
Now, do you see that’s the purpose of the law? When Jesus says to us, “Don’t commit adultery,” and
we commit adultery either with our physical bodies or by looking onto a woman to lust after here,
then Jesus is exposing to us that, “There, you are not trusting me for your sexual life. You’re not
trusting me. You’re not trusting that I will give you whatever satisfaction you need in that part
of your life. You’re grabbing for it on your own because basically, you don’t trust that I and my
Father know that side of your life, and will fulfill it for you in just the degree that will be
right.” That’s the importance of the law you see.
God comes along and says, “Thou shalt not commit adultery.” We find ourselves committing adultery

either in our minds, or in our bodies. What are we to do? We’re to go to God and trust him more.
Do you see that? Not we’re to go and by sheer will power try to obey the law, but we’re to allow
the law to drive us back to God, to expose before us our lack of trust in him. The law says, “You
shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.” We find ourselves bearing false witness; we
find ourselves talking about our neighbors, gossiping about them, criticizing them. What God wants
to show us is, “Listen, you’re not trusting God for your own status or your own reputation. That’s
why you’re spending all this time running down everybody else to bring yourself up, bearing false
witness against your neighbors, criticizing them in order to show how good you are, because you’re
not trusting me that I will establish your status, I will establish your reputation. You’re not
trusting me to give you a reputation and status that is right for you.” And again and again, you
see, faith is to make us right with God. And the purpose of the law is to expose our lack of faith
and to drive us to trusting God more — not to drive us to trying to obey that law for its own sake,
but to drive us back to God, to trust him so much that that law will never be able to expose any
lack of trust in it again.
So it is with stealing. “Thou shalt not steal.” And if you find yourself stealing, it is God
saying to you, “Look, you don’t trust me to give you all you need,” or, “You disagree with me about
what your needs are. That’s why you’re stealing. That’s why you’re stealing other people’s
reputation. That’s why you’re stealing little things, because deep down in yourself you don’t trust
me to give you all that you need.
“That’s why you covet. You’re coveting what other people have, because you’re not trusting my
promise that I will supply every need of yours from my riches and glory in Christ Jesus.” But do
you see brothers and sisters, the response that the Father expects is a greater trust in him.
Now you see the great danger. The great danger is when we come to spiritual laws that we will not
see them in the same light. And so the Father has been teaching some of us in the evenings that you
are to witness [to others], not in your emotions and not just with your brilliant intellect, but
you’re to witness in your spirit. And Jesus has taught us certain laws of the spiritual life. Now,
if you find yourself suddenly witnessing in your emotions, God does not expect you to say, “I’m
going to get hold and obey this law. I’m going to obey it. I’m going to witness in my spirit and
not in my emotions.” No, the spiritual law is to drive you into a deeper relationship with Jesus to
trust him more, so that there will come a time when you will be able to witness ‘in your spirit’
without any difficulty.
Spiritual law, you remember, is that you love your neighbors, you love your dear ones in the
dormitories or in the classrooms, and you love them as yourself. You love them with an unselfish
love; you love them for Jesus’ sake. And you find yourself not able to love them with that love.
Then God doesn’t want you to try to get hold of your emotions and say, “I must love them the right
way; I must love them the right way.” Do you see you’re coming back under the law when you do that?
What Jesus wants you to say is, “Lord Jesus, there must be some way in which I am not trusting you
completely in relationship to my friends. Now, I want to trust you completely. Will you give me
revelation through the Holy Spirit so that I can trust you more completely, so that I’ll be able to
love my friends with the love that you want me to love them?”
But brothers and sisters, do you see that the law, then, is a dear friend? The law is a dear friend
to all of us who are children of God. That’s why the Bible so often talks about loving God’s law
and meditating in it day and night. Brothers and sisters I’ll tell you I love God’s law even when

it has shown me completely that I’m not like him at all. That is precious. That is God’s
diagnostic tool going to work and showing that you are not trusting the Father deeply enough. Ask
the Holy Spirit for revelation.
But do you see the purpose of faith is to make us right with God. The purpose of the law is to
expose our lack of faith. The answer to the law is a greater exercise of faith and trust, and from
that will flow a natural obedience. But that’s the way God wants us to be.
And the important thing is really — I know this is heresy — but the important thing is not the
drinking or all the other things that we’re not supposed to do, or even the drugs. That is not the
important thing. The important thing is that those things reflect an utter lack of trust in your
God, an utter distrust of your Father in heaven, and therefore a great illogicality. If he supplied
all that we see around us, and you still won’t trust him for this little part of your life, then
there is a great lack of reason in your life, as well as a lack of real faith. But that is the
purpose of the law.
So I’d say to you this morning, do you find that the law convicts you somewhere in your life? Do
you sense somewhere this morning where you’re not obeying the law? Well now, that’s God showing you
that you don’t trust him enough. And if you ask the Holy Spirit, he can nail that down to a
particular in your life, and you can enter into a greater release and freedom through the revelation
that the law gives you. So could we begin to look upon it as a dear friend?
I can’t get this business where Christians say, “Oh, I’m free from the law, it doesn’t matter what I
do.” It seems to me the law is a dear friend to tell us when we’re not trusting our Father. And
we’re expected to love it and respect it and respond to it with trust, not with that old gritted
teeth and the old will power, but really just with the trust of our Father. And you can trust him,
really. He will keep his promises with you. He won’t destroy his own nature just to let you down,
really. He loves his own nature and he wants to remain consistent and he’ll keep his promises with
you.
I don’t know what your need is. Some of you may be sick this morning, or some of you may have a
relationship at home that is just pitiful and miserable, and tearing apart. Do you see that God
wants you to trust him about that? To start trusting him and acting on the basis of that trust.
If you want me to tie it down, at home it usually means that you’ve stopped getting your sleeves up
and getting into the thing and trying to put your dad right, your mum right, the brother right, the
sister right, your dorm mate right, everybody else right. And you start trusting God saying,
“Father, I trust you to bring about a change in them, and I’m just going to love them.” And with
the old examinations it means you stop trying to worry the consequences into A’s instead of B minus.
You stop trying to worry the consequences and the results of the exam into the right category, and
you begin to say, “Father, I trust you with this and I’m going to do my best but I trust you with
the results.”
But trusting the Father is retreating from that front line and letting him take over the front line
and you begin trusting and living in that. And it’s really a good way to fly, you know, it’s really
the only way to go. It really is, and it’s the Father’s plan. The Father doesn’t plan for us all
to be walking around in strain and worry, striving and straining. That wasn’t his plan for us, you
see. Filling the psych wards, and running out of all kinds of drugs in order to get ourselves
relaxed. That isn’t the Father’s will. The sun doesn’t strain too much, from what we can see, to

get up in the morning — probably because we’re turning and it’s not getting up — but the Father’s
world goes naturally.
“Look at the flowers of the field, they toil not neither do they reap. Yet Solomon in all his glory
was not arrayed like one of these.” Now God expects us to trust him as our loving Father and then
to do things, not to get money, but because he’s told us to do them. So it doesn’t result, you see,
in a world that’s irresponsible, because we still do the things, but we do them because he’s told
us, not in order to get the things we need. Really it’s his plan for us.
I do pray that — because, I know it’s easy to listen to this stuff each Sunday and really what you
need is revelation. I really feel for you because I can’t talk to you individually and I’d love to.
But really loved ones, it’s for you, individually. The Father can work this kind of life in you if
you start trusting him and stop just trusting your great self all the time. The Father will make it
real for you. Honestly, he will. Whatever the old strain is, or the old difficulty, the Father can
work it, if you begin to trust him.
If you’re sitting there with an intellectual mess, I was in that same state brothers and sisters.
You can trust him, you can stand back from the intellectual mess and say, “Father, I’m not going to
stop thinking, but I am going to trust that your truth is deeper than I can see with my finite mind.
And I’m going to move out on the steps that you’ve shown me, and then I believe that insight will
come from that trust.” And it will.
You know, if I can help you in any way, would you feel free to come down? A few of us stay around
afterwards down here, and really just come down and we can talk or pray if it helps, really. But
really enter into it, don’t just sit there.
Let us pray. Father, we thank you that from all that we can see with our own eyes you do manage
mighty movements of planets and galaxies, and you do take care of things that are far too big for
us. Yet Father, by some deception we have again and again thought that only we can run our own
lives and only we can sort out these business problems, or these school problems. Father, we believe
you are able to do that. We would declare now our Father, that we’re willing to trust you.
Lord, we don’t know all the ins and outs of becoming a Christian, or getting rid of our sins, but we
believe the first step is to begin to trust in what you have said, that we are justified by the
blood of Jesus, and that you have nothing against us, and that you are reconciled to us. And if we
would only trust your promise you will give us your Spirit of life to transform our own moral lives.
So Father, we would tell you this morning that we intend to trust you from this day forward, and we
intend to make it evident in our lives that we are trusting you.
Father, if we’re involved with the tranquilizers or some kind of drugs to keep the emotions quiet,
Lord, we’re ready to take a step there. We’re ready to begin trusting you to fill us with the peace
of Jesus and we’re prepared to throw away those things. We are prepared to begin to walk as we
believe for your glory. Amen.

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?