Are you good at math?
Or have you a kind of mechanical aptitude,
you know?
Or do you like poetry?
Or painting?
Now, if you have children, do you think
they'll like poetry, if you like it?
Or that they'll be good at math, if
you're good at math?
There is psychological evidence to suggest that it's
really possible for you to transmit traits like
that of your personality to your children.
And you've probably seen it yourself.
You probably can see some things in your
own personality that you've got from your mum
or your dad.
We talk at times about people having the
same quick wit as their mother has.
Or we talk about them having their father's
eyes.
It's obvious that you can transmit to your
children qualities of your mind and your emotions
and your body.
And can transmit it by heredity, not just
by environment.
Now, do you lose your temper often?
Do you have trouble with pride?
Do you have trouble with anger?
Now, if you have children, will you transmit
those traits to them?
And the psychological evidence that we have suggests
that you won't.
That you don't, by heredity, transmit moral traits
or qualities.
Now, it is true that you're influenced by
the environment in which you're brought up.
If you're a person that is always escapist
about your responsibilities, then your children will grow
up seeing you escaping again and again from
your responsibilities.
Seeing you lapse into melancholia every time you
have something that you should do.
And of course, they will learn to take
the same kind of attitude.
But you see, they'll learn it by environment
and by example.
Not by heredity.
Now, brothers and sisters, it's those two kinds
of transmissions that you and I have experienced
from the first man in the world.
The first man in the world, you remember,
transmitted in those two ways something of himself
to us.
And that's really what the verse that we're
studying this morning says.
Maybe you look at it.
Romans 5 it is.
And verse 17.
Romans 5 and 17.
It's page 981.
If because of one man's trespass, death reigned
through that one man.
That's really what it means, you see.
The one man's trespass was, you remember, he
refused to live off God's Holy Spirit.
He refused to receive the uncreated life that
God had to give him.
And he decided to go it alone and
live it on his own.
And you remember that as a result of
that, because he didn't receive the Holy Spirit
into him, his mind and emotions and his
body underwent deterioration.
His mind became impaired and made mistakes.
His emotions became unbalanced and his body became
weakened.
Now, brothers and sisters, that he passed on
to you and me, you see.
Our bodies are not nearly the bodies that
God made them in the very beginning.
Our minds aren't the clear thinking machines that
God made them at the beginning.
Our emotions aren't the beautiful balanced things that
God made at the beginning.
So, in a way, Adam has passed that
on to us.
And then you see that as he lived
in the world independent of God, so we
all learn from his example.
We learn to live as if there's no
creator.
So that today, the great mass of people
in the world live as if there is
nobody taking care of the whole thing.
And as if everybody has to make his
own way.
And that's really what that means, you see.
That because of Adam refusing to receive the
Holy Spirit into himself, he passed on to
us his impaired mind, his unbalanced emotions and
his weakened body.
And he created a pro-self world, a
world that existed for itself, an anti-God
world, a world that was filled with many
evil spirits and anger and envy and jealousy.
And we entered into that environment.
And it's in that sense that we have
kind of original sin passed on to us.
It's not that we can't avoid being evil.
It's not that because Adam was evil, we
are evil.
But it's because Adam refused the life of
the Holy Spirit.
It affected his personality and his body in
certain ways.
And he passed those traits on to us.
And really, that's our situation today.
And you remember the beauty of it is
that really, we are all living in this
kind of death life unnecessarily.
We're all living this way unnecessarily.
Because in fact, God put us all into
Jesus in pre-creation eternity, and he destroyed
us all there.
And actually, we don't have to die today.
We're under the misapprehension that we do.
We're under the misapprehension that God has taken
his Holy Spirit from us and will not
evermore give it to us.
And actually, that's wrong.
God destroyed us all in his Son, Jesus.
And so God, actually, this morning, is willing
to give us his Holy Spirit.
And really, our situation today is not that
we cannot get at the Holy Spirit.
Our situation is we have a choice this
morning.
You can either live receiving the Holy Spirit
into you and allowing the Holy Spirit to
influence your personality, or you can refuse it
and live in the midst of the death
that Adam lived in.
And that's really our choice.
So each of us are deciding whether we're
living in the midst of death or in
the midst of life today.
You remember two weeks ago, we looked at
some of the effects of that death on
our minds.
And just this morning, I'd like to look
for a few minutes at the effect on
our emotions.
God's plan was this, that we'd receive the
Holy Spirit of uncreated life into our spirits.
And that Holy Spirit contains his own genes.
It contains the joy of our Creator and
the love of our Creator and the peace
of our Creator.
And his will was that we should pass
that through our wills and through our minds
and then through our emotions to our bodies.
And that the emotion would be the link
for that life between our minds and our
bodies.
And the emotions would be used to express
that love and joy and peace to the
whole world.
And as the joy and the love and
the peace that came from the Holy Spirit
passed through our emotions, our emotions would automatically
get satisfaction themselves.
They would just enjoy it.
And that was God's plan.
A wee bit the same kind of experience
as you have when you do a job
that you're utterly taken up with.
You know, you've probably done that.
Brothers, we've done a piece of carpentry or
part of electrical work or something on the
automobile that has really given us satisfaction and
our emotions are utterly satisfied because we've really
been utterly taken up with the job.
Or sisters, I think when you're doing something
that utterly occupies you and satisfies you, your
emotions are satisfied.
They're not all frustrated and pent up.
Now, that was God's plan, you see.
That we would receive this love and joy
and peace from our relationship with Him through
the Holy Spirit.
And our emotions would be used simply to
express all that to the world.
Now, when we refuse to live off the
Holy Spirit, we find that we had emotions
on our hands that had no satisfaction.
And dear ones, when we live in death,
that's what we find ourselves.
We find ourselves with emotions that aren't satisfying.
And so men began to dedicate their whole
lives to getting satisfaction for their emotions.
They felt an emptiness in the world.
They felt an emptiness each day.
They felt there was something not satisfying.
And they wanted to try to get that
satisfaction from the only source they could, from
the world.
It's really terribly frustrating, you know, because it
is extremely difficult.
However brilliant an adman you are, it's extremely
difficult to convince people that by buying a
Cutlass, you can absolutely be flying high every
moment of every day in your life, you
know.
Or by buying a Mustang, you can solve
once and for all all your need for
emotional satisfaction or exhilaration.
It is extremely difficult.
But you see, we're committed to that.
We're committed to trying to satisfy emotions that
are terribly unsatisfied and frustrated.
We really do lack the sense of excitement
and exhilaration that God's Spirit would bring us.
And you know that.
You know there are days when you just
wonder, oh, this is just blah.
There's just nothing.
And you almost feel, oh, I want to
do something.
I want to do something to get excitement.
Now, brothers and sisters, do you see, that's
what we experience when we aren't receiving this
supernatural life from God.
We find we have emotions on our hands
that are just miserably unsatisfied and frustrated.
And the only thing we can do is
try to get excitement and satisfaction for them
from the world.
And so we do it, you know.
We buy a faster car to see if
we can go faster.
But after you get past 80 and you're
used to 80 miles an hour, it's no
longer very satisfying.
So, okay, we'll try to do it on
skis.
All right, then we'll try to do it
on a snowmobile.
Okay, then we'll try to do it on
water skis.
And we go up and up and up
until most of us come to the place
where we can't find anything else to excite
us enough.
And we find that we're then beginning to
use people to satisfy our emotions.
And you know that.
So often you've used the girlfriend or the
boyfriend not to express love to them, but
to get exhilaration, to get excitement, to get
satisfaction from them.
So often, you know, that's why our jobs
are frustrating.
Because we're demanding from our jobs a satisfaction
and excitement that a job cannot give you.
And so many of us live in the
midst of death.
The death that Adam experienced has been passed
on to us.
We have emotions that just can't get enough
excitement and that are continually frustrated.
And you know that if you try to
find the exhilaration that God's Spirit alone can
give you in sex, there's a tremendous anticlimax,
isn't there?
If you try to find the sense of
transcendentalism that only God's Spirit can give you
through drugs, there's a tremendous anticlimax after you've
tried it.
And so many of us live our lives
in the midst of anticlimaxes.
We try to get satisfaction from the emotions,
but they won't go.
That's one way in which our emotions become
unbalanced.
At times, we're trying to get elation for
our emotions.
At other times, we're trying to get stability.
At other times, we're depressed in our emotions.
At other times, we're utterly exhilarated so that
we can't control it.
At some times, we're utterly insensitive to people.
At other times, we shake at a shadow.
And we find our emotions are going back
and forward, trying to get the exhilaration that
God's Spirit alone can give us and trying
at the other end to get the peace
that God's Spirit can give us.
And we find our emotions are unbalanced.
There's another way in which our emotions are
unbalanced.
You can find it there in Genesis 3
and 8 through 10.
Genesis 3 and 8 through 10.
And it's page 3.
Genesis 3 and 8.
And they heard the sound of the Lord
God walking in the garden in the cool
of the day.
And the man and his wife hid themselves
from the presence of the Lord God among
the trees of the garden.
But the Lord God called to the man
and said to him, Where are you?
And he said, I heard the sound of
thee in the garden.
And I was afraid because I was naked
and I hid myself.
Now, you can see in old Adam there,
you know, I was afraid and there's the
old fear there.
And I was naked and I hid myself.
And there's the old stealth and the furtiveness.
Now, dear ones, we entered into that kind
of emotion too.
Many of us are dominated by a self
-doubt and by a fear that we will
not be accepted.
Many of us live our lives in that
way, you know.
We wonder, will we be accepted?
And really our problem is we're not sure
whether the man behind the whole universe will
accept us.
And we're in great doubt about whether we're
fitting into any plan or not.
And we have a great problem with our
own identity and why we're here.
And you know what we do.
When we lack a sense of satisfaction and
acceptance in our emotions from God, we try
to gain it from other people.
And that's what most of us are involved
in.
We're trying to make up for the lack
of acceptance with God because our consciences are
not clean towards Him by trying to get
acceptance from everybody else.
And so our emotions are all bound up
with almost draining other people of love.
And you know we do that, don't we?
We're almost draining others of love.
We want them to accept us and we
want them to give us signs that they
accept us.
Isn't that the whole sensitivity group circle?
It's the whole tea group trip, isn't it?
Where we're trying to tell each other that
we accept each other.
And we're just draining energy and love from
other people to try to satisfy these emotions
that are demanding acceptance.
And you know what happens then.
You see other people are gaining more acceptance
than you are.
And so another emotion comes up inside you,
envy and jealousy.
And you're jealous of them because they're gaining
more acceptance in the public eye than you
are.
And that's why really stars, it's great I
suppose to have stars, but really it's part
of the expression of a sinful world.
Because you know so many of us when
we see the star with his two or
three cars or we see him with his
big house or with all his fame and
this respect that people are giving him, it
really just produces in us an envy and
a jealousy that is restless and makes us
dissatisfied.
Now in that way too, you see, we've
entered into unbalance in our emotions.
Our emotions are unbalanced because we're often trying
to use them to give us ourselves a
sense of acceptance.
And so brothers and sisters, most of us
live lives full of opposite kind of emotions.
Our emotions are almost apart from us.
Many of us feel these are things that
we cannot control.
At one time they're related, at one time
they're depressed.
At one time they're happy, at one time
they're sad.
At one time we're outgoing to our friends,
at another time we're all closed in on
ourselves, an introspective gaze.
And our emotions are up and down in
all kinds of ways.
At times we're filled with envy, at times
with anger that we cannot control.
At times we're filled with strain and nervousness.
All these things that eventually bring hypertension to
the body.
And we find really that we're people who
are almost being whipped along by our emotions.
Now brothers and sisters, those are some of
the things we mean when we say that
we have entered into the unbalanced emotions that
Adam experienced through lack of the Holy Spirit.
Now dear ones, that whole deal changes completely
when you at last choose life in Jesus.
It really does.
When you at last believe that God destroyed
you in Jesus and that he no longer
hates you or that he no longer is
demanding anything from you, there comes into your
own conscience and into your mind and spirit
a great sense of acceptance.
There just is a great peace comes into
your mind and your emotions.
And at last, instead of doubting acceptance, instead
of wondering if everybody else accepts you, instead
of running these kind of popularity contests in
your own mind with other people, suddenly you
come to a place where you have a
quiet assurance that the Father in the back
of the universe loves you with all his
heart, thinks the world of you, accepts you
fully as his child, as his son, as
his daughter, and watches you every moment of
the day.
And there comes a great sense of peace
into your emotions.
And then God begins to give you his
Holy Spirit.
And the Holy Spirit begins to fill you
with outgoing love for other people.
And a joy and a peace that suddenly
makes you independent of faster cars.
And makes you independent of a vacation.
You know, so often I just have to
have a vacation.
I'm falling apart.
Brothers and sisters, I say this in love
to us all.
Really, we should be able to live without
vacations.
I know that sounds mad.
But do you see, that's the Father's will.
We shouldn't come to Christmas, you know, and
be worn out.
I just can't wait till I get home.
Or wait till the summer time till we
get a vacation.
It's the Father's will that we should live
continually in peace and in serenity with him.
Continually receiving strength in our emotions from him.
Now brothers and sisters, it is possible to
enter into that kind of thing.
You know, Jesus expressed it there.
It's in John, I think.
And John 14 and verse 27.
It's page 939.
John 14 and 27.
Peace I leave with you.
My peace I give to you.
Not as the world gives, do I give
to you.
Let not your hearts be troubled.
Neither let them be afraid.
Now brothers and sisters, what happens when you
really accept that you've been destroyed in Jesus.
And that your creator accepts you because of
that.
That peace becomes a reality.
You can't produce that peace by meditating on
those words.
There all you get is a psychological, emotional
lift.
But that peace is actually given to you
miraculously by the Holy Spirit.
And it brings a serenity and a quietness
inside.
The exhilaration.
The exhilaration that we so often demand from
things like motorbikes and snowmobiles and boats and
fast cars.
That peace is meant to come to us
from the mind expanding transcendental experience of being
in touch with the creator of the universe.
And that begins to be a reality when
you accept that position in Jesus.
Paul talked about it, you know, in 2
Corinthians 12 and verses 2 through 4.
And it's just one of the experiences obviously
that he had.
But it gives you some sense of it.
2 Corinthians 12 and verses 2 through 4.
It's page 1010.
And he's talking about an experience that he
had in a personal relationship with the maker
of the universe.
I know a man in Christ who 14
years ago was caught up to the third
heaven.
Whether in the body or out of the
body, I do not know.
God knows.
And I know that this man was caught
up into paradise.
Whether in the body or out of the
body, I do not know.
God knows.
And he heard things that cannot be told,
which man may not utter.
Now, loved ones, do you see that in
the sexual experience, and in the drug experience,
and in the faster motorbike, we're looking for
a substitute for that kind of exhilaration?
And it's madness.
You never get it.
It always bursts as a bubble in your
hand.
You have the experience and the anti-climax
comes.
The only way to come into that is
to enter into it by an experience with
God in Jesus.
And then it becomes possible to experience that
exhilaration in the way you are meant to
experience it.
And your emotions become satisfied.
At last, you cease to be a parasite.
You sisters, you know the way.
You drain your poor roommate.
You know.
You never pay any attention to me.
Why don't you pay attention to me?
Or brothers.
We drain our brothers.
We drain our brothers by competing with them
in rivalry to try to prove that we're
better than they are.
Husbands and wives, we drain each other.
You know we do.
We demand love from that wife.
She won't give us attention.
We demand love from that husband.
He won't give us attention.
But then, dear ones, it carries on.
We drain our fathers and mothers.
We drain our sons and our daughters.
Now that isn't the father's will.
Father's will is that we should come into
absolute balance in our emotions through a full
experience of relationship with him.
And that's part of the way life comes
to us.
That's why, you know, Paul says, really, there
is life to be experienced.
Romans 5 and 17, you know.
And it is really possible to reign above
unbalanced emotions.
It's really possible to enter into a world
of real balance and real peace and real
joy.
And that's what God wants for us, you
know.
So will you see that all the effects
of death can really be reversed, but it's
all conditional on you and I entering into
Jesus and accepting that God has destroyed us
in Jesus and received the new life that
he rose to give us.