We were looking at God's dwelling place and
seeing that the foundation for this house that
we're building to be God's dwelling place is
His perfect love for us.
The Bible begins with the words, In the
beginning, God.
Those are the first four words in the
Bible.
And if we make that the rule of
our life in everything, we will live the
Christian life the way God wants us to.
In the beginning, God.
When we seek to do God's work, in
the beginning, God.
Not the need.
A lot of people start with the need,
that's the problem.
They get into a lot of problems when
they try to serve the Lord on the
basis of need, because need is everywhere.
I don't seek to serve the Lord like
that.
I live in a country where there's tremendous
need.
And if I go on the basis of
need, I would have become a nervous wreck
ages ago.
But I'm a very happy Christian, because for
me, in the beginning, it's not need.
It's God.
That means I try to understand what God
wants me to do.
And what God wants me to do may
be only a small, to meet only a
small fraction of the need.
That's all I do.
I leave the rest to God, because He's
the master of the vineyard.
It applies in many areas.
In our daily life, how do you begin
your day?
What's the first thing you think of when
you get up in the morning?
I hope it's God.
It should be, if you're a Christian, in
the beginning, God.
I'm not talking about a religious ritual of
reading your Bible.
A lot of the Pharisees read their Bible
in the morning, but it didn't make them
any better.
I'm talking about God, and there's a lot
of difference between God and the Bible.
A lot of people who read the Bible
can be religious.
People who read the Bible killed others who
read the Bible.
And even today, people who read the Bible
say a lot of evil things about other
people who read the Bible.
But when you begin the day with God,
that means when you wake up, before you
got out of bed, you open your heart
to God.
God is your first thought when you wake
up.
That's the way God meant us to live.
In the beginning of everything in my life,
it must be God.
When I seek to build a dwelling place
for God, when Moses began to build a
dwelling place for God, we saw that expression
in our last study, about 18 times, it
comes in chapter 39 and 40, just as
the Lord commanded Moses.
Now, I don't know whether you've seen a
picture of the tabernacle, but it's one of
the most unimpressive buildings you can ever think
of.
It doesn't even look like a proper tent.
And Moses, who was trained in the academies
of Egypt, where they used to build pyramids,
which are the wonders of the world in
those days.
Even today, people wonder how they managed to
put all those stones together, that you can
hardly slip a blade through them.
How did they get them so smooth?
You know, if Moses was the unbroken man
that he was at the age of 40,
and God had given him this pattern of
the tabernacle, he'd have said, just leave it
to me, God, I'll do a much better
job than what you've described here.
I have studied construction in the academies of
Egypt, just leave it to me, I'll make
a grand thing for you.
And he would have.
The only thing that would have been missing
would be the glory of God.
It wouldn't have come down upon it.
Because it would have been built according to
the wisdom of Egypt.
See, this is the trouble with a lot
of churches today.
They are built according to the wisdom of
Egypt.
Where man follows the principle of the business
world, tries to spread the gospel just like
Coca-Cola salesmen spread Coca-Cola, and the
end result is the glory of God is
missing.
You have grand, impressive structures and statistics and
annual reports and everything else.
The only thing missing is the glory of
God.
Whereas, by the time he was 80, God
had done such a work in Moses of
breaking him thoroughly that he didn't even think
of suggesting to God any modifications or changes
to that very simple tabernacle.
He did it exactly like the Lord told
him.
I remember reading a poem many years ago,
more than 30 years ago, as a young
man that challenged me, where the Lord says
how he's looking all over the earth for
someone who will listen to him.
He says, I'm looking for one who will
wait and watch for my beckoning hand and
my eye, who will work in my manner
the work I give and the work I
give not pass by.
And oh, the joy that is brought to
me, says the Lord, when one such as
this I can find, a man who will
do all my will, who is set to
study his master's mind.
That's what God's looking for.
He's not looking for clever people.
That's why he chose fishermen, who would not
modify his plan.
And when he did choose Moses, he had
to take him for 40 years in the
wilderness to thrash out all that wisdom of
Egypt from his system.
And he found the best way to thrash
it out was make him look after sheep,
make him live with his father-in-law
for 40 years.
Boy, that can teach you a lot of
things.
And the end result was he was thoroughly
broken.
He would not modify anything that God told
him.
It's amazing with what God can do to
a broken man.
The trouble in Christendom today is we have
unbroken people trying to do the work of
God.
People who have who have a lot of
knowledge, who've gone to the equivalent of the
Egyptian academies that Moses went to, Bible schools,
seminaries, all types of things, but they're not
broken.
They feel they can modify God's plan for
bringing up their children, for building the church.
They read what the psychologists of the 20th
century have to say, rather than what the
book of Proverbs has to say about bringing
up children.
They read what church growth movement scholars have
to say, rather than what the Bible says
about how churches are to be built.
And no wonder there's confusion.
I'm not surprised.
That's God's judgment on people who are unbroken.
There will be confusion.
There will be chaos.
Because a man has to reap what he
has sown.
You can't expect to sow rotten seed and
get a good harvest.
So, we need to see the way God
has shown it in Scripture.
And I believe one of the most important
things when we come to build God's dwelling
place is to say, is to recognize that
we have to do it God's way.
And to do it God's way, I have
to give up my own way.
And the first thing I need to take
care of is the foundation.
Before I get busy all doing God's work,
I say, don't do God's work, just hang
on.
A lot of people today are being urged
to build a third story.
Well, I'm all for building the third story.
But I've seen enough people running around trying
to build a third story and the whole
thing collapses.
After so many years, because they don't have
a foundation, they don't have a first story,
and they don't have a second story.
How in the world can you build a
third story?
How in the world can you do God's
work and build a church when you don't
have a foundation and you don't have the
foundation and you're not absolutely sure of God's
perfect love for you?
You haven't got to walk with God, you
don't have a home, and you're trying to
build a church.
I say, brother, forget it.
Go and do something else.
If you want to do God's work, do
it like Moses did, exactly according to God's
way.
Let God thrash out the wisdom of Egypt
out of your brain.
The apostles never had any of that because
they came straight from secular work into full
-time Christian work.
Fortunately, they didn't go through some Bible school
or something like that and get some empty
degree before they started serving the Lord.
That was their salvation.
The only man you read of in the
Bible who went through a Bible school was
Paul.
He had spent three years with Gamaliel before
his conversion, got a degree from there, and
therefore, if you read in Galatians 1, that
God sent him to Arabia for three years
to thrash out all that chaff from his
head and say, okay, you got rid of
all that chaff, now come, I'll serve you.
You can serve me.
Peter didn't need that three years in Arabia
because he had not been to Gamaliel's school.
Do you see God's way?
God places no value on all this human
education.
He's got another system of education which is
primarily to break us and to teach us
obedience, to do things exactly as He says,
to say, not my will but thine be
done, to recognize His love for us, to
put Him in the beginning in everything, to
seek His will about a move, to seek
His glory in all things, to seek His
purposes and not our own gain.
And when God finds a man like that
who's willing to do that all through his
life, God can do amazing things through one
man.
And if you look back over church history,
you'll find that God has very often been
able to do a lot more through one
man, like Paul, than through hundreds of other
believers.
What is the secret?
Just think if all those hundreds became like
Paul.
What a fantastic work God could have done,
even in the first century.
But, you read in the first century of
backslidden people, of elders, for example, in Sardis,
who have a name that they're alive but
they're dead.
Laodicean elders who are wretched and miserable and
poor and blind and naked and still think
they're very spiritual.
Why was that?
They were not broken.
We find Christendom in exactly the same state
today.
We find Christian leaders who are running after
money, who are immoral, impure, and producing a
bunch of people who know how to say
the right things and sway to the right
music and clap their hands and raise their
hands, but who are not spiritual, and who
can't build a dwelling place for God.
That's the tragedy today.
And people are moved by all that they
see of crowds.
God is not.
God looks for a pure dwelling place.
He doesn't want a big bush, but he
wants a bush that is completely on fire,
controlled by the Holy Spirit in every single
part of it.
You know, when that bush was on fire,
no germ or bacteria would ever live in
that bush.
It was on fire.
And that's how it is when God sets
a man on fire or a house on
fire, a home, I mean, a Christian home,
or a church.
The fundamental thing there is purity.
Fire is used to purify.
And that's the picture we see in God's
first dwelling place.
So, we saw something about the foundation, God's
perfect love for us.
Now we want to go on from there
and think of the first story that we're
building on that foundation.
Before we can build our home, before we
can build God's house, we have to allow
God to do a work in our own
heart.
That's very important.
Because the heart is the channel through which
the river from heaven is going to flow
to a needy world.
See, God's method of ministry is not to
stuff my head with a whole lot of
knowledge and then I stand before people and
vomit it out.
A lot of preaching is like that.
Some person, he's got to Sunday morning, so
he sits down on Saturday and got all
his books and tapes and everything and stuffs
his head with knowledge and prepares a very
impressive intellectual sermon and stands up on Sunday
morning and vomits it out before people.
And those poor people have to eat that
vomit.
It is that.
It's not God's word.
It's just man's opinion, very cleverly presented.
And how much do you think children are
going to grow if they got to eat
vomit every day?
That's the reason why many Christians don't grow.
They're not getting solid food because the channel
is impure.
Jesus said, when you're filled with the Holy
Spirit, rivers of living water will flow out
from your innermost being.
When you go to Revelation chapter 22, you
find that that river starts in the throne
of God.
John says, I saw a river flowing from
the throne of God in the land.
That's the Holy Spirit flowing from the Father
and the Son.
But it's looking for a channel through which
to flow.
For 2,000 years, the Holy Spirit's been
on earth looking for channels wherever possible.
You know how rivers are?
You see how rivers have cut through rocks
and made a channel in different parts of
the world?
The Holy Spirit's like that, always wherever He
can find someone who will open up to
Him.
He doesn't force.
He seeks to find a way so that
He can flow to other needy people in
the world.
But that channel has to be clean.
Otherwise, what flows out is something of God
and a lot of myself.
That's why the Bible says, even when a
man prophesies, you have to judge it, whether
it's from God or not.
And I believe one of the biggest mistakes
in the charismatic movement is that people blindly
swallow prophecies without judging whether it's from God
or not.
And a lot of people get led astray.
And if they make a mess of their
lives, they deserve to become a mess because
they did not listen to God's Word.
They listened to a man.
And if you listen to a man rather
than to God, you deserve to have a
mess in your life.
Sure.
Who told you, a creature of God, to
listen to a man when God has given
you His Word?
If you were some ignorant barbarian who did
not have the Bible in your language, I
can understand.
You can be forgiven.
But you had a Bible in your own
language and you ignored that and listened to
what some arrogant man got up and said,
thus said the Lord.
You deserve it, brother, sister.
I'm sorry to say it.
You deserve it for dishonoring God and exalting
a man to that position which God should
have in your life.
The best you can do now is repent
and God can sort out that problem.
But you have to put God in the
beginning in your life if you want everything
sorted out.
What flows through men, through the best of
men, is polluted to some extent by that
man's personality.
And that's why if we want to do
God's work, we have to first cleanse our
own heart.
Very, very important.
But coming back to prophecy.
I believe prophecy is like when a man
gives a prophecy, it's like somebody giving me
a banana to eat.
What do you do when you get a
banana?
Monkeys eat it as it is, but we
peel it.
Because we know there's a skin there.
And when a man prophesies, I've seen sometimes
the skin is so thick that I have
to peel off most of it, 99%
of it.
There's about 1% of God in it.
And that's all I take.
I don't eat the skin.
I'm not a monkey.
I throw the skin away.
The more mature and the more godly that
man is, the thinner the skin.
And I've seen bananas with very thin skin.
Plenty of matter inside.
And I've heard prophecies like that.
But there's very little of the man.
It's almost entirely of God.
But you must judge that.
Even when the Apostle Paul got up in
Berea to speak.
You know what it is?
Notice this verse in Acts chapter 17.
Acts of the Apostles chapter 17, it says
in verse 10, the brethren sent Paul and
Silas by night to Berea.
And the people in Berea were more noble
-minded than those in Thessalonica.
Verse 11, because why does the Holy Spirit
call them noble-minded?
Because they received the word with great eagerness.
They paid attention in the meeting.
They were listening to what Paul was saying.
Very carefully paying attention to every word he
was saying.
And then, they didn't accept it.
Even though it was the great Apostle Paul
speaking.
They went home, examined the Scriptures daily, compared
what Paul was saying with the Scriptures, to
see whether these things were so.
And therefore, verse 12, they believed.
Why did they believe?
After comparing what this great Apostle Paul said
with the Scriptures.
And if you have that habit, you'll be
saved from deception.
You'll be saved from all deception.
They listened to Paul, and they said, well,
praise the Lord, brother Paul, it was good
to hear you, but we'd like to check
up on the Scriptures to see whether what
you say is right.
I know you're a great Apostle and all
that, but we'd still like to check with
the Scriptures.
And Paul didn't get offended with that.
He was delighted.
Hey, these are the type of people I
want.
These are the type of people with whom
we can really do something solid.
Because they don't even accept what I say.
They check with the Scriptures.
That means they won't accept what any preacher
to this place preaches before comparing it with
Scripture.
And that'll be their salvation.
And have you noticed there is no letter
to the Bereans in the Scriptures?
Why?
Why is there letters to the Corinthians correcting
the wrong teachings there?
Letters to the Galatians correcting the wrong teachings
there?
Letters to the Thessalonians correcting the wrong teachings
there?
But no letter to the Bereans.
Because there was no wrong teaching.
There cannot be a wrong teaching where people
refuse to accept any preacher without comparing what
he says with the Scriptures.
I wish we had more Bereans today.
Real Bereans.
Not just to give that name to that
church.
But real Bereans who follow the Scriptures.
Exactly.
So that's the way we can be protected
from a lot of false prophecy these days.
That's why I say, if you want to
serve the Lord, it's important that your heart
is clean.
We have to cleanse ourselves.
There are two types of cleansing the Bible
speaks of in the New Testament.
One is the cleansing that God does for
us.
And the other is the cleansing that we
have to do.
There are two sides of the same coin.
And if you've got only one side, a
coin printed only on one side, or a
currency note printed on only one side, you've
got a counterfeit.
Throw it away.
If you've got a real currency note, it'll
be printed on both sides.
And the cleansing the Bible speaks of is
God cleansing us, and you cleansing yourself.
Now, most Christians have got a currency note,
a gospel, where only God does the cleansing.
The other side is blank.
I say it's a counterfeit.
However right the other side may be, it's
still a counterfeit, because one side is blank.
How many of you would accept a currency
note printed only on one side?
Why have you accepted a gospel printed only
on one side?
Because you have not carefully studied the Scriptures.
Let me show you.
1 John 1, verse 7 and 9.
It's very simple.
Even a child can explain this and understand
it.
Who does the cleansing here?
That's my question.
It's very simple.
Very simple answer.
1 John 1 7.
If you walk in the light, as He's
in the light, we have fellowship with one
another.
In the blood of Jesus His Son cleanses
us from all sin.
My question is who does the cleansing?
God or me?
Who?
There's no catch in the question.
Very simple.
God.
Who cleanses you from all sin?
The blood of Jesus His Son cleanses you
from all sin.
That's God doing it.
You only walk in the light.
That's all.
Verse 9.
Who does the cleansing?
If we confess our sins, He's faithful and
righteous, forgive us our sins, cleanses us from
all unrighteousness.
Who does the cleansing?
God.
What was my part?
I confess my sin.
There's no way I can cleanse my past
guilt.
A thousand good works won't do it.
I have to let God do it.
My part is only to confess my sin
and say, Lord, I'm sorry.
This is what I did.
I repent.
I turn from it.
He cleanses thoroughly.
Perfectly.
There's no guilt concerning my past life.
I need to know this cleansing.
I need to know not only that I'm
cleansed, I also need to know that He
does not remember my sin anymore.
You know, a lot of us still remember
that thing we did last year or that
thing we did two years ago and it's
there.
You know who's reminding you?
That's the devil.
Without a doubt, if you've confessed it.
If you have not confessed it, ever, then
it's probably the Holy Spirit reminding you.
But if you have confessed it, even once,
you don't need to confess it a second
time because it's cleansed.
But you say, oh, but it was a
terrible sin.
Is there a different method of confessing terrible
sins and less terrible sins?
I don't see it in Scripture.
It just says if we confess our sins.
Just by the way, all sin is terrible.
Let me mention that to you.
In God's eyes, it may not be terrible
in your eyes, but all sin is terrible.
And if you confess your sins, you've repented
of it, to the best of your knowledge,
you've said it right with God and man,
it's cleansed.
Not only cleansed, it says in Hebrews 8
.12, the Lord says, I will not remember
their sins anymore.
Now we need to understand this verse.
I remember the sins I did 40 years
ago.
Don't you?
Don't you remember what sins you did last
year?
Or 10 years ago?
And is it possible that God does not
remember what I can remember?
It's not that God says to me, well,
I don't know what you did 20 years
ago.
He doesn't say that.
That would be a lie.
Because God knows very well what I did
20 years ago.
He does not say, I will forget.
It's very important to understand this.
God does not say, I will forget.
He says, I will not remember.
Which means, I choose not to remember.
It's a choice.
God says, I have chosen not to remember
what you did in the past.
Because it's under the blood of my son,
it's gone.
And therefore, when God looks at me today,
he does not remember a single thing against
me that I did in all my life.
Because the blood of Jesus cleansed me.
That's the meaning of being justified.
To be justified means, just as if I'd
never sinned.
A simple meaning of justified.
Just as if I'd never sinned.
Because God does not remember my past.
It's very, very important to have this assurance
if you want to serve the Lord.
Not only concerning sins I did ten years
ago, but sins I did this morning.
How long does it take for the blood
to cleanse us?
Is there a time gap?
No.
God's word acts immediately.
When God said, let thy be light, what
happened?
What do you think happened?
Did about ten hours pass before something happened?
I don't think so.
When God said, let the trees come up
out of the earth, what do you think
happened?
Immediate.
Boy, I would like to see that, how
it happened.
Straight away the trees came up.
It wasn't a slow...
No, there was nothing slow.
When God says something, it was like that.
And when God cleanses us from sin, it's
exactly like that.
It's not a ten-hour process.
It's immediate.
If you have confessed your sin, He's cleansed
you.
If you haven't confessed, He's not cleansed you.
That's all there is to it.
And sin must be confessed in the circle
in which it is committed.
If I sinned only against God, I confess
only to God.
Like thoughts, attitudes, I confess only to God.
If I've sinned against you as well, like
shouted at you or hurt you or cheated
you, I confess to God and I set
it right with you also.
Blood cleanses me.
It's God.
Why do I need to set it right
with you?
Because that is the proof of my repentance.
How do I know I've repented if I
don't come and apologize to you?
There's no proof that I've repented.
How do you know Zacchaeus repented?
Because he said, I'll go back and give
all that I've stolen wrongfully.
And Jesus said, Ah!
Salvation has then come.
Salvation didn't come till Zacchaeus decided to do
that.
But once he did that, it came immediately,
even though it may have taken five years
for him to go and return all that
money.
The moment you take a decision, Jesus says,
Salvation has come.
You need to believe God is true.
The blood has cleansed me.
The mighty power of the blood of Jesus
is such that my entire life has been
put under the blood and I stand before
God.
Imagine how you'd feel if you had never
sinned in your whole life.
Can you picture that?
Just imagine that from the day you were
born till today, you never committed one single
sin in thought, or word, or deed, or
attitude, or motive.
Boy, you'd have such tremendous confidence to come
before God.
Well, that is the confidence I have.
Because that's what the blood did with my
past life.
Now, if you don't believe that the blood
of Jesus Christ has done that with your
past life, you're actually dishonoring God.
You think that your sin is greater than
the power of His blood.
That's the greatest insult you can give to
God.
To think that your sin is so much
greater.
Ah, yeah, the little temper you lost and
all the blood can cleanse.
But that terrible thing you did last year,
oh, well, that I don't know whether the
blood can cleanse me.
Well, according to your faith, be it unto
you.
The blood will not cleanse you.
Because you don't believe it.
You live with the torment of that day
after day, year after year, just because you
don't believe.
But if you believe, the blood of Jesus
cleanses you from all sin.
And He does not remember your iniquities anymore.
You know, I have a little theory.
I think, you know, haven't you met believers
who are always so eager to rake up
somebody else's sin?
Or always glad to expose other people's weaknesses
and failures and tell you stories about the
evil things that other people did.
I mean, they rarely talk about the good
things other people did.
But they have a tremendous memory for all
the evil things that other people have done.
And they want to go around from house
to house telling people, this person did this,
and that person said this, and this person
did this.
I have a theory.
They rake up the past in other people
because they are not completely sure that God
has blotted out their own past.
But when a person thinks, how will you
feel?
How do you think about this?
Think of the evil, maybe immoral things that
you did in your life, that God has
covered up so beautifully, that not even your
best friends know about it.
Isn't that good of God?
Isn't it so good of God that all
the stupid things you did in your life,
He's covered up?
Can't you be good to other people like
God's been good to you?
That's how we should be.
Love covers a multitude of sin.
When a man is justified by the blood
of Jesus Christ, he's so grateful that God
has covered his entire past that he's not
interested in exposing anybody else's sin.
If you are interested in exposing somebody else's
sin, I would say there's something wrong in
your relationship with God.
You probably haven't got your past covered up.
You need to come before God and repent
and believe the blood of Jesus.
God says, I will not remember your sins
anymore.
It's a wonderful position to be in.
It gives me such authority over Satan that
when I confront Satan in a demon possessed
person or in a situation where Satan has
entrenched himself, I have authority over him.
I have authority over him because I'm standing
there as a sinless man.
A sinless man?
That's right.
A sinless man confronting Satan.
If there was sin in my life, I
wouldn't have that authority.
How did I become sinless?
Because of the blood of Jesus Christ.
You know what the Bible says in Revelation
12, 11?
They overcame Satan by the blood of the
Lamb.
Not by their shouting and yelling.
By the blood of the Lamb.
That's what gives us authority.
A heart that is clean.
Very important.
We are building the first story here of
God's dwelling place.
A heart that's totally cleansed, justified, declared righteous,
and therefore I can lift up my head
with boldness.
You know the difference between being forgiven and
being justified?
A lot of believers don't know.
And one of the best illustrations I could
use is this.
Supposing I'm taken to court on 101 charges
of all types of crimes I've committed, and
the judge carefully examines all of them, and
the prosecution has proved every last one of
them, and I'm guilty, but the judge in
great mercy says, You're forgiven.
You can go free.
I'm happy.
And as I walk out of the courtroom
and all the town has gathered to see
what punishment they gave for me, I say,
I've been forgiven, but I'm a criminal.
Forgiven.
I walk with my head hanging down, deeply
grateful for being forgiven, but deeply aware that
I'm a crook and a cheat and a
criminal who's been forgiven.
And every time I walk through the town,
I walk with my head down because everybody
around me knows this is the forgiven criminal.
That's forgiveness.
I'm happy.
I'm not in jail.
I've been forgiven.
Now let me describe being justified.
Justified, back to the courtroom again, and now
here I'm being charged with all those crimes,
and the judge examines everything and says, I
don't find any substance in any of these
charges.
This is just a pack of lies.
This man's not guilty of any of these
things.
He is a righteous man.
Again I walk out of the courtroom, again
happy, but this time my head is lifted
up.
I'm not walking with my head hanging down.
I've got nothing to be ashamed of.
I was accused of 101 things, none of
which were true.
I walked through that town for the rest
of my life with my head lifted up.
In both cases, I'm free, but in one
case I have a confidence and a boldness
which I didn't have in the previous case.
That's the difference between justified and forgiven.
I've met multitudes of believers.
Most of them are forgiven.
They don't believe they're justified.
They're so unsure when they come to God,
they don't know whether God will listen to
them.
They're so scared of the devil.
They're so scared that somebody will do black
magic on them.
I met a Pentecostal pastor once, a Pentecostal
pastor, a man who was supposed to believe
in the baptism of the Holy Spirit.
And he said, he said, Brother Zach, I
was paralyzed for 8-9 months.
I said, what happened?
He said, oh, the neighbors did some witchcraft
on me and I was down there in
bed and I was struggling.
I said, where was Jesus all those 8
-9 months?
What was he doing?
I'm amazed that the devil could touch a
person who's supposed to be a child of
God.
The devil's got no right to touch us.
Absolutely not.
You know, there are people who spin all
types of theories which are not in Scripture.
They say you've got to shout and yell
at the demons otherwise they won't go.
It's a lot of rubbish.
I never see Jesus shouting or yelling at
a demon any time.
He just spoke quietly, a word of authority.
I remember once whispering and 30 feet away
the demon left a person.
The person in the front row didn't hear
me.
Yeah.
And the other thing they say is, oh,
be careful when you cast out demons from
people that there are no children around.
Don't do it in your home.
I've cast out demons in my home with
the children all around.
Nothing happens.
How in the world can the devil do
that?
I find believers are so scared of the
devil.
You know why?
They're forgiven.
They don't believe they're justified.
They don't believe they stand as sinless people
before sin.
Why?
Because they don't believe in the blood of
Jesus Christ.
They don't believe what the devil, they don't
believe what the Bible says.
They believe what the devil says about the
blood rather than what the Bible says about
the blood.
What can God do?
God can't do anything for somebody who will
not believe his plain word.
It's so important if you want to build
this first story strong that you recognize what
the blood of Jesus Christ has done for
you.
The confidence it gives you before God and
the boldness it gives you before Satan.
Both are equally important.
That when I go to God, I go
to him as my father.
I'm going to my dad.
You know in the Old Testament they couldn't
go to God like that.
You look at the Old Testament and nobody
calls God father.
It's oh Lord God, great and terrible God,
almighty God and all those words, that's all
they called him.
But, Jesus said when you pray, say father.
Our father, who art in heaven.
And you notice that difference between the Old
Testament and the New Testament and the Old
Testament, nobody could call God father because nobody
was born again.
They could not be born again.
They could not become children of God.
They were God's people, but not God's children.
To illustrate that, it would be like some
managing director of a huge factory.
You know there are some people who work
in a factory for 40 years and never
see the managing director even once.
They don't even know what he looks like.
There's some great figure up there who lives
in his air-conditioned office who runs this
whole show.
Well I'm a small little person working in
this factory.
That's how a lot of Christians live before
God.
He can say I'm an employee of this
factory, but I don't know who the managing
director is.
He's there, he provides, he gives me my
salary, he takes care of my needs, but
I don't know who he is.
He's a kind man.
But that managing, and this man can never
dream of going into the managing director's office
or even if he does go for an
interview, he has to go through the proper
channel and get permission from so many people
before he ever gets in.
But what about the child of that managing
director?
He doesn't go through any secretary or anything,
he just walks into his dad's office and
goes and sits in his father's lap.
That's our position in the New Covenant.
Do you recognize that?
Do you recognize that you can go and
sit in God's lap and say, Dad, I'd
like to tell you something.
You can tell him everything that you told
your earthly father as a little boy or
girl.
That's the relationship God wants you to have
with him.
You can tell him your little problems.
You can tell him your little sorrows.
Yeah.
It's exactly like a child with his father.
See, if you don't have that type of
relationship with God, it's because you're being plagued
by the devil, by the memory of your
past sin.
It's so important to believe the power, the
mighty power of the blood of Jesus Christ.
The tremendous love of God that makes you
secure in God.
But that's one side of cleansing.
The blood of Jesus cleansed me, justified me,
declared me righteous before God.
Now there's another side to this cleansing of
my heart.
And that is, let me show you this
verse.
In 2 Corinthians in chapter 7.
This is the other side of the currency
note.
2 Corinthians 7.1 Having these promises, what
are these promises?
Chapter 6, verse 17.
Therefore come out from among their midst and
be separate, says the Lord.
Do not touch what is unclean, and I'll
welcome you.
I'll be a father to you, and you
shall be sons and daughters to me, says
the Lord Almighty.
God says, I want to walk among you.
Verse 16.
I want to dwell in your midst.
We're talking about God's dwelling place.
Last part of verse 16.
I'll dwell in them.
I'll walk with them.
I'll be their God.
They'll be my people.
I'll be a father to you.
Verse 18.
You shall be my sons and daughters.
Boy, me, being a son and daughter of
God.
God dwelling with me.
God walking with me.
What fantastic promises.
But the Lord says, come out from their
midst, chapter 6, verse 17, and be separate
and don't touch what is unclean.
Don't have anything, any contact with what is
unclean.
Then I will do all this for you.
Therefore, chapter 7, verse 1.
Since we have these wonderful promises, that God
will dwell with us.
God will walk with us.
We'll be His people.
We are going to be His sons and
daughters.
And He'll be a father to us.
And the only condition is, separate yourself from
what is unclean.
That's the only condition.
Therefore, He says, let us cleanse ourselves from
all defilement, all filthiness of flesh and spirit,
perfecting holiness in the fear of God.
Okay, now my question is, who does the
cleansing here?
Who?
We.
This is not God.
This is, let us cleanse ourselves.
The other was God cleansing me in the
blood of Jesus from my guilt of my
past life.
Justifying me, blotting out my past.
This is me cleansing myself.
What does that mean?
I get rid of that filthy magazine lying
in my house.
I stop watching that program on television, which
has got such a lot of pollution in
it.
Moral pollution.
Ah, it's got some interesting things in it,
but I'm willing to sacrifice that because I
want to keep my mind pure.
You know, nobody wants to poison another person
who will give pure poison.
I hope you know that.
No sensible person who wants to poison somebody
else will give a glass of poison.
He'll give him a glass of milk with
poison in it.
And when the devil wants to pollute people's
minds, he's not going to give pure pornography.
He's gonna, I mean, he gives that to
some people who want that, who are sufficiently
corrupted.
But since most people are not that corrupted,
he says, well, if I give them total
pornography, they won't accept it.
But if I give it to them in
small doses, I can gradually, you know, make
them more and more corrupt and finally destroy
them.
I heard of an experiment that somebody did
with frogs.
They put a frog in a bowl of
cold water and raised the temperature very gradually.
Raised it a little bit and left it
at that temperature for some time till the
frog got acclimatized to it.
And then after a little while, raised it
up a little more and kept it that,
slowly, very slowly, degree by degree and finally
killed the frog.
It never jumped out.
Because at each stage, it was sort of
getting acclimatized to this heat.
But, if you had put that frog straight
away into boiling water, it would have jumped
out immediately.
You see the lesson there, of what the
devil has done to God's people.
If he straight away gave them something terribly
wicked and polluted, they'd throw it away.
But he's acclimatized them.
He's acclimatizing today's children with Harry Potter books
and Dungeons and Dragons games and all types
of things dealing with witchcraft, so that from
childhood they'll think of witchcraft as something normal.
And they'll grow up and expose themselves to
demons.
This is supposed to be normal.
And there are so many Christian parents who
don't seem to know what's happening to their
own children.
It's the same story of the frog.
Kill it gradually.
At each stage, get it acclimatized to more,
a higher temperature.
And that's how Christians today are being acclimatized
through videotapes, movies, television, to greater degrees of
impurity, pollution, foul language.
You understand what cleansing yourself means?
Don't ask God to cleanse you.
Don't ask God to get rid of all
these filthy programs.
He's not going to do it.
Let us cleanse ourselves.
We have to do it.
Let us cleanse ourselves in our speech.
Not just in that we don't use foul
language, but that we learn to be kind
in our speech, that we get rid of
rudeness, impoliteness, that we speak courteously, even to
people who are way below us in social
level, beggars on the street.
Okay?
We may not for various reasons want to
help them or do anything for them, but
let's speak kind.
Why should we be rude to anybody?
If at all you speak, speak kindly.
Otherwise, don't speak.
Just move on.
But if you speak, never speak rudely to
anyone.
That is cleansing ourselves in our speech.
Let's cleanse ourselves in our financial transactions.
You see, it's not you saying, Oh God,
please purify my speech.
No.
You can ask God to cleanse you from
the guilt of your past life.
That's okay.
But when it comes to purifying your speech,
it says you cleanse yourself.
Have you read this verse in Ephesians?
In chapter 4, verse 31, verse 29 first,
let no unwholesome word or rotten word, the
literal meaning is rotten.
Rotten means it's corrupt and decayed, stinking like
rotten food.
Just like you would not put rotten food
into your mouth, don't let rotten words come
out of your mouth.
Exactly the same way.
How much rotten food would you put into
your mouth?
5%?
2%?
1%?
Or 0?
How much rotten food do you want to
put into your mouth?
I'm sure the answer is 0.
How many decayed words do you want to
come out of your mouth?
It must be 0.
Your desire must be that your speech is
as pure as the food you eat.
That's the minimum.
Like I won't put any bad food into
my mouth, I don't want any bad words
to come out of my mouth.
Let no rotten word come out of your
mouth, but only what is good, which edifies
according to the need of the moment.
That means don't say too much.
We need to listen to the Holy Spirit.
Some people just don't know how to stop
talking once they open their mouth.
They're so full of themselves.
I read a little couplet once which said,
Lord, fill my mouth with worthwhile stuff and
nudge me when I've said enough.
We really need that nudging.
The Holy Spirit saying, okay, it's time for
you to stop now.
Give the other fellows a chance to talk.
There are ten other people sitting in the
room and you're not the only one.
There's a lot of unchrist-likeness in the
many Christians.
Only that which is good for the need
of the moment, that it may give grace
to those who hear.
You know, we all have bad habits which
are partly because of our feeling that we
are so important.
You have it and I have it.
And we have to cleanse ourselves from it.
And it doesn't go overnight.
Some of these bad habits that we've acquired
over years, it doesn't go overnight.
And we have to battle with it.
We have to battle with it and say,
God, I've got to get rid of that.
I've got to get rid of that.
Work on it.
Cleanse yourself.
And it says here in verse 31, verse
30 says, don't grieve the Holy Spirit.
In other words, our words can grieve the
Holy Spirit.
Let's get rid of all bitterness, verse 31,
all wrath, all anger, all clamor, all slander,
along with all malice.
Who's got to do that?
We are the Holy Spirit.
We've got to do it.
It's no use saying, Lord, get rid of
all the bitterness from my life.
And it says, you've got to do it.
I can't ask God to do what I'm
supposed to do.
I can ask God to do what He's
supposed to do, which is cleanse me from
the guilt of my past life.
But when it comes to cleansing myself from
this corruption and pollution in my mind, I
have to cleanse myself.
I have to say, Lord, give me power.
And I want to do it.
Through this spirit, I put to death the
deeds of the body.
Yeah, it's true.
It's through the Holy Spirit.
Let me show you Romans 8, 13.
That beautiful balance that we see in Romans
8, 13.
Scripture is so balanced.
That's what I love about it.
And if you followed Scripture exactly, you'd be
perfectly balanced.
Romans 8, 13 says, the last part of
that verse, by the Spirit, you put to
death the deeds of the body, you will
live.
Now my question here is, who is the
one who has to put to death the
deeds of the body?
Who?
Us.
Not the Holy Spirit.
You do it with the power of the
Holy Spirit.
That's right.
In other words, God gives you the power
and says, now you do it.
I've got to do it.
Because that's the way God finds out whether
I want to do it or not.
Do I really want to get rid of
all anger from my life?
Do I really want to get rid of
all gossiping and slandering in my life?
Or do I just relish it?
Well, if you relish it, God's not going
to force you to give it up.
Let us cleanse ourselves.
Another area we need to cleanse ourselves is
in the area of our financial transactions.
There's a lot of unrighteousness.
There was a wise old man who lived
a few hundred years before Christ who wrote
a book called Ecclesiasticus.
It's called The Wisdom of Sirach.
It's in the Apocrypha.
It's not the Bible.
It's not part of the Bible.
The Roman Catholics have it in their Bible,
but it's not inspired Scripture.
But, though it's not inspired Scripture, that particular
book has got a lot of wisdom in
it.
You know, it's like reading Tozer or someone
like that.
It's not inspired Scripture.
Sirach.
And one of the things he said was,
there is all the sin is very close.
I don't remember his exact words.
Sin is very nearby, he says, in all
buying and selling.
And if we examine our life, we find
that we buy and sell a lot of
things.
Sin is very close.
If I'm not careful, in my buying and
selling, I can commit sin.
See, I'll give you an example.
When you sell something secondhand, you've got something
in your house that you want to sell.
Say a tape recorder.
Okay, that's fine.
But, when you sell it, tell the person
why you're selling it.
Tell him this rewind button doesn't work properly.
Occasionally it works and sometimes it doesn't work.
I'd like you to know that before you
buy it.
That's honesty.
But, if you press the rewind button hoping
it'll work while this fellow's watching and selling
it, you're deceiving him.
Because you know 50% of the time
it doesn't work.
That's what I mean by sin.
You've got to tell him, listen, it doesn't
work 50% of the time, so you've
got to give me a lower price.
That's honesty.
You'll get a little less money, but you'll
retain the anointing of the Holy Spirit.
Which do you want?
A lot of cheating in buying and selling.
In everything, being honest, I remember a God
-fearing man who once said that if a
true disciple of Jesus were a merchant selling
fish, he would have one basket saying today's
fish, another basket saying yesterday's fish.
But if he's not a disciple of Jesus,
he'll have only one basket saying fish.
He's speaking the truth, it is fish.
It's not monkeys and dogs in there, it's
fish.
But he doesn't distinguish between yesterday's fish and
today's fish.
Because he wants to make a profit.
There's a lot of sin in buying and
selling.
I remember once when I went to buy
something from a shop late at night and
I came back and I discovered that the
shopkeeper had given me back more change than
I should have got.
And of course I would definitely give it
back, but I thought it's late now, I'd
probably go tomorrow morning and return it.
When the Lord spoke to me, supposing He'd
given you less change, when would you go?
Tonight or tomorrow morning?
I said, Lord, if it were less change,
I think I would go tonight itself.
And the Lord said, if He's given you
more change, go back tonight and give it.
And I did it.
These are the little things.
Let me show you another verse, 2 Timothy
2.
In a large house, verse 20, there are
gold and silver vessels, and vessels of wood
and earthenware, some vessels to honor, some vessels
to dishonor.
In God's house, which is a large house,
there are different types of vessels.
Earthenware vessels, which cardboard boxes, not very valuable.
Golden vessels.
How to transform yourself from a cardboard box
to a golden vessel?
Here's the answer.
Verse 21.
If a man cleanses himself, who is doing
the cleansing here, God or the man?
Man.
You.
If a man cleanses himself from these filthy
things, he will be a vessel for honor.
A cardboard box can become a golden vessel
in God's house.
A vessel for dishonor can become a vessel
for honor if he cleanses himself.
I know God will use other vessels also,
but He delights in using the vessels of
honor.
Cleanse yourself.
One more verse.
1 John chapter 3, verse 2.
We have this hope, the last part of
verse 2, that when He appears, we shall
be like Him.
Verse 3.
Everyone who has this hope of the second
coming of Christ.
How do you know?
If I were to ask you how many
of you have the hope of the second
coming of Christ, we'll all raise our hands.
But I ask yourself, test yourself by verse
3, whether you really have this hope or
not.
Everyone who has this hope purifies himself.
Who does the purifying?
God or He?
He.
And when does He stop purifying Himself?
When He becomes as pure as Jesus is
pure.
In other words, the proof that you got
the hope that you will be like Christ
when He comes again is that you purify
yourself now.
You cleanse yourself.
You purify yourself.
Day by day by day and you're not
satisfied till you reach Jesus standard of purity.
This is the first story of this building.
A heart that's clean.
A walk with God in the light of
cleansing ourselves.
And this is we got so much to
do in this that you have no time
to judge other people.
No time.
And to be busy bodies in other people's
matters, you got enough to do cleansing yourself.
Cleansed by God and yet cleansing ourselves.
Heavenly Father apply the truths that we've heard
today to our hearts so we can live
and walk in the light.