I told you earlier that God allows us
to fail and fail and fail and fail
and fail and come to rock bottom.
And when you come there, you learn two
lessons.
One of those I already mentioned that I
can never get victory.
No matter how hard I try, it's like
those disciples who went fishing.
I can fish left side, right side, front
side, back side, I won't get fish.
I try, try, try, try for six hours
and I say, okay, enough, I can't get
any fish.
I'm going home.
Then the Lord comes, cast your net on
the right side and suddenly the whole boat
is full of fish.
That's how we get victory.
When you come to rock bottom and you
say it's hopeless, there's no hope for me,
I'm the worst case of all, the Lord
says, now you're ready for victory.
Because when you get the victory, you won't
come to the shore with this bag full
of fish and saying, see what I caught.
You'll come with your head bowed and say,
I could catch nothing, but the Lord gave
me victory.
You will say that till the end of
your life.
I've seen people who get victory and they
get proud of it and they fall again.
Why do they fall again?
Have you had that experience, where you get
victory for a little while and then you
fall again?
I'll tell you why.
There's only one reason to fall.
When you got victory, you became proud of
it.
God has to save us from pride.
It's no use God saving us from a
ten foot pit called anger or lust and
you fall into a thousand foot pit called
pride.
That's not victory.
That's defeat.
That's what's happened to so many people.
You can get up and preach a good
sermon one day and so many people are
blessed and you get so puffed up that
for the next one year your sermons are
all boring because God took away the anointing.
It's very easy for God to bless a
man, it's very difficult for God to keep
him humble after he has blessed him.
It happened to me.
I remember in the early days, sometimes I'd
experience an anointing and then I'd get puffed
up and the next time I got up
it was dry as a bone.
And I knew why.
I didn't even have to ask God.
God does not give his grace to the
proud.
The greatest work God can accomplish in you
is he can keep you humble after he
has blessed you and anointed you immensely.
Given you victory, given you a ministry, keeps
you down in the dust before his face,
God's done a work.
But he cannot do that until you have
failed and failed and failed and failed and
failed and failed and you say, Lord it's
impossible, I cannot catch fish.
Then he'll fill your boat.
The second lesson that we learn when we
have failed so much is this, that we
never despise another human being after that.
I can honestly say that today before God.
Now, I do not feel that I'm better
than any other human being because I know
how much I've failed.
I know God's done a tremendous work in
my life.
Imagine a man like me who was discouraged
most of the time and now rejoicing every
day of the year.
What a work that itself is.
Man who has defeated my thoughts, God's given
me purity.
God's able to control my tongue, a man
who used to get angry and upset and
all that.
It's God.
It's 100% God.
I can't take any credit for it.
But when I look at another person who
falls into sin, I can say before God
I don't despise him.
Do you husbands despise your wives?
I'll tell you why.
You have not hit rock bottom yet.
You've got miles to go before you come
to a genuine life of victory.
You know that you have come to victory
when you despise nobody.
You know that you are victorious that when
you don't despise your wife, when you don't
despise your husband, when you don't despise that
other brother who has fallen so much, you
don't agree with him, but you don't despise
him.
You can look at everybody and say, I
don't despise him, I don't despise him, I
don't I was worse than that and God
did a work in me, so I have
faith that God can do a work in
that person too.
That's the mark of a man who has
hit rock bottom.
I really believe my brothers and sisters, until
you hit rock bottom, whatever victory you have
will only be temporary, shallow, superficial, only to
impress others.
It will not be genuine.
Don't be satisfied that other people in your
church think you are victorious.
That is worthless.
It's like painted gold, wood painted to look
like gold, what's the use of that?
It says in the days of Rehoboam, you
read that in the Old Testament, when the
enemy came and took away the gold shields,
he put some bronze shields that looked like
gold to fool the people that it's still
here.
It wasn't there, the enemy had taken it
away.
Very often we do that.
When the enemy has taken away our joy
and our victory, we still try to pretend
that it's there.
It's not there.
You know a lot of people who are
song leaders in a lot of charismatic churches,
they are great people at smiling and laughing
and cracking jokes and all, it's only for
those few hours in the pulpit, go and
see how they live on Monday and Tuesday
in their home.
There's no joy.
It's froth.
A lot of these meetings where they whip
people up to be emotional and excited, it's
like putting soap into water and stirring it
up, there's a lot of bubbles.
Go back a half an hour later, there's
nothing there.
I don't want a joy like that, that
comes like soap bubbles and disappears after a
while.
That's not godliness.
There's a lot of this superficiality among Christians.
Don't be satisfied with it.
God has to allow you to become weak,
weak until you come to zero, and the
proof of it will be you'll never be
proud after preaching an anointed sermon, you will
never be proud if somebody got healed when
you laid hands on that person, you will
not be proud when you got victory, and
you will not despise any other human being.
You won't look down on the Roman Catholics,
you will not look down on the CSI
or people in other denominations.
You'll disagree with them, you may not work
with them, but you will not look down
on anyone.
Because you'll say, I'm the chiefest of sinners
and God did a work in me, why
can't he do it in other people?
That's the mark of a man who's got
genuine victory, and God wants to bring every
one of us there.
That's why he allows failure, that's why he
makes us weak, that's why he allows so
many circumstances in your life that appear to
be frustrating you, you blame people, don't blame
people, it was God trying to break you
and humble you, and then he'll give you
wisdom.
He'll give you words of wisdom, he'll give
you a solution to the problems that you
find in your life, but it's in that
low place.
You've got to lie there with your mouth
in the dust.
John the Apostle, when he was 95 years
old and he saw Jesus, he immediately put
his face in the dust.
Imagine having walked with God for 65 years
of spiritual life and his face in the
dust.
And I see brothers who haven't even walked
with God for 2-3 years, their faces
all lifted up.
They haven't learned what John learned.
It's in the dust, when your face is
in the dust, that the Lord says, John,
I'm going to give you a message to
these seven churches.
And he gave him.
When your face is in the dust, he'll
give you a message to many churches, but
you lift up your head and you won't
hear him.
But if your face is in the dust,
you'll hear his voice like a trumpet.
God makes us weak with a purpose.
This is the new covenant.
John the Baptist came to prepare the way
for Jesus and for Jesus' ministry.
And one of the things he said in
Matthew 3 and verse 10 was, the axe
is laid to the root of the trees.
See, all sin has got a root cause
to it.
In the old covenant of the Old Testament,
the root was never hit by the old
covenant message.
The law could only deal with the external.
Don't murder.
Jesus said, go to the root of it,
anger, hit that.
The old covenant was don't commit adultery.
And Jesus said, go to the root of
it, it's in your thoughts, lusting after women.
Everywhere he was going to the root, that's
what he said here, the root, the axe
is laid to the root of the trees.
The sad thing I have found in many
Christians, even born again Christians, is they are
dealing with the fruit.
That's old covenant.
There were many old covenant people who lived
an externally good life.
I mean, think of John the Baptist.
Think of Elijah.
They were not living externally bad lives.
I think their life was probably better than
the lives of many of us.
So what does the new covenant bring?
The axe is laid to the root of
the tree.
And in the Old Testament, nobody understood where
the root of the tree was.
We can say the law was like a
pair of scissors.
You know, bad fruit is coming there, you
cut it off.
Another bad fruit coming here, you cut it
off.
And if you have a tree that's always
producing bad fruit, you'll have to keep on
going around with your scissors all the time.
You have to preserve your testimony.
You have to always cut off here and
cut off there so that your testimony is
not spoiled.
That's not new covenant Christianity.
But if you hit the root of that
tree, you won't need the scissors anymore.
The root is hit and the bad fruit
does not come.
So that's what John the Baptist said.
Now Jesus is coming, the axe is laid
to the root of the trees.
So all the sins that you face, you
know, we are tempted by so many things
in our life.
There's a big list of sins in some
epistles in the New Testament.
It gives a list of number of sins.
Jesus spoke about a number of sins that
come out of the heart of man.
But what is the root?
The root is found when we look at
the origin of sin.
Where did sin originate?
Sin did not originate with adultery or anger,
the things we are battling with, or with
the love of money.
None of these things, the things we battle
with is not the origin of sin.
And you can try to cut off the
love of money and cut off that anger
and cut off watching pornography, but you haven't
hit the root.
The root is described in Ezekiel 28.
In Ezekiel chapter 28, the word of the
Lord, it says here, came to Ezekiel saying,
say this to the leader of Tyre.
That was a human leader, an earthly king
of the city of Tyre.
But behind that earthly king, earthly leader, was
the real king of Tyre, and that was
the devil himself.
And then, so the Lord says in verse
11, now take up a lamentation over the
king of Tyre.
That's the one who's behind the leader.
And you know that now he's talking to
the devil because he tells him, this is
not any human being, Ezekiel 28, 12, you
have the seal of perfection, full of wisdom
and perfect in beauty.
This is what Lucifer, or whatever his name
was, we don't know his name, he's called
star of the morning, and it's commonly referred
to as Lucifer, but that's not in the
Bible.
Every precious stone was your covering, and it
goes on to say, on the day you
were created in verse 14, here's what he's
described as, the anointed cherub, he's an angel.
The anointed cherub who guards Eden, verse 13,
you were in Eden.
Before Adam and Eve went to Eden, there
was somebody else in Eden.
That was the star of the morning, who
we know today as the devil.
He was the anointed cherub, or angel, who
guarded Eden.
And that's what made him jealous when one
day he saw God putting somebody else there
to guard that garden of Eden.
That's what...he was determined to get that fellow
out of Eden, where he was supposed to
be.
You know, it's like when you're appointed in
some important position in an office, and then
you're removed from there, and somebody else is
put there, who is junior to you, and
you want to somehow get him out of
there, because you're jealous.
And that's why he was against Adam and
Eve over there.
And the Lord says, I placed you in
Eden, verse 14.
You were on the holy mountain of God
until the day, verse 15, unrighteousness was found
in you.
Here's where the root of sin comes in.
It was perfect until that day.
And it says here, in verse 17, what
the root was.
Your heart was lifted up because of your
beauty, because of your wisdom.
So there you have the root of sin.
It's not external.
Sin is not in anything external.
It's in the heart.
And it comes from the heart becoming proud
because of something God has given us.
God had given him wisdom.
God says, you corrupted your wisdom, it says
in verse 17.
Beauty, see the two things mentioned in verse
17.
Your heart was lifted up because of your
beauty, and your wisdom, and your splendor.
Our heart can be lifted up because of
some wisdom God has given us, or some
glory, or something that makes us stand up
above other people.
Maybe victory over sin.
Something that maybe you can preach better than
others.
Maybe you're smarter than others, or you can
do something far better, and your heart is
lifted up.
It's nothing on the outside.
You can still act very humble with, you
know, speak the right humble words and fool
people, but God's not fooled, and the devil's
not fooled.
That root in the heart, if it's not
hit, you remain defeated all your life.
It will spring out here in one way,
and spring out there another way, and God
wants to hit that root.
Jesus came to hit that root.
That root is your heart getting lifted up,
maybe because of spiritual reasons.
Like we heard just now, you could preach
a powerful sermon, and then for the rest
of the time, you're thinking, what a wonderful
message I preached, or something like that.
The heart is lifted up, or you look
down at others, and you're always feeling, you
know, this feeling that when you have a
conflict with somebody, that guy's wrong.
He's definitely wrong.
I'm right, of course.
I'm never wrong.
I'm always right.
That person's wrong.
That is where the root of sin is.
It's pride that makes you feel you're always
right, and the other person is wrong, and
you don't consider the possibility that you could
be wrong, at least sometimes.
The devil does not allow us to think
like that.
I want to say, brothers and sisters, that
that will hinder your spiritual growth, and I
believe that many of us could have gone
far ahead spiritually in humility and in conformity
to the likeness of Christ if we had
allowed the Holy Spirit to hit the root
down below in our heart, the root of
exalting ourselves, and as soon as it comes
up—see, we are tempted to pride.
Pride is the primary characteristic of Satan, and
all the sin in the world originated here
in what you read in this chapter, and
God tossed him down, not because he committed
adultery, not because he stole money or he
loved money, or not because he did anything
other than he was—and even his pride was
not visible.
It says your heart was lifted up means
it was invisible, so there are a lot
of lessons we can learn from this.
What is the root to which the axe
has to be laid?
If I identify that, and you allow the
Lord—say, Lord, hit that root in my heart.
I took a long time after being born
again—I'd say more than 15, 16 years as
a born-again Christian before I discovered where
the root of sin was, because I never
heard anybody preach about it.
People were preaching about external sins—don't do this,
and don't do the other thing, and I
had my scissors ready to cut off anything
that I heard was bad.
That's a bad testimony for a Christian.
This is a bad testimony for a Christian.
I had my scissors ready to cut it
all off, and this is how most Christians
are living, and yet the root is never
hit, and Jesus came to hit the root.
All the conflict in families, all the discord
that comes between husband and wife, all the
divorces in the world, and all the conflict
between believers is always because of this root
not being hit, sometimes in both people or
sometimes in one of them.
And even if the other person—if you have
a conflict with somebody in your home, with
your children or with your wife or husband,
instead of concentrating on where the fault is
in the other person, ask yourself one question.
Is there a root something in my heart
that the Lord wants to lay an axe
to?
Open yourself up to that possibility and say,
Lord, lay the axe to the root.
I want to eliminate that which made the
highest archangel into a devil in a moment.
It didn't take him 10 years to be
the devil.
One moment he was the anointed archangel, the
highest of all the angels.
The next moment he was the devil.
It doesn't take long for an archangel to
become a devil.
Why can't that happen today?
For a godly man suddenly to become so
evil, and what is the cause?
He didn't commit adultery.
He didn't steal anybody's money.
He just got puffed up with what?
Verse 17, his spiritual attractiveness, at least that
he thought he was attractive, that everybody thought
he was a wonderful saint because he had
built up such a reputation in the church,
and his inner idea of his own wisdom,
how he feels he knows more than anybody
else.
That can happen to any of us, and
it's a wonderful thing if God can give
us light on this.
That's why you often heard me say the
three secrets of the Christian life are humility,
humility, humility, and where do I get that
from?
I get it from Philippians 2.
If pride was the root of all sin,
it has to be the opposite of that
that is the root of all salvation, definitely,
and that's why salvation came through the humility
of Christ, just like sin came through the
pride of the archangel.
Pride is that which elevates a person.
Humility is that which brings a person down.
The archangel exalted himself.
I mean, he got so crazy he thought
he could go above God himself.
That's how stupid pride can be.
Now you see how salvation came.
You see how sin came, and the opposite
of Ezekiel 28 is in Philippians 2.
Philippians 2, it says in verse 3, do
nothing from selfishness or empty conceit.
Empty conceit is the root of sin in
the heart.
A conceit in the heart that makes me
think I'm better than everybody else, but with
humility of mind, look at this exhortation.
I don't know how many of you really
have taken this seriously.
With humility of mind, regard one another as
more important than yourself.
Take that one statement and meditate on it
for this week.
Regard others as more important than yourself.
Now, don't misunderstand it.
Not more spiritual than yourself.
That's impossible.
If somebody is not more spiritual, how can
you fool yourself and believe he is?
But it says here, regard others as more
important.
And then it says, have the same attitude,
verse 5, that Jesus had.
Jesus did not go around thinking everybody is
more spiritual than me.
That's a foolish idea that some people say.
Yeah, consider the other person as more spiritual
than you.
Rubbish.
That's not what Jesus did.
Paul did not consider all the Corinthians as
more spiritual than himself.
He said, you're all carnal.
So this is a false humility where you
go around pretending that you think other people
are more spiritual than you, and when you
know they're not.
I don't believe others are more spiritual than
me if they're not.
But I...
Because Jesus never did that.
We don't follow Jesus there.
But Jesus did consider everybody as more important
than himself.
That's why when the bucket of water was
there at the Last Supper, which a slave
was supposed to take and wash people's feet,
and none of the disciples did it, Jesus
said, well, I'm the least important person here.
I'll do it.
There's a difference between knowing you're the least
important and pretending to be the least spiritual.
No.
Or pretending to be humble.
Pretending that others are more spiritual.
That's all garbage.
Consider others as more important than yourself.
Treat others...
If you believe that someone is more important
than yourself, you will always treat them with
respect.
For example, how would you treat a dignitary,
a state dignitary like the governor if he
came to your house?
That's the way I examine myself.
I mean, I've been down to the poorest
villages in India, extremely uneducated people who are
very, very simple and very poor.
And the Lord told me, treat these people
as dignitaries.
Respect them.
Consider them as more important than yourself.
And that's what I've striven to do in
all the 50 years that I've gone to
those places.
Consider others more important.
That is the attitude of Jesus Christ.
I want to say to you, my brothers
and sisters, as you sit in this church,
if you follow that exhortation, consider others not
as more spiritual.
You know they're not.
You know some people sitting here are very
carnal.
But more important than yourself.
Respect them as more important, like a dignitary.
Don't treat them lightly.
Recognize yourself as least important, even if you're
the most spiritual.
I believe the most spiritual person here will
definitely think of himself as the least important.
The two go together.
And here is the three steps of humility
I mentioned.
Now, this is the opposite of the highest
archangel.
If sin had to come through an archangel
trying to exalt himself, salvation had to come
by the opposite of that, by somebody humbling
himself.
So we see Jesus, you see the three
steps of humility there, because it says here
in verse five, have the same attitude in
yourself which is in Jesus Christ.
And what is that?
Number one, though he was God, verse six,
he did not hang on to that.
But emptied himself of all that sense of
importance and being what he was.
You know, there's a lot of it in
us.
We may think we are very humble, but
we've got a lot of thing in our
head which makes us feel we are pretty
important.
And it's only an act of humility very
often in our language.
But it says he humbled himself and came
right down to become a man.
First step of humility.
Second, as a man, he could have walked
around as a king, but no.
He took the place of a slave, a
bond servant, it says, verse seven, which is
a slave.
God becoming man itself is a big thing.
But then as a man, he became a
slave, the lowest level of the human race,
slaves, which is lower than even servants.
And you'd think he'd reach the bottom.
No.
He went one step further.
He went down to being thought of as
a criminal.
Those are the three steps of humility.
God becoming man, man becoming like a bond
slave, and a bond slave going even down
and being considered as a criminal on the
cross.
And it says here, that's why I say
three steps of humility, humility, humility.
That's the secret to the Christian life.
And it says here, you must have the
same attitude.
And this is not something that, you know,
we want other people to recognize.
It's not that you go around getting a
reputation now for being very humble, for humility.
That's a lot of garbage.
But you recognize in yourself what you are
and seek to follow Jesus inwardly.
That's the only way I want to say
to you, dear brothers and sisters, that the
devil will have no power over you.
The devil has power over anybody who's got
even an atom of pride in him.
If there's conflict in your home, it's because
the devil has brought pride in somebody there.
And you cannot overcome pride with more pride.
You cannot overcome somebody's arguing by arguing against
that person, husband or wife.
The only way you can overcome is the
way Jesus overcame, humility.
Go down, go down, go down right to
the bottom.
Keep quiet.
Let the other person think they won the
argument.
Go down.
Didn't the devil think he had won on
the cross of Calvary?
Jesus is willing to let everybody think that
the devil finally won.
The Pharisees finally won.
Let them think that.
And have you noticed that he did not
even want to prove after his resurrection?
You know how a human being would have
such a temptation after the resurrection to go
and stand before Pilate and say, hey, you
thought you could get rid of me.
Here I am.
Or to go before the Pharisees and say,
you thought you could get rid of me.
Here I am.
Do you know that Jesus never showed himself
to a single unbeliever after he was resurrected?
He never wanted that carnal, evil delight in
humiliating other people by saying, hey, I triumphed.
You tried to crush me.
I could not be crushed.
Do you have that desire?
When somebody tried to harm you, to somehow
prove to that person that you triumphed?
It's not the spirit of Christ.
He did not want to show himself to
anybody after the resurrection.
He showed himself only to believers who already
trusted in him.
That's a tremendous example for me.
There should be no cheap triumphalism.
A triumphalism that is cheap to show other
people, I triumphed over you.
There must never be even an atom of
that spirit in us.
No desire to show, see, you tried to
harm me, but see what I did.
I overcame you.
What a lust there is in us to
show, and we think we are glorifying God
that way.
Jesus could have thought that I can glorify
God by standing before Pilate or standing before
the Pharisees and say, see, I'm resurrected.
See how God honored me.
Has God honored you?
Keep quiet about it.
Bury it.
Let the Lord show it in the day
he returns.
Not today.
This is not the time to reveal those
things.
When Christ returns, he will be exalted.
We don't want to be exalted before that.
We must have no desire to prove ourselves
right to anybody in the world.
Let the whole world think we are wrong.
Even today, the whole world thinks that, I
mean, when Jesus died, he never showed himself
to anybody, and even today, people say that
he never rose from the dead.
It's a wonderful thing to see this, the
way that Jesus went, and if we allow
this to happen in our lives, and the
axe is laid to the root of the
tree, I believe our victory will be genuine.
We'll come to a real overcoming life where
there'll be no strife or conflict in our
heart or no attitude in our heart that
is negative towards any other human being.
We've got to work towards that.
Work on it, brothers and sisters.
God will help us.
Amen.