TV Transcripts

Transcript of message from TV Broadcast 1632 — taken from Closed Captioning Text

Phil: Scripture says, one follows his heart is a fool because the heart, man’s heart, is evil. The one we’re born with is evil. That’s why we need a new one. And God’s plan is to deal with all of these issues and to give us a full and complete salvation. Thank God!

It’s salvation too. It’s not a self-help program. It’s something where I have to give myself completely to Him and trust in His power to save me because I have none.

Oh, we’ve gotta have this sense that there is truth that we need to recognize. This is how it is, this is what God says and that trumps everything else. I don’t care how Satan packages it, makes it appealing, ‘cause folks, if there’s some part of your nature that has a hold on you, whether it’s a bodily lust or whether it’s pride or whether it’s trying to obtain something or gain a position in the eyes of others, Satan will pull on that and he will give you a rationale that will make it seem okay.

You know what a rationale is? You’ve already decided something, but now you gotta come up with a reason so it makes it seem okay, instead of it being rooted 100% in the truth. And God calls us to walk in the light, to walk in the truth. So that becomes the central thing right there. We’ve got to recognize there is such a thing as absolute truth and we need the Lord to reveal it to us and to give us a heart that surrenders to that truth. Even when, especially when it shows our own need. Praise God

But the second thing I think is where my mind went to more than any other, when I was thinking about all this. The belt of truth buckled around your waist, but with the breast breastplate of righteousness in place.

Now, what is righteousness about? Think about what that means. It means being right with God. It means God regarding us as right with Him. Sin has absolutely built an impenetrable barrier between us and God, impenetrable to us. All you have to do is go back to the, to what the Lord showed Isaiah, who all of his experience was down here and he thought of some people as good and some people as evil and all of that.

And then all of a sudden the Lord captures him up and he sees the Lord, high, lifted up, utter purity. In one moment He knew the truth about, not just about the Lord, but about himself, didn’t he? Oh my God, if we’re gonna walk in truth, we’re gonna have to see that as a starting point.

But here is the situation God is dealing with. He is determined and has purposed and will successfully call a people out of this and make them fit to live in a place like that. Do you need the Lord? Oh my. That’s the only hope that I have. You can come here and be faithful and sing all the songs all your life and miss out completely on this. We need the Lord to do a saving work and to give us an understanding of righteousness.

So, what’s the Lord’s plan in this? We find out, and Satan certainly is better, knows this better than a whole lot of professing Christians, that when Jesus died, he paid it all. Once for all he died for those that God is calling into His kingdom. When he laid down his life, he went there in my place. That gives God the freedom to have punished my sin in him.

And when I come to Him with an open repentant heart, He has the power, the right to blot out all of my guilt, to remove the barrier that separates me from Him. I think the devil knows far better than we do, that salvation and God’s purpose is all about a relationship, an open, pure, free relationship between us and a holy God.

Okay, well if you’re the devil, what are you gonna be doing? You gotta undermine that somehow, don’t you? And so plan A is to undermine that idea, to so focus on being the accuser of the brothers that you focus the person’s attention on their need. And somehow it just can’t quite be applicable to me. Oh, this is wonderful for brother and sister so-and-so, but poor old me. Look at me, I’m such a, I’m so bad that I could never….

And somehow he undermines the confidence, the ability to let go and let God have his way in this, to understand that God meant what he said, that we have that right and that privilege of calling upon Him. Now, we don’t call upon Him saying, I’ll try harder. We are coming to get a righteousness that we did not earn, could never deserve.

But it means putting our lives 100% in His hands, saying, God, you are gonna have to fix what’s wrong with me. And what’s wrong with me needs not just fixing, it needs replacing. I need a new heart and a new life. And I just give myself, I humble myself in your hands. We talked about that, you know, humbling ourselves in the mighty hand of God. This is involved in that.

But oh, the devil is gonna do everything in his mind, in his power to come to an individual and blind them to the reality of this truth, at least as it applies to them. And you know, one of the best ways, one of the best tools he has, you know, I can just see the devil saying, you know, we knew how to handle it when God came to Moses and then tried to pass all that knowledge and that revelation on to God’s people. Look how we fixed that.

Yes, I know there was a whole lot of idolatry along the way, but there were still people that were so married to that law that we knew we had to do something. God wanted a relationship. And so the way we’ve got to fix that is we’ve got to turn that into a self-righteous effort. We’ve got to corrupt the message so that people don’t understand how the relationship is meant to happen.

And you call it legalism. And you’ve got a lot of churches who have devolved into a system where I have got to measure up, here’s what God expects of me. And I am constantly falling short and repenting and then trying harder and trying, you know, falling short and repenting and that’s my life. But I gotta do it because that’s what He expects. Yeah, I think you’re the only one.

But do you see the work of Satan in that? Do you see how he is corrupting the message? There’s no question what God wants and what holiness really is about. That’s not the issue, but the how do you get there is the issue.

And so here’s Satan saying, I have got to undermine the gospel. I’ve got to attack this person. In some cases, you have a person who has never really come to faith, but some people have really come to faith. God has a remnant of people who actually know Him, but they’ve fallen under the influence of people who sound good because they’re talking about the holiness of God and all these things but they don’t really have the gospel. They don’t understand God’s plan and how it works.

And so here’s the devil, undermining. My God, do we need a revelation of the finished work of Christ? Do we realize that if there is a genuine heart repentance and faith in His saving power, that we can stand before Him as if we had never sinned? It takes a divine work in the heart to come to that place where we can be His and know that we’re His, know that we’re accepted in the Beloved. He who knew no sin became, was made sin for us. Why? So that we might become the righteousness of God in him.

Now, one interesting thing about that, that we might become, that’s again, that is that Greek present tense. So it’s in one sense we have a standing before God that is secure but yet become the righteousness of God tells you that there is a process that follows that, okay?

And the devil has all kinds of ways of trying to get somebody who has maybe come to that place. Yes, I believe in the finished work of Christ. I believe that when Jesus died, he took the law with him. We’re not under the law anymore. Praise God, we’re under grace.

Oh my God, the devil says, what am I gonna do now? They believe in the finished work of Christ. I’ve gotta come up with something. I know what. I will use the, “it’s all taken care of” doctrine. Anybody ever heard that one? Because now I can work on a person who has weaknesses. They can look in the word and say, nowhere does it say I’m gonna be perfect, but it’s all taken care of. All of my sin has been put on him. Therefore, God understands. I can just, I mean, I’ll stay outta something that’s gross. I won’t go out and murder people or rob banks, but you know, God understands that what I’m made of and He’s already taken care of it.

So pretty soon, without meaning to, the devil can take somebody whose particular weaknesses he has nurtured and somehow create a justification where it’s okay. God help us. Is that what Jesus died for? You know, we have been set free, but why? Have we been set free so that we can now be free to give vent to our nature? Oh, but it’s a small private little thing. It is not hurting anybody. I mean, nobody knows where I go on the internet and the stuff that I look at and the things I think about, that’s just all being, it’s private.

And the devil’s sitting there feeding, feeding all these things that he’s cultivated in us, the weaknesses that we all have, every one of us. If it’s not one thing, it’s another. But he’s sitting there, I’ve got to keep feeding this. And right now they’ve got this idea. They understand that Jesus paid it all, but now I’ve got to somehow keep my hold on them. Alright, let’s come up with a rationale that makes that seem fine.

And this is the one where it’s all been taken care of at the cross. So I can just, I’ll do the best I can. I’ll say I’m sorry when I’m done, but basically I’m allowing something to go on in my life. That’s what it boils down to. So you got one person who’s living for, supposedly for the Lord, but yet they’re allowing things.

And, I’ll tell you, when does the devil come to you most readily? When does he succeed with you most readily? When you’re sitting here in the congregation and the Lord is present? Or is it when you’re off by yourself? You might even be in the wrong place or around the wrong people. Or you’re tired, man, you’re worn out.

There’ve been a lot of battles in history where somebody, some one particular army just came in and won a great victory. What did they do afterwards? They went and had a party. And how many times have they wound up being the ones defeated because they weren’t watching. They were giving vent to their night, to their nature, and letting down their guard because they had just come off a great high victory.

How many times, how many people, I won’t ask you for a raise of hands, I wonder how many of us have come through a time when it’s been a time of battle or a time of victory, a time of, you know, being around the Lord and things, you know, going His way. And then you ever had the devil come to you right then and kind of steer you back into ways of thinking and doing that aren’t good? Yeah, I certainly have.

You think the Lord wants us to become more aware of those things and experience more of His victory? Do you think the righteousness that He’s talking about is just this legal standing that I have before God? Or does He actually want to produce real righteousness? And if so, how?

You know, you still got this legalism, like I said, where someone can come to the place where, yes, I know I’m the Lord’s, but oh God, I gotta live up to it. And all of a sudden it becomes saved by grace and kept by works. How’s that work out for you?

You know, you read again, you read Romans seven, you discover how Paul learned the hard way, it doesn’t work if I try to serve God. I don’t care how zealous I am to keep God’s law. It ain’t happening because I got something in here that just won’t let me. Oh God, who’s gonna set me free? Who’s gonna deliver me from this body of death?

And that’s when he realized that’s not God’s plan. It was never God’s plan just to save us, wipe out our sin debt, and give us a ticket to heaven and then say, go for it and just try to live for me, ‘cause it’s all taken care of, don’t worry.

But here’s Paul saying, it matters that I serve God, but I can’t seem to do it. How is this supposed to work? And then he realizes the righteousness of the law, the righteousness of the law, the purpose that was intended for in the first place is fulfilled in me. Ah, how does that happen? “Who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit.”

Wouldn’t it be a good prayer to say, Lord, please shine the light, shine the light. Show me where the devil is getting an advantage over me. Show me how to recognize him and what to do and how to defeat him. That’s a pretty good description of the Christian life, folks. Walking in the light. But walking in the light, that’s terrible because that’s gonna show all the bad stuff in me and then I’m gonna feel bad. That sound like the way the devil would have us react to that?

So he recognizes that truth. He says, I got to do something. I gotta undermine that somehow so that people are just afraid to walk in that light because I need light that’s gonna show my need. I need to have an honest heart that says, Lord, I know I need you. You know everything that’s lacking in me. That’s why you saved me. You gave me the certificate, if you will, of righteousness, but now you’re working to actually make it happen.

And I don’t know how to do that. I don’t even know what’s wrong with me, let alone have the power to do anything about it. But I know You do. And I don’t want anything to come between us in this process. I want to just walk with You, be willing for You to shine the light wherever it needs to be shined, rest in that knowledge and that truth, not be anxious.

Oh my God, I should have, you know. You see how the devil’s going to, comes in so many different ways to undermine all of this. When God wants that person just to walk with Him, and then we discover something that’s wrong. Now what? “If we walk in the light as he is in the light, we have fellowship one with another, and the blood of Jesus Christ cleanses us from all sin.”

Now is that just sort of an automatic thing? There’s actually a part that we play. And that’s where he goes into at the end of that passage. “If we confess”…. Again, what does confessing mean? Is it just admitting? It’s an agreement with God.

You see here, somebody’s walking in the light wanting to experience His righteousness, knowing that they don’t have any power, not afraid to face the truth. Oh, the devil’s getting scared when he sees all this begin to happen. He’s terrified because he knows what’s real. We’re the ones who misunderstand and listen to his little suggestions that kind of undermines this in one way or another.

But we’re walking in that, we’re wanting Him to show us our needs and then to help us with them. And that’s going to involve us coming short. That’s what a need is, if I’m less than He wants me to be, is that not a sin? Is that not something that’s wrong? Does that not need help?

So, what do I do? I go right back to the cross. “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.”

Oh, but I messed up. I have got to get it straight before I can face Him again. Where does that thought come from? You see how the devil just, he’s gonna be sitting, he’s gonna be parked out there desperately trying to undermine every little thing that happens in our lives. And all God wants is this free open relationship.

We first of all, trust him with our soul. We depend on the cleansing power of what happened at the cross, we stand on that foundation, we’ve got righteousness right here. It’s not just what happened then, but it’s what He’s doing in me right now. And yes, there are things that are gonna come up that we haven’t got there to the future yet, but that’s in His hands. I don’t have to worry about that. I just walk with Him right now, let Him deal with what He’s dealing with right now and grow and be honest with Him.

And when there’s something that’s wrong, I bring it. I don’t wait. I bring it right to Him right then. And the fellowship never has to be broken. Can’t you just hear the devil screaming when a child of God wakes up and realizes such simple truth and begins to walk in it?

But I’ll tell you what, I pray that God will, God will help us with these things, help me. And not to feel condemned because I’m not down the road somewhere. And not to worry about the past or be out with this person or that person, just to say, Lord, here I am, I’m in Your hands. You know what I need, and I know I’m confident in Your love because You called me knowing what I am.

I don’t have to produce righteousness. What I need to do is learn how to submit to Yours and trust You to give me the strength and the knowledge and the wisdom to be able to recognize the enemy when he starts talking to me, when he starts maneuvering me to go down that street and I’m not ready. When he puts me in with these people, and I start listening to their way of thinking and their way of doing stuff, to help me to recognize what’s going on, recognize the voice of the enemy. See beyond the outward circumstances and see a sneaky enemy that isn’t always going to mount an outward offensive. He’s gonna try to sneak in that back door every weak place that we have.

But we can walk with Him with confidence because of the cross, because of His promise to walk with us to the end of the road, because His promise that we can walk in the light in a place of fellowship acceptance with Him. But He counts us as a righteousness, as Jesus himself. Praise God!

Oh, wouldn’t it be wonderful if we all learned these things to the point where they became the operating principle of our lives? Anybody here need Him this morning? Well, He’s available and He longs to walk with every one of us and teach us how to recognize the tricks of the enemy and to be able to stand against them and say, wait a minute. I understand what righteousness means. I’ve got this. You can’t get to me, devil. You can accuse me all you want, but I have an answer for every accusation. I know I need a Savior, but I got one. Praise God!

And I’m looking forward to standing with beside Him one day, not because I deserve it, not because of anything I’ve ever done, but because I just put myself in His hands and let Him save me. And I walked with Him and He was faithful. Praise God!

May God help us to recognize Satan’s devices, schemes, and learn how to stand against them. Learn how to recognize them as the biggest thing, I think, and understand how he works so that we can more effectively stand our ground. And the Lord’s gonna help us, isn’t he? Praise God!

Transcript of message from TV Broadcast 1638 — taken from Closed Captioning Text

Phil: There are things happening in our lives right now that we would prefer that they not happen. They bring things to light that we would rather deny, not face. And here’s God’s heart looking down at us saying, I have called, I have chosen these people. They’re mine. I’ve called them to live in earth’s darkest hour. And I have things that I want to accomplish.

There are people that grow up in here that need to see more from us. They need to see more of Jesus and a little less of us, and we don’t even know it. We’re clueless so much of the time. And God has to allow circumstances in our lives to bring us to a place where it’s Him living in us and not us.

Oh, how many times do we have things come up and we feel, and we find human nature kicking in by default? And what’s our reaction to it? Resistance. Resistance, denial. I’m just gonna, I’m just gonna pretend this isn’t there. I’m gonna push it down and hope nobody notices. And God wants to break the chains. He wants to set us free.

He is allowing things that show us our need, so we can come to Him and say, Thank You. Thank You Lord, for loving me enough to show me the truth about myself. The thing that I’m afraid to face. The thing that I’m afraid to admit. It’s gotten quiet. It’s a lot to think about, isn’t it?

Are there circumstances in your life right now that you’re having to face and all of it, and you don’t feel able to face? Do you think maybe, just maybe the Lord is deliberately allowing us to be in those things where we don’t have control and we aren’t enough, we don’t have the answers to what we need?

I see God’s mercy to do that, because are we able? Does anybody here have what it takes based upon the life of Adam in you to stand in this hour and accomplish anything for the kingdom of God? Not one of us has it. We are everyone in the same position. We need one thing from God, and that’s what He offers in Jesus Christ, and that’s mercy.

Look what He goes on to say about all these people that He’s called. He said, “It is because of Him that you are in Christ Jesus.” It’s because of God. If He’s called you, it’s because God started the ball rolling. Can we not bow before Him and worship Him and say, God, touch my heart. Do whatever it takes so that I can be Yours and not mine. Lord, help me!

“It’s because of Him that you are in Christ Jesus, who has become for us wisdom from God. That is our righteousness, holiness, and redemption,” everything. It’s just one of those many Scriptures that talks about everything that we need is there. It’s in Him.

It’s been mentioned this morning about holiness and defining some of the things that that means, but oh, what a process it is. Holiness essentially is being separated from what we were to God. Cleaned up to where we’re useful to Him. How can we carry on with dirt, spiritual dirt in our lives and then put on a smile and sing the songs and clap and raise our hands and just go on. And can God use that? God wants to express His life and power in us.

He doesn’t do it because we are good, we are capable, we’re strong, we’re any of those things. He is looking for a people who can just stretch forth their hands and say, Oh God, do whatever it takes in me to break the strongholds, to change my default setting, so that when I boot up in the morning, it’s You living in me and not just me. Okay, what am I gonna do today? And just going on in our own strength and for our own purposes. God help us. God help us to understand things that are happening.

And you know, one of the things, one of the thoughts that came to me is this. I have no doubt that in each of our lives there are things that will rise up under just the right circumstances. And it’s, you know, I preached a message one time, “That Thing,” and it’s just, had such a depth of hold, that the only thing we seem to know to do with it is to push it down. Try harder, deny it, pretend it’s not there, instead of bringing it out into the light.

It’s like, God in heaven can’t even fix this one. Now, we would never, we know not to say that, but isn’t that what we are really saying by our actions all too often? God in heaven can’t even fix this one. I don’t deserve it. I don’t, you know, 1,001 lies the enemy is quick to inject.

And here’s God looking to shine a light on a need, not so that we will be discouraged, not so that we will throw up our hands and give up, but so that we will bring that to Him, so that He can set us free and cut those chains. Bring them into the light and say, It is what it is. I just surrender into Your hands, Lord, do what You have to do to fix me and to change my heart. Oh my God.

Is this something that you think I’m exempt from? Oh my God. See, that’s the point. See, if God is gonna use a people, it will be people that know what it’s like, that have got real things in their hearts. I don’t care what your background is.

You know, the thought I had was, It’s so easy. The devil loves to, when something rises up and you sense a need and a bondage maybe in your life, or a characteristic of your personality, and it just keeps getting in the way, it keeps, and God tries to shine the light on it. And how easy is it for the devil to say, Well, what about them? I’m jealous, if I had, they have it so easy. If they’d been through the things that I have in my life. Then on and on, and you know, you fill in the blanks.

I’ll tell you, I don’t care what your background is, what your life, earthly life has been about, these issues are about every single one of us. And as we said so many times, everyone is unique. We each have our own call and our own place. And God has allowed the things that have happened in our lives to shape us for the ends to which He has called us.

But oh, that God help us to learn how to get out of His way, when He shines the light, not to draw back, but to recognize, this holiness, this ability to be God’s vessel in this hour comes entirely from divine work. It’s of God that we’re in Christ, but He’s the one that’s made to us all that we need. I need Him.

And there isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t realize I need Him more than I thought I did. I thought I had gotten this far. And oh my God, there’s this thing, it rises up and it wants to take control. And this is, I just, I react this way, I think this way, I plan this way, I do this way, whatever it is, it just covers the gamut of human nature. May God give us a practical victory. And what do we do? You know, when these things happen, that’s a critical thing.

So anyway, Paul talks about this, and he’s talking to the believers. And then he says, “Therefore, as it is written, let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord.” Now, I’ve got this underlined, I had not ever really underlined this next statement before or the beginning of verse two. “And so it was with me, brothers.”

Do you catch that? This isn’t just about the ones to whom Paul was writing. This is Paul saying, Yeah, I’m in the same boat. I’ve got the same need. God didn’t call me because I was special. He called me to take a part, to take away all the things that made me special to people and to get me down to the point where it could be Him and me. Not through my strength, not through any goodness of, of my own. He’s brought me to a place where I could be usable to you.

And I don’t care who you are, how low, how high, as far as earthly measurements are concerned. Paul is basically saying, We occupy the same place. We have the same need, to let go and let God have His way, and be willing to let Him touch the things in our lives that get in his way, that are part, as I say, of our default setting.

Okay, “Brothers and sisters, when I came to you, I did not come with eloquence or human wisdom as I proclaimed to you the testimony about God. For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you, except Christ Jesus or Jesus Christ, and Him crucified. I came to you in weakness, with great fear and trembling. My message and my preaching were not with wise and persuasive words, but with a demonstration of the Spirit’s power.” Why? “So that your faith might not rest on human wisdom, but on God’s power.”

Not everybody’s called to preach, to teach, but every believer is called to live out the life of Christ. Wouldn’t it be something, if your words, you could literally speak words. I don’t mean, Yea, I say unto you, I mean just ordinary words, and they’d be God speaking through you to somebody, without you even trying.

Wouldn’t it be awesome if God could bring us to that place where we could speak life to people? It’s not just, Be encouraged, you know, on a human level, but I’m talking about that we could be in such tune with God that we could speak words in a matter-of-fact tone, and they make an eternal difference.

But you know, the Lord, in order for that to happen, God’s gotta do some pruning, doesn’t He? He has got to get rid of things that hinder. And I’ll just mention in passing the Scriptures that we use so many times, because it has to do with Paul and how God dealt with Paul. And how he begins in 2 Thessalonians talking about what God had allowed him to go through, where he despaired of life, remember? It was so difficult, so tremendous, so tremendous.

Anyway, what he was going through, that he thought he was going to die. He was willing to do it, but I mean, he really thought it was over. But then he reveals something that we need to get. Number one, he didn’t just look at this as, you know, like, God’s judgment against me, or the devil’s winning or anything. He said, There’s a purpose in this. God’s allowed this. You understand?

The thinking that you see manifested in this. God’s allowed this. He’s allowed it for a reason. If He wants me to die, praise God, that’s even better. But, if I’m still to live here, He is teaching me something in this circumstance that I need to get. What was the lesson? Not to rely on my own strength, but on His.

Now, do you see what the Lord was saying there? Paul, I’ve called you and you don’t even understand the degree to which you are still relying on your own natural ability here. And I have got to get your attention. I can’t just pull you into a classroom and explain it to you. See, we hear this a lot, but this is not the kind of thing you can just learn and hear and then you got it. This is the kind of thing where God is going to have to take us through life experiences that reveal what’s lacking in us, what’s needful in us, but also that reveals His loving purpose in it, so that we can see beyond the thing.

We don’t have to sink into a pool of self-pity, or anger, or all the human emotions. We can say, God, thank You. You saw something in me that I wasn’t aware of. I love You. I thank You for it.

And isn’t that what we pointed out so many times in chapter 12, when there was a danger of pride and the Lord allowed something, allowed an attack of the enemy. And Paul went to the Lord about it, but I see in his spirit a desire to do God’s work. That was the heart of it. God, You’ve called me, I want to please You. I want to do what’s right. And in that context, God revealed the purpose for which He had done it. That it wasn’t just some random thing, God saw a need.

Is there any need in your life that God might consider? It doesn’t have to do with people that just get up here. It has to do with every single believer. Is there anything that God knows about in your life and He’s allowing something to happen right now? What does He want? Wouldn’t that be a good example to say, Oh God, help me, help me to understand what I need to know? Paul was essentially asking for wisdom and God gave it to him. God, at the proper time, God gave him an understanding.

Now, here’s where human nature kicks in. You know, we love to, if something bad happens, something we prefer not happen, Well, praise the Lord. And of course the words are okay, but the spirit behind it is anything but.

But what was Paul’s reaction? Did he say, Okay, I get it, Lord, I don’t like it, but I’ll go along with You on this one. There was a rejoicing. Do you see what God had imparted to him was this desire to serve God, this desire. He’d worked in him over a long period of time to take away all the religion that he depended upon. He came to regard it as scripture says in Philippians 3, As garbage, so that he could win Christ. Wanted to be like Him, wanted to be used of Him. God put that in his heart.

God worked that in his heart. He had to go through hell and high water to get there, but God brought him through. But it wasn’t just a, Okay, I’ll go along with You on this Lord, there was a rejoicing. Can we push through the circumstances that God allows in our lives, seek to understand His reasons and His purposes, be willing to see the faults and needs that we have, that He wants to change, set us free from?

Can we do that and lay it on the line and say, God, the one thing that controls everything is I want to do what’s right. I wanna please You. I wanna be useful to You. I want You to be able to live in me. And Lord, in the light of that, I’m just gonna say, ‘Wow, this is awesome!’ God is so merciful. God is so faithful to show me my need, praise God!

Because doing His will, it doesn’t depend on my strength anyway, so He set me free. All He wants me to be able to do is to yield myself to Him and have that partnership like Jesus did, so it’s actually Him in me. And I’m opening my mouth, I’m stretching forth my hands, whatever is appropriate. But it’s not just me, God’s power is there.

Do you want, do we want God’s power in our life or do we just want the form? Do we want just enough to get into heaven? That’s a real question. Been asked this morning. Is that really readiness? Is that somebody who really has handed their life over to the Lord, or they just want a ticket to heaven?

God has called every one of us. May God bring us to that place where we can do what Paul said, I glory in my weakness. I boast about it. Praise God, I’m weak. Think about the effect on people to whom he preached. They felt weak. They were aware of needs in their lives, and here’s one who stands up before them. He doesn’t say, I made it, and you can too. Come up here, we’re all, this high place that I live in.

It wasn’t that. It was, I’m one with you, and God has gone out of His way to remind me that I have nothing. I can do nothing in my own strength, and I’m so glad. I just pour out thanksgiving from my heart. God has shown me the past, so I can fulfill the vision and the thing that I value most is serving You, being useful to You and helping other people to come to that place.

Again, it was posed this morning. Do we want just enough, or do we want to actually be able to be used to help somebody else? This is what’s involved. It’s not just for the handful of leaders, visible people. This is for every believer.

You think maybe Dorcas who lived in, was it Joppa, someplace? Anyway, the one that Peter went to visit, and he was there and she had died and she had had such an impact on that community just by being kind and taking care of people’s needs and just giving in a Christlike spirit, being a vessel that the Lord lived in. And the whole village gathered around when she died, weeping. She had had an impact on their lives.

And the Lord sent Peter in there to raise her from the dead. And the testimony, the power of that testimony was such that everybody in that area just came to the Lord. There was a tremendous move of God’s Spirit.

I don’t know what God has planned. Is it gonna be the ones and twos? Is it gonna be something big and visible? I don’t know. But I want to be part of what He is part of. And if that’s gonna happen, He’s gonna have to be able to shine the light where it needs to be shined and I can’t duck it and deny it.

And not only that, I need to be so geared into what God wants that I can say, Thank You, Lord. This was in Your, this was in the way and I didn’t even know it. Thank you for shining the light. Thank You. Even if it was difficult to go through, it’s what I needed, Lord and I love you.

Because what is it? What is this life worth? Is there anything in this world, your life here that’s worth more than walking with Him and having Him live in you? That’s what it’s gonna be like for all of eternity is the Lord living in us, and we’ll be free from all of these things that happen down here. Thank God, those of us who are older, certainly looking forward to that.

But I praise God today. Do we value weakness? Do we value our inabilities? God wants to bring us to that place where human ability is not the question, not the issue. It’s, am I available to Him and is my default setting getting in the way? Does He have the right to shine the light and to put me in circumstances that show me that?

And then when He does, what am I doing about it? How am I responding? Am I willing to lay down my will and not just to grudgingly say, yes, but to say joyfully, Yes Lord, this is what matters to me. This is what I value above all things. And here, You’ve helped me in this. This has been a help so that, because I want Your power to go out and touch people. And if I’m getting in the way, that’s getting in the way of Your power and it’s not working.

God set His people free. Give us a heart that says, Lord, do whatever it takes. I’m Yours and You’ve called me to live in this hour. Help me. And then be glad when He does, because the way He does it a lot of times isn’t pleasant to our flesh. It never is. Death has to work in us, so life can work in others. Isn’t that what Paul said?

But I’ll tell you, it depends. Are you focused on the death and what you gotta give up? Or are you focused on the results and the life? See, when we learn from Jesus, what do we learn? Learn from me, My yoke is easy, My burden is light. And you will find rest for your souls.

So much of our striving is all about preserving self and taking care of it and trying to find our way instead of just letting go and letting Him have His way. To God be the glory. Praise God!

Transcript of message from TV Broadcast 1659 — taken from Closed Captioning Text

Phil: Well, you know, my thoughts have, as we indicated last week, gone to the book of Romans. And last week, we talked about salvation part one, which was kind of a, I don’t know what Alan will do with that title, but we’ll see. But anyway, salvation is more than most people think of.

Most people, as I say, think of simply the forgiveness of sins and thereby, we get to go to heaven. But there is so much more to it. And that’s absolutely part one, because if my sins are not gone, then I’m in trouble.

But anyway, Paul, as we, just to give a brief review, Paul wrote to the Roman believers. He hadn’t been there yet, he had hoped to go and wanted to. He just had this burden, no doubt he was in prison at the time, had this burden to write to them. And one of the things that the Lord laid on his heart, and I’m glad he did, was to lay out the gospel that he preached in very clear terms, just reasoning it out, going through all the aspects of it, in such a wonderful, clear way.

And he writes to those that are called to belong to Jesus Christ, called to be his holy people. So it’s not a ticket to live as we please, is it? It’s calling us out of something into something else.

And so, you know, we talked about how he spoke of man’s condition in general as being in rebellion. He knows something about God, knows enough about God to be responsible. And yet he takes what he knows about God, and literally there’s something in him that rebels against and resists it, wants to go his own way. And the result of that is the wrath of God rests upon this planet.

You know, we’ve talked many times about how something was set in motion at the cross that is absolutely gonna happen. God set a plan in motion, there’s nothing anybody can do to change that, not the devil, not any person, it’s going to happen. And, you know, oftentimes, and I think we rightly emphasize that that has to do with what He did regarding us. That we were there, we participated, and there was something set in motion that absolutely determines our destiny and carries us through until that. And that’s absolutely true.

But I wonder how many times you’ve thought about it from this standpoint, when God judged Jesus, it was not just for my sin, it was for the sin of the world. We have said this before in the past, but he died as a representative of this corrupted creation. When God poured out his wrath upon his Son, he was pouring it out upon his creation. And we are living in the interim between that, that historical event that absolutely determines the destiny of this world, and the fulfillment of it.

You wanna know what the destiny of this world is, and everything it stands for? I don’t care, the good, the bad, the ugly, everything in this world is literally, you wanna know what its destiny is, you look at the cross. And you know that it lives, it exists under the wrath of God.

And, of course, Paul, you know, went on to describe the condition because a lot of Jews, the situation, because a lot of Jews regarded themselves as different from everybody else. The gentile world was in darkness, they had the prophets, they had the law, we’re good. And Paul made the point over and over again that that’s not what it’s based on. It doesn’t matter, God has fixed it to where everybody is under not just sin, but the power of sin.

And that’s why he said at the beginning, the gospel that he preached was the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes. It’s not just religious doctrine, not just some formulaic thing that we think about and we just sort of believe it. I need power, how many of you need power? Yeah, I need something that is way beyond me. I need God to do something for me that’s impossible for me to do. And that’s the gospel that he preached.

And you know, we went over, we’ve alluded to the fact that God is absolutely a just God, He has to punish sin. You can’t ignore sin if you have a law that says the sinner must die, that law has gotta be fulfilled or He’s not being just, it was fulfilled. But His Son stepped in, willingly as our representative. And like they did in the Old Testament, those who come to Him, we put our hands on the head of the sacrifice and say, basically, that’s me.

You know, we sang the song this morning, I should have been crucified. He got what I deserved. But oh, he’s willingly stepped in to fulfill the Father’s plan, to open a door of hope for a hopeless people. Thank God this morning that we have all the ground that we need. It’s not just a hope so that, oh, I hope God fulfills what He’s… Oh, man, you wanna see what’s destiny is about, you can look at history. History determines our destiny, folks, if we can believe it. God wants us to come to understand that in a deeper way, and understand how that works out.

So anyway, of course, Paul dealt also with the question of how we enter into this. How do we come to a place where our sins are gone? Do we somehow work for it? And, of course, he spends chapter four talking about Abraham and how he came into a relationship where God said, You are righteous in my eyes.

Now, is there anybody here who can do something and cause God to say that about you? No, there was something that God instituted right there that absolutely sets the pattern and tells us what He is looking for. All we have to do is look at Abraham, and we see a man who heard God speak to him, who believed not simply the words, but the person behind the words, to the point that whenever God spoke, he believed what He said.

When God told him to do something, he did it. When every circumstance that could possibly rise up to say no, it can’t happen, he believed it anyway. There was a persistence in saying, I don’t care, God has spoken. I don’t care what rises up to say it’s impossible, I know it’s gonna be true because God said it. That’s exactly what he’s looking for from me.

How many of you run into impossibilities in your own life, and the devil just jumps all over you and say, look, you know, I know it’s a great thing, but not you. Oh my God, God wants to bring us to a place of such confidence that we can move ahead and enjoy what He has given.

And, you know, we talked last week also about the fact that coming into faith is not just some superficial thing. Abraham had to face some facts about himself. The impossibility of him fulfilling the role of being the father of many nations. His wife’s womb was dead. She was what, 90 years old when the son was born? And he was 100 years old, that was history. There was no human way that that could be fulfilled. And yet, he believed God and it was.

Folks, you and I have to come to terms with the reality of what we are. It says in the scripture, he faced the fact that his body was dead and his wife’s womb was dead and all that. And folks, when we come to faith, we have to face the facts. God has to show us the truth about ourselves, to the point where we realize that we are sinners, we are guilty, we are deserving of death, that we have no power to save ourselves, and we need a savior.

And oh boy, when we surrender to that truth and say, okay, I’m done, I surrender, I’m in your hands. You’re the potter, I’m the clay. How many songs did we sing this morning that just expressed all of these simple truths? My life is in your hands, and you’re gonna have to take care of something I have no power to deal with.

And thank God, thank God the guilt of my sins was taken away simply, not because I earned it, not because I could possibly deserve it, but because I put my faith in what God said He did at that cross. And it’s not something I’m waiting for him to somehow work out. I look back and there it is, it’s the cross. He knew about me and all of the depth of my need that I’m still discovering. I’m still finding out why He had to save me, and why it’s impossible for me to do anything about it. But at every point, I look back and I realize there’s a God who knew about me, who did something for me long before I discovered America.

And here I am in such need, and He doesn’t look to me and say, okay, here’s what’s wrong with you, fix it. He says, look to me, look at the cross. Look at what I did. I did something there that absolutely, you can bank your eternal destiny on, on what I did for you at the cross. That’s what we’re called to, folks. Thank God!

When God can bring us to the point of faith and surrender and repentance, all these things that we know about, God, I mean, then we’re in a position where, you know, salvation part one is taken care of, because God has taken care of the guilt of our sins, the things that separated us from a holy God. And now we have the freedom to have a relationship with a holy God. That’s incredible!

Think again of the picture that God painted so many times of Isaiah seeing the glory of God, the purity of God, and realizing in a moment of time, the truth about himself. And yet he found a God that did something about that, didn’t he? There was a coal that was taken off of the altar and it touched the very thing that he was conscious of. Oh, everything I say is wrong because I’m wrong. And the Lord touched his lips with a sacrificial coal of a sacrificial altar and took care of that.

My God, I need that same God. We need that same God. But thank God, He’s available. That’s what the good news is about. That’s what caused Paul to get up in the morning, caused Paul to write all of these things in spite of languishing in prison. That wasn’t what his life was about, he saw that was beyond all of this. And that’s what God wants us to see.

And so salvation part two is, I mean, chapters 5 through 8 in particular delve into that. And I have wrestled with, how in the world do you deal with all of this? Because there’s so much, so many aspects of truth that are all important. And Paul is step by step going through this. And I think I’m just gonna start and I don’t know how far we’ll get, but I’m not gonna worry about it. Lord, that’s up to you. You take my thoughts and guide them, because I don’t know what to do with it.

But the question really you have to raise when, all right, now the relationship is there, the barrier is gone. Sins are gone, I’m forgiven, now what? Because it’s pretty obvious that we can come into that relationship with God, and yet here we are still living in this broken world. What’s that about? What’s God’s purpose? How do we navigate that? What does salvation mean, in terms of our having to live here? Does God give us, as some people actually think, does God give us a license to sin by just blotting out our sins, or is He calling us to be his holy people?

Well, I don’t have any power to do that. You remember what the problem was, when He said all have sinned? That’s one, so we all have a rap sheet that’s enough to enough to send us to the judgment and wrath. We all have the rap sheet, we have sin, but it goes on and says, we fall short, we continue to fall short. There’s nothing we can do but fall short.

And all you have to do is see a glimpse of glory, as different ones did in the scriptures. And we know, whoa, I’m not like that. And yet, here we are. And does God have a plan for dealing with that? And if so, what is his plan?

Okay, so chapter 5, let’s just kind of look at some of these things. And I don’t know how long we’ll hang on particular scriptures, but I’m just gonna start. Therefore, all right, in view of salvation part one, and the fact that it’s based upon coming to a place of confidence and faith in him, surrender, facing facts, all of that.

“Therefore, since we have been justified by faith,” thank God for the past tense there, thank God. If you’ve come to that place of surrendering your life and putting all of your hope in what He did at the cross, there is something that is in place right now. I have a clean, erased rap sheet. What an amazing, amazing thing. How could such a thing be? We have been justified, declared righteous. There is nothing that God can charge me with, because it’s all been paid for and taken care of. His wrath has already been poured out upon my sin, thank God. We’ve been justified through faith, again, that’s the ticket to get into this place. We have peace with God, all right?

There is a relationship where you look down in the passage and you find out we were his enemies. Well, now we’ve come into a state of peace. There is a surrender. We’ve changed sides, folks. If you’re still a part of this world system and this is where your heart is, you haven’t entered in. God calls us to a separation from the heart, the purpose of this world. We live here, but we’re not of this world, we’re of citizens of a heavenly kingdom. And that’s what our eyes need to be focused upon, it and His purposes.

And God has made every provision. You know, we just sang the song this morning that says He’ll give you everything. He’s not talking about Cadillacs and mansions. He’s talking about everything we need for the fulfillment of His purpose that He has declared. He set the ball rolling at the cross and the resurrection, but boy, it’s got everything you and I need. Anybody need anything this morning? That’s what the Lord wants us to get, because we all need him this morning, starting with me. Thank God, the peace with God, that’s the foundation. Now I’m in a relationship with Him, now what?

All right, and, of course, it’s through our Lord Jesus Christ. Now it says, “Through whom we have,” once again the past tense, “We have gained access by faith into this grace in which we now stand.” Now, I’m quite sure, I haven’t looked this up, but I’m quite sure that have gained access is that wonderful Greek perfect tense. It looks to something that has happened in the past, but it’s not just an event that’s come and gone. This is something that has happened in the past, but there is an ongoing result.

See, everyone here has at some point in the past, walked through the doors of the church. Is that right? You have come. Well, I’m also saying not only you came through the doors, but you’re still here. That’s the perfect tense, you’ve got both senses, all captured in that one Greek tense. We have gained access, that means we have it. Thank God, access by faith again, into something, into this grace in which we now stand.

I’ve had that phrase come to my mind time and time again, but I just pray that God will help us to see something. You know, all the world is under the wrath of God. That’s how God sees people who are in rebellion against him. But now, He’s talking about a different place. He’s talking about a place that he calls grace.

Imagine if you were in a place of danger and you knew that judgment was gonna fall and there was no way to escape it. And then all of a sudden, you found out that there was a place and it was a place of safety, it was a place where that threat was gone. And now, how do I get in there? How in the world can I leave this terrible place that I find myself? How can I get into that place of safety?

And, of course, it’s through Jesus Christ and what he’s done and our confidence in him. He has opened a door into a place that has a wall around it. It walls off all human virtue, all human effort, anything except the grace of God. He is the door through which we enter. Thank God for the Son of God, for what he was willing to do so that we could enter into a place. We could leave the place where wrath of God reigns, and we could step into a place where grace reigns.

And I feel like my definition of grace has evolved. You know, that traditional “unmerited favor” is a little bit, you know, it doesn’t really go into the depth of it. And when we’re talking about having been under the power of sin, I need something that’s got some power to it, got more power than sin does. And so, grace is God’s power at work, saving sinners. How’s that for a definition? God’s power at work, saving sinners.

And you could add unworthy sinners if you want, but I mean, that’s what I need. I need God at work if anything’s gonna change. He can’t just say, okay, here’s the plan, you do it, and leave it to my resources. It ain’t gonna happen. I need absolutely the intervention of God at every point.

And that’s what He wants, that’s what He’s teaching us, ‘cause we don’t live that way naturally. We run in our own wisdom and our own strength. We blindly live out our lives so much of the time, and we don’t realize what His purpose is, we’re blind to it. And when we face something, we don’t remember we’re in a place of grace.

And grace has so many aspects. It’s not just the strength that He exerts, that He gives us and all of that. It’s His favor. It is His favor, okay? It means instead of regarding me as his enemy, deserving of His wrath and just awaiting that day when that’s gonna happen, now he sees me as His child. He loves me, He’s for me.

How many of you can get up in the morning, and you know in your heart and you believe actively in your heart, God loves me, He’s for me? He knows everything that’s wrong with me, and He loves me anyway. And everything He wants me to do, He’s ready, He’s there with His arms outstretched saying, I’m here. I’m here not to punish you, not to be mad at you, I’m here to help you. I know you need things that you don’t have in yourself, I get that, that’s why it’s called salvation. But I have brought you into a place now, where this is how I see you.

Folk, do we see ourselves that way? Do we really? I mean, we can get this doctrinally to where we could assert the right thing. We could say what we believe, but emotionally, how many times do we get in places where it doesn’t feel like that and we’re not so sure? What did Abraham do in those times, when it was impossible, when all hope was seemingly gone? Did that nullify what God had promised?

See, that’s what God wants you and me to get today. You’re going to find, if you’re not right in that place now, or you haven’t been, you will be. If you’re his child, you’re gonna run into situations where everything about you is gonna cry out and say, this is impossible, there is no hope, I can’t do this, all hope is gone. And the Lord wants us to get as we never have before.

We’re gonna need it in this hour, folks. We’re gonna need a confidence that sees beyond earth’s circumstances, sees beyond our feelings, every circumstance that rises up, every temptation. See, all those things are things that Paul is gonna unfold in these chapters is, how does this work? What now? How do we navigate this life in terms of salvation? What’s God’s plan for this life? Why in the world are we still here? And that’s what the gospel unfolds, but oh, what a place it starts.

These first few verses really are kind of a summary, kind of a broad picture, and then he begins to unfold it as he goes along. But we’ve gained access by faith into this grace in which we do what? Now stand. There’s a couple of wonderful words there.

How about the now one? How many times does it feel like, oh God, I’m falling, I can’t handle this, this is too bad, this is too difficult? And yet he says, now. God is always a God of the now. He does not look to us to depend upon how we feel, because we will feel like Abraham did. There’s no hope, I don’t see any way naturally.

I don’t either, and I’ll tell you, there’s not a day goes by that it doesn’t get more apparent to me. There is nothing I can look to here, not one thing. No goodness, no strength, no virtue, no nothing. But I’ve got a place to look, folks. He doesn’t tell me to look in here, he tells me to look to the Son of God who gave himself for me. Praise God, he set something in motion that involves me. How amazing is that?

Transcript of message from TV Broadcast 1664 — taken from Closed Captioning Text

Phil: Those who are led by the Spirit of God are what? Children of God. Now it’s not just this influence in my life, this extra strength that I don’t have. Now, I’m actually His child. That’s incredible. That’s the relationship He wants. Those who are led by the Spirit of God.

God wants to be so real in our lives that we take our direction from Him. We don’t say, What is it that I want out of life and how can I get it, and focus our energies on that? But, Lord, I’m in your hands. Show me what you want.

Does not… Hebrews 12, as we said so many times, talk about running with perseverance what? The race marked out for us. I want the race that He’s marked out. I don’t know that. He doesn’t give me a panoramic view that this is how it’s all gonna work out. I’ve got to walk with Him day by day trusting Him, even when He takes me in places that I’d rather not go, like the valley of the shadow of death. But He’s with me, isn’t he? And He has a reason. Those are things that will be unfolded.

But anyway, those who are led by the Spirit of God are the children of God. Thank God. What an amazing thing that He wants that kind of a relationship with us. The Spirit Who you receive does not make you slaves so that you live in fear again. Oh, how the devil loves to introduce fear into the equation. He must be so disappointed in me. I just can’t be …. Oh God, help us, set us free from that.

You who have children, are your children perfect? Giggle. Giggle. Yeah. But are they still your children? You still love them. Yes. You think you’re better than God? We’ve got a heavenly Father Who knows exactly where we’re at. He knows what we can and can’t do and just how to bring us along. But He’s not our slave master. He’s not demanding something we can’t do. He stands there ready to help us, to draw near to us, not in a Spirit of condemnation and fear, but one of love and mercy and help. We’ve got a throne, as we said so many times, where we can go and find the mercy and the grace to help us when in our time of need. You see how these scriptures just fit together?

So anyway, the Spirit you received does not make you slave so that you live in fear again, rather the Spirit you received brought about your adoption to sonship, or it’s the Spirit of adoption, I think in the original.

Basically, now we’re taking a longer look. Remember, we come short of the glory of God. We’re saved. Now we have a hope of the glory of God. Now He’s beginning to talk about how we get there and what that is.

How many of you know what adoption is in this context? Well, yeah, adoption in our word, in our culture, is when you take a child, say, that doesn’t have parents, and you bring them in and they legally become your children.

That’s not what this is. This is the final product of a child born into a family, raised to learn its values, going through the whole process of maturing, and learning, and growing, and they reach a point of adulthood. They are completely ready to stand on their own and bring honor to their father and mother who had brought them up. And now they’re ready for the purpose of their entire existence.

There was a ceremony in their culture. Let’s say an important man had a child and they raised them. Do you think he would take a 2-year-old and say, Here’s my business, go run it? But no, there would come a time when he could present that son to the society of his day and say, This is my son. They are ready to take their place in society. And when they act, you treat that as if it’s me acting, I give them full authority to represent me, to handle my affairs. They are ready to take their place.

How many of you believe God has a purpose in our existence? There’s a place He wants to take us. I’m not able to fill that place right now, are you? If God turned over what He has made me to the responsibility He designed me to have, if He turned it over to me now, would I handle it correctly?

You better believe I wouldn’t. I’d mess it up. There’s things I wouldn’t know, I wouldn’t know how to do. I’d do it wrong. God is training and teaching us as His children getting us ready for a day when He’s gonna present us in full glory and say, This is my son. This is my daughter. They’re ready to reign. They’re ready to completely fulfill my purpose. And that’s what God’s Spirit living in us is all about.

Now, how does this fit in? I mean, think about how all this fits in with what Jesus said to Nicodemus, for example. What was the point that Jesus made about the Kingdom of God? Yeah, you gotta be born again. There is a literal birth that has to happen. Doesn’t that fit this? Where He becomes our Father? We have to be born.

And as I’m preaching this, I’m talking about this teaching, whatever you call it, I’m aware that there’s probably gonna be people, perhaps in here, perhaps who will hear it elsewhere, and none of this is real. It’s like this world is real. The desires I feel are real. All these things. I see my friends doing this and doing that and making plans, and this Kingdom of God, I can’t see it. I can’t see this God you’re talking about. It’s just not real. Pie in the sky by and by. You want me to give up my life for that.

But do you know it’s impossible to see the Kingdom of God unless you’re born again? We’re gonna have to have that divine encounter with God. Apart from that, our eyes will remain blind. I’ll tell you, if there’s anybody here who’s in that place, and this doesn’t make sense to you, what I’m talking about this morning, it’s not real, I’ll ask you the question, Do you want it to be? I would call upon you to seek God with all of your heart, to open your eyes because that’s the only way they’ll be open. I can’t explain it well enough to open people’s eyes. Only God can do that.

You think about Paul writing and talking about the blindness that is caused by the devil ruling over this planet. How he’s blinded minds so they’re unable to see the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. But then he says of himself and Timothy, evidently, you notice the “we” all the way through that passage? It’s Paul and Timothy, who’s writing. So, it’s like he’s saying for Timothy and me, God shined his light in our heart.

The same God who said, Let there be light back there, now has shined and said, Let there be light in my heart. And He’s shown us the reality of His kingdom. And He’s called us to become a part of it, to give up our lives, hand them over to Him, and now, all of a sudden, something that I cannot see or touch, it’s real.

Do you want this to be real? I don’t want anybody just to blindly do anything. It has to be because God, by His Spirit, opens up the ear, the heart. And you’ll never see it without being willing to humble yourself and hand your life over to Him. But if you do, you’ll become His child. Praise God! This will become real. All right?

And it says, And by Him, now he’s talking about the Spirit of adoption, the Spirit that leads to sonship, he says, And by Him we cry Abba, Father. That was a very intimate word. I don’t want to trivialize it, but it’s like He’s papa, He’s daddy. Can you imagine? You think of the greatness of this God who’s behind it all, Who fills everything, is pure and holy, and yet we can look to Him and think of Him as our Father in that sense. That’s how He wants us to see Him.

Now, that’s not to bring Him down to our level and treat him with a casualness, but that’s a sense that I want, to have a real personal relationship with you. I care about you. I care about every detail. I know every hair on your head. I know every thought that’s ever passed through your mind and your life. I love you. I’ve got plans for you. But I want you to know me, not as just some awesome monarch somewhere that you can’t see or touch. I want you to know me as Father, as Dad, as Someone that you can go to at your darkest hour and know that I’m there and I care. Praise God!

Now, I’ll get to where I think in my mind the focus has been on this, because one of the issues that the devil will focus on, he hates this truth. He’s opposed me thinking about it. Probably opposed some people from coming. He hates this. And he wants to do everything he can to undermine our confidence and our knowledge.

But I’ll tell you, God wants this to be real to the point that we have a solid foundation down here wherever, inside, (chuckles) that’s real, that is strong enough to stand no matter what kind of flood comes from this world and the condition that it’s in. God wants a solid foundation, not just out here, but in here. Okay?

So how do we know? How do we know that we’re part of this? You know, the devil’s gonna say, Well, you could go and do everything perfectly, sincerely, and yet get to that day and He say, I never knew you. Do you think that’s what the Lord is trying to convey by that? No. Those people are people that have resisted His voice on the inside and said, found ways to say, no. But there is a way that there is something that God wants to do for every one of us.

Verse 16, The Spirit himself testifies with our spirit, that we are God’s children. You know, the devil has often tried to make me afraid to say that. You imagine why? Because he wants to say, Oh, you’re just gonna make people, make good Christians doubt. You’re gonna make them live in a state of uncertainty.

I believe with all my heart, God wants us to have a state of certainty and not to be afraid to lift up this truth. Because when God has children that He births, He is more than willing to testify to that and say, You’re mine.

Human nature hates to get quiet and just face reality. Didn’t the prophet say, The wicked are like the troubled sea. It cannot rest, Waters cast up mire and dirt. ‘There is no peace,’ says my God to the wicked. There’s a restlessness in the human heart. But God wants us to be able to get to the point where we can be completely at rest and know that we know, that we know, get past evaluating, Am I His by our performance? but rather we can know that we’re His and just put our hope and our trust in Him every single day.

Do you believe God wants you to know that? Yes. Do you? I mean, do you know that right now? Is that witness there? God wants it.

And I guess it’s hard for me to preach this without going back to my own experience. I’ve talked about it many times. God will take us through this in different ways. Now, this is how He did with me. Because I was among the people that at that particular time, that emphasized certain experiences that we were supposed to have, and there are genuine experiences. But anyway, that was the emphasis.

And you’re supposed to seek God and you’re supposed to get this real experience, and it’s supposed to be manifest in certain ways. And I came to a point where I looked around and other people seemed to be being blessed and I wasn’t. And I was mad. And I didn’t like it. What’s wrong with me? Why do you treat me this… You know, whatever, however it was put.

And so I quit. For about three days, I just did not put forth any effort. I didn’t pray. I didn’t praise God. I didn’t say I reject you or anything of that sort. I didn’t turn to sin. I didn’t go rob a bank. But I just simply quit. Put forth zero effort. And nobody outside knew what was going on. It wasn’t like somebody came with some magic formula, some word or something like that. It was just me and the Lord.

And yet during that time, there was this still small voice and I did my best to ignore it. I was upset. But there was a still small voice on the inside that basically communicated the truth. You’re mine. And I knew my spirit was agreeing with that. I knew that, Lord, no matter what, I’m yours.

And there was two witnesses there, me and the Lord. And the most quiet moment when I wasn’t trying to pretend anything, there was nothing else going on that could have fed into that, it was just nothing but me and the Lord and dead air, if you will. And yet somehow there was a conviction. Didn’t come from out here. It was in here. There was a witness.

I don’t know how that would happen for somebody else. And I’m sure there are others here who could testify to something along that line, where the Lord really bore witness down deep in your heart, You’re mine, and your spirit said, Yes, I’m yours. And the issue was settled. It was completely settled.

And many times that comes in times of difficulty because God is gonna take us through a lot of different things in this process of getting us to that place. He’s taken us, this adoption ceremony, if you will. He’s gotta teach us a lot. And many times He’s gonna take you on tour of what’s wrong with you and me. But you know, in the midst of that, what a difference it makes if we can come to that place and just be totally quiet.

I would challenge anybody here who’s got a question. You need to seek God from the depths of your heart until that becomes real. It’s not a feeling. I had no sensations, nothing that I could point to that was natural. It was just a reality down in here where I knew that He was real. I knew that I belonged to him. That I had already set out on a road, there was nothing to do but say, All right, Lord, I surrender.

And of course, the question was, Why aren’t you giving me experiences like everybody else, making me feel good? That happened to be the issue. And so, I finally was brought to a place where I said, Okay, very patiently, three days at least. And I went through this and finally I said, All right, Lord, I surrender. I will serve you if I never have a feeling.

Now, as I say, that happened to be the issue. It could be something else with you. But my prayer, and I believe it’s God’s heart, God wants to be real to you to where you can be completely at rest, not trying to feel good and scratch this itch or that one, but you can be just completely at peace with Him.

Now, think about how scripture describes our relationship with God. What did Jesus promise if we would come to him? Rest. See, that’s not… I got an itch, I gotta scratch. I gotta do something to feel okay. I can be at complete rest and peace.

Think about how that’s described in Hebrews. Is it Chapter 4? Where God wants us to enter into what? His rest. See, God’s not worried about whether He can pull this off. It’s done. It’s done as if it happened already. But He wants us to stop trying and come to a place where we just surrender and we find a place of rest in Him.

Now, once we have that, we’ve got a ground to be able to stand and face the things that life throws at us by God’s design. All right? But I gotta have a foundation. I gotta have something to stand on. God wants to bring every one of us to where we can be totally quiet. Nobody else knows what’s going on. It’s just you and the Lord. And deep down in here, there’s a conviction, Yes, you’re mine. I put my seal on you as what Paul put it in Ephesians 1. I put a seal on you. You’re mine. The devil can’t have you.

I wanna know that. And I want my spirit to join with Him in that witness and say, Yes, I have surrendered. I have nothing to bring to the equation but myself. I’m a lost, hopeless sinner apart from you. But I believe, and I have put my hope in you.

I want everyone who comes to this place, everyone who hears that to come to that place of rest before God, where you’re not just coming and going through the motions and doing the right stuff. I want you to have that witness in your heart. Because anything short of that isn’t gonna end well. God wants to make Himself real.

Oh my God! And if we are children, then we are heirs, heirs of God and coheirs with Christ. There’s an inheritance that’s coming. God has something that He is preparing for His family beginning with His son, but we are heirs right together with Him. Oh, what a heavenly Father we have. How worthy is He, and how worthy is the Savior through whom all of this has come about? Praise God!

What a salvation. Heirs of God, coheirs with Christ. If indeed we share in His sufferings in order that we may also share His glory, now we’re back on the path of glory. It means we’re gonna have to put up with stuff. God is not gonna have sons that just muddle through. He’s gonna have sons that absolutely will face obstacles, face adversity, and continue on because they have Him living on the inside.

And we’re His, we’re not our own anymore. And we’re not seeking our own will. We’ve handed that off to Him. What’s in charge in your life? Have you ever been born of His spirit? Is this important? Does this matter? Are the things that Jesus said that make it absolute, this clear picture of most of humanity going in the wrong direction and God calling out those who will humble themselves and put their trust in Him?

I’m with Him. Are you? And I just pray that if that witness is not clear to you, that you’ll seek Him until it is. And don’t go looking for feelings. Don’t go measuring your performance. Don’t do anything except, Lord, I want to be yours. I wanna know that I’m yours. And I believe with all my heart, God will bear witness to His children. Isn’t that what He says? This is His promise.

And I’m calling Him on it because I got brothers and sisters here, and I want every one of you to know where you stand and to be able to stand on solid ground and go forward with confidence, not in yourself, but you know where your help comes from. You know you’ve been born of His spirit, and you’re headed for glory. And there’s no devil in hell that can stand in the face of that.

What a salvation that God has given to us. And there’s so much more that He unfolds here. But praise God, that’s enough for today, I think. I think the focus is the witness of the Spirit. Every one of God’s children needs that. You don’t need to say, Oh, I follow what Phil says. You need to follow what He says. It needs to be real personally to you regardless of me and my limitations, and whatever, it needs to be between you and Him.

And there’s nobody who wants it more than He does. He knows you. He loves you. Jesus died when you were still his enemy. Praise God! What a Savior we have. To Him be all the glory. Praise God!

Transcript of message from TV Broadcast 1671 — taken from Closed Captioning Text

Phil: What a dangerous prayer it is when we say, Lord, I want higher ground. Lord, I want you to use me. Lord, I want you to make a difference in the Kingdom through my life, I want… I think you know what I’m talking about, don’t you?

Some of you prayed that, and you said, Oh, Lord, I didn’t know it meant this. But the thing is, if God doesn’t deal with this old nature, our lives, what John calls our lives in Revelation 12, that we’re loving so much and we’re still attached to more than we know. If God doesn’t break those connections, how effective are we gonna be?

I mean, Paul recognized that it’s kind of like an athlete. Now, the earthly athletes, they’re going for a prize. You know, they’re disciplining their body and they’re doing all these things because they want a prize. Well, I want a prize too, but it’s not that, okay? I wanna go for the ones the Lord offers. He’s called me to seek after something that’s eternal. But how can I do that if there isn’t some self-discipline?

And so he actually, in the Greek, it says, I beat my body, or I keep it under, in one translation, or basically, I’m in charge, my body isn’t. I keep that under. I recognize that there’s impulses that come from my flesh, that if I just let ‘em go, if I somehow say, Well, that’s okay, it’s all taken care of. And the Lord’s wanting to deliver, and the Lord’s wanting to actually break that hold and break that tie.

Paul says, I beat my body and I make it my slave, I think in this translation. I bring it under subjection. I make it my slave. Is your body and its impulses your slave to serve God? Are you in charge or is it in charge? And the Lord’s gonna bring us into circumstances that kind of help us to see.

And in every instance is the Lord’s purpose to defeat us and to cause, make us feel discouraged? I think you know that’s not the case. But I just pray that God will help us in these areas. Because many times overcoming does mean, I need to be free from that. It’s a weight that I need to lay aside, as Hebrews 12 says. It’s something that has attached, that’s so attached to me that I can’t run freely. I can’t do what, I can’t be what the Lord wants me to be because that’s holding onto me. And I need the Lord to cut that chain. So overcoming in that context means to get rid of that thing and to be able to say, I have the victory.

Now, does that mean that in every case you’re gonna have this grand experience and suddenly it’s gonna be gone? No, more often than not, it’s going to be a step by step, day by day looking to God and winning the victory. I’ve heard I don’t know how many testimonies of somebody that’s been brought out of a terrible lifestyle. And there were aspects of that that kept trying to intrude. And over time, sometimes over years, the Lord gave more and more victory and there was less and less of a hold.

I believe God wants to get us to the point where we’re looking ahead and we’re looking up every time. We know we’ve got a place to go. Thank God! Amen. If we’re struggling and there’s something that’s still got a hold, and we mess up, thank God for the blood. Thank God for the cross. If we have a sin, if we sin, we have a place we can go. But there’s a heart in that instance that, in that situation, that is an agreement with God. It says, God, I don’t want to do this. Help me.

But you know how the Lord helps us? Does He help us by just taking the thing away and we’d never feel the temptation again? No, He wants to build something in us that can withstand that. Does that mean He’s gonna, we’re gonna have to dig down deep and find the resources to do that? Or does He say, No, you’re gonna have to come to me. It’s gonna be My grace. I’ll give you what you need, but you’re gonna have to let go of your attachment to that thing. You’re gonna have to recognize it for what it is.

You know, there’s so many things that connected with this. One of the things I wrestle with is that sometimes I’ll preach on a subject and it just covers the whole gamut. And I’m always asking, Lord, what’s the focus here?

Well, I think the focus really has to come down to where you and I are at individually. We are in a certain place in our journey. And the Lord is going to let adversity in some fashion come against you, and He’s called us to overcome, to be overcomers, okay? And I just gave an instance of something where overcoming means, That’s not part of my life anymore because God has given me the victory.

It could be drugs, it could be alcohol, it could be pornography, it could a lot of things, but God wants us to have a freedom from that. And so, I guess where I was about to go with that is this: When the Lord was encouraging the churches, it wasn’t just to him that overcomes, but it says, Let him that has ears to hear.

Do you have ears to hear? Is there something in you that says, Regardless of what my circumstances are, I know that I need to hear what the Spirit is saying to the churches? It’s not enough just to know the Bible. I’ve got to hear His voice because I’m in a particular place in my journey. And just as the Lord’s message to these churches was specific to their particular need, God has words that are specific to your need and to mine, if we’re tuned in and ready to listen.

Now, it’s all often easy, when we hear that, to say, Oh, I know what that’s about. That means, when I’m in a battle, God’s gonna give me a promise. Well, thank God that’s part of it. Because God’s gonna remind me of His promises of grace, and strength, and help, and so forth. That’s part of it.

But do you know there’s another part? Do you know we need a deeper understanding of why the problem exists in the first place? Do you think God maybe needs to give us a little bit more of an insight into what’s going on, what the real situation is down here? A lot of us deal with the oppression of the enemy, this recurring issue that I have, or I feel sorry for myself, or I feel, you know, whatever, whatever it is, and we get focused on that.

But the problem is, why. God needs to, we need to have a heart that allows the Lord to reach down into the depths of our being and show us those kinds of things and to have an honest heart about it. ‘Cause I need that, don’t you? And so the Lord is wanting an honesty that looks to Him and says, Oh, God, give me more understanding. Give me more wisdom in this thing.

Think about David and how many times that he would come to the Lord. And there was an honesty about him, wasn’t there? How many times does he begin a psalm, and the psalm is, Oh, God, where are you? Oh God, I’m in a bad place. I’m struggling. This is going on. There was an honest heart. I don’t see any place where the Lord rebuked him for that.

Wouldn’t that be a good place to start? I guess what I started to say a minute ago is, a lot of times when we are experiencing some of these things, our tendency is to kind of, I’m okay. Everything’s fine, hope you are. And we’re just, you know, we just paste on a smile and pretend, when God wants to get down to the issues that are really operating in our lives and give us a degree of freedom that we haven’t had.

And that’s why I appreciated what Scott said the other night, because there was an openness about it. And it’s not that we have to get up here and everybody confess all these things necessarily, but we need to quit pretending. We can come to the Lord and say, Lord, this is what I’m feeling. This is what I’m going through, and I need help.

And depending on the situation, you know, like I say, if it’s a besetting sin, we need the Lord to go down in there and find out why, what happened, what’s going on that we need to bring out, and just bring it out and say, Lord, this is the way it is, and I need You to give me victory in this area.

So yes, it’s the voice of God to give me the promises, but sometimes it’s the voice of God to tell me the truth about myself. Wouldn’t it be good to listen to that? Can we not trust somebody, who loves us as much as He’s demonstrated, to know that He has our best interest at heart? Oh, how pride keeps us prisoners when the Lord wants to give us a degree of freedom.

And of course, the other thing that… Well, like I say, it isn’t always making the thing go away. Sometimes it’s simply strength to stand, okay? Isn’t that how it was in many….? Well, in Paul’s case, the Lord didn’t take that spirit away, didn’t chase him away. But rather, You need this at this particular time. There’s a spiritual need in your life that I want to deal with. You have a tendency to get proud, and I’m gonna put you in a place where you just don’t have the ability to be proud. You recognize your weakness. But don’t worry, I’ll give you the strength. So for him, overcoming was standing and continuing to believe God and continuing to trust God, okay?

You know, I thought of a scripture, there’s so many scriptures, but I just thought of one that somebody may well have thought of, but it’s in 1 John chapter 5, where John says, Everyone born of God overcomes the world. This is the victory that has overcome the world, even our faith.

Now, where do we get faith from? Yeah, He’s very willing to share that with us and to give us what we need. But faith is not simply, I believe this, and I believe that, a mental thing, this is, God’s gonna give me something that I can do, some way that I can express that faith.

Now, if I’m in a place where, let’s say I’m depressed. The enemy is just oppressing my mind with all, This is wrong, that’s wrong, and somebody did this to me, you know, and, I feel bad, and on and on. We all experience those things from time to time, but if I’m sitting there… I can’t even remember what I was starting to say. But anyway, praise God.

There has to be a place where we’re just not focused on that. Isn’t that the natural human tendency? If I’m in a battle, my whole focus is the battle. Oh, poor me, I’m in a battle. Why me? Why me? Well, we know why, because the Lord wants us to be overcomers. But if I’m focused on the battle, how is that helping me? There has to come a point where, yes, I need to be honest about the battle. That’s wonderful. That’s exactly right. I need to be honest about what’s going on, but then I need to be able to turn to Him and find the strength that I need to meet that situation.

See, faith doesn’t just look at that and say, Huh, poor me. Faith has to say, God has brought this to my, to here, brought me to this place, and His purpose for me is to do something in me that isn’t gonna happen any other way. And I need to rise up, and I need to exercise the faith, the strength that He gives me, to look beyond that and to see enough about what it’s about.

What I’m supposed to do here is be thankful, for example, to praise Him, to look to Him, to have an expectation towards Him. Praise God! If I’m anxious, if I’m just overwhelmed with anxiety about all the things that might happen, oh, God, yeah, we know we can pray, that’s absolutely part of it, but think about scriptures that talk about casting our care upon Him, for He cares.

But there’s a scripture in Psalm 55: Cast your cares upon God, and He will sustain you, uphold you. Different translations. Anybody here need to be sustained? Yeah. So if somebody’s doing that, what are they focused on? Are they focused on the problems? Oh my God, no. Okay, I got it. Here it is, Lord. I’m looking to You to give me the strength to continue trusting in You, believing in You, knowing that it’s gonna be okay, that I have all the strength that I need because it comes from You and You love me.

You know, it’s kind of almost become a joke, I guess, but, you know, the message I preached about getting your “buts” in the right place enters into it here, because there’s a pattern again that you see in David where he is being honest in bringing his troubles to the Lord. The enemy has got him in a bad place, and he knows it. And he’s just… And some of it’s because he recognizes there’s things in him where he needs help, but over and over, but over and over, that word, “but,” comes into it, and you find his attention shifting and saying, But I trust You, but I praise You, but I thank You. There’s this turning of our attention to the Lord.

Undoubtedly, there’s people here today, that you’re in a place where you’re here, you’re singing, and you’re smiling, and I believe you believe it, but yet, you’re being oppressed right now. You’re in that place where you’re feeling it. And God wants me and every one of us to be able to get our but in the right place when it comes to this, these things.

There’s a place for recognizing needs. They need to be left on the other side of but. Because whatever follows but is what’s really in charge. And if we ever find ourselves saying, like the one psalmist did, Surely God is good to Israel, but as for me, then we are in a bad place. You see, God wants us to get to that place where we can absolutely get our buts in the right place and put, leave all of these things on the other side of it, but turn our attention to Him and to His faithfulness and His promises.

To God be the glory. God wants to be present, not just in convention time, but all the time. Amen. God wants us to enjoy His presence, but we cannot focus on the problem and on the battle to the point where we get our eyes off of Him and the victory that He’s already won at the cross.

That doesn’t always mean the problem’s gonna go away, it means we have strength to bear it. Like he says in 1 Corinthians 10:13, is it? There’s strength to bear it, to bear up under it. I don’t have to rely on my own weakness and my own strength ‘cause that’s gonna lead me in a bad place. Thank God. Amen.

Well, I thought of one other scripture that probably needs to be put in here, and it’s in Joshua chapter 1, because the Israelites were facing some real challenges. I mean, you think about looking at a land, and there were some walled cities and big armies. And among those armies, there were some giants mixed in. And they were facing some things that, from a human standpoint, were pretty scary.

I don’t know how many of you have seen that wonderful video of Asher acting out this verse. If you haven’t, that’s precious. Praise the Lord. But anyway, verse 9: Have not I commanded You, ‘Be strong and courageous’? So that’s what we’re supposed to be. Where do I get that from? See, that’s a way of, that’s my mental approach. That’s how I see a situation. I don’t look at the walls, and the giants, and the armies and say, Oh my God, I’m in trouble. I look at that, and I stand there, and I say, Yes, but God’s with me. Okay?

Be strong and and courageous. Now, here’s the other side, what you don’t want to be: Don’t be afraid. Don’t be discouraged. Anybody, I won’t ask you for a show of hands, but if anybody’s discouraged this morning because of what you’re feeling and what you’re going through right now, God doesn’t want that for His children. If He has put you in a place where there is an oppression going on in your life, whatever form it takes, whatever the issue is, because we’re all different, in one sense we’re all different, God wants His people to lift up their eyes, to look to Him to find the strength that we need to be able to be courageous and to face something, to do the same thing that David did when he recognized the battle is the Lord’s.

And there he was in a humanly impossible situation, facing a giant, and God gave him the victory. Praise God! Praise God! Amen. Be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid. Do not be discouraged. Why? For the Lord your God will be with you wherever you go. That’s what the Lord is looking for from His people.

Do you see, there’s two things that you go back to the letters to the churches. God wants me to have a hearing ear. I don’t need a religion to be handed down to me that I’m just supposed to observe. He wants me to have a relationship with God, Who’s doing specific things in my life, dealing with needs, shaping me for His purposes. I need to be hearing what He’s saying right now to me. I’m glad for what He said, but I need the, I don’t live by bread only. I live by every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God. And He’s gonna help me to understand what’s going on in my life.

Do you believe God wants you to understand, at least in whatever measure is right for His purpose? He wants you to have an understanding in me, so that we can respond in the way He’s told us to respond. So praise God!

But then what He’s looking for, regardless of what the situation is, whether it’s overcoming or repenting from a sin, or whether it’s standing in persecution, or whether it’s just holding onto what you have until I come to, don’t you dare turn from that ‘cause I’m gonna be with you. Whatever the particular issue is in our lives, God wants one thing from us is to overcome, to be victorious. And He will give us what we need to simply stand fast and believe Him. The faith that He gives us will give us the victory. That just means continually.

Now, what is my faith in? My faith is in my terrible circumstances. I’m so, things are so bad. Oh my God, my faith is in all. No, our faith is not in the storm or the problem. Our faith needs to be lifted to Him and say, God, you have got me here for a reason, and I love You, and I trust You. And I know that whatever I need to be an overcomer in this circumstance, You will give me. Whether it’s to make the thing go away or whether it’s to stand fast in spite of the thing, God wants to get us ready, not just for a convention, but for everything. Amen. So that we can stand fast and be united.

And you know, when you’re focused upon you, you’re not exactly focused on anybody else. One thing that would be good to remember is when we find ourselves in a place of oppression, we’re just conscious of it. Oh my God, the devil’s just pressing in on me. You’re not the only one. It’s like I said the other night, I was so conscious of that. Every person, every honest person there could have said the same thing.

When I experience that, you are experiencing it, and I need to get my eyes off of myself and do some praying for you. Yes. Guess what, if I’m really, from my heart, praying for you, there’s life coming from God into me and out of me to you. That’s kind of a good thing for me too, isn’t it? ‘Cause I’m getting washed with some of that same water of life that God wants to pour.

So I believe the Lord wants to encourage His people today. What He’s looking for is to be an overcomer. I don’t know what the particular issue is. You have every right to go to the Lord and ask wisdom. Yes. Yes, amen. Let Him look wherever He needs to look in your heart. Don’t cling to anything from your own life, because if you hang onto that, the devil’s always got a place he can grab a hold of and bring you down. And God has absolutely delivered us through the cross, but He sure wants our participation, doesn’t He? He is faithful.

So God is, we’re called to be overcomers. I guess that’s probably as good a title as any, A Call to Be Overcomers. Hadn’t really thought too much about a title, but… There’s nothing new that I have said this morning, but somehow I felt like this was needed right now. I think the Lord knew that. Amen.

Because no matter what we know up here, it’s what we are experiencing in our actual, practical, everyday lives that really matters. What good is what we know in our heads if it doesn’t make a difference in our lives? But I’ll tell you, God is faithful. Amen.

We’re okay. We just need to start where we’re at and look to Him. Don’t need to beat ourselves up about where we’re not, just, this is where I’m at. And, Lord, You’ve brought me here, and You’re gonna take me on, and You’ll love me enough to talk to me, to help me to understand, to help me to reach up and find the help that we need. So to God be the glory.

Transcript of message from TV Broadcast 1676 — taken from Closed Captioning Text

Phil: Well, I’ve had a lot of thoughts go through my mind, and I’m just trusting the Lord with this. Of course, hopefully that’s not a new thing. You need to be trusting the Lord all the time. But I feel especially inadequate. And yet, isn’t that the foundation of everything? We are inadequate. We can’t live, we can’t serve, we can’t do anything unless he does it in and through us. So that’s my prayer this morning that the Lord will absolutely take over and just have his way.

I’d like to read a scripture that we often read. I just wanna focus in a particular way today. And that’s in Ephesians chapter six. Carl, I’m sorry, I guess I have your affliction this morning. But anyway, this is where Paul, after talking about so many aspects of truth and encouragement that the believers needed, he says in verse 10, Finally, be strong in the Lord and in his mighty power, put on the full armor of God so that you can take your stand against the devil’s schemes, for our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.

And then he goes on to describe the armor. But my focus is on the fact that we have talked about a number of times, the reality of this world and what it’s about. And of course, we’ll get to how it affects us, because it’s not just information about the world. We need something will help us right where we’re at in our Christian walk.

But the fact is, there is an unseen kingdom. We see the kingdoms of the world, the presidents, the emperors, the kings, whatever they are, prime ministers and the various levels of government, the armies of the world. We see all those things visibly. We think of this capital city and that one and wars, and we think in a very physical way.

But there is an unseen kingdom that’s very real. And I feel like the Lord wants us to delve into this a little bit more than perhaps we have, and become a little more conscious of what it is that Paul is talking about when he says to take on the armor because we wrestle not and so forth. What does that mean?

Well, for the world, it means that this world is, as we have often pointed out, under the control of the enemy. There is an unseen kingdom that literally rules over the hearts of man. It blinds their minds, it causes them to be under his power, unaware of the Lord and his purposes and his kingdom.

But I wonder many times if this isn’t just a kind of a vague idea, okay, there’s a kingdom out there, and you know, we see its effects in this broad general sense, but I believe the Lord wants us to get back to where we are conscious of the fact that that breaks down into individual members of that kingdom. We call ‘em demons, we call ‘em evil spirits, devils, whatever you want to call them.

You know, we think about earthly governments, and we say Putin attacked, you know, was it Ukraine? Don’t get old! Putin attacked, well, Putin was sitting there probably in a bunker or a secure location in Moscow, and he didn’t have anything to do with it. He wasn’t the one out there pulling the triggers and throwing the bombs, dropping the bombs and all of that. He was, but yet we say he did it.

There are a lot of things where we read in the scripture about the devil, you know, resist the devil. Well, I think we have to realize if we’re honest that Lucifer, the person we know as the devil, does not literally come down and bother us as individual believers or individual people. Now he does interact with humanity, but that’s, when it’s talking about the devil, it’s talking about his kingdom. And there are hordes of literal spirit beings who serve his interests and who affect the lives of individual people.

You know, there was a time when the Lord was visiting the church here in an unusual way. We don’t spend a lot of time talking about that. It’s not what we’re about, but it was real. And we became very conscious of the activity of demon spirits and how they affected people. In some cases it was demon possession, but there were many others where, you know, you saw that there was, you could see the effect of something, but then you realize, hey, there’s a spirit behind it.

And I know it’s an uncomfortable subject in many ways. And usually when you bring up something like this, just says, Oh, don’t talk about that. It’s just people’s personalities. And you know, it’s just kind of … where does that wisdom come from? Yeah, we’ve got a kingdom of spirits that literally have a plan and a purpose to dominate human kind. They would love if they could to drive out God and all of his people from this earth. And Satan would have his hands completely on everything and everybody, that’s what he would like.

Thank God for the blood that was shed on that cross. Thank God that he was defeated. You know, the message that we preached and the one in the MCM, things the devil knows, he knows that his time is short and he knows he doesn’t have the power. But that doesn’t mean we don’t have to have some understanding in this area, because spirits do affect people.

Now, I know one of the things that, as soon as you get into that, you get into questions about demon possession and oppression and all that kind of stuff. Frankly, I don’t care about trying to sort all that out. All I know is the devil will affect any person that he can to any degree he can. If it’s just a matter of whispering in their ear and shaping their thinking and encouraging their motivations in a wrong sense and it’s all from out here, well, that’s part of it.

But if it gets to the point where spirits gain such an access to a person that they come to live in that person, do you know that happens literally? Yeah, I mean, we know from scripture certainly that they literally can be taken over. And then you get cases where someone’s totally outta control.

And like when Jesus saw the man in the tombs there, he talked, but the person that talked back to him was not the man, was it? It was one of the many spirits that were living inside the man that had such control that he literally was able to exercise the man’s mind, his body, his tongue, everything about him. It was not the person, it was the spirit.

Do you know that’s real? You read the headlines every day, and it’s pretty obvious what’s happening in the world. And you think about Mary Magdalene, one of the characters, one of the ladies who went around and no doubt cooked food and helped take care of the disciples and Jesus when they traveled around. But what does it say about her? Out of her went seven devils.

What does that literally mean? If somebody had had seen her someplace, they would say, there is a woman and her name is Mary. And so Mary lives inside this human body that I see before me, but Mary wasn’t alone. Before Jesus came along, there were seven, anyway, seven other spirit personalities.

You know demons have names, they are real beings. And you know, we’ve had testimony recently and from time to time of incidents where people have been able to see demon spirits. They are real.

Now, I wanna very quickly point out that all of this is not to inspire fear. The demon spirits do not have the power to just come and, you know, like some kind of monster, gobble you up and take over. They’ve got to work behind the scenes. They have got to use strategy, which is one thing Paul talks about here. They have got to work almost like a guerilla force, if you will. They’ve gotta be behind the scenes, unrecognized.

I’ll tell you, this world is totally, is it not under the control of the devil? Do they not live under his dominion? Are they not blind? That’s the world that we live in. And people do not know where their ideas, where their motivations come from.

And you literally have spirits whose job it is to go around and study people. Do you know there are spirits that study you and me? Why, what’s going on, what’s that about? The devil is looking for any kind of a weakness, any kind of an opening that’s there.

And of course, we know that people are unique, aren’t they? None of us are, we’re not the same as as each other. And you have people that are more intellectual and you have others that are more emotional and all kinds of different variations of human personality. Well, the devil is gonna study each person, say, Now how can I, where’s the weakness here? How can I get to them? How can I begin to inject my influence into their minds and their hearts?

And you know, you can almost see, I don’t know how literal this is, but you can almost see spirits going around with a notebook, studying somebody. It’s as real as if they were doing that. This is not fantasy. There are people the Lord has allowed to know these things and then come and be able to tell us because the Lord pulled ‘em out of that.

This is real, but there are devils that literally will study you and say, you know, there’s a weakness here. Hey, you, spirit, you spirit of fear, come here. There’s a weakness, it’s in the family, and I want you to take this person and work on that. And I want you to just keep ministering that and get a degree of influence and control over their lives. I want you to weaken them.

And as you do, I want you to kind of pay attention and study them because other weaknesses are gonna show up. And then maybe we can bring in a spirit of something else and all these things. And we’re gonna get control.

See, I don’t care whether it’s the degree where you have to put somebody in asylum or whether it’s somebody that looks respectable. There are plenty of people who look respectable in our society and you don’t have any idea that they are under the control of Lucifer in their thinking, in their actions. It doesn’t have to be some crazy crime that makes it obvious. If the devil has got somebody to the point where they love this world in any aspect of it, whether it’s the lust of the flesh or the pride of life, or the things they can see, the lust of the eyes, he’s gonna take control.

Now you think about the man that came to Jesus, and he wanted to become part of the kingdom, but Jesus knew he had an idol. And so he said, Here’s what you do. You sell everything you have, you give it to the poor, and then you come take up your cross and follow me. Well, what happened? He walked away. Sadly, there was a weakness in his life.

Now, anybody looking on would think, There’s a respectable guy. He’s wealthy, he’s successful, God’s blessed him. Isn’t that awesome? Do you think that that was just an interaction between Jesus and a human being, or was there the influence of the enemy that had built up to the point where there was a strong hold in his life? Folks, that’s the world that we are dealing with.

And you remember how Paul spoke earlier in the book of Corinthians, and he talks about how we have been brought out, we have been delivered, I think is the word, I have to look it up, but delivered from the power or the dominion of darkness, and what brought into the kingdom of his dear son in whom we have redemption through his blood, I believe. Praise God!

I’ll tell you, those are the only alternatives by the way. If there’s somebody who has never come to Christ and put your faith in what he accomplished on the cross, surrendered your life and you’re serving him, you’re part of his kingdom, you are part of this kingdom of darkness that will ultimately be destroyed. Those are the only alternatives.

And so I just appeal to anybody who hears this, and that’s where you’re at. You need a Savior, you have no power. There are things that happen in your life that you don’t understand. He understands there’s things that are going on you don’t know, and you need a Savior to open your eyes and set you free from that power.

But I believe with all my heart that the Lord wants us to be just a little more aware of some of these things. The Lord has many times emphasized the secrets of Christian living, and he talks about faith and talks about the word and coming, you know, being filled with that and seeking, Lord, last week about coming to the Lord and listening, having a listening ear and seeking him. All of that is part of it. But you can do all of that and need this.

Think about the man that Jesus talked about on one occasion, where he talked about the man out of whom, you know, a spirit left, a spirit went away, and he went into what he called dry places. And what was he seeking? Seeking rest. Did he find it? No. There’s no way for a demon to find any kind of satisfaction anywhere else except through human beings.

And so what he did eventually was he went back to check out the house, the body of the man that he had lived in. Well, he found it empty. It’s a dangerous thing just to get devils out but not get Christ in. All right, so this man was still empty. So what did he do? He went and he got seven other spirits more wicked than himself, and they went in there and lived. And the last state of the man was worse than at the beginning. So now instead of a man and one demon, he’s got a man and nine demons or eight demons, whatever it is. All those personalities living, inhabiting that same, you wonder where all these multiple personalities come from?

They’re real, you know, like was pointed out recently in a message we heard when the Lord talked to that man who’d come outta the tombs. What is your name? Well, there was only one spirit literally talking through that man, but it was obvious that he was not the only one there because, and when Jesus said, What is your name, singular, he said, Legion, for we are many. So he was speaking on behalf of all the other inhabitants.

Folks, this is the world you live in. We need to be aware of it, okay? And you can go on and on and on talking about the effects of spirits and all of that. But I’m more interested in how this affects us. And the Lord’s kind of gotten my attention with some of the scriptures that we read. And this is one of them obviously.

But the Lord will say something like, Resist the devil and he will flee from you, and so forth. He doesn’t say resist the bad thought. Doesn’t say resist your nature. Obviously, those things are involved, but the focus is not on all the things that we would like to focus on and just forget all that demon stuff that’s just scary.

By the way, the Lord is not talking about this to scare anybody. The fact that he has to sneak around to do his dirty work should tell us that we’re the ones in the position of power, that we have a choice, and especially if he has delivered us from that power and brought us into the kingdom of his son he loves, okay? So there is no reason for anyone to be afraid like there’s a monster, okay? So let’s just put that aside, but the Lord does want us to understand in a deeper way than we do.

And I just want to throw this all out here today and pray that God will bring us to a deeper level of freedom. Because I believe with all my heart that many of the needs, if not most of them, that people come for, and you know, there’s a problem in my life. There’s a bondage, there’s this, there’s that. Where’s that coming from? And it’s awful easy to say, well, that’s just my human nature. That’s just this, that’s just habit of thinking.

That’s just, and all those things are involved, but they are more symptoms of an influence, because the devil knows he cannot take us and steal us from Christ. If you’ve really been born and he lives in you, he can’t steal you and destroy you, thank God. But he can sure do a lot of bondage.

You know, I was at one point when I was thinking about all this, I was picturing a scene. Many of you have probably at some time in your life seen a movie version of Dickens’ Christmas Carol. And you remember the scene near the beginning where Marley’s ghost appears to Scrooge? What’s the scene? How is that depicted? He’s this ghostly figure, first of all, but he has chains all over him. Oh, these are the chains I forged in life.

Well, I mean, yeah, it’s kind of amusing in a way it’s portrayed, but isn’t there something real about that? The devil would like to put chains on every one of us to the extent that he can. And I fear that more of the time than we realize, there are chains, the things again about which we struggle.

We might need to go back a little deeper than we sometimes go. It’s not a better formula, it’s more than just information. There has to come a time when God’s power comes into play to set us free from something that is a power that’s come against us.

This is not just some fantasy, folks, do you believe this stuff is real? Do you believe there are literal spirits that study you and me, looking for opportunities? And I wonder how many times the opportunities are there because we’ve been born into a family, a context of some kind, and they have weaknesses, they have chains in their lives, and there’s an effect. They have an opportunity right there to affect children that come into that environment. And so they’re just programmed from youth with certain limitations, certain weaknesses, certain opportunities for the devil to hinder them.

Just because he can’t steal your soul and come in and all of that doesn’t mean he can’t attach chains. And God wants every one of us to come to that place where we recognize the chains that have bound us and where they come from.

You know, one thing comes to mind, and it certainly doesn’t affect, it affects a lot of people. So I’m not just thinking about any one place or person, but think about something like unforgiveness. The devil loves to promote a culture where, if somebody does something wrong to me, the way I look at it is, they’re in the wrong, I’m right. And the only way we’re gonna get over that is for them to humble themselves, come to me and admit that they were wrong, and ask for my forgiveness, and then I’ll consider it.

And you can have whole cultures in families and groups that come from that mistaken idea. Where does that come from? It certainly comes from Satan and his kingdom. There were literal spirits that went to work, maybe on grandpa and grandma and great-grandpa and grandma way back. And there’s a culture, there’s a spiritual culture that has been handed down, and people are born into it.

There’s a lot of the stuff that that afflicts our lives. We aren’t even aware of it. That’s the whole point. The devil hides what he’s doing, he’ll send a friend, so-called, into your life, and you don’t realize what’s really motivating. There’s something in control, there’s a degree of motivation there, and they’ll pretend to be your friend, but they’ll influence you. We can do this and it’ll be okay. You can think this way. You can think that way.

Look at our culture. It is devoted to totally programming people’s minds in ways that are absolutely anti-Christian, anti-Christ. And God wants us to be a lot more aware than we are.

Transcript of message from TV Broadcast 1678 — taken from Closed Captioning Text

Phil: Well, as you can imagine, the devil has, in light of what we talked about last week, the devil has fought hard. But that’s a pretty good indication that he didn’t like what was said. And so we’re just gonna look to the Lord and pray that he will continue to add what he wants.

You know, I won’t go through all of what we said, but obviously we talked about the fact that the world’s system is a spiritual order of things ruled over by a fallen angel we know as Lucifer or Satan, a devil. And he has a kingdom built with the loyalty of other angels who fell with him or rebelled with him. And there is a spiritual order that is designed to use, abuse, and destroy humanity. All they wanna do is use us for their own evil desires, and if they kill us, great, and go on to somebody else.

But we talked about how I think we many times aren’t aware of the reality of the kingdom of darkness. We think of the devil as some vague generalization, but there are real spirits that actually attack and work on and approach individual people. And God wants us to be aware of that.

Now, I know you can go in two different ditches. One is that we just ignore the devil and it’s all about Jesus. The other is that everything is, Oh my God, is the devil under here? You know, it just gets down to ridiculous stuff. But God does want us to be aware. Doesn’t he? Be sober, be alert.

Well, there’s gotta be something to be alert for. And he doesn’t say, Resist the thought. He says, Resist the devil. And so in other words there’s an inspiration behind things that trouble us, that hold us back, that keep us in a place of bondage. And so the Lord wants us to come to a place of greater freedom. What would happen if the Lord had more of a hold on us and we were freer in him? Do you think maybe we might be able to help other people and to have more of an impact on people and the Lord could do more?

You know, so many times I think we settle in and say, Well, this is as good as it gets. And when the Lord is wanting us to take new ground now we know the condition of the world. There are people who are in terrible, terrible spiritual prisons. God could use some of us to help some of them if we get out of our own prisons. And I believe that’s what the Lord wants to focus on a little bit.

And I think if you’ve served the Lord any amount of time, you know that when we’re saved, doesn’t everything bad go away. I mean, in one sense, yes, I’ve heard wonderful testimonies of people in these terrible prison houses and God saved them and there was a dramatic change in their life. But universally, if you talk to them, they will say, Well, no, there were still a lot of issues. Still a lot of areas of bondage, still a lot of, of battles to be fought.

And when the Lord calls his people into his kingdom, he’s not calling us into a cushy, quiet, trouble free life where we got a ticket to heaven in our back pockets and all we do is sit back and the Lord just makes every trouble vanish. Obviously we know it’s not that way. So God has ordained that it is the way that it is.

And he has called us not to a life of of ease and comfort, but to be warriors. I’ll get a title out of the way here. Called To Be Warriors. Last week we talked about knowing your enemy. Or know your enemy. And we have to. We have to be aware that what’s really coming at us and how the devil works different ways. I believe the Lord can teach us these things and we don’t learn it all at once. But our life is going to be learning how to trust God, how to seek him, how to lay hold of the things that he’s given to us, all of which are ours, but not all of which we possess in a practical sense.

And so that’s why Paul, for example, told Timothy, Fight the good fight of the faith. What did he follow that up with? Lay hold of eternal life. There’s some laying hold of things, that means I don’t have it right now. Now it’s mine. My name is on the account. It’s not like I gotta earn it. Jesus paid it all, thank goodness. But he has laid up something for me that I have to do something in order to obtain. And so that’s where the Christian life is not just a, you know, cushy walk in the park. It’s a warfare, but thank God it’s a warfare that we can win because He’s on our side.

Obviously we see that Jesus himself was called to walk, when he walked in a human body he faced temptation, he faced trouble, he faced opposition of all kinds. And we know that he’s described as a tested stone. Now we know that what God is building, there’s an illustration of what God is building. He’s the cornerstone. Everything is built off of him, related to him. He’s the one that that sets what God’s purpose is and we’re attached to him but the cornerstone itself was not just a stone but a tested stone.

You know, one of the greatest comforts or the things that should be a great comfort to all of us is the fact that he was tempted in all points just as we are. Now he demonstrates in his life how to overcome because he didn’t do it in his own strength. He came in a place of dependence. He said, I can by myself do nothing. But yet he did all these things. How did he do that? He knew where his help came from. He leaned upon the ability that God gave him in every instance.

And you know, he came to the end of his journey the night before he was crucified and he said, The prince of this world is coming now. Who’s he talking about? That’s Satan, right? The prince of this world is coming. But what was his testimony? He has no hold on me! Now, was that for lack of trying? The devil did everything he could to gain a hold upon Jesus, but he couldn’t find any way to appeal to him and say, I’ve got a hold on you.

You know, we talked last week about how the devil does get a hold upon people. He hangs chains from them. How does he do that? The reality is, if you and I have a hold in our life and we have an area of bondage that’s just persistent and there it is and it keeps holding us down and holding us back, where did that come from? Yeah, by giving in at some point. And it could have just been ignorance. It could have been, Well, I know that’s wrong, but. There’s a whole lot of ways that the devil will appeal to people.

And if we yield to him, he will come in and, you know, one illustration would be to dig in his talons. You think of him like a dragon or something with claws. And I use the illustration about criminal gangs. If you gave a criminal gang member access to part of your house, do you think he would just later on say, Oh, you need this room. Okay, bye bye. No, there is a spirit in that kind of thing that he says, That’s mine. And that’s where I believe God wants us to come to a deeper freedom.

Anybody here need that? Yeah, I’m the first one. And that’s what the Lord wants to give us, is a deeper sense of freedom. And there are areas where the devil has dug in. You know, we can stand at the door. I thought of this illustration. You can stand at the door and say, Devil, this is God’s house. You can’t come in here. But what if there’s a back door that’s still vulnerable and he still can come in and out and do stuff? God is wanting to shut all our back doors and help us to overcome.

Now you know, we mentioned and have often mentioned that we’re not just dealing with, you know, doctrines and ideas and theory and all that kind of stuff. We’re dealing with power. There is a real power and I’ll guarantee you, the power that Satan has to hold us in is greater than our power to say, Devil, get outta here. We don’t have that kind of power.

That’s why the world is in the condition it is. Now, a lot of it is deception, but there are plenty of people out there, more than you might realize, who deliberately reach into Satan’s kingdom knowing it’s Satan’s kingdom. But they’re looking for power. They’re looking for help. They’re looking for some earthly advantage.

You know, I was in the printing business, I had customers who were dabbling in that area. They live right around here. This is not way off someplace. There are people who literally reach out and they’re probably people you walk around and you see ‘em and you don’t know what’s going on in their hearts and their lives, but they’re literally reaching out for help from devils.

Well, do you think there’s no cost to that? Do you think you can play with a devil and get help from them in some area, whether it’s information or whatever you want? Do you think you can do that and they’re not gonna dig in and hold? They’re absolutely gonna get a hold on somebody’s life. There’s a price to pay. Boy, we need the Lord. We need him. Thank God for what he has done for us.

But we don’t realize many times the seriousness in a practical sense of what we need and what we have as well in the Lord. So I was emphasizing the fact that there is a real power involved. It’s spiritual power that holds people captive. And I don’t care how hard they try to be different, the devil gets a certain kind of hold, it’s there. And it takes a greater power to break that. Okay?

You remember a scripture that we’ve often been referred to in the past and it’s in 2 Corinthians 10, I believe. Paul is talking about his ministry and talking about how he did things. He says in verse three, For though we live in the world, we do not wage war as the world does. Okay? So we’re not here trying to use psychology and all the kinds of things that men try to use to fix people’s problems. We’re coming with different kinds of weapons. We recognize the need is different from what people think it is. People think, Oh, I was born this way, or I’ve just got this problem, I just need a psychiatrist. I need this, need some medicine. I’ll tell you, we need Jesus. All right?

So then he goes on to talk about the weapons because if God has called us to be warriors, we better have something to fight with, okay? So Paul says, The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power, to do what? Demolish strongholds. Now a stronghold is what? It’s a stronghold. It’s something where this criminal gang member has got a place and not only is he gonna hang onto it, he’s gonna invite his friends in there and they’re gonna take every advantage they can to have their way and not yours. And you can be a believer in Jesus Christ and still have a stronghold.

Now I get that, you know, there are people who will pretend to be Christians, who even think they’re Christians, but they’ve never really surrendered their life to Jesus. It’s still theirs. They’re trying to reap the benefits of what Jesus did without handing over their lives, it doesn’t work that way.

But even when we surrender, even when we come and give him what we know and we say, Lord, I’m yours, I’m gonna serve you from now on, I’m irrevocably, I’m yours, lock, stock, and barrel. There are still going to be these areas of need over time that God is going to be touching and putting his finger on and helping us with. He longs to bring us to that place where the freedom, where he’s such got practical control. He has such practical control in our lives and strength and influence that power can not only break these holds, but flow through us to other people, unclog the pipes, as it were.

So anyway, Paul says, The weapons that I’m fighting with, they have divine power. Folks, we need divine power. We can use all the right words, but they gotta have some power there, okay? We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God.

Now I use the word pretension. That’s related to the word pretend. Something isn’t real, but you act as though it is. That’s how the devil works, it’s deception. He’s gonna tell you stuff that if he can make you believe it, then you’re gonna live as if it’s true. Like, You’re not a child of God. Anybody ever fought that battle? If you were a child of God, this would, you know, the devil’s gonna fight every kind of thing and throw it out there and boy, if he can get us to bite, then we’re in a weak place.

But Paul talks about weapons that will demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God. That’s what I need. Yes, I need truth, folks. I need that which is true. And we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ. Boy, if we can get free in our minds and what we think about and what we believe and what we act on, man, there’s gonna be more freedom than we’ve ever had. May God bring us to that place.

Well, I thought about going back to a scripture that we use many times, but I see it in a little deeper way, I think. And I just pray that God will take this and make it real. Because we see something about the fall of Satan in Revelation 12. And we see how there was a battle, there was a war in heaven. And the devil did not prevail. Thank God!

He has no right to rule over us, by the way, he has only what we give him. And so what the Lord wants to do is to take that permission that we have given the devil, to take it away and remove him, kick him out. Praise God!

So anyway, Then I heard, after this war, Then I heard a loud voice in heaven saying, verse 10, Now have come the salvation and the power. Anybody here need that? And the power and kingdom of our God and the authority of his Messiah is Christ. For the accuser of our brothers and sisters who accuses them before our God day and night has been hurled down.

Then he talks about triumph. They triumphed over him by the blood of the lamb and by the word of their testimony they did not love their lives so much as to shrink from death. Now, as I thought about this, the Lord seemed to quicken it. I came to a place where I felt like reading this first part, the blood of the Lamb, it’s almost like that’s a wonderful doctrine and you just kind of blow right past that. But I think there’s something a lot deeper there.

You know, we sang the song and I listened to it again last night, Thank you Jesus, for the blood applied. Yeah, the blood of Jesus is wonderful. What he did is incredible. To shed his blood so that my sins can be washed away, cleansed, forgiven, thank God. But there’s an application of that that needs to happen in my life. And if I’m gonna get to the point where the second part is effective, I gotta have the first part right? You get me?

And I think many times I’ve been in this place. Oh God, I did it again. Oh God, please forgive me. And thank God he does but still there’s not, nothing happens beyond just, you know, this feeling. Sometimes we approach these kinds of things like, I’m sorry Lord, I did it again. Please clean up my mess. I promise I’ll try harder.

Do you think that’s the description of the Christian life? Is that the best God has for us? Or is there a place where we can actually take this ground that the devil has taken hold of and is hanging on to? Is there a way we can get him to let go and be able to look him in the eye and go to the effectiveness of the word of our testimony where he has to actually say, Oh my God, I don’t own this anymore. I guess I gotta go. I can’t stand before this. That’s where I want to get.

And I believe God is bringing us there. And I believe with all my heart, this blood business is not just simply a doctrine about what Jesus did. It is that. It’s founded upon that. But there has to come a time when the effectiveness of what he did is applied to my life.

Now you remember what John said in 1 John. If we say, included himself, didn’t he? So you know that even John in this late stage of his life, there was still things God was working on. He had gotten to a place where there was a great deal of freedom but still there’s always more ground to take.

But here’s John and he is saying, If we say that we have no sin, it’s not even just lying, it’s we deceive ourselves. There’s a deception. Where does deception come from, okay? See, the devil can paint a picture of who you are and who you think you are in your mind. I’m a good person. Are you? By whose measure? You go with Isaiah to the throne and just see how you fare. Oh my God, we need the Lord, don’t we? But thank God he doesn’t leave that there!

If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. But if we sin, If we confess our sin, is how it goes on, If we confess, there’s a lot in that word confess. Now I’ve used this in the past as that means we are agreeing with God, but there’s a lot to that. That’s not some little thing. If I’m gonna agree with him, first of all, I’ve got to put my finger on that and say, That is sin. I’m not gonna say, That’s just my personality. That’s just my weakness.

You know, we have all kinds of excuses we learned to make for things that just recur in our lives and we know they’re not exactly what Jesus wants, but, Oh well, the blood was shed, I’m good. But if we’re gonna come to a place of victory, that blood needs to be applied to that. I need to be in such agreement with God that it is more than, I’m sorry I did that. It is a renunciation of that. It is a repentance for that. It is a change of heart and change of attitude, change of mind. I need God’s help to do that.

You know, when Paul talks about the weapons in chapter six of Ephesians, he’s talking about, he gives all the weapons and the armor and all of that. But then he comes to prayer. We’re gonna need to be going to God. We’re gonna have to be going. Does the Lord know that we need help to do this? Yeah. So he’s gonna be looking for people and listening for people who call upon him, who seek him, who say, God, I know that what I need, I’m not where I need to be. I know that it’s a thing that has a hold on me and it has a hold on me ‘cause I yielded. And I don’t have the strength, Lord, I know I need to repent, I need to let go of this thing. I don’t even have the power to do that, so help me, Lord.

Do you think God’s gonna answer a prayer like that? That’s what he’s looking for is for us to come to that place of renunciation of all that that sin represents and just turning away from it and putting it under the blood.

And what is the promise if we confess? He is faithful and just. There’s a justice involved because that sin was already paid for. He can be just. He could still maintain his justice and forgive us. That’s because it was paid for through a representative.

He is faithful and just to do, but there’s two things that He does. I think sometimes we stop at the first one. He is faithful and just to forgive us. But He also cleanses us. I need to be cleansed. I need that area of my life purified from all the defilement that’s there.

And I think many times I could look back and, Lord, thank you for forgiving me. And then we go right on and the devil still has access to that. And God is wanting to take us down the path of our life and reveal to us. You know, the thing is, many times it’s not something where I say, Oh God, I need you to show me what’s wrong. We know. If we’re honest, we know.