See, this is dictating thinking to a whole
culture of young people.
Is our robe unspotted today?
He preached another time on this, without holiness
no man shall see the Lord, and then
he spent his entire sermon telling the people
and showing them that they had no holiness
at all.
That was his object in the sermon.
He would get people who thought they'd been
Christians for 30 years suddenly crying out with
a loud voice and saying, Oh my God,
I'm undone.
I've never been saved.
Elders in the church would confess of sins.
You're sitting in a classroom and cheating.
Why do you break out in a sweat?
Why does your heart beat faster?
And when the teacher moves, you know you're
caught and your face gets what?
Red.
And your ears tingle.
What's doing that?
Conscience.
Conscience is saying, This is wrong.
This is wrong.
And you're reacting to it.
What's he going to do to you?
He finds you in the state of your
heart that you're in now.
He doesn't care about outward appearances at all.
I'm talking about the state of your heart.
What is that sin that you've been clinging
to?
What is it, people?
What is that thing that you once had
a white robe and it's spotted?
There's something on it.
God can see it.
The devil can see it.
Humans around you can't.
It's a secret sin.
Nobody even knows, or hardly anybody, maybe a
couple of family members know about it.
You don't show it to anybody.
You walk in these doors and you're faking
it all day.
Are you a Christian?
You're going to survive judgment day in front
of a judge like that?
Really?
You think you are?
You think you are.
What would your sin do to you in
that day?
This is how much God hates sin.
He sent Jesus to go through the passion
to get rid of it.
That's how much he cannot stand sin.
He allowed his precious lamb to be slaughtered,
to be whipped to an inch of his
life, to have the flesh torn off his
back, to have crown of thorns stuffed on
his head.
Pain unbearable.
That's how much God hates sin.
If he finds it in you, he will
put you as far from himself as he
can.
Are you hearing his voice calling you, young
man, to cut off the right hand of
lust, indulged in the chambers of your mind
with magazines and books that you've hid from
mom and dad and perhaps wife?
You women, mental fantasies, nurtured by your television
set and your daytime soaps with their sordid,
cauldry bile and filthy, adulterous lace block.
Are you taking every step necessary to stop
feeding your lust or you just occasionally have
a little whimper in the closet when your
conscience gets so active you can't live with
it and you whimper and cry and ask
God for a little help and then you
go right back with your hand and your
eyeball firmly attached.
Oh yes, once in a while you take
a dull paring knife and scratch your hand
and occasionally you scratch around your eyeball that
you haven't begun to cut off and pluck
out.
You better listen to the words of Jesus.
Not everyone who says Lord, Lord shall enter,
but he that does the will of my
father in heaven.
If ye by the spirit do mortify the
deeds of the flesh, ye shall live.
The culture we live in is really not
helping us, folks.
This culture is not increasing the sensitivity of
our conscience, is it?
Oh no, no.
Watch TV, it'll desensitize you.
Go to the movies, listen to the music,
read the books.
It's just bashing your conscience.
Nobody's perfect.
This is the hypocrite's couch.
This is the believer's bed of thorns.
Nobody's perfect.
That's the hypocrite's couch.
He lies back, no serious determination to do
the will of God.
Who says nobody's perfect?
The true child of God.
No one is perfect.
It's my bed of thorns.
Wretched man that I am.
I find that when I would do good,
evil is present with me.
To will is present, but to perform I
know not.
That's the bed of thorns.
Is the imperfection of your obedience your couch
or your bed of thorns?
Now my friend, it can't be both.
It's one or the other.
And I'm asking you not knowing if I'll
ever stand in this pulpit again, you better
answer with as much honesty sitting where you
sit tonight as Christ will make you answer
in the day of judgment.
Many people who wouldn't be boldly evil in
their conversation and they wouldn't be boldly evil
in their behavior are boldly evil in their
mind.
A man who abstains from sexual sin because
he's afraid of getting caught can well be
indulging in a thousand fantasies because he thinks
nobody's going to discover the private sin.
I'll tell you who will discover it.
Your conscience and your conscience will produce shame
and guilt and fear and doubt and worry
and steal your joy.
To indulge in sins of thought is to
molest the conscience directly and nothing will damage
your conscience more than the habit of evil
thinking.
Thought sins work directly on the conscience.
He got baptized straight away.
Why?
Because you've got to deal with sin fully
and you don't muck around with things like
that because it'll kill you.
It'll kill you.
And if you don't have the full experience,
man, if you aren't repenting and getting baptized
and receiving the Holy Spirit, the whole nine
yards filled to here to overflowing with the
Spirit of God, I don't believe you'll last.
In those days, I would say they would
not even consider you to be part of
them yet.
They would say these people are inadequate under
God.
We've got to get them, you know, you
see it all the way through the book
of Acts.
From beginning to end, repent and be baptized.
You shall receive the gift of the Holy
Spirit.
Why do we cut people short today?
Why do we shortchange people?
Why do people go to our crusades and
not truly end up?
Defeating sin.
Why do 95% of people who go
forward at crusades fall away within a few
weeks?
How many Christians do you think love the
Bible more than they watch their favorite television
shows?
How many Christians do you think love the
Bible and God's Word more than they love
the TV?
We act
like Jesus.
Jesus is a friend of mine.
We act like the gospel is a kind
of Colgate commercial.
And if you, you know, we used to
have this ad in New Zealand.
And if you, if you brush your teeth
with Colgate, you get this little ring of
confidence.
And of course, you can smile forever after
that, because you've got it.
And of course, it's a fake load of
garbage.
But sadly, a lot of people walking into
our congregations are getting the same opinion of
Christianity.
That it's kind of like this fake little
commercial and everybody gets the little ding of
confidence and looks around smiling.
And it ain't really there.
It never was in half the cases.
And in a lot of cases, sadly, it
once was truly there and it's been lost.
And all that remains is the shell of
Christianity that walks into church buildings and stands
and claps and does all the routine little
parade and the little dance that we do.
In Colorado, a man out in the western
part of Mississippi, in a little rural town,
way back up the river, that had a
large plantation and many, many slaves.
Somebody came around to the slaves and said,
the Emancipation Proclamation's been signed.
They went to the owner and said, now
what does that mean?
He says, that means I can't sell you
to anybody else.
I mean that from now on, you just,
I just can't sell you.
It's utterly impossible for me to sell you.
The government said, I can't sell you.
And so, well, what does that mean?
That means you just go right ahead and
work here and you don't need to be
the least bit afraid.
You just work for me and go right
on working for me and I'll never sell
you.
I'll never sell you.
You can stay right here.
So one year went on, two years went
on.
They kept living in the slave quarters.
They kept going to the field, eating the
food, and taking the lash of the overseers.
It's going right on.
And they said, isn't this wonderful to be
emancipated?
We don't have to be so fear about
being sold.
Our families won't be broken up until you
can live right here with your daddy and
your mommy all your life.
We go right on working for the emancipated.
And so they go right out into the
fields and grovel and serve.
And they were talking about being emancipated because
they couldn't be sold to anybody else.
Then someone came along and said, what are
you doing here?
Well, we're emancipated.
We don't need to be afraid about being
sold anymore.
You don't understand what emancipation is.
You don't need to serve that man anymore.
He doesn't own you.
He not only can't sell you, but he
can't work you.
You don't have to do his dirty bidding
anymore.
You can leave here, pack your things, and
go down the road and go anywhere you
want to go.
Well, he never told us exactly what it
meant to be emancipated.
And so we've spent four years working here
when we didn't have to.
Oh, listen, I know children of God that
have been four years doing the bidding of
the world and longer than that doing the
bidding of the flesh and longer than that
being hounded and whipped by the devil.
And they never heard that Jesus Christ died
to set them free.
But oh, to think that when they turn,
they'll go right on to the north.
That's unthinkable.
And so if I speak to you and
you've had bondage to the world, it's been
gripping and pulling the Lord Jesus Christ to
set you free.
He carried you with him to the cross
so that as you went down in death,
the world would have to relinquish its hold
and couldn't follow you into death.
He carried you with him to the cross
so that as you went with into death,
the flesh couldn't hold you and govern you
anymore.
He carried you with him so that the
devil couldn't hold you anymore.
And then he brought you up on the
other side of the grave with him in
moments of life so that you could walk
in peace for he that is dead is
free from sin.
Can you go on neglecting so great salvation?
You can't.
You've got to admit you've bonded, admit you
need, admit that you've been serving when you
didn't have to serve.
And come and throw yourself at his feet
and gladly take from his nail to his
hand the deliverance that he purchased for this
world.
Because you've served him.
You've hurt him.
And you know that he died to set
you free.
Set you free.
Years ago an Englishman had gone out to
California, made his fortune in the gold field.
He wanted to go back and live with
his own people.
So he sent his money by check around
back to England and he came overland on
the Santa Fe Trail to Kansas City and
down to Missouri.
And then the Mississippian ended up in New
Orleans where he was going to take ships
to New York and from there to England.
And as a tourist in New Orleans, he
did as most tourists do.
He went down to the slave market.
Only then, in early 1850, there were still
slaves being sold.
And as he went into the market, he
saw a lot of men gathered there and
one party was put on, a young Negress,
very beautiful for her race.
And he heard the men as they were
speaking about her.
He saw two evil looking men bidding for
her quite eagerly.
And then he heard them say what they
would do with her.
And his heart just revolted against the whole
swinish thing.
And finally when they were bidding and the
bidding prices were getting very high and smaller,
he just couldn't stand it.
And so he beckoned to the auctioneer and
he said, a figure which was exactly twice
the last bid.
Utterly beyond anything that had ever been paid
for a slave in that market before.
He said, have you got the money?
And he came up and he said, yeah,
he got the money.
And so the bill of sale was made
out.
He went over to the block to take
the woman that he'd purchased.
And as she came down one step and
stood just about level with his eyes, he
had made a mouth full of stipple and
she spat right full in his face and
hissed through her fence teeth, I hate you.
He said nothing to the back of his
hand.
He went to stipple away.
Took her by the hand, walked down the
street across this intersection through the mud down
that street till he came to a little
office building.
She couldn't breathe, didn't know what it was.
He went to the desk, began to speak.
The man behind the desk began to protest.
He said, I insist it's the law.
I insist.
And finally he came back, paid some money
and got a paper.
He walked over to the woman that was
like a beast ready to spring on you.
He handed the paper out and he said,
here, here are your manumission papers.
You're free.
She still hissed, I hate you.
He said, didn't you understand?
I said, here are your manumission papers.
You are free.
She said, I know.
He said, no, you paid twice as much
for me as they've ever paid for anybody
on that block.
And you're giving me the, I don't believe
it.
He said, yes, these are your manumission papers.
And he put them in her hand and
she said, stop, mister.
Yes.
Do you mean to say that you bought
me to set me free?
He said, yes, that's why I bought you,
to set you free.
Tears came up into eyes that hadn't known
tears for a long time.
They just spilled over.
Her face softened and then she slipped down
on her hands and knees and she reached
down and put her hands around those rough
miner's boots and then laid her cheek down
the toe of one of them.
And through her tears she sobbed, oh, you
bought me to set me free.
You bought me to set me free.
You paid more than has ever been paid
before just to set me free.
And then through her tears she looked up
and said, oh, sir, all I want in
life is to be your slave.