The reading is from Ephesians chapter 3.
For this reason I pull the prisoner of
Christ Jesus for the sake of you Gentiles.
Surely you have heard about the administration of
God's grace that was given to me for
you, that is, the mystery made known to
me by revelation, as I have already written
briefly.
In reading this then, you will be able
to understand my insight into the mystery of
Christ, which was not made known to men
in other generations, as it has now been
revealed by the Spirit to God's holy apostles
and prophets.
This mystery is that through the gospel the
Gentiles are heirs together with Israel, members together
of one body, and sharers together in the
promise in Christ Jesus.
I became a servant of this gospel by
the gift of God's grace given me through
the working of his power.
Although I am less than the least of
all God's people, this grace was given to
me to preach to the Gentiles the unsearchable
riches of Christ and to make plain to
everyone the administration of this mystery, which for
ages has been kept hidden in God, who
created all things.
His intent was that now, through the church,
the manifold wisdom of God should be made
known to the rulers and authorities in the
heavenly realms, according to his eternal purpose, which
he accomplished in Christ Jesus our Lord.
In him and through faith in him we
approach God with freedom and confidence.
I ask you, therefore, not to be discouraged
because of my sufferings for you, which are
your glory.
The burden still remains from last week when
I brought to your attention this fact that
a Christian is born in power.
The initiation experience, the coming to Jesus Christ
is a power experience.
But not only is he born in power,
he continues in power and he will go
out in power.
The Christian community as I see it are
individuals around the world of which the Tabernacle
Fellowship is but a small, small sample that
are placed into God's circuit and pulsating through
that circuit is the power of God as
the illustration floods into your mind of an
electrical circuit with a generator and the power
of the mains humming its way through.
Now, just for starters, let me remind you
and those of you who are not Christian
need to be informed about this that the
moment a person comes to the Lord Jesus
and asks for his sins to be forgiven,
he has an experience of the dynamic of
God.
A Christian, let it be said, is someone
who acknowledges that Jesus is the Lord, the
second person of the Trinity, that he died
on the cross so that all our misdoing
might be forgiven and when we confess this
in faith, then we are born again.
The word that sometimes is used from the
pulpit to describe such an experience is regeneration
and that's a word that jumps out of
the vocabulary of the electrician.
Regeneration.
The renewing of power.
Not that you ever had that power before
yourself but the beginning of the race when
Adam was alive, before he fell, he knew
the power of God but it was disconnected
when he broke the law of God and
as a result he was disarmed of that
power.
And we are born into this world as
sinful people, powerless people, strangers from God, cut
off from the life of God.
But the day comes in the experience of
the believer when he encounters Jesus Christ and
he confesses, as I have just indicated, his
need of the Savior, he recognizes that there
is no other hope in this world.
This world is in a state of utter
confusion.
There are many, many people, many voices outside
that of the evangelical pulpit which are saying
more or less the same thing.
The whole situation is hopeless.
And the believer in Jesus Christ comes to
him and says, I believe that life makes
sense with you.
I need your life within me.
I want to become partaker of the very
power, of the very essence of your being.
And that is what the apostle Peter said
really constituted salvation.
You become partaker of the life of God.
Now that's again a concept that's difficult to
grasp hold of.
You certainly can't just acquire it intellectually.
The Bible tells us that when people confess
Jesus, then to Him, to them, gives He
the power to become the sons of God.
Now I grant you that word power really
means authority.
But you can't have authority without power, can
you?
And when you move through to the letter
that Paul writes to the church at Rome,
you find one of the greatest definitions of
the gospel.
Romans 1.16, I am not ashamed of
the gospel of Christ.
It is the power of God for the
salvation of everyone who believes.
When the apostle moves on in his writing
and pens the letter, which actually probably historically
came first to the Christians at Corinth, he
makes reference to the gospel, to the message
of the cross.
And he says in the opening chapter in
the 18th verse, for the message of the
cross is foolishness to those who are perishing,
but to us who are being saved, it
is the power of God.
And he goes on and repeats exactly the
same thing in a later verse, perhaps putting
it across even more strongly.
You see the point and the reason why
I'm bringing you to these scriptures, and I
could give you many more.
The Christian is a person who is born
into power.
You can't be regenerated without that.
You experience God.
You cannot be saved merely by a deduction
from a text.
You believe that Jesus Christ is Lord.
Yes, I believe Jesus Christ is Lord.
You believe that you need your sins forgiven.
Yes, I believe I need my sins forgiven.
Well, take your sins to Jesus.
I've done just that.
All right, you're saved.
No.
That's the ascent of the mind.
But it goes beyond that.
You need to know the indwelling of the
Spirit, the entry of the Spirit of God
into your life.
And without the Spirit of God, you can't
be saved.
You are born by the regenerating power of
the Holy Ghost.
That's what makes the Christian a different person
than anybody else.
That's what makes Christianity different from any other
philosophy.
It's the very life of God being planted
in the soul.
A great preacher, to whom I'm going to
be making reference on several occasions this evening,
by the name of George Whitfield, when he
was a student at one of our major
universities, was given a book by that name,
The Life of God in the Soul of
Man.
He read that book and he said, I
want this.
He spent days and nights wandering around the
streets of his university town, pleading that somehow
he might have his sins forgiven.
And the day came when God flooded his
heart and cleansed him.
Whitfield was born into the Christian church in
power.
Now, if we're a powerful community, at least
ideally speaking, then the life of the community
shall be marked with the power of the
Holy Spirit.
And where would you expect to read of
this, to feel this very power in the
New Testament?
Well, obviously when you take up the story
of the church.
And that means that you turn to the
fifth book of the New Testament, the Acts
of the Apostles.
And at the beginning there, you find the
words of our Lord Jesus directed to the
disciples.
And he tells them to go to Jerusalem
and to wait for the promised Holy Spirit.
And in his own words, he says, you
will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes
on you.
And you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem
and in all Judea and Samaria and to
the ends of the earth.
They'll go to Jerusalem and there they will
be brought into a living experience of the
third person of the Trinity.
They will be linked into the circuit and
the power of God will start to hum.
And I tell you, if you've got sensitive
ears, when you read the Acts of the
Apostles, you can feel, you can detect the
generating power of the Spirit.
It hums across every page.
So we move to the third chapter and
there we discover Peter and John.
They're going into the temple, they're going to
pray.
There's a man, he's a beggar, typical of
so many in his unfortunate condition in the
temple precincts.
He asks for money from these men.
Alas, they've got no money.
But what they do have is faith in
the living God.
And they pray for the man and he
jumps to his feet.
And a crowd gathers as a result.
And they inquire as to what Peter and
John have been about.
And they respond, men of Israel, chapter 3
and verse 12.
Men of Israel, why does this surprise you?
Why do you stare at us as if
by our own power or godliness we have
made this man walk?
By deduction you discover they're saying that the
power that has been released has come from
God who has invested them with such dynamic.
You move on to the fourth chapter and
there you find a picture of the church
at prayer.
The 32nd verse, all the believers were one
in heart and mind.
No one claimed that any of his possessions
was his own.
But they shared everything they had.
And with great power the apostles continue to
testify to the resurrection of the Lord.
And much grace was with them all.
You move on to the sixth chapter of
the Acts.
And there they have a particular task to
do, those early Christians.
They're concerned about widow women who have come
into the fellowship.
These are days when there weren't such things
as pensions and social security.
The church looked after its poor and they
needed men to handle the finance.
This was a responsible position.
So what did they do?
They chose seven men, seven almoners, like deacons
in effect.
And we discover this description of one who
was selected for such a useful ministry.
They chose Stephen, verse 5 of chapter 6,
a man full of faith and of the
Holy Ghost.
And it indicates in the eighth verse that
he is full of God's grace and power,
doing great wonders and miracles and signs among
the people.
You move on in the Acts of the
Apostles.
And you find reference in the tenth chapter
to the ministry of Jesus.
Peter is preaching in the household of a
Roman soldier.
And when he refers to the Lord Jesus
in the thirty-seventh verse, he has this
to say, or rather verse 38, we tell
you how God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with
the Holy Spirit and power and how he
went around doing good and healing all who
were under the power of the devil because
God was with him.
Now this idea of power that hums, as
I say, throughout the whole of the Acts
of the Apostles, it's also there in the
epistles which Paul and Peter and others write.
The fifteenth chapter of Romans, for example, Peter
is referring to his successful ministry as he
establishes churches for the Lord Jesus.
I read to you from the eighteenth verse
of Romans 15, I will not venture to
speak of anything else except what Christ has
accomplished through me in leading the Gentiles to
obey God by what I have said and
done, by the power of signs and miracles
through the power of the Holy Spirit.
And when you go to an earlier verse
in that fifteenth chapter, you find that Paul
includes all the Christians at Rome in a
prayer that they too might know the dynamic
of the Spirit.
May the God of hope fill you with
all joy and peace as you trust in
him so that you may overflow with hope
by the power of the Holy Spirit.
All right, I'm into Romans, I could take
you into Corinthians, into Thessalonians, I can take
you into Peter, I can take you right
to the last book of the New Testament
and we would be substantiating my main contention
before you, that the early church was a
church of power.
It was born into power and it was
the power of God released through the church
that made them to be so successful in
their witness so that at the end of
the first decade even pagans and therefore unbelievers
stood by in utter astonishment and they said,
these men, they've turned the world upside down.
Now this is remarkable, they didn't have any
advertising media, there was no television, there was
no printing press, there was no way at
the human level in which a bunch of
men and some ladies too in an upper
room in Jerusalem could suddenly move out into
the rest of Palestine and around the known
world and preach the gospel that they'd learned
from a carpenter and be utterly successful without
recognizing this.
They had tapped a source of power and
nothing could withstand them.
And I want to say, my friend, today
that the only way in which we can
penetrate a sinful world is as we appreciate
experimentally what Paul meant when he prays in
the Ephesian epistle twice that the Christians there
may be full of the power of the
Holy Ghost.
You cannot convince a person of the truths
of Christianity unless you are a living example
of the Christian faith itself.
And to be a living example, and here
I address my senior friends in this tabernacle
including myself, it is not sufficient to have
commenced in power, we must go on in
power.
Initiation is one thing, continuation is another thing.
The great men of God, and oh, that
the Lord would give you a passion and
a desire to read history and all that
God has done through his church in the
centuries that have gone by, the great men
of God who were used to bring thousands
into the kingdom were men who had an
utter and an increasing reliance on the power
of God released through the indwelling of the
Spirit into their ministries.
I know that we are in the area
of controversy as to where you pin certain
terms such as the baptism of the Spirit
and the fullness of the Spirit and the
sealing of the Spirit, which is a phrase
Paul uses earlier in this letter.
But I tell you, as I mentioned last
week, that I have gone beyond the desire
merely to be theologically accurate and to dot
all the I's and cross all the T's
as though academic perfection was my chief objective
in understanding something of the power and the
fullness of Almighty God in my life.
I will not cross swords with those who
in this area differ from any theological construction
that I might be sympathetic towards.
The main question which needs to be asked
is simply this.
Do you know the power of God?
Do you know it in your life?
Do you know it as an overwhelming experience?
Are there times when you are so aware
of God that everything and everyone else in
this world takes a secondary position?
This is what Paul knew.
He has such an awareness of God and
such a love for Jesus that there are
times when Paul engaged in the most complex
and profound piece of theological reasoning tells us
that Jesus loved him and died for him
and Paul is overwhelmed at the thought and
he leaves his argument and he engages in
a hymn of praise to the Lord as
with a soul that's overwhelmed he pours out
his love to the living God.
And I'm asking you, younger friend and older
friend, do you know this experience or experiences
from time to time and indeed increasingly?
There are those who seem to suggest that
the idea of the fullness of the Spirit
and power with God is something that we
mortals in the 20th century, we Christians have
entered into or certain branches of the church
as though these great men like Calvin and
Luther, great theologians like John Owen and Jonathan
Edwards and Flavel and a host of others
that I could marshal before you never knew
anything of this.
Whitfield who went to Bristol and preached with
Wesley to the collierers as they came up
out of the mines with their sooty, dirty,
grimy faces.
He was responsible under the Lord for the
release of the convicting power of the Spirit
to the extent that onlookers saw the clean
little rivulets that were formed by the tears
of the miners as under the conviction of
the Spirit of God they called out and
asked that God would forgive them their sins.
And Whitfield knew the power of God in
his life.
He writes in his journals of a significant
occasion when God moved in upon him and
God became all and all to him.
One of the greatest men who ever lived
as far as intellectual ability is concerned was
a man by the name of Jonathan Edwards
reckoned by some to be the greatest philosopher
since Socrates.
And this is what Jonathan Edwards had to
say and he's a man who's not exactly
an emotional man like John Wesley, a man
who's in the area of logic and legal
things, a man who's not going to be
caught along by any psychological element in a
meeting, a man who's not going to have
any psychological experience induced into his personality.
Well, here is Edwards, the great theologian, this
great lawyer, and he's in America.
It's in the 18th century.
And he refers to what happened to him
one day as he makes a journey from
one point to the States to another.
I felt an ardency of soul to be
what I know not otherwise how to express,
emptied and annihilated, to lie in the dust
and to be full of Christ alone, to
love him with a holy, pure joy, to
trust in him, to live upon him, to
serve and follow him, and to be perfectly
sanctified and made pure with a divine and
heavenly purity.
Jonathan Edwards was never the same.
After that experience, he wasn't a man caught
up in an emotional cloud.
He was a man who wrote a book
against cosmetic, counterfeit experiences of the spirit, but
he was a man who knew God himself.
Take another, a man by the name of
David Brainard.
Brainard goes to witness to the Indians in
North America.
He's a man who has a passion for
God.
It turns him out of his bed at
night.
Sometimes he seems to be almost a fanatic.
In the icy cold of the northern parts
of the States, he'll spend hours in prayer,
seeking, hungering with a passion for Almighty God.
And the day comes when God meets Brainard,
and Brainard's ministry penetrates the Indians.
He'll read his diary, read the story of
what happened as a result of Brainard releasing
the power of God amongst the Indians.
Let me bring you forward a century.
These notes, I've got a little jottings of
the experiences of great men of God that
I've listed down.
Here's D.L. Moody, the turn of the
last century.
He needs to know the power of the
Lord.
And he's in New York City.
He's between campaigns, yet he's still feeling powerless.
He still realizes that there's a lot more
of God for him to experience than he's
known before.
I began to cry, says D.L. Moody,
a great evangelist.
I began to cry as I've never cried
in my life.
The hunger increased.
I felt that I did not want to
live any longer.
If I could not have the power for
service, I kept on crying all the time
that God would fill me with the Spirit.
Well, one day, in the city of New
York, oh, what a day!
I cannot describe it.
I seldom refer to it.
It is almost too sacred an experience to
name.
I can only say that God revealed himself
to me, and I had such an experience
of his love that I had to ask
him to stay his hand.
Let me give you another testimony.
A Welsh preacher.
Got a strange Christian name.
Christmas Evans.
Great preacher, despite the strangeness of his name.
He, again, is between two points in his
ministry.
He sets off, and he's going along one
of the northern mountain ranges in Wales, and
he says, Having begun in the name of
Jesus, I felt as if my shackles were
loosening.
Here is this preacher.
Can you see him perhaps on horseback as
he's in the idyllic countryside of northern Wales?
The old hardness begins to soften, just like,
as I thought, the mountains and frost and
snow is dissolving and melting within me.
This engendered confidence within my soul in the
promise of the Holy Ghost.
I felt my whole mind relieved from some
great bondage.
Tears flowed copiously, and I was constrained to
cry out aloud for the gracious visits of
God by restoring to my soul the joy
of his salvation and that he would visit
the churches in Anglesey again that were under
my care.
Why do I bring these illustrations to you?
Well, I do so as a corrective and
as a stimulus.
A corrective to those who feel that the
whole business of the fullness of the Spirit
and entering into the presence of God and
knowing his power is something rediscovered.
And some of us may question certain aspects
of the rediscovery in the 20th century.
My friend, Whitfield Wesley, these great men of
God, I could have told you of Howell
Harris, of Daniel Rowlands, and a thousand more,
well, certainly hundreds more.
They knew.
They knew the power of God in their
lives.
What did it do?
What was the effect of that power?
Well, it had remarkable effects upon them.
For a while, they were exuberant depending on
the variation that there was in their personality.
There were some who were caught up into
an ecstasy before the Lord.
There were some who were quietly moved in
their innermost being.
There were some who felt they could sing
and dance before the Lord.
But most of them, indeed all of them,
came out of the experience, or the experiences
with a great concept of the holiness and
the majesty of God.
Listen to Dr. Lloyd-Jones, a Puritan of
the 20th century, as he evaluates some of
these experiences.
A man may sing or may dance for
a while, but that does not persist.
It is temporary and due to weakness of
the body, but what is permanent, what proves
genuineness, is that a man is filled with
a sense of awe.
He has been near the majesty of God
and is of necessity humbled.
Great men of God rarely spoke about it.
There was no boastfulness.
What had happened to them was almost too
sacred to be mentioned.
It leads to humility and to a love
of God and a rejoicing in Christ with
a joy unspeakable and full of glory.
I find myself saying amen to that to
the extent I brought the quote because I
could not preach it with the eloquence or
with the perception of Lloyd-Jones.
Do not tell me that this tabernacle, its
pastor, its elders and deacons, stand for a
stuffy academic intellectual apprehension of the gospel.
There is nothing more I tell you, God
be my judge, that I want in my
life, that I want for you precious young
people and you older friends too, than a
knowledge, an increasing knowledge of the fullness of
God himself.
And when that happens, God becomes so great
in our estimation, we recognize his reverence, his
majesty, his person, his holiness, those great and
glorious attributes.
We're caught up in conflicting emotions.
At one point we want to fall down.
Our reaction is that of Peter the fisherman.
Depart from me, for I'm a sinful man,
O Lord.
You're all that I'm not.
I revere, I honor your holy name.
And then there's that other element.
In which we recognize that this God is
a great, delightful heavenly Father who loves the
uninhibited praise of his children and we want
to bless and adore him.
We want to sing.
We try to find words in the human
language to express our praises and find that
it's a beggarly medium of worshiping the living
God.
And sometimes in his infinite grace, he resolves
that problem by giving languages that have never
been learned.
You see my point, my friend.
This is what I'm saying.
That the increase of the knowledge of God
and his power in my life, it changes
me.
It makes me realize something of how great
he is.
And I want to worship him.
I want to love him.
I want to serve him.
There are some experiences that I have in
marriage that I would not publicly refer to.
And there are some experiences that a Christian
can have with the great God of glory
that are so delicate that he or she
finds themselves like Moody.
Somewhat hesitant in relating them.
I'm always put off by the person who
seems to wear his religious experience on his
shirt cuff.
The man who has a knowledge of God
doesn't need to tell you.
You know.
You feel it.
One of the things I shall miss on
the departure of Wilfred Mortimer was sometimes when
he prayed how one felt the closeness of
the Lord.
That man could intercede before God like a
leaf that quivered when the wind of the
Spirit blew.
And I want to know more and more
of that in my life.
What are the effects of knowing the power
of God?
Well, if I had time I would take
you into two long excursions.
But I won't.
I'll do it in summary fashion.
Which outline the fact that when God moves
in upon the soul in an increasing fashion
it changes the person internally and it has
certain external effects.
What do I mean by that?
Well, internally, so to speak it gives him
a tremendous assurance of salvation.
Romans chapter 5 and verse 5 uses language
which resembles Acts 2 the latter referring to
the outpouring of the Holy Spirit and when
Paul in Romans 5 employs that terminology as
he speaks about the pouring of the Holy
Spirit he says, hope does not disappoint us
because God has poured out His love into
our hearts by the Holy Spirit whom He
has given us.
And later on in the 8th chapter with
the same topic in mind, speaking of the
Spirit he says, the Spirit causes us to
cry out to the Lord Abba Father.
In other words, we have a great assurance
that we belong to God because of the
indwelling Spirit and we need to know more
of the power of God in our lives
to convince us of this.
To know that if all Christian fellowship was
stripped from us all Bibles were banned and
burnt we were entirely on our own.
We belong to God because the power of
God by the indwelling Spirit brings this sense
of assurance.
That's what I mean when I say it
has an internal benefit.
What's more it gives a tremendous sense of
joy when Peter the fisherman is writing to
the Christians who, Christian Jews who have committed
their lives to Jesus Christ in the opening
letter that bears His name.
He says in the 8th verse of chapter
1 Though you have not seen Jesus, you
love Him.
And even though you do not see Him
now you believe in Him and are filled
with an inexpressible and glorious joy.
Now I ask you, my friend older friend
and younger friend do you know this?
Don't water this down.
Here is an inexpressible joy not a cosmetic
smile, not just a grin this is a
joy that's deep down in the soul but
it surfaces and people can recognize the fact
that there's something different internally you're changed, you
have this assurance that you belong to the
Lord you have this joy unspeakable and full
of glory to quote the language of the
authorized version this is one of the byproducts
of knowing the power of God the sealings
of God's Spirit upon your life.
What's more there is within the soul created
a passion for the lost a passion for
the lost this was a thing about Whitefield
Charles Spurgeon, you may have heard I've referred
to that man once or twice in this
pulpit Charles Spurgeon reviews the life of Whitefield
now Spurgeon's life was crammed with activity to
the extent he died prematurely in his early
fifties but when Spurgeon reviewed the life of
Whitefield he said, I believe that most men
are half dead but Whitefield was full of
life you always found him as an activist
he was always doing something, what was he
doing?
he was preaching the gospel every fibre of
his being was invested in this every cent,
every pound of his money was invested in
this he has a passion for the lost
Wesley is asked which his church is and
which his particular piece of ground where he
evangelizes is in Anglican terms, what's your parish,
Wesley?
and Charles says, the world's my parish I
think that big and if you'd looked at
Wesley and Charles trying to keep up with
one another these remarkable brothers, you saw them
tramping across England, on into Scotland across to
the Americas you do the same as I
say with Whitefield, here he is, he's in
London you shut your eyes, he's not in
London, he's in Edinburgh you shut your eyes,
he's not in Edinburgh, he's in Glasgow he
nips up to a place called Cambuslang, he
starts to preach and remarkable things happen, hundreds
of people come and listen to him, the
power of God falls upon his ministry but
you can't keep him down that's exactly the
case with Danny Rowlands and so many of
these great men of the past I plead
with you, read the history of the church
now, you have power you say?
all right, thank God, I believe that this
power is available to us today on the
same basis as it was on the day
of Pentecost but if you've got the power,
then show me the passion for souls thank
God there are many in this church that
have a passion for souls and a power
for the Lord but they must go along,
you see you shall receive power after the
Holy Spirit has come upon you that you
may have an ecstatic experience, that you can
sing a chorus for the 20th time and
get little shivers up and down your spine
that may be a psychological analysis of some
religious experience, that it could be valid or
invalid I don't know well then, and here
I come to wind up what I've wanted
to share with you for so long what
can you do about receiving more of God's
power of knowing the outworking in your life
of Paul's plea for the Ephesians to be
filled with the power of God, with the
fullness of God what can you do take
the Bible at its word believe that when
Paul was praying this, he really meant it
he's not engaging in some theological speculation it
is a concept that goes beyond full understanding
but in basic principles we can grasp what
he's saying that there is something about God
and His ability within our lives that He
can do immeasurably more than all we ask
or imagine according to His power that is
at work within us do you believe that?
and then you're to seek to seek constantly
and daily for a greater measure of God's
life within you so the evangelist Luke tells
us recording the words of our Lord in
the eleventh chapter of the gospel that bears
His name when he's speaking of the infilling
of the Holy Spirit there was a great
Puritan writer who, referring to the sealing of
the Spirit says, sue God for it, sue
Him come before Him and ask Him more
and more that you shall have the power
of God in your life that you will
have in actuality what is there for every
Christian, potentially what do I mean by that?
well look, let's imagine that you leave me
ten thousand pounds and I leave it in
the bank potentially I'm rich actually I'm not
I would never be a rich man as
far as that amount of money is concerned
until I went to the bank and took
it and used it Apostle Paul says in
Ephesians that all spiritual blessings belong to us,
Ephesians 1, 3 in Christ Jesus, they all
belong to us potentially we're so rich the
desire to make your potential actual and then
to remember the sovereignty of God you see,
we're in a state of preparedness we cannot
induce blessings from the Lord we can't induce
a supply of power people have tried this
and it becomes the most clumsy and the
most ugly thing when people endeavour to induce
spiritual experiences indeed, they're not spiritual, religious experiences
they can be harmful, they can be counterfeit
but you see, within the sovereignty of God
as we make ourselves available the potential for
service, the potential for power is infinite and
so we are to keep in a state
of absolute preparation Colossians 3 and verse 5
tells us that we're to using the language
of the A.V. which someone pointed out
to me I know more by heart than
the language of the N.I.V. mortify
the members of your body what does that
mean?
well here's the N.I.V.'s updated translation
put to death whatever belongs to your earthly
nature sexual immorality, impurity, lust evil desires, greed
which is idolatry put away these things, discipline
yourself day by day, I find that so
hard oh does that sound a terrible confession
that the man who preaches at the tabernacle
for a decade who followed great preachers, who
previously occupied the pulpit confesses to several hundred
people he finds it hard to put to
death all the earthly nature, but I do
I wish I could tell you I was
101% sanctified but you ask my wife
I've got a long way to go in
the school of sanctification I have to work
at it every day I have to determine
what I'm going to read, what I'm going
to look at the conversation I'm going to
engage in how I'm going to spend my
money, how I'm going to relate in various
situations, every moment of the day it's a
fight, but when you do that or try,
and heaven knows I fail often enough you're
in that condition where God in his sovereignty
can come down upon your life, and take
you up into heavenly places in Christ Jesus
and fill you with a sense of his
power and his peace, and give you that
assurance of soul that you really belong to
him I continue also to read his word
Whitfield, Wesley, Luther, Calvin Spurgeon, Campbell, Morgan Martin,
Lloyd-Jones, have you ever read their books?
their minds saturated in scripture I knew Dr.
Lloyd-Jones conducts seminars for hundreds of ministers
in London, sometimes the most abstruse, the most
complicated theological subject was up for debate, and
he'd sit there and he'd not have a
bible in his hand, and he'd listen to
these great minds as one man got up
and gave his view, and another man got
up and gave his view, and just as
though he had an invisible bible that had
been implanted into his brain he could tell
a person, turn back a page in your
bible, read chapter 5 and verse 14, and
there you'll find the answer to the point
that you're making, and discover that your premise
is completely unfounded a man, admittedly, with a
remarkable brain but that's not the point, I'm
not even talking about remarkable people, I'm talking
about the likes of you and me and
you can't get less remarkable than I am
saturate your mind in God's word so it
becomes a very part of your mental fabric
and apparatus, look when Paul says to the
church at Ephesus I want you to be
filled with all the fullness of God, he
wasn't talking to the pastor or pastors, or
elders or deacons alone, he was talking to
the youth fellowship, he was talking to the
widow people, he was talking to the rich
and to the poor, to those who'd gone
to an academy to those who were slaves,
filled with the fullness of God knowing power
and it's still the same it's still the
same today we were born in power we
were made for power and Christian people are
to go out in power Amen