I suppose the book of Revelation is my
favorite book.
I've certainly spent more time in it than
any other book.
I just love the book of Revelation.
It's just such a powerful site.
Aren't you grateful to know where things are
headed?
You know, if we were facing the things
that we've heard about, but we didn't know
how the story ended, think how demoralizing and
how difficult that would be.
But we know the story.
We know how it ends.
We know basically, maybe not all the details,
but we have a pretty good idea of
what's going to happen.
And, you know, the book of Revelation is,
if I could put it in real simple
terms, it is the story of how God
is going to bring all things under subjection
to Jesus Christ.
And I appreciated what Brother Mark said about
the kingdom theology deal.
And, you know, I do believe that God
is going to pour out his spirit in
a wonderful way, but it's not to somehow
take over the kingdoms of this earth.
That's ridiculous.
I agree.
But anyway, what the whole book of Revelation
is about is God is giving to his
son this world and all these different plagues
and, you know, pouring out of these different
plagues and so on.
And all that is about is bringing to
a culmination this world system, which John called
Babylon.
And that's what it's all about, okay?
But there is a message in the book
of Revelation, and that's what I want to
talk about today.
And it kind of goes along with what
I shared with that pastor last night, and
that's what I'll get to here in a
while.
But there is a message in the book
of Revelation that you see it all the
way through.
Once you become acclimated to what is being
expressed in there, in the book, you start
to see it.
The book basically opens up saying, blessed is
the man who reads this prophecy, and blessed
are those who hear it read and pay
attention to its message, for the time is
near.
You know, so that's kind of how things
open up.
Now, if we were doing inductive Bible study
on Revelation chapter 1, you know, K.
Arthur would tell us, well, one of the
important things you need to do is find
out the who, what, why, where, and when
of the chapter, you know, and all that
sort of stuff.
So in that basic mindset, let's just look
at the who and the what here of
this statement.
Who is this being expressed to?
It's being expressed to those who hear and
read this message.
In other words, Christians, right?
That's who it's being expressed to, not to
pagans or whatever.
It's being expressed to Christians.
Now, throughout the book of Revelation, there are
three groups.
First, there are those who dwell upon the
earth, as the NAS says it.
It is the unbelieving world out there, and
there are billions of people who want nothing
to do with God.
They are headed in a direction.
They will end up in Armageddon one day
because they are in rebellion to God's authority.
They want nothing to do with God's authority
or anything else with the Lord, and they
make no pretense about it.
Okay, we understand that they are there.
Then there's this tiny, infinitesimal little group called
the saints, a word that is used 13
times in the book of Revelation.
Anytime the Lord is talking about His people
in the book of Revelation, He uses this
term, and it's really not that way throughout
the rest of the New Testament.
The term is there, but it's not used
like it is in Revelation.
And then there's this third group.
It's like a weird hybrid, and Brother Mark
mentioned the harlot church, and that's what I'm
talking about.
You see it in Revelation 17, where this
harlot is riding the beast.
It's a hybrid of Christians who are in
the world, both.
You know, saints are separated from it.
Those who dwell upon the earth are given
over to this world system, and this hybrid,
they're in between.
They've got one foot in the world, one
foot in the church, as we've heard said
before.
But really the reality is, I think I
said this maybe last night, outwardly they are
professing believers.
They say all the right things, you know,
hey, we're going to have church tonight, hallelujah,
praise the Lord.
And, you know, all that sort of stuff.
It's the religious system we just heard about.
But inwardly, their hearts are given over to
the spirit of the world.
So this message that is going forth through
the book of Revelation is a message to
Christians.
Not to those who dwell on the earth,
they're not interested, but to churchgoers, apostate Christians,
and to saints.
All right, so what is the message?
Here it is.
You want to know?
Could you act like you care?
OK, here it is.
You must conquer.
That's the message.
You must be an overcomer.
You must be committed to victory.
You must go into this battle, which will
intensify in the days ahead.
You must go into it with the mindset
that I will be an overcomer.
Now, is this dangling around my ear, making
me look funny?
No?
No, you just look funny anyway, OK.
So the book of Revelation begins, you know,
with an introduction there in the first chapter.
Dave will straighten me out.
And then we go right into seven messages
that Jesus has for these different churches.
And basically, at the end of each of
those messages, Jesus says something to him who
overcomes, and then he makes some wonderful, glorious
promise, doesn't he?
And I'll just read the first one to
the book of Ephesus.
Thank you, David.
And this is in the Living Bible, and
I'm only reading it out of this because
it just sounds nice, you know, the way
they wrote it.
Let this message sink into the ears of
anyone who listens to what the Spirit is
saying to the churches.
This is Revelation 2-7.
To everyone who is victorious, to everyone who
overcomes, to everyone who conquers, OK, to everyone
who is victorious, I will give fruit from
the tree of life in the paradise of
God.
All right, so this message about being a
conqueror through, through the ordeal coming upon this
earth is throughout the whole book.
And you see it here and there, and,
you know, I don't want to get into
that.
That's not the purpose of what I'm sharing
about.
But I will bring it down to the
last message, or the last reference to it
in chapter 21.
Let me read this verse to you.
The one who conquers will inherit these things.
Now he's been talking about the new Jerusalem
coming down out of heaven, OK, in those
first few verses in chapter 21.
And then verse 5, he says, the one
who conquers will inherit these things, and I
will be his God, and he will be
my son.
Praise the Lord.
That's where we're headed.
But to the cowards, and then he goes
into a list and, you know, offers up
some different people with different sinful attitudes and
practices and so on.
I'm just focusing on this word, cowards.
But to the cowards, their place will be
in the lake that burns with fire and
sulfur.
OK, so here's the title of my message
today.
Cowards, the Cowards and Conquerors of the End
Times Church.
Cowards and Conquerors of the End Times Church.
And they're right there.
Actually, they're throughout the whole book.
If you, once you have eyes to see
and you're, you know, you get a sight
of it, then you start seeing it everywhere.
Cowards or Conquerors.
So let me ask you a question because
this is the overriding question, at least in
my heart.
I don't know about you.
When I hear these sorts of things, the
thing that rises up within me is, how
am I going to react?
When there is overwhelming pressure to conform ourselves,
you know, the message coming through CNN and
all the other worldly outlets, conform, conform, and
everywhere you turn, you know, even the apostate
Christians are pressuring you because you're an embarrassment
to them.
You know, and all this pressure to conform,
how are you going to react?
What about when your family turns on you?
What about Christians that you know when they
turn on you?
What about the world?
What about the authorities even?
What are you going to do?
What makes you think that you're going to
be able to handle it the right way?
And this is what I'll say, dear ones.
Your current lifestyle is a prediction of how
you will handle that pressure later.
Your lifestyle, the way you live your life
right now is a prediction.
You are predicting.
You are laying a course.
This is where you're headed.
Now, I want to talk, I'm going to
approach this from this standpoint.
I don't like being negative necessarily, but, you
know, it'll just be a nice little way
to do it.
Three characteristics of apostate Christians.
And here they are, I'll tell you right
up front because they sound nice.
Sacrifice, separation, and sanctification.
That's a sign of a really good preacher.
You know, when they can get them all
to sound alike like that.
You know, you guys just, you know, you
stare at me with your mouths hanging open.
That's a joke, you know.
That means you're supposed to laugh or chuckle
or something.
All right.
This is just a tough crowd tonight, Mark.
I was kind of hoping you'd warm them
up for me, but maybe it's the subject.
Seriously speaking, these three characteristics.
How would apostate Christians handle things?
In this area of sacrifice.
Apostate Christians, I'm going to make this statement.
Apostate Christians are spiritual cowards because they are
unwilling to put the needs of others before
their own.
That's the first point.
You know, there is something about, well, it's
like I shared last night.
You know, this self-life in an apostate
Christian is fully intact.
I know they go to church.
I know they read all the latest Christian
books.
And I know they listen to Christian radio.
But their self-life is basically fully intact.
And so because their self-life is intact,
you know, they are essentially, they may be
nice people, but essentially they're self-centered.
And that's just the way it is.
But you know something?
It often takes a crisis to prove the
mettle of a person's character, doesn't it?
A lot of people just get by in
life.
They kind of slide through life and you
don't really know what they're made of until
they are thrown into a crisis situation.
Heroes and cowards don't always stand out in
everyday life.
Sometimes they have to be put into circumstances
that are going to push them one way
or the other.
I don't know if you remember about a
year ago, the captain of that Italian ship.
Was it an Italian ship or a Greek?
Yeah, Italian ship that ran aground on a
Greek island.
And man, I mean, first of all, he
was being reckless.
He wasn't paying attention.
He was showing off.
He runs this ocean liner, this cruise vessel
into the rocks.
And then, you know, the ship's captain's responsibility
is to stay at that ship.
He should be the very last person to
leave that ship.
He does not leave the ship until every
single passenger has safely been evacuated and so
on.
But this guy was on the first boat
out of there.
He said later, you know, he kind of
excused himself and said, well, I tripped and
fell into the lifeboat.
He probably tripped over some, you know, older
lady or something as he was stomping his
way through.
But anyway, that is a picture of cowardice,
isn't it?
I mean, it's a natural, in the natural
realm, it's a picture of cowardice.
But what about on the other side?
One of the most wonderful stories, because it
just couldn't be a natural thing, is the
story of Cory and Betsy Ten Boom.
You know, World War II is going on
and Gestapo headquarters is right around the corner
from them.
But you know something, when there was a
need, these Jews started showing up looking for
help.
These two little old ladies, probably the most
unlikely heroines in the entire Europe, you know.
But they went to work.
They knew what to do.
You know why?
Because for years they had already been living
selfless lives.
They had already been giving out to other
people.
They had already been involved in the needs
of other people.
So when the crisis broke, what did they
do?
Just what they've always done.
That's what happened.
They just did what they've always done.
And, you know, it's really the same way
either way.
I don't know if you remember the story
in the movie, if you saw the movie,
where the minister comes and he wants to
get his watch worked on.
And they have just gotten this little Jewish
baby in.
And Betsy says, praise the Lord, the Lord
must have sent you.
Because they live out in the country and
what better place to take a baby and,
you know, spare it.
And so this minister, how did he react?
Well, that's illegal.
You know, I've got my family to think
about.
This was a man who supposedly giving his
life away for the sake of others.
But obviously he wasn't.
You know, because the first thing he could
think of was protecting himself.
And that's the way a coward always thinks,
isn't it?
You know, if you go through life looking
out for number one in your daily life,
what do you think you're going to do
when everything's collapsing around you?
You're going to do more of the same,
aren't you?
But if you have a track record of
giving yourself away, being involved in other people,
meeting needs, loving people, as Brother Mark said,
then what's going to happen?
You're going to do what's been natural for
you to do.
The track record.
That's all that's going to come out of
you is just more of the same.
Persecution becomes an opportunity for people who have
the Lord living within them.
You know, it just becomes an opportunity.
I don't know why we would expect the
Ten Booms to react to the need of
the day any differently than they did because
they had a long track record of being
that way.
You know, it's interesting to me also in
Revelation 12.
You remember the passage, it was talking about
Satan being the accuser of the brethren and
so on.
And then it said that the saints would
overcome him.
Remember, they would overcome him by the blood
of the Lamb, by the word of their
testimony.
In other words, even in the midst of
fierce opposition and persecution and hostility, they are
still speaking forth what Jesus Christ means to
me, what Jesus Christ has done for me,
how he has rescued me from a life
of sin.
They are still speaking it forth.
And one other thing, they did not love
their life even when faced with death.
You know, that's a conqueror.
That's someone who has gone through life with
that mentality.
But it's a sharp contrast.
I mentioned last night that 2 Timothy 3
is a snapshot of the apostate church.
It's an end times church.
This is what they are like.
And what is the very first characteristic?
They will be lovers of self.
You know, here you got this group, did
not love their life.
They will be lovers of self.
Even when they are facing death, and then
you have this group, the apostates.
The first thing Paul says about them, when
he gets that sight, sitting in that dungeon
in Rome, and the Lord just opens his
eyes and gives him a sight of what
these people look like on the inside.
On the inside.
Their inner man, their inside world.
Here's what they look like.
And the first thing Paul saw, they just
are in love with themselves.
Soft.
You know, just soft.
Spoiled.
Self-indulgence.
When you think about cowards, really isn't that,
there's nothing that will make you a coward
like sin and self-indulgence.
It just strips you of your manhood, I
guess wouldn't be the way to say it.
But what would you say, you know, your
nobility of character?
Huh?
Backbone.
Yeah, that's a good word.
It just strips you, it dissolves your strength
of character.
Okay, number two, the second area that you
can see.
How people react is in the area of
separation.
And here's my statement.
Apostate Christians are spiritual cowards because they are
unwilling to resist the influences and the enticements
of this world.
You know, if you can't win the battle
with your flesh now, how are you going
to win it later?
If you can't run with the footmen, how
are you going to run with the horses?
However it is that Jeremiah says it.
You know, we are living in a time
when we still have time, dear ones, to
prepare ourselves, to get ourselves in the right
mindset.
Even if everyone around us is just asleep,
which is what scripture tells us will be
the case.
Even if everyone around us is in a
sluggish complacency, we can be prepared spiritually.
Revelation uses the word saints.
As I mentioned, the word saints is hagios.
And hagios is just simply the word holy.
You know, so if you were to say
the Holy Spirit, it would be pneuma hagios.
Or maybe it's the other way around, hagios
pneuma.
I always get, Spanish throws me off, you
know, because I know enough Spanish to make
me dangerous.
And so I always want to put words
backwards.
But anyway, holy ones.
When God looks down from heaven upon his
blood-bought saints, what he is saying is
they are holy because I am holy and
I indwell them.
And by the way, these things that I'm
mentioning, it's not like, you know, mustering up
your courage and do these things.
If Jesus Christ is indwelling you, living within
you, there is a compulsion inside you to
live your life a certain kind of way.
You almost don't even need to be told,
but maybe so.
Maybe we need the reminder or whatever.
But the Lord is always pushing us in
a direction.
And I want to read a little piece
out of my book, Intoxicated with Babylon.
This is the first book, you know, of
those two I mentioned to you last night.
Let me just read this.
The corporate body of these separated ones is
called the church.
Greek ekklesia, which means out of, and kleitos,
which means called.
In Old Testament language, God's called out ones
were the congregation of the Lord.
In the New Testament, they are the church,
the called out ones.
Having been delivered from the domain of darkness
and transferred to the kingdom of his son,
Colossians 1, they would live separated lives from
this world system, set apart as consecrated vessels
for God's use.
They would be known as saints.
Praise the Lord.
That's what God expects of his people.
And that's what his people are, his real
church, his true body.
And you know, in Revelation 18, I think
you mentioned this, Mark.
That cry, you can just hear almost the
pain inside the Lord.
Come out of her, my people.
Come out of her so that you will
not participate in her sins and receive of
her plagues.
Well, who's he talking about?
He's talking about the harlot church.
There should be a separation in our lives.
What this book is all about is separation.
It's the spirit of this world and how
it has infiltrated and just invaded every aspect
of American Christianity.
Every aspect from the business side of running
organizations or ministries or churches to television, to
the counseling field, to materialism, and just on
and on and on it goes.
How we've been corrupted as a people.
But there's an answer and God can see
us through and draw us out of that.
I met a couple last night.
I don't know if you're here.
That couple that wanted to move into an
apartment.
Are you here?
Raise your hands if you're here.
I don't see you.
Well, I guess that's better.
I can talk about them.
They're probably, you know, 50 years old or
so, successful.
And they said to me, this is their
words, we have been pseudo-Christians for 25
years.
They both went to Bible school and just
got into the system and was all about
materialism and all that.
And somehow God got a hold of them
just a few weeks ago and just started
shaking them and showing them the emptiness of
their lives, living for the things of this
world.
How vain and how empty and futile this
world is and what it offers.
And so what they want to do is
sell all their stuff and their house.
They got apparently a beautiful house and they
want to just really downsize and move into
an apartment.
You know, man, that was just such a
blessing to hear that.
You never hear stories like that.
Very rarely, you know, I mean, sometimes a
young person, they're going to go into ministry
or something, but that was such a blessing
to me.
And it wasn't out of some legalism or
something's been imposed upon them.
No, it came from within.
It was a fountain of life that has
burst forth within.
They have seen a different world that they
want to live for.
Not this temporal world.
All right, the third area that you'll see
this is the area of sanctification.
God working in people's lives.
The apostate Christians are spiritual cowards because they
are unwilling to allow God to deal with
them, to discipline them and to conquer them.
Dear ones, if you're not conquered by God,
you cannot conquer this world system.
But if you've allowed God to conquer your
self-life, you will conquer this world system
and the enemy and the flesh.
You will.
You will be more than victorious.
That's not just cheap talk that Paul talked
about.
It can be the spiritual reality of our
lives.
It should be the reality of our lives
to be more than conquerors.
And you know, by the way, at the
end of the day, there's only two groups.
I know that there is a segment of
the church and 10,000 false teachers out
there that are just adamant that there's three
groups, that there's gray area.
But there is no gray area in Scripture.
It's either or all the way through.
You are either on God's side or you
are on the side of this world.
And when I say on God's side, I'm
not talking about just making a nice little
pretense, you know, a show of things.
I'm talking about sold out, I am in
all the way.
There is no third group, really.
There's only two groups and there's only two
destinations.
Now, this word sanctification in the Greek is
hagiosmos.
And it's just, you know, a form of
hagios.
And all it really means is, you know,
the process of being made holy.
That's what it really means.
And let me just read another little portion
here out of this book.
Progressive sanctification describes the development of Christian character.
It means to mature in the faith as
the new believer, full of self and all
of its baggage of sin, pride and selfishness,
undergoes the sanctifying processes of God.
He gradually conforms to the likeness of Christ.
Sanctification is how a person is made holy.
It is the process.
Holiness is the result.
You know, that's what the Lord desires to
do inside of us.
If you have the Holy Spirit indwelling you,
I promise you, God is going to be
at work inside you.
And he will be bringing things into your
life.
He'll bring you into different kinds of situations
to make you more Christ-like.
Holiness is to the soul what health is
to the physical body.
Freedom from the damaging effects of impurity.
That's holiness.
Now, I don't know if any of you
even know anything about me, but I began
ministry in 1986.
I had been a cop in Los Angeles
and totally given over to perversion and, you
know, just a blatant brazen womanizer and so
on, and addicted to that lifestyle.
I was in deep trouble and I ended
up with a gun to my head.
And that's when my life turned around.
Praise the Lord.
Just another reason to join the...
What is it?
NRA, right?
But anyway, I had a gun to my
head that day and that's when God got
a hold of me.
He dealt my self-life a real blow.
And then he led me into ministry.
I quit the department and began a ministry
in 1986, Pure Life Ministries, reaching out to
men in sexual sin.
And now today we have a whole facility
up in northern Kentucky and with 35 of
us on staff, and we have 75 men
in this nine-month program, and there's a
bunch of other things we do.
And it's all based on, not psychology, it's
based on the belief that God has the
power to transform the worst sinner.
If we were just believing, and we see
tremendous transformations all the time.
Adam Gardner, my police buddy back there, is
one of just thousands, I suppose, whose lives
have been changed.
This is a guy who, you know, he
works in the inner city down in LA,
Atlanta, and, you know, just the worst possible
place, and goes into work every night full
of the love and the joy of the
Lord.
Next time you want to complain about how
hard it is on your job, try that
job, being a sold-out Christian.
He and his wife love God, and that's
why he's one of my best friends and
why he's been a board member of Pure
Life Ministries for years.
He went from darkness to light.
He got truly saved.
He wasn't interested in some half, you know,
half-hearted, compromising sort of lifestyle.
Once God got a hold of him, that's
it, man.
He heard the message.
He saw the light, and he has thrown
himself into the things of God.
We were talking this morning.
He was saying how those first few years,
he would spend hours every day with the
Lord.
Hours.
He was so hungry for God.
I'm just sharing one testimony with you.
I'm way off track now, but the whole
point I was trying to get at is,
all these years, I've kind of gotten out
of Pure Life now, and the Lord has
led me in a different direction, more towards
giving a message to the church.
But over those 25 years of working in
Pure Life Ministries, I've been deeply involved in
many, many, many people's lives.
You know, when you're in biblical counseling, and
especially when you're living with people, you know,
live with your counselees sometimes.
You know, this is what my wife and
I did.
We went to Kentucky because God told us
to.
We opened up our home, you know, and
brought in sexual addicts to come into our
home, and we ministered to them.
And you know, you do that for a
while, and you start getting involved in people's
lives.
You start seeing some things.
You start understanding what goes on inside people.
So anyway, you know, I've dealt with many
courageous souls like Adam over the years.
Many stories, many, many stories like that, I
can tell you.
But I've also had many cowards that I've
dealt with.
And one thing I can say about cowards
is that usually their greatest fear is looking
at themselves.
Acknowledging the reality of their own hearts.
Spiritual cowards lack the courage to face themselves.
That's usually the case, you know.
And so that's why they minimize their sin.
That's why they blame shift.
That's why they justify themselves and rationalize the
things they do.
That's why all that comes out of them
because we don't want to say that we're
wrong.
We don't want to acknowledge that something needs
to be changed inside of us.
But let me tell you something, dear ones,
even though maybe you don't come from a
lifestyle of horrendous sin like I've come out
of, maybe you don't come out of a
life like that, but I guarantee you one
thing, until Jesus Christ does a work inside
of you, you are not fit for heaven.
I don't care how nice of a person
you are.
I was up in North Carolina once, a
few years ago, and I got to ranting
and raving and I started telling those people
about an article I wrote that Aunt B,
how's that go, Adam?
Yeah, Aunt B's in the other place.
I was talking about Aunt B being in
hell.
And I thought that church was gonna have
a riot on me.
You know why?
Because we want to hold to, my whole
point in that little article I wrote was
I never saw anything, she's a nice little
old lady, lives in a Christianized nation and
goes to a Christian church, but I never
saw anything in her life that indicated to
me that she loved the Lord.
I never saw her interceding for people or
bringing people to the Lord or sharing what
the Lord meant to her.
I never saw any of that.
She's just a nice lady.
And you know, but that's what people tend
to think.
And you start pointing that out and people,
you talk about hatred coming at you.
I don't know what it is.
It's the strangest thing.
If you suggest to people that just maybe
you should, you know, just maybe you should
examine your heart and make sure that you're
a Christian, it's like you have called them
every filthy name in the book.
You know why that is?
Because the mentality is that we are good
enough to deserve heaven.
That's a lie from hell.
It's probably the worst lie that's been propagated
upon the American people is that good people
go to heaven.
People like Charles Manson and Hitler, those are
the people that go to hell.
And that is a lie.
You have to face up to who you
are and what you are and what the
Bible says about you.
The fact that you need Jesus Christ and
you need him to do a work inside
of you.
I want to read a quote from C
.S. Lewis about this.
Many people go to the Lord to be
cured of some particular sin, which they are
ashamed of, or which is obviously spoiling their
daily life.
Well, he will cure it all right, but
he will not stop there.
That may be all you asked, but once
you call him in, he will give you
the full treatment.
That is why he warned people to count
the cost before becoming Christians.
Make no mistake, he says, if you let
me in, I will make you perfect.
The moment you put yourself in my hands,
that is what you're in for.
Nothing less or other than that.
You have a free will, and if you
choose, you can push me away.
But if you do push me away, understand
that I am going to see this job
through.
Whatever suffering it may cost you in your
earthly life, whatever inconceivable purification it may cost
you after death, whatever it costs me, I
will never rest nor let you rest until
you are literally perfect.
Until my father can say without reservation that
he is well pleased with you.
This I can do and will do, but
I will not do anything less.
And I say, yes, amen.
That's exactly what my experience has been with
the Lord and the way the Lord deals
with people.
But the wonderful glorious side to it is
how he changes us and transforms us from
devils who belong in hell into godly saints
separated for himself as a bride for his
eternal kingdom.
Praise the Lord.
So, you know, the reality is the way
that the Lord deals with us, I just
speak for myself, I would not have the
courage to put myself through the things that
I would have to go through, the disciplines
and so on, to become a different man.
I just would not have the courage, the
commitment, whatever you want to call it.
I wouldn't have it.
And I thank God that he takes me
and he deals with me and he works
in my life through circumstances and so on.
Praise the Lord, because he will do far
more than I would do on my own.
I would be so willing to settle for
so little.
I just would.
This is the interesting thing about the Lord.
He demands that you love people.
The greatest commandment is that we love Him
with all our heart.
The second one is like it, that we
love other people.
He demands that you love people.
But you know something, dear ones?
He doesn't leave you there with this demand
that you do something that you don't have
the capacity to do.
God never asks you to do anything that
you can't do.
He puts this demand on your life, but
then quietly He comes inside of you and
gives you the love for other people.
Praise the Lord.
And He demands that you separate yourself, that
you, you know, get away from all the
worldly stuff, that you cut off the television
or the internet or whatever it is that's
corrupting your soul.
He demands that you do that.
But He also comes within and He puts
a passion inside you to have Him to
live your life for His kingdom.
In other words, He doesn't expect you to
do what you can't do on your own.
And He demands that you become holy.
Be ye holy as My Father in Heaven
is holy.
He demands it of you.
But then He comes along and He does
the work for you and He transforms your
heart.
He gives you a heart of flesh, as
we heard.
He does the work inside of you.
So, you know, I just felt like because
of time's sake, I wanted to kind of
get through this message quickly.
But I wanted to address the question, what
makes you think that you will be able
to handle what's coming upon this earth?
And dear ones, I want to tell you
something.
If these things are really what I could
say is if the Lord is really indwelling
you, then these things are growing convictions in
you.
These things are happening inside of you.
God is already doing a work inside of
you.
If you're the real deal, then He is
doing that work inside of you.
And if this is describing the way you
live your life, then when things get hard
and bad later, you'll do the right thing,
just like Corey and Betsy did.
You don't have to fear it.
You don't have to fear the coming persecution
because God is going to be there.
You remember that story that Corey shares in
her book?
When she was afraid of death and she
remembered back to when she was a little
girl and she asked her daddy about, you
know, what's it like to die?
And her dad thought for a second.
He said, Corey, when I take you to
the, put you on the train, when do
I give you the ticket for the train
ride?
And she said, well, you give it to
me right when I need it, right before
we get on the train.
And so it is with our Heavenly Father.
When you come to face that time, listen,
you don't have to think in terms of
how you feel today.
You know what I mean?
If I was facing horrendous hostility and persecution
today, yeah, maybe I would be full of
fear.
But I know my Heavenly Father.
I have proven Him out so many times
over the years.
I remember one time we had a child
molester in our residential program back when we
were still accepting them.
And this guy went off on me, screaming
at me, you know, in my face, screaming
at me.
And the more he yelled, the calmer I
felt inside.
I guarantee you when I was a cop,
I was just the opposite.
I was exactly the opposite of that.
I was, well, Adam and I have talked
about it.
But, you know, I had a hair trigger.
But this guy, the more ugly he became,
the more sweet I became.
And that is not in me.
I'm not that kind of guy, you know.
I'm just not that kind of a person
in myself.
But Jesus is.
And when I needed that, it was there.
And that man was just so ugly.
But like I say, man, the Lord just
came over me, and I had nothing but
love for him.
Really.
And that was just one experience of many
I've had like that in counseling and so
on.
But, dear ones, you don't need to fear.
You don't need to look off into the
future and imagine this horrible scenario.
You know, the problem with thinking that way,
this total black picture that we tend to
come up with, is that we leave God
out of the picture.
But God will be in that picture if
you're living your life for him now.
Trust me, he will be there right when
you need him.
And he will astound you with what's going
to come over you.
Just a love for your persecutors that you
just cannot imagine.
And strength inside, courage to face it, and
to face it calmly with dignity and so
on.
Not that we will necessarily do everything perfectly,
but you will have something that maybe you
don't realize that you will have.
Praise the Lord.
Okay, I think I'm going to stop there.
I'm going to ask Brother Frank to come
up and close in prayer.
And Frank, since I'm, you know, gave you,
I mean, since you got kind of cut
short there, if you want to share those
three things real quick, you go right ahead.
Praise the Lord.
God bless you.