Very good morning to you, my friends of
the radio audience.
I count it a great privilege to come
again this morning and thank God that he's
enabled us these days to come together each
Lord's Day on these different stations around the
central truth of the Bible, what God has
done in the matter of redeeming men and
women and what the response of men must
be if they shall enter into that which
Christ has accomplished for men in life, this
life and the life to come.
We're ready this morning for the fourth in
the series of messages on the general subject
of salvation.
We need constantly in these days to remember
that salvation is not simply the escape from
some dire peril or predicament.
Salvation must be rightly related to Almighty God
and the one's self and the one's neighbor.
And according to the Lord Jesus Christ, everybody
except us is our neighbor in the Bible
sense.
Salvation is God Almighty in Christ restoring men
to right relationship to him.
It's not simply a fire escape from hell.
It's not simply a way to release some
of our burdens, but it is to rightly
relate us to our Creator and God our
Redeemer.
You know, whatever we may think about men,
there's one thing that's certain about all men,
they were made for fellowship with God.
And deep down in all of the ruined
condition of man, there's something left in a
man that fixes it so he judges himself
and he's not satisfied with his condition.
Augustine put it, that thou hast made us
for thyself and we'll never find rest until
we rest in thee.
And that is dead certainly correct.
And so these Sunday mornings we've been talking
about salvation, which is the wonderful, wonderful thing
that God Almighty has done to rightly relate
men who've gone astray and rebelled against him
and sinned against him, to rightly relate men
to him and to one another and to
their own selves.
And we've been talking about how Paul preached
this wonderful word of salvation to everybody he
could.
And we believe it would pay us to
be diligent in these desperate days, to be
dead certain that we preach a whole gospel
for men as they are in relationship to
Almighty God.
And for the last two Lord's days, I
think we've been camping on this fact, that
there's no need to talk to men about
their need to be saved, as the Bible
uses that word, rightly related to God and
to one another and to their own selves,
unless men see their need of that wonderful
salvation.
And that's the issue of the hour now,
for we live in a day when men
are not conscious that they are estranged from
Almighty God.
Men live as if there were no God.
Miss Georgia Hartness, that provocative writer of Methodism,
has something like this to say along that
line.
She said, it's amazing how many people there
are in America who will tell you they
believe in God, but live as if there
were no God.
And that's the heartache, and that's the crisis
of the hour in which we live.
Millions of church people who'll tell you they
believe in God, but live seven days a
week as if there were no God, and
as if they were here forever and were
not destined to die and go yonder into
the hands of a holy God.
That's the issue of this hour.
Men are not conscious that they need to
be restored to right relationship to God.
And the reason they are not conscious has
been our subject the last couple of days,
and that is that men are sinners.
And the more a man sins, the less
conscious he is that he does sin.
Now, that seems to be a paradox, but
it's so.
The old hardened sinner, as we talk about
him, is not under conviction.
He thinks he's getting along pretty well.
You'll see tender children crying and sobbing their
hearts out about their sinful condition a whole
lot more than you will to see the
old fellow down on skid row who's lost
his family and lost his character and lost
his health and lost his job and lost
everything that seems to make life worth living.
And yet the old boy's getting along all
right, thank you, and has no consciousness of
his awful estrangement and alienation from a holy
and yet a loving God.
Yes, I am sin, my friends, is here,
and it is a part of the judgment
of Almighty God that even in this life
men pay for their sins.
It is still true, whether this world believes
it or not, that the way of the
transgressor is hard, and that the wages of
sin is death.
Sin is here, sin's in the air, sin's
all about us, sin's in our hearts, sin's
perverted our will, sin has darkened our minds,
sin has dug graves, sin has provoked war,
sin, s-i-n, sin is h-e
-r-e, here, sin, here, and men need
to be saved, to be rescued, to be
recovered, to be delivered from sin's bondage and
its clutches.
Men are living in the state of sin,
and so before a remedy will be appreciated,
a de-felt sense of a man's own
condition must be felt.
I received mail this week along that line,
one young fellow said, I haven't appreciated your
program much until now I see I'm a
lost sinner in need of salvation, and I
want to write and thank you for your
faithfulness in the message.
Oh, my friends, our gospel is not appreciated
now, except by men and women who've been
brought to the place of despair, despair of
ever, ever saving themselves.
Oh, I would that that would be all
over this country, in our homes and in
our church members and all down the streets
and everywhere, wouldn't it be wonderful if men
today, if in God's good providence and grace,
the power of the gospel one more be
felt, and we could preach it in the
power and demonstration of the Holy Ghost with
signs following, if you please, that men might
know that they're responsible to a holy God,
and that they stand in desperate need of
being brought back into the right relationship to
Him that the Bible calls salvation.
And so we've been talking about the presence
of sin, about the fact that sin's everywhere,
about the fact that sin is in man.
There's something radically wrong with men, and you
do not need just to be shed or
rid of some of your evil deeds, but
you need to be made a brand new
creature in the sight of Almighty God.
Last Lord's Day we dwelt along that line,
and we talked about sin, S-I-N,
sin, its origin, its universality, its nature, its
grip on men, and we learned that men
desperately need to be redeemed from the clutches
of sin.
And today we want to remember that sin
has a tool.
Sin is personified in the word of God
like a great monster, it's personified.
And the Bible tells us that sin has
a tool, a if you please, by which
it's able to accomplish its work a whole
lot better.
And that tool of sin, according to the
Bible, is the F-L-E-S-H,
flesh of mankind.
Now, in Paul's preaching about flesh, when he
talks about flesh, it's not the same thing
as the body.
I wish you'd get that.
There's nothing wrong with your body.
Christians are told that their bodies are temples,
or sanctuaries, or dwelling places, or habitations of
the Holy Spirit.
And that translation in the word of God
into King James, our vile bodies, is a
little wrong.
It should be the body of our humiliation.
And we look to a glorious body like
the body of the Lord Jesus Christ, but
there's nothing vile about the human body.
And so sin doesn't use the human body
as such, but sin as its tool.
But sin does use that which the Bible
calls flesh, and the flesh is basically the
material side of man's nature.
It's not necessarily evil, but since S-I
-N, sin, personified, using the flesh as its
base of operation, and that's where he works,
has corrupted that base of operation, thus, therefore,
the flesh, the material side of man, is
no longer moral and neutral, according to Paul.
It has become the involuntary accomplish of sin,
and sin is the real criminal.
And as the material which gives sin its
chance to operate, the flesh then comes to
signify not merely man in his natural weakness,
but man as a fallen man, his human
nature as being apostate, departed from, separated from,
alienated from, estranged from his Creator and his
Redeemer.
And thus, in the word of God, to
trust in the flesh, or to walk by
the flesh, is not so much to give
way to the lower passions, although that is
included, as it is to live godlessly in
sinful self-reliance.
In other words, to live by the flesh,
or to walk in the flesh, means to
turn away from God as your Creator and
Redeemer, and to find your own security in
the creation.
Something you can see which is transcendent and
perishable is going to be burned up.
My friends, is that in the picture of
the world today?
Men living as if the only thing that
is worth anything in this life and the
life to come, if there is a life
to come, is money, or a fine house,
or a social position, or something else which
is their God.
Men are living according to the dictates of
the flesh, which is being used as a
tool of Satan now, to live as if
there were no God.
That's the way men live today.
The awful categories of sin, Cora talked about
being sins of the flesh, are not so
much the base operations of our sinful nature
as they are pride, and things like that,
sins of the mind, and sins of the
heart.
And thus we know that the word flesh
does not simply mean bodies in the New
Testament.
The flesh, therefore, is a picture of the
way men live today, and the Apostle Paul
says that to live by the Spirit, to
live by the Spirit is the only remedy
for the awful pain of death which comes
to men who live according to the flesh.
And thus the flesh stands for the complete
inadequacy of the creature before his Creator, and
the only cure for it, according to Romans
8 and 2, is the Spirit of life
which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
I wish I could come and sit down
and talk face to face with every radio
listener listening to me now, and say to
you, my friend, you better wake up to
the fact you're living in a world that
is acting like we did not have any
life to come.
We're acting as if there were no God.
We're acting as if there was no responsibility
due Him.
We're acting as if we were just animals
and we'd claw each other and eat, drink,
and be merry, or jump off in a
corner and feel sorry for ourselves.
I tell you, my friends, man is more
than a body.
Man is more than a fallen human being.
Man is a creature created in the image
of God, and he desperately needs to be
restored to favor with Almighty God.
And then we learn not only that sin
is here and that it uses our sinful
nature, our material bodies, if you please, as
the tool by which it operates, but we
learn that the third member of the awful
trio that holds man, sin, flesh, and third
is law, the law of God.
The power of sin, the scriptures say, is
the law.
Sin is in one aspect a violation of
God's holy law.
Not only the law of Moses and the
Ten Commandments, but the universal and eternal law
of Almighty God expressed in those commandments.
And in this sense, the law of God,
Paul tells us, has been written in the
hearts and consciences of all men.
Then the scripture tells us that through the
holy law of God comes a knowledge of
sin.
The scriptures tell us that God's law shows
up sin as sin and shows a sinner
that his life is wrong with God.
It also actually provokes to sin.
When the law says, Thou shalt not, the
old sinful man said, I will too.
And therefore the law also produces wrath.
It produces God's wrath.
For the scriptures tell us the wages of
sin is death, and sin, if persisted in,
proves fatal.
And that is a part of Almighty God's
judgment.
And so the Apostle Paul speaks of the
curse of the law.
Now, my friends, elsewhere in the scriptures, the
Apostle Paul calls the law holy and good,
and says it was meant to give life.
Now, how can the same man, the Apostle
Paul, describe the law in one place as
the holy demand of God, and in another
as a slavery driving a man to despair?
Well, the explanation is this, that it's not
the law, which so far as it contains
the moral demands of God, is still valid.
But it is the spirit of legalism which
is the curse.
Legalism, my friends, is the attempt to live
or to find salvation under the law.
And we do make that attempt by seeking
to obey its statutes, and so obtaining credit
in the ledgers of heaven.
Now, a man ought to seek to keep
God's law, but if he seeks to keep
God's law so as to obtain credit in
the ledgers of heaven, that is legalism.
And that is believing that you can do
and be good in your own strength.
The legal man, therefore, is the religiously self
-made man.
But the Apostle Paul, if he could preach
to this generation, could say and say it
by experience, Mr. legal, self-righteous, self-made
man, trying to lay up credit for yourself
in the ledgers of heaven.
It just can't be done.
Paul say, I know, but I tried.
And I expect I tried a whole lot
harder than anybody living in the sound of
the voice of Ralph Barnett now.
And Paul says it can't be done.
It can't be done.
The law is powerless to save, Paul will
tell us.
It's powerless because it's weak through the flesh,
through our sinful nature.
And Paul will therefore tell us that a
man needs to look at himself in the
mirror of God Almighty's holy law, for that
law was given to prepare.
The law is a method of preparation, and
its aim is to lead men to that
place of despair, of having kept God's righteous
commands, to where they'll plead guilty to being
sinners in the sight of God, and cry
out to God for mercy.
And when a man is brought to that
place, then thank God he's at the place
where the grace of God operates, for God
always meets men at the point of their
need.
And when a man really comes to where
he's seen, needs to be restored by God,
to be saved by grace.
Bless God, he's already one step into the
kingdom of God.
To the apostle Paul, therefore, speaking to men
who are clutched in the bondage of sin,
which uses the flesh as its tool, the
base of operation, and where men are hemmed
in by the law of God that provokes
them to sin.
And she, thank God, the gospel meets a
man at the point of But the point
of his need to the apostle Paul, for
sinners in that threefold clutch, he tells us
that for our sin we are accountable to
almighty God.
Oh, we can't stress that too much.
Somebody says, well, brother Barnabas, how
is your responsibility to him?
Paul said, for our sin, because of our
sin, we are accountable to God.
Every man must give an account.
And yet, Paul will add that by the
works of God shall no flesh be justified.
That includes you, and that includes me.
Paul will say, we cannot put ourselves right
with almighty God.
We just can't do it.
We can't put ourselves right.
Change their own leopard spots.
He cannot die.
But he tells us this is a dark
picture, but God help you, it's true.
Oh, if you believed that, brother, you'd start
screaming for mercy.
If you believed that you'd go out and
find something, you'd
sail away.
You've either got to be brought to the,
I don't know how to preach the grace
of God unless against the dark back.
Oh, my soul, what a wonderful privilege it
is when you find someone except men
bound in sin and knowing it, bound in
the clutch, refusing to alibi and just pleading
guilty and throwing up your hands and saying,
I'm a lost, hell-deserving sinner.
Bless God, I got good news for a
person like that.
And we're going to be occupied in the
days to come with this wonderful against the
background and against the background of the fact
that in his day, men knew they were
mortally ill.
I'll follow in the name of the Lord
Jesus Christ.
I cried over this microphone that in your
goodness, in your providence, in your grace, in
your mercy, once more, oh, so-called Christian
America, where everybody's Christian, therefore, and they shall
be brought to the place where the grace
of God will bring them back into fellowship
with God in Christ.
This is our prayer in his blessed name.
Amen.
I come again this morning to continue the
messages that we've been occupied with some Lord's
days on the general subject of the gospel
of God's salvation as preached and taught by
the greatest representative and interpreter of Christ this
world has ever known, by that man whom
God in his providence, through the power of
the Holy Spirit, inspired to write the great
interpretations of the life and death and resurrection
and ascension and present reign and coming glory
of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.
We're ready this morning for the fifth in
this series of messages, and I am hopeful
that you are listening each Lord's day, for
we just begin each day where we left
off the Lord's day before.
I want this morning to come and just
spend a moment of review.
The Apostle Paul is crystal clear in one
thing, and that is that men who are
not guilty of sin toward Almighty God neither
need salvation nor recognize their need.
And that is peculiarly true of the day
in which I am preaching and the day
in which you are living.
The consciousness of sin has well and rightly
parted the lives of men and women in
America.
Wherever we go, inside our organized churches or
out, every godly preacher, and there are many
of them, thank God, bewails the lack of
godliness and Christ-likeness on the part of
the vast majority of the people who have
their names written on the church rolls of
our land.
It is certainly true that this is the
day when numerically Christianity is growing as it
never grew in any day since the time
of the apostles, but at the same time
we have more people claiming to be Christians,
but we have lost the salt.
The salt has lost its savor, and pound
for pound Christians weigh very little today.
And I am persuaded that one reason for
that is, I do not know all of
the reasons, but one reason is that we
skip over very lightly this awful fact of
S-I-N, sin.
I do know, and you bear witness to
this fact, that only people who are conscious
of great sin are very anxious to experience
great salvation.
And the Apostle Paul preached salvation to men
who needed to be saved, and in his
day, because of the conditions, multitudes of people
believed that they needed to be rescued and
delivered and justified and redeemed and reconciled and
restored in the right relationship to Almighty God.
And so the Apostle Paul, before he talks
about the experience of past salvation, for I
remind you that we are approaching the preaching
of Paul's gospel of salvation by saying that
Paul preached salvation in its past aspect, salvation
in its present aspect, and salvation in its
future hope.
And we have been trying to lay a
foundation from the Apostle Paul's preaching for the
experience of crisis we know as salvation in
its past aspect.
And we have been saying that the Apostle
Paul uses three great words.
These words come from different directions, but they
speak of the same thing, to describe how
God saves men in the matter of having
been saved, salvation in its past aspect.
He uses the word redemption, he uses the
word justification, he uses the word reconciliation.
But we have been showing you how the
best we could that Paul preached these great
truths against the background of men who were
conscious of their sin.
And we have tried to say that sin
is here, that man is a sinner, that
he is a rebellious sinner, that he is
positive in his rebellion against God, that there's
something radically wrong with us, that it's not
just that we do some things that we
could stop if we were a mind to,
but we are in this condition that we
know what's right, but we are unable and
unwilling, and we're unable because we are unwilling
to obey.
The matter of believing the gospel is difficult,
not because God has made it difficult, but
because believing the gospel means to obey God,
and to set his glory at the center
of our ambition.
And it's mighty hard to obey.
That's what makes it so difficult for men
and women to believe, because the essence of
believing is surrender and obedience.
And in this sense, man is a sinner.
He knows what's right, that does not live
a human being on top side of God's
earth that does not have some conception of
right and wrong.
And that is a standard that he didn't
set for the worst sinner as times when
he mourns over his very sinfulness.
There's a paradox about being a sinner.
Men willingly sin, and yet they also judge
themselves in the still small hours of the
night for their awful sin.
And because that's so, there is hope that
sinners may be saved.
Paul has said that man is a sinner.
He said that men need salvation from sin,
and from the flesh that is the tool
of sin, and from the law that provokes
us to sin and provokes us to wrath.
And then Paul has said that man is
accountable unto God.
You know, there's a paradox about the grace
of God that nobody can understand, and that
is that a Christian, listen to me now,
a Christian gives all the glory to God.
He'll say, I am what I am.
I'm not yet perfect, but I'm on the
way.
I am what I am by the grace
of God.
I have nothing wherewith to glory.
It's of God.
Salvation's of the Lord.
He did it.
He sought me first.
And at the same time, when the Christian
is the most conscious of what he is,
what he is by the grace of God,
he's also the most conscious of his absolute
freedom and his absolute responsibility to God.
There is a paradox about sin, that while
men sin inevitably, men sin because they can't
help it, at the same time men are
responsible for that sin.
Now, my friend, you can't explain that.
That's just so.
I'm not in the explanation business.
I'm not trying to square things.
I'm saying that the Bible is not a
logical book, and that the great truths are
paradoxical.
You can't understand them in your head.
The grace of God, the grace of God,
oh, it's incomprehensible.
And if any preacher could tell you exactly
what it is, it wouldn't be grace any
longer.
And I say to you that the fact
that a man sins inevitably just because he
is a sinner, and in that sense he
cannot help the fact that he sins, the
Bible turns right around and says that although
he sins inevitably, he sins responsibly, and that
God holds him to account for his sin.
Now, I can't explain that, but you need
to deny it.
And it's high time the pulpits of this
land quit trying to square one set of
teaching over against another, and we just well
face the fact that God's ways are above
our ways, and his ways pass finding out,
and they're above our knowledge, but we must
be true to men.
I'm speaking to people this morning that sin,
and in that sense you can't help your
sin.
That's the awful condition you're in, and if
it's left up to you, you're just going
to go to hell.
But at the same time, my sinner friend,
you're responsible for that sin that you sin,
although you can't help it.
You say, Brother Barnard, I don't understand that,
neither do I, but that shows you something
of the awful predicament that men and women
are in.
Explain it.
I couldn't do it in a thousand years,
but it is so.
It is so.
Oh, the apostle Paul wasn't trying to prove
something, he was just telling the truth, and
men need to bow to truth, whether they
understand it or not.
Oh, if it is just true that sinful
men did some little bad things, and sometimes
some pretty bad things, and that if we'd
educate them a little better, and love them
a little more, and improve their environment a
little more, why, they'd slough off all those
evil habits, and they'd be alright.
If that is so, the picture of this
whole world would be pretty rosy, but that
isn't so.
I'm telling you, men and women sin because
they are sinners.
They sin inevitably.
They're unable to do anything else, and yet,
for their sin, they are responsible to Almighty
God.
Oh, if that's so, if one half of
that is so, if you bow to that,
if you'd accept that, if you quit running
to some preacher who denies the first part,
just preaches the second, and denies the sovereignty
of God, and puts it all on you,
you'd come to stop short in your tracks,
and you'd say, oh my soul, I'm in
the pit, I can't get out, but the
trouble is that I dug the pit, and
I've fallen into the pit that I dug
myself.
Now, brother, a man's in that shape's in
a bad shape, and that's exactly the condition
that men and women to whom I'm preaching
right now are in.
You dug the pit yourself, and you can't
get out, and that's the reason you need
the long arm of God in Christ, to
reach down in the pit of your own
digging, and with his everlasting arms underneath, to
lift you up to higher ground, and restore
you to fellowship with Almighty God.
I wish I knew how to tell the
truth as Paul preached it, about the actual
condition of men and women.
I'm telling you, sin is not just some
little acts and deeds that you do.
Sin is a very part and substance of
your nature.
My sinner friend, you do not need some
of your acts and habits destroyed.
You need your nature changed, and that's the
heart of the condition of sinful men.
The Apostle Paul is clear on that.
Maybe what is clear to him you will
not bow to, but Paul preached that men
are accountable for the very sin they cannot
help but commit, and that's a desperate condition.
My friends, if that's so, a sinner is
helpless.
That's so, a sinner is helpless.
And if a sinner is helpless, and yet
a sinner is responsible, oh, how sinful people
need the salvation that God was in Christ,
making possible for sinful men everywhere.
I wonder if any of that is getting
over to you.
Today we preach a little message that a
fellow ought to quit drinking, he ought to
quit this, and he ought to quit that,
and there's not anything much wrong with men
except a few little bad things they do.
I have people come to me, dear women,
and say, Brother Vine, I want you to
pray for my husband, he's such a good
man, he's just got one bad habit.
But God says he's not just a man
with one bad habit, he's a man with
a heart that's hateful to God and hostile
to God, and that he sins because he's
a sinner, and that he needs to be
made a new creation in the sight of
Almighty God.
It'll not do to take off his old
dirty clothes and clean them up a little
bit, and shine his shoes, and brush his
teeth, and scrub behind his ears.
That the old boy doesn't need to be
cleaned up, he needs to be changed, and
the salvation of God that's in Christ Jesus
talks about a new birth, and a new
change, and a new start, that's what salvation
is.
The purpose of God in Jesus Christ is
to bring the past on this whole earth,
a new species of people, a brand new
race, a new creation.
God's not pouring new truths into old limeskins.
This is the gospel.
Do you know, my friends, here's where we
need to count, because people today book this.
They say, Brother Barnum, man can't be held
responsible for what he can't help doing, but
that's exactly the shape you're in.
Now, I can't explain that.
A man doesn't sin and thus become a
sinner.
A man sins because he is a sinner,
and therefore what he needs is not simply
to have some of his actions improved, he
needs to be changed from a rebellious sinner
to a willing, loving, bond-slave of Jesus
Christ.
Whether I've got this over to you or
not, whether the Holy Spirit has helped in
any way or not, I do not know.
I know I'm preaching against the grain of
this hour, but it's so.
I can't explain it, but it's so.
There you sit as you ride along your
car this morning, or as you're around washing
the dishes, you're getting ready for the labors
and duties and privileges of the day, and
you are a helpless, responsible sinner.
Did you get that?
You are responsible to God.
God's going to hold you accountable, he does
now, for your sinful way.
And you need to be made a new
creature in God Almighty's sight.
Helpless sinners, rebellious sinners that inevitably sin and
yet are held accountable and responsible by a
holy God.
The Apostle Paul says, they need salvation, they
need salvation.
You know, the picture wouldn't be so awful
dark if I could stop now, but I
have one other thing that I must talk
about if I'll be true to the gospel
of salvation as Paul preached it.
Not only is sin here, not only are
men clutched in the awful trio of sin
as personified using the flesh as a tool
and spurred on by the flesh-killing claims
and demands of God's holy law, not only
is man in that awful shape a helpless
but responsible, but I won't call your attention
this morning to something else that looms large
in the theology and the gospel that Paul
preached.
And that is that man, not only in
his awful condition, but he lived in, that's
true, but man lives in a world, now
you get this, where Satan, where the devil,
where the power of hell is active and
working night and day.
Somebody says it wasn't for the devil the
world would be converted for some.
I wouldn't be surprised if that's so.
Oh, we are living in a world that
the tracks of the archenemy of Almighty God
and the enemy of eternal souls, the tracks
of that enemy the devil can be found
everywhere.
And the Apostle Paul, I guess we call
him a back number now, but he joined
the Lord Jesus Christ in talking about demons
and the worship of devils and struggling against
principalities and powers in high places, spiritual powers.
And he talks about the devil being the
prince of the powers of the air, and
he talks about the devil being the God
of this present economy, this present order of
things, this present world.
And here you are, sinner, you sin because
you're a sinner.
The law spurs you on because of your
weak sinful nature.
The flesh that's your sinful nature gives sin
the working ground, the workshop where he can
display his power.
And you're living in a world where your
next door neighbor's a sinner, and sin's in
the atmosphere, and it's easy to sin and
difficult to do right.
And also, walking the streets and in the
air above you and in the very atmosphere
are millions of demons, the very legions of
hell him that did self and the servants
of the devil.
And these demons are everywhere, and their tracks
are everywhere, and Satan clutching men in his
awful embrace, blinds people to the glory of
the gospel, encourages men and women to go
on in their rebellion, stifles the desires and
cripples the will and deadens the consciences of
men and women.
Brother, that's not an accident.
You're living in a world where the devil's
working, the devil's working.
I'm telling you, Paul, he may be a
back number now, but he not only believed
in sin being everywhere as a very fact,
but he said the devil's here, the devil
as a power is here.
The little apostle Paul says the devil's got
a kingdom, it's the kingdom of darkness, and
demons and evil spirits are everywhere.
And he warns of the power of Satan.
He said that men and the world in
which they live were mightily affected by and
influenced by S-A-T-A-N, Satan.
All through his writings, the apostle Paul talks
freely of the satanic agency in human affairs.
He talks about, for instance, in Ephesians, he
says, our wrestling, and he mentions it is
not merely with human adversaries, but with principalities
and powers.
He says we're in a war.
He writes as if God Almighty in Christ
is battling with the very powers of hell
itself.
He calls these demons the servants of the
devil.
Somebody said that the devil never did a
better stroke than when he persuaded men to
disbelieve in him.
And I know that in these later years,
people sort of made fun of the devil,
and they've acted like he wasn't around, but
he is around.
Have you ever seen demons in action?
Have you ever had them spit in your
face?
Have you ever heard them scream and curse?
I have.
I've been in services where the power of
God was so powerful that the demons in
demon-possessed people took possession and took charge.
I'm telling you, demons are everywhere.
Our Lord Jesus Christ, I guess he is
a back number because he talked about demons,
and he cast demons out of people when
he was here.
Our godly missionaries in the very heart of
heathenism talk about the powers of hell and
the powers of satan and the demons that
are everywhere.
I tell you, my friends, that anybody that
can deny the presence and the power and
the awful influence of the powers of hell
to thee just must have shut himself up
in a room somewhere, gone to a monastery,
stuck his head in the sand like an
ostrich.
I tell you, satan is raging everywhere.
Maybe he knows his time is short, but
there never was an hour when he was
fighting any worse than he is now.
You try to preach, brother, and you can
just see his cloven ears and his horns
and feel his evil wrath upon you.
And he's trying to discourage God's people and
overcome God's people and dishearten God's people and
get them off the fire and fire.
I'm telling you, satan, you live in a
world that's influenced greatly by the power of
hell.
Our missionaries talk about them.
You and I live in a day of
Nazi Germany, six million Jews killed and their
bodies made into soap.
You and I live in a day of
the atomic bomb falling on Japan.
You and I live in a day of
the awful curse of communism.
You and I have read the papers about
the rape of Hungary, and you talk to
a policeman now, and talk about our cities,
even Winston-Salem, and the policeman will tell
you about the powers of hell.
One man has said there are times when
the police lay their hands on a criminal
and yet are not satisfied.
Behind this petty thief or thug is some
other person, dimly guessed at, some master hand
moving the pawn.
The police can recognize that of that other
strategy, for the man himself could never have
had thought of it.
My friends, the marks of satanic strategy and
power walk our streets.
Did you read your papers?
You know what I'm talking about.
Women cannot walk the streets by day or
night all over this land.
Demons are raging, hells are popping.
Sinner, you need to be rescued, not only
from sin, but from the power of Satan
himself.
Next Lord's Day, we'll be ready then to
start talking about the provision of salvation in
Christ for men in the clutches of sin
and in the power of Satan.
And now my time is gone, and the
message must come to a close.
May God bless you, everyone.