During these first four weeks of the academic
year, we've been discussing the first principles of
the presuppositions on which we here base our
weekly studies of the explanation of reality that
Christianity gives.
And you remember that we started about four
weeks ago with the question, is there a
God?
And we concluded with Darwin, really, and Einstein,
which is a fairly good company, that the
existence of a supreme being who is personal
and intelligent is the most plausible and indeed
the only completely satisfactory explanation for our own
existence.
And for the existence of the order and
design in our universe and for the presence
of our conscience in us and our sense
of moral obligation.
And then you remember that two Sundays ago,
we studied the various human accounts of what
this creator is like.
And we saw that the accounts of men
like Buddha and Muhammad and Zoroaster are accounts
of their own personal subjective opinions of what
the creator of the universe is like.
And that there is a vast difference between
the Koran and the Buddhist scriptures or the
Hindu scriptures or Zoroaster or the Mormon scriptures
and this book here.
The other scriptures are the accounts of the
personal subjective visions of ordinary human beings like
ourselves.
There is no way of substantiating or confirming
them unless you can get into the mind
of the person himself.
But that this book is a remarkable historical
account of the actions and the words of
not only our creator but of his own
son in our time.
And they can be substantiated by confirming them
in comparison with other contemporary accounts and by
studies of archaeology and by studies of other
writers outside those that are in, for instance,
the New Testament but who refer to the
same events and the same people.
And then you remember last Sunday we discussed
really the most striking and startling phenomenon of
our world.
And that is the phenomenon of a man
who was born in 6 BC and who
said he was the only begotten son of
the creator of our world and that he
knew God before the world was created.
And you remember we examined his life and
found that it does not have the abnormality
or imbalance of a lunatic.
And it is a contradiction in semantics to
call him a great ethical teacher and a
liar.
And that there was not sufficient time for
a legend to develop after his death because
we have written accounts that circulated within 14
or 15 years after he died.
And so we were bound to conclude that
because of his power over sickness and disease
and because of his perfect humanity and a
sinless life and above all by this incredible
power over death that he expressed in his
own resurrection that when we deal with Jesus
of Nazareth we're dealing with the actual son
of the creator of our universe.
This Sunday is the pivotal point in your
own thinking and mine.
It is.
Because, loved ones, if you believe all those
things it makes not an iota of difference
to your life.
Really.
Believing all those things need make no difference
to your life.
In fact, this dear book says that even
the demons believe and shudder.
Even the demons believe all those things because
it is reality.
It is very difficult for a logical mind
faced with the intellectual evidence that we have
to reject the idea that this man Jesus
is more than human.
And that in fact he is what he
said he is.
He is the son of our maker.
But the pivotal point in your thinking is
today.
It's not what you believe that makes the
difference.
Because lots of people believe that smoking causes
lung cancer.
But as soon as they get out they
are smoking like mad.
It's not what you believe that matters at
the end of the day.
It's what you do in the light of
that belief.
And I just point out to you the
real situation.
If I said to you, I am the
son of your creator.
And my father and I were close before
you were ever made.
And I have been here on earth.
And I have left the earth.
And I came back here.
And people have seen me alive.
I am the son of the creator of
the world.
Don't you see that?
Loved ones, you know in your heart that
if you believe that with your whole being,
there will be a whole response from you
to me that will run along the lines
of, well, tell me, why am I here?
You must know it all.
Why did your father make me?
Look, my name is so and so.
This is what I'm doing here on earth.
Now, what should I be doing?
Why am I here?
What did you put me here to do?
What do you want me to do?
You know that would be your reaction.
It would certainly be mine.
If I could get one of you who
could prove to me that you were the
son of my maker, my whole response to
you would be, well, listen, tell me.
My name is Ernest O'Neill.
I've been here so long.
And I wonder, what should I do?
What should I be doing with my life?
And listen, what's the point of all this?
Listen, there are things I want to ask
you about this life and about life after
death.
Can you tell me?
In other words, loved ones, once you believe
a person to be the son of the
creator of the universe, that person becomes your
total authority in everything.
And if he doesn't, do you see that
you're being illogical?
Do you see that?
And actually, in order to run your life
your own way, you have to be illogical.
You have to say, from the evidence, this
seems to be the creator of the world,
but forget it.
I will run my life according to my
own ideas, however poor they may be.
So, I'd like to assume that some of
you, at least, are interested in knowing what
this man said about our lives.
And what he said was the most important
thing for us to do.
I just share it with you as simply
as I've been able to understand it myself.
And this man, Jesus, says to you this
morning, look at your body.
You have wrinkles, even the youngest of you
have wrinkles that you didn't have before.
Even the youngest of you probably have discovered
gray hairs.
It must be very obvious to you that
all you are is flesh.
You're born of flesh the way your grandparents
were and your great grandparents.
And you must see that that flesh is
deteriorating.
And you must see that you're not going
to live any longer, certainly, than your grandparents,
probably 70, 80 years at the most.
In fact, this morning, do you know that
millions of cells in your body have died
since you got up this morning?
Now, some have renewed, but more have died
than have been renewed or reborn.
And that's the first thing that this dear
person has told us, that all of us
here are just flesh.
That is, we're just mental life and physical
life that is not going to last beyond
70 or 80 years.
And then the second thing he says is,
you know, you won't believe that.
You see all the evidence for it, but
you don't believe it.
It's as if you're on a bus together,
a greyhound bus, that's traveling at about 80
miles an hour, and five miles on there
is a concrete wall into which you know
it's going to crash, and yet you somehow
won't believe it.
And you keep on thinking that you weren't
made to go out like a light after
70 or 80 years.
No, it can't be.
It can't be.
There's some way in which we can avoid
this.
And Jesus says, that's what you all think.
You all live as if you're never going
to end.
And yet he says, you are going to
end.
The physical and mental life that you have
is not made to last forever, and it's
going to deteriorate and die, and that's going
to be it.
And yet he says, you won't believe it.
And that's why you keep trying to parlay
the attributes you have of your physical and
mental life into some semblance of life that
goes on forever.
And you know it's right.
We do.
You know that.
I mean, deep, deep down, every one of
us here feels we should have stability.
We feel it, don't we?
We feel there must be steadiness somewhere.
I mean, we see popes come and go.
We see politicians come and go.
We see our own parents and our children
at times come and go.
But we keep on feeling, no, we weren't
made to come and go like this.
We weren't.
There must be some security or stability or
safety somewhere.
It's interesting, isn't it?
We all feel that.
When we see the old prudential rock, we
think, yeah, yeah, we were made for something
like that.
There must be, there must be some kind
of safety that we can get.
And, I mean, we spend most of our
lives, poor little slaves that we are, we
spend most of our lives trying to bring
that about, don't we?
We try to get a good education and
try to bargain that into the best job
we can possibly get.
And then we try to do something with
our salary.
You know the way we do.
We try to, we pay it out in
rent.
And then if we can get a little
extra, we start salting it into an insurance
policy.
And we try to build up the best
insurance package we can, the best life insurance,
the best fire insurance.
And then if we have a little extra,
we try to buy some stocks and shares.
And in our heart of hearts, we're trying
to somehow get beyond that fiddler on the
roof experience that most of us have.
That feeling that the slightest breeze will blow
us right off.
And so we spend most of our lives
trying to establish safety and security.
We sense that we were made for that,
don't we?
And then, of course, we're utterly cast down
and continually haunted by a hard use.
We seem to do it better than all
the rest of us.
Seem to get more money than all the
rest of us.
And yet died, you know, in loneliness.
And died as a pauper, really, in the
conditions of a pauper.
And we wonder, well, we were made for
that, but how do we get it?
And I think it's the same with our
feelings.
We feel we were made for peace.
Somehow we were made not to worry about
hitting that wall and that bus at the
end of five miles.
We somehow feel, but we're made for peace.
And so, you know, we're always trying to
get it.
We're always trying to experience peace.
And yet it's interesting, isn't it?
Peace itself bores us.
Isn't that right?
So we want peace on the one hand
and we want excitement on the other.
But we somehow feel there's some way in
which we can break away from the bonds
of this earthly existence and get into the
realm of eternity or infinity.
I think that's why we skydive and hang
glide, isn't it?
And why we go through, go down slopes
as fast as we can in skis or
go around corners as fast as we can
in motorbikes or cars.
We somehow feel we were made to burst
beyond these bonds that we feel.
And we sense that if we could just
get the atmosphere of a South Sea island,
and so we all dream of South Sea
islands or tropical shores, where you'd have the
serenity and the peace of Walden Pond.
And then on the other hand, you'd have
the wild excitement of the Arabian Nights.
And we're always trying to do that.
And that's actually why we at times use
each other to do that, don't we?
We try to get every kind of relationship
we can, every kind of experience, to somehow
produce that mixture of peace and excitement that
we feel we were made for.
And yet, it's kind of disappointing, isn't it?
I mean, soap bubble bursting your hand, you
feel that would so often symbolize our experience.
However many people we use, however many relationships
we prostitute to get the excitement and the
peace that we want, somehow we end up
in loneliness and delusion and in a desolation
and an emptiness that is an absolute contrast
with the sense of conviviality and the sense
of utter satisfaction that we feel we should
get from some deep, intimate experience.
And yet, we feel we were made for
those things.
It's the same with ourselves.
I don't know that there's one of us,
I had a terrible inferiority complex, so I
don't think inferiority complex gets you out of
this feeling.
However inferior we all feel, we all have
some of the feeling of John Milton, the
English poet, that we were born for some
great thing, or we were born to do
something that nobody else could do, or somehow
we are important.
It's interesting, you know, but every one of
us is feeling that.
You know, the next person to you is
feeling the same as you.
Boy, that was a terrible shock to me,
you know, because I thought I was the
only guy.
And we all seem to have a feeling
that, well, yeah, yeah, they're clever, they're more
intelligent than I, they're stronger, they're better looking,
but I have something that sets me apart
from them.
And usually it's nothing but that thought that
we are different from them.
But we do have that feeling.
We feel it's more than the gold watch
at the end, you know, it's more than
the name on the gravestone.
Someone, somewhere, somehow must have noticed that I've
passed this way.
Somebody, somebody.
And we feel, you know, we are in
some way significant.
There's some way in which we do go
on forever, and that's why we love that
feeling when the scientists prove to us, oh
yes, everything in the universe somehow goes on
and on forever.
We like to feel that, yeah, somehow, surely,
we can't just go out like a light
and that's it.
And yet Bing Crosby haunts us, because they
don't talk about him anymore.
And Jack Benny, you don't talk about him
anymore.
Eisenhower, once in a while.
Hard Hughes, rarely.
It's amazing how even the most famous people
seem to go out of life, and that's
it.
And so we're haunted with this feeling that
we should have more security and safety than
we actually possess, and we should have more
of the feeling of an eternal life than
we have, and we were made for something
beyond this world, and yet somehow we can't
get it.
And the more we try, the more we
become perverted, hedonistic, egotistical, domineering, manipulating monsters,
who actually become so perverted that we could
not be trusted with the power to live
eternally, even if it were given to us,
because we turn our universe over an infinity
of years into a hell.
And yet the amazing thing is, Jesus says,
Ponce de Leon searched for the fountain of
eternal life.
And your mythological history books are full of
people who searched for the elixir of life
that would maintain eternal youthfulness, because you were
actually made to live forever.
That's what Jesus says.
He says all those feelings you have reflect
reality.
You were made to live forever.
My Father did actually make you to live
forever, but not with that mental or physical
life that you have.
That will never last forever.
That itself has to be transformed by the
life that runs through my veins, Jesus says.
The life that was able to transform my
broken, wounded body on the cross into a
life and a body that could pass through
walls and cover immense distances in a short
time, you have to receive that life into
you.
And that's my Father's will.
And you all are trying to make do
with the mental or physical life you have
and trying to parley it or womp it
up to the nth degree through drugs and
through something that will take away the terrible
anxiety in your heart into an eternal life
that lasts forever.
And He says you can't do it.
You can't make a stone into an animal.
Stone does not have life in it.
However long you leave it there, it never
becomes an animal.
And you yourselves cannot become the beings that
my Father made you to become unless you
receive from Him the same life that runs
through me.
And then Jesus has pointed out to us,
my Father was willing enough to give you
that at one time.
But do you see that if He gave
it to you now, the way you're living,
trying to get everything you need from each
other and from the rest of the world
and the perverted monsters that you now are,
you would destroy the universe with this power
to live forever?
In other words, your own personality now is
so perverted that it doesn't matter what power
my Father would give you, you would not
use it to benefit the world.
You would not use it to make it
what He wants it to be.
You'd use it to make the world your
slave.
I don't know if you've noticed that that's
true in your own life.
I certainly did.
I noticed that I could have little feelings
of good desires and good motives.
And when I tried to express them in
my own life, it came out wrong.
I mean, often I really wanted to be
patient with my loved one, and I couldn't
be patient.
I mean, I got so used to using
other people to do what I wanted that
I could not be patient when they didn't
do what I wanted.
And I found that my personality was so
perverted and twisted that even when I wanted
to do the right thing, I couldn't do
it.
And what this Son of God says to
us is, that's why when I died, I
took your hands with me.
Your hands, if my Father gave to you
the spirit of His eternal life that runs
through Him and me, and He wanted your
hands to do that, to give, your hands
are so used to grabbing that they'd grab.
They'd continue to grab, and you'd actually destroy
that life in you.
Your eyes were given to express love and
generosity and joy and love to others.
Your eyes have become so irrevocably covetous and
filled with desire and lust that even if
my spirit wants to express that through you,
it cannot, because your eyes have become perverted.
Your body, your legs, your feet, your hands,
your side, every part of you, your whole
personality is mystically enslaved to this world from
which you have tried to get all the
security and the happiness that you need.
And unless that is destroyed and remade completely,
my Father cannot give you the life that
will enable you to live forever.
And Jesus says, when I allowed my side
to have a sword put through it, I
was only expressing the miracle that happened in
eternity, when I allowed all of you to
be put in me and destroyed and completely
renewed.
And that is something that my Father has
done to all of you.
And you are able, this very moment, to
experience that complete change in your own life,
if you will accept at last the destruction
of that old, intern, selfish, egotistic, domineering, manipulating
life, trying to produce its own security and
stability, its own happiness, its own sense of
significance, if you will accept the destruction of
that in me and believe that you were
destroyed in me, and then will submit to
my Spirit as He comes into you.
That is what my Father wants you to
do.
Loved ones, that's what Jesus says.
And if you're one of those independent kind
of philosophic types that I certainly was, and
you want a little help, you don't mind
a little help, I'll do with a little
help, but I'll really do it myself, you'll
never come into reality.
You won't.
I mean, Jesus says, very down to earth,
He says, you have to be absolutely changed.
That's why I died.
I didn't die to give you people a
good example of how to love others.
You've had plenty of good examples.
You don't need good examples.
You need the power to change.
And when I died in a cosmic miracle,
God, my Creator, Father, remade you.
And you are able to experience that now.
Really, I just thought of it, you know,
it is like those old Firestone towers.
I mean, they all have been recalled.
They have.
And all you have to do is go
in, but you do have to go in.
You do have to go in and say,
okay, I'll trade in the old ones that
you say now have become faulty or are
dangerous, and I'll receive the new ones.
The whole transaction is already done.
The price has been paid.
The whole thing is ready.
But you do have to be willing to
make the change and to allow it to
be made true in your life.
And loved ones, that's the crux of what
Jesus says.
Are you willing to accept that you are
a hopelessly perverted, twisted personality?
That it would be a crime for my
Father to allow you to live forever in
this universe?
Are you willing to accept that?
And are you willing to accept that you
were destroyed with me on Calvary?
And that all your in turn selfish life
was destroyed there?
And are you willing now to live for
me and for my Father instead of for
yourself?
And then secondly, will you submit yourself now
to my spirit as he begins to come
into you?
And loved ones, that's what Jesus, the Son
of our Maker, says we have to do.
So, you know, if you're sitting here and
it's kind of come home to you for
the first time and you say to me,
well, what do I need to do then?
I'd say just those two steps.
One, are you willing to join Jesus on
the cross?
Are you willing to have everything destroyed in
you that is filled with egotism and selfishness?
That is filled with setting yourself up as
your own God?
Are you willing for that?
I mean, God will show you the things
that you need to be willing for.
But are you willing to have that destroyed?
Are you willing to admit that you're wrong
and you need to be utterly changed?
And are you willing to submit to that
change?
And secondly, will you now this morning by
faith receive the spirit of eternal life that
enabled Jesus to rise from the dead into
your own life and begin to obey that
spirit as a real person and a friend?
That's it.
Do you see, it isn't a philosophical concept.
It isn't something that you think over and
you like the idea of.
I'm asking you, will?
The will is the key.
For the past three Sundays, we've been talking
about the mind.
Now, the will is the key.
Are you willing to accept the destruction of
your old selfish life in Jesus?
And are you willing to submit your will
this moment now to the spirit that will
begin to move inside you and begin to
come out through your mind and give your
mind a sense of what you ought to
do in life and in the Creator's plan?
Will begin to touch your emotions and begin
to give you the sense of joy and
peace that comes from a relationship with an
infinite eternal person?
And that spirit that will begin to come
out through your whole will and give you
a sense that you are loved by your
Father and you are His dear Son and
you are actually unique and you are dear
in His eyes.
That's what Jesus, the Son of our Creator
says and explains.
Now, what will you do with Jesus?
What is your reaction at this moment?
That places you in a place of life
or a place of death this day.
Let us pray.
Jesus, we see that you have evidence to
give us that you're the Son of our
Maker that no one else has.
And we do see too that if you
overcame death once, you must be able to
come in and out of this life as
often as you want.
And we do see that logically you must
be alive today and you must be able
to see us.
And Jesus, we hear your words that all
that is born of the flesh is flesh.
You must be born again, born of the
Spirit.
And Jesus, we see that unless the old
creation is destroyed, there can be no new
birth or new creation.
So, Lord, we thank you for putting it
so plainly.
And we thank you for showing us that
your death was actually the destruction of our
perversion and that you are now asking us,
are we willing to live in the benefits
of that death and to allow our personality
to be completely renewed and recreated?
And Lord, we see that that's our choice.
We see you're asking us, are we willing
to die to our own selves and to
our interned life?
Lord, we see that you're asking us this
morning that if we're willing, will we submit
this moment to your Spirit, to the Spirit
of the Lamb who is willing to come
into us, not only enable us to live
forever, but most of all to live an
unselfish loving life like yours.
Holy Spirit, we would want you in, we
would receive you, and we would begin to
obey the promptings that you give us so
that we may begin to become eternal as
our Father planned.
Just as we're praying, loved ones, it's really
important that you do what you need to
do at this moment and take whatever action
or attitude to Jesus that you know is
right for you.
I just encourage you as we remain with
our heads bowed to do that and take
a definite step this morning.
It's very easy for us, I think, to
continue to talk about these things and do
nothing.
I just point out to you that nothing
will happen unless you take a step.
So often we've said we can't think ourselves
into this thing.
You have to will yourself into it by
taking a new attitude to yourself and to
your God and then ordering your will in
harmony with that new attitude.
Lord Jesus, we would ask you now to
begin to run our lives.
We're asking you in faith and we ask
you to begin to speak to us in
ways that we can understand so that we
may have some direction in our lives and
may begin to develop as your Father planned
for us.
We ask this in your name and because
you're alive and you're truth and we want
to live in reality.
Now the grace of our Lord Jesus and
the love of God and the fellowship of
the Holy Spirit be with each one of
us now and evermore.
Amen.