1st
John 2:18-29; 3:1-3
Part 2
Verse
28, "And now little children, abide in him"-born ones,
again, those who have been given birth, the new birth, born-again-"abide
in him." Reason? "That when he shall appear, we may have confidence,
and not be ashamed before him at his coming." Notice, "when he shall appear", John,
90 years old says "we", personal pronoun, includes himself,
what that meant: Is that he expected that the Lord could have
come in the time that he had remaining on earth, because he
included himself in the statement. What that means is that all of the apostles
and those who walked with Christ and the early church leaders
believed in an imminent return of Christ.
They believed that he could return at any moment. John will tell us, as we begin the next
chapter, "Any man that has this hope in him purifies himself,
even as he is pure."
It was a great purifying factor in the early church.
So John now includes himself.
Paul in 1st Thessalonians chapter 4 say
"Then we shall be caught up to meet him in
the air" including himself, expecting that. Again, in 1st Corinthians 7,
telling the single men to stay single because the Lord was
coming. The church would have died out in the
first century if we'd have listened to him. But expecting, "Little children abide in him, that when
he shall appear, we may
have confidence and not be ashamed before him at his
coming." (verse 28) It's an interesting word "we may have confidence", it is literally
"freedom of speech", but it was taken from the Roman court. And the idea is, there was a person who
was guilty, and when that person was guilty in the Roman court,
he did not have this word applied to him because he was guilty. But there were those who were taken to
Roman court who were not guilty of what they were accused
of, and they had great freedom or boldness of speech to defend
themselves because they were innocent.
And here he applies that word to believers "that
we should abide in Christ, that when he appears"-it could
be at any time-"then we will have that freedom of speech
as those who are innocent before him"---washed in
his blood, not in our own work.
Not of our own strength.
But listen, this is very important.
Because you know, if you've been walking with the Lord
any time, you have those days, you have those times, you may
have a month or six months or a year where you backslide,
you fall back into sexual sin, you turn away from the Lord,
and you live in a condition where you're saying 'Boy I hope
that he doesn't come tonight. Lord, please, help me.' And there is such desperation and misery
in that condition. And
John is saying 'Live in such a way where you're abiding in
him, that when he appears, whenever it might happen, we may
have confidence, we may have boldness at his appearing, and
not shrink or be ashamed before his coming.' That's the sense that he says, 'not be
ashamed before him', and it is literally "not be ashamed from
him" is the sense in the Greek, drawing back.
Now I want to say something.
If you are in that condition, if you are smokin' dope,
goofing off, snortin' coke again or crack, or you're living
in sexual sin, you have turned away from the Lord, you're
drunk, you're gambling-you know, I don't have to identify
it for you. Do
I? You know you, as good as I know me, so
I know what pickle you're in because I know what pickle I'm
in, I live with me everyday.
I get up and look at this in the mirror, and say 'Oh
Lord.' And it
looks worse in the morning.
[laughter] Hair
sticking up all over, and your face is kind of squashed and
you have to wait for it all to settle and get back in place
again. But the
idea is, here we are in this verse. We didn't plan to be here tonight. We started teaching through the Bible
in 1981. And
we come to this verse tonight, and if you are sitting here
in this condition of being away from the Lord or being backslidden,
then if the shoe fits, wear it. If that is putting pressure on your heart,
I'll tell you why, it's because the Bible says "that God loves
the backslider" are you listening?-"God loves the backslider,
and promises to heal us of our backsliding."
So if you are here this evening, and you are living
in a particular way, that if Jesus were to come before this
study was over you'd feel like you'd have to shrink back from
his coming, you would be ashamed because of some way you're
living or something going on in your life-tonight is the night
for you to get all that straightened out and put it behind
you. Tonight
is the night for you to turn back to him. He's not waiting with a stick to club
you. People are like that. And because people, at different times
in your life have been waiting with a stick to club you, you
think he's like that.
He's not. You came to him empty-handed in the beginning
with nothing, he has never expected anything of you more than
that, except to come to him unworthily and drink freely. And he will then do the work in you, and
clean up your life from the inside out.
[How is the new covenant defined?
What makes it different from the old? In only two places in the Bible God defines
precisely what the new covenant is, and it has nothing to
do with which set of laws given in the Bible one chooses to
follow (OT 10 Commandment law of God or NT Law of Christ).
It is simply stated in Jeremiah 31:31-34 that God will
write his laws upon the hearts and within the minds of his
people, the House of Israel and the House of Judah at the
2nd coming of the Messiah. In Hebrews 8:6-13 the apostle Paul quotes
Jeremiah 31:31-34, showing it also applies to believers in
the church age as well.
In the new covenant the major responsibility and muscle-work
for a believer's obedience comes from God and not the believer.
That is the essence, the heart and core of the new
covenant as opposed to the old covenant.]
But what he asks from us is our hearts.
If one of my children at home do something wrong and
get in a position and turn away and think that I no longer
love them, it is heart-breaking, because I love them unconditionally.
I may have to deal with them for what I believe is
their benefit, but my love is unconditional.
And wherever they go and however far away they get,
and whatever depths of sin they may enter into, my arms will
always be open to them.
And Jesus told us that when the prodigal came back
to the father's house, he found the father, and Jesus is portraying
God running to that individual with his arms outstretched,
falling on him, kissing his neck and receiving him back.
If you this evening have been away from Jesus Christ,
I pray that this study gets planted deep within your heart,
because God the Father loves you, has paid a price for you,
you are blood-bought, and he desires you to turn back to him
and once again renew your fellowship and your walk with him-not
because you deserve it, you don't-but because Jesus paid the
price, and because he's made you his child, and his love is
unconditional toward you.
And we have all, I have been, in my Christian experience,
at times and in certain days, thinking 'Boy I hope he doesn't
come now.' But
my deflections are short-lived now. Five minutes at a time, half-hour at a
time, maybe if I have a big argument with my wife-and I don't
really do that, I'm just trying to make you feel better [laughter],
about your marriages. You know, possibly for an hour I may think
'Oh Lord, don't come till I make up.' But I know earlier in my Christian experience
there were those times when I turned away longer when I struggled,
coming out of the lifestyle I came out of.
Maybe you're going through that.
Or maybe for some [other] reason, some disappointed
individual in the church has turned away.
You know, learn something from that.
Jesus is not a member of the church in the sense that
all of us forgiven sinners are.
And if you have gotten your eyes on man and gotten
disappointed, you've learned an important lesson. Get your eyes off men and put them on
Jesus. And if
you do, you will find him with his arms outstretched waiting
to receive you back again.
But he asks us to abide in him, so that "when he appears,
we might have confidence." And the great thing about living
without compromise, as best as you can, giving your life to
Christ, is it is a struggle, but it at least leaves you in
a place where every day you say [or can say] 'Oh Lord, I hope
you come today.' 'Oh
Lord, get me outa hear.'
'Oh Lord, I want to slug this guy, but I know I can't
do it Lord. I
am struggling Lord, I want to walk with you, come today, please.' 'Oh Lord, please, get me outa here.'
You can at least live with looking forward to seeing
him, with looking forward to being delivered from this world,
with looking forward to the sound of the trumpet and the voice
of the archangel and Christ with a shout, you can look forward
to that if you enter into the battle and struggle and you
give yourself to him. If you're living in compromise, it says
right here, that's why John's telling us to abide, then we
end up living shrinking back at the idea of his possible return
at any moment.
Verse 29, "If
ye know that he is righteous, ye know that every one that
doeth righteousness is born of him." We know that he is righteous, then
if we are born of him, if he's given birth to us, we also
then should be righteous.
1 John 3:1-3
1st
John 3:1-3, "Behold what manner of love the Father hath bestowed
upon us, that we should be called the sons of God"-and
it's daughters too, by the way, I don't want to leave anybody
out-".that we should
be called the children of God, therefore the world knoweth
us not, because it knew not him.
Beloved now are we the sons of God, and it doth not
yet appear what we shall be: but we know that when he shall
appear, we shall be like him; for we shall see him as he is. And every person that hath this hope in
him purifieth himself, even as he is pure." ".has this hope in him," not himself
but in Jesus. And by the way, it's emphatic here, and it
is in the plural, and it is "Behold ye" which is an unusual
voicing in the grammar, "Behold ye", and it's in the tense
of "you all, continually be considering this".
Of all the things that fill our minds, I can't believe
the Eagles won today 5 field goals.
If it wasn't for the kicker they still wouldn't have
scored. You know,
those kind of things I can help consider them, 'Ah, get that
out of their, I want to think about spiritual things.' But it says, of all the crazy things that
fill our minds, the cat just peed in the basement again and
the whole house smells, you know, or the baby just, you're
out in company and messed his pants, and you know, the ceiling's
dripping. The
other Sunday morning I got up and wanted to study and the
ceiling was dripping and I wanted to study and there's the
ceiling dripping. We again have this rule that important
things in life are rarely pressing, and the pressing things
in life are rarely important.
The things that eat us, 'Ah, I got a flat tire.' or
this has happened, a fender-bender, you know, the phone's
not working, the tree branches fell down, pulled down the
wire, the ceiling's dripping, the cat threw up, you know,
all of this stuff that consumes us is rarely important-we're
caught in it. The
important things, though, are rarely pressing. 'Ah, I'll read the Bible to the kids tomorrow.'
'Lord, I'll have morning devotions with you tomorrow.'
That's why he's saying that we should continually be
considering this, and what he tells us to consider 'the kind
of love the Father has for us, that we should be called his
children.' Literally,
it is, from what country, we would translate that "Behold
how foreign God's love is for us, that we should be called
the sons and daughters of God."
Just consider how foreign that love is.
And again, the New Testament writers had the luxury
of using certain words when they spoke of love.
Eros is a word we get erotic from it,
that is used in the New Testament that speaks of the pleasure
that a husband and a wife enjoy physically in their relationship,
eros. Philio, we get Philadelphia from that,
city of brotherly shove [laughter], we have our church here
on Philmont Avenue, the mountain
of brothers, Philmont Avenue.
Philio is a fondness, where you just kind
of hit it off with someone and you're buddies with that person. And you will find that within the body
of Christ, you are not going to be buddies with everybody. The Bible tells us that we have to agape' everybody, we have to love them
with a divine love, but we're not gonna be buddies with everybody. Certain people you just think 'Well, I
gotta love 'em.' Don't
you? Don't you think that? 'Gotta love 'em. We'll never be buddies.' And sometimes it's tough if somebody decides
to be your buddy and you haven't decided the same thing. [laughter] You know, the Bible describes us as a
body, you know, the leg bone's connected to the ankle bone
and all that stuff.
And certain parts of our body are buddies.
Even though our body has to love the whole body, my
big toe is never going to be a buddy with my ear.
You understand. So philio is another word that's used. And sometimes it's used of Christ, we
should be fond of him, love him as a brother, remarkably you'll
find that in the New Testament.
But then of course there's the word agape'
which we know, it's a divine love [could be termed as a genuine
outgoing concern for others that transcends mere brotherly
love]. We know that it is a love that often is
a decision, not a feeling, it is something that we do in obedience,
we put it into practice sometimes, very practical without
feeling. And because of that, even our understanding
of agape' is lacking.
As best as we are to love one another, and the Bible
says "by the love we have one for another all men will know
we are his disciples."
But it is really when we consider God demonstrating
that agape love, that divine love, that we really see how
wonderful it is. And John says "Consider how foreign the
agape love of God is towards us, that we should be called
his children." It is more foreign than any other kind
of love, it is so foreign it is beyond human understanding. In other words, we're never going to have
a situation, imagine the Serbs and the Croats, they just laid
down their arms and said 'You know, I don't know why we're
fighting, this is so silly, we really think so much of each
other, let's just surrender to each other and we'll love you
and you love us.' No,
it's never going to happen there.
And yet the Bible says that God loved us when we were
yet enemies, we were at enmity with him.
It [agape] must be more foreign than human countries
then, it's beyond human, it transcends natural love, it is
so foreign, this love, that God set it on us without expecting
anything back. It
isn't because there's something in us that's lovable.
He didn't sit on his throne in heaven and say 'Oh,
I'm just dying to go down there and be crucified for them,
they're so cute, look at them.' [laughter]
You understand, when you fall in love with someone,
or even if you become buddies with someone, you become buddies
with a guy that likes to fish and you like to fish and he
likes to collect what you like to collect and he likes the
teams that you like, and he likes to travel where you like
to travel, you talk to that guy and you become friends, and
you think, 'Man, that is a smart guy.' Or when you fall in love with somebody
you want to get engaged to, there is something in that individual that
draws your love, that elicits your love.
And because of how they are, and who they are, for
some reason, you're able to set your love upon them, and usually
it has to do with what you're getting back from them.
[i.e. filling each other's emotional tanks, what makes
a marriage work. To learn more about this, log onto http://www.howmarriageworks.com/.] But God loves us, and it isn't because
there is a single thing in us that drew his love. There is no thing in us that elicited
his love. He
didn't look down from heaven and find something in us.
He loved us because he loved us.
There's no reason or rhyme to it.
He loved us because of his own nature. God is love John tells us. And because of his very being, because
it is his very character that is foreign to any kind of human
kind of love we know, because all human love has strings attached. Doesn't it? Even, again, when you got married and
people came to your wedding shower, and they give you things
like German shepherd lamps, you know, and you say 'That's nice, isn't it honey, what are we gonna do with this, keep it in
the closet for 20 years, we can't give it away because my
grandmother will ask about it.
The day we give it away.wait till she dies, and then
we can get rid of it.' Because there's strings attached. People give you stuff with strings attached.
And the amazing thing with God's love, there's no strings
attached to it. That is why we struggle with it. We either receive it, or we don't enjoy
the beauty of it. We
either, like Peter, get out of the boat and walk upon the
water, we receive it in faith, or we never ever enjoy it.
We will still be Christians, we will still be forgiven,
all of those benefits will be there for us, but we will never
enjoy them unless we receive them on the grounds that God
says he gives them to us.
And again, the difficult thing about that is, there
is no standard. Every human we've ever been involved with
has injured us in some way.
In human love, even with a wife or a husband or a child,
the amount of love you're going to share with that person
is directly related to the amount of vulnerability you are
willing to accept in your life. And when you make yourself vulnerable,
when that person decides they don't want to marry you or don't
want to go out with you anymore, they don't love you anymore,
you can be crushed. You can be crushed. Again, Marge Caldwell, when she was here,
and I encourage you to get her tape, it's called Mountains
and Valleys, great tape.
You will laugh, you will cry.
Marge in her seventies, talked about growing up in
her home, her father was an alcoholic. Being small children, she said I remember
going to bed at night, putting the pillow over my brother
Johnnie's head and over my head because we'd hear my mom screaming
as my dad was beating her downstairs.
She said, when we got to be 14 or 15 years old, we
used to see here with the black eyes, and we understood then
what was going on, and we used to beg her, 'while dad's at
work, let's leave, let's pack up, we don't need anything,
just take the car, we'll go.'
Just being bitter at their mother, 'Why do you stay
with this man?' And
having her mom say 'Honey, I believe some day Jesus is going
to save your father.
And when he does that, I don't want to be somewhere
else. I want
to be right here, I want to be in the front row.' And how 30 years later, that man came
to Christ. But
she said, finally, she was getting out of that house, she
was engaged, and she said, finally we'd be able to say grace
at the table, no one will mock us or scream at us or make
fun of us, marrying a Christian man, first in his class at
university, had the wedding dress.
Two days before the wedding, gets a call from the emergency
ward, he's dead at the hospital, died of an aneurism or something.
And she said, after that, as a Christian, I went into
great depression. And she said, in those days, when you
got depressed, you didn't go see someone, you got put somewhere. And coming through all those difficulties,
as she ends the tape, remarkably, and she's in her seventies,
and she said, and she
talked about God's love all through the tape, she said
'This spring, I lost my best friend, my 45 year-old daughter
died of cancer this spring.' And yet she talked about God's love.
And she said, 'All of this pain and heartache in my
life has brought me to a place now where I go into the hospitals
in Houston and Dallas, and they let me come in Carte Blanche
with my Bible and talk to teenagers that have tried to commit
suicide. And they let me walk right in and minister
to them. And
she said, the other week I walked into the room and there
was a young girl, 17 years old, tried to kill herself.
And she said, when I came in the room she said 'Who
are you?' She said, 'My name is Marge, honey.'
And she said, 'Why are you here?'
And she said, 'Well I'm here to tell you that Jesus
loves you and that I love you.' And she said, 'You don't love me, you
don't even know me.'
And she started to scream at her, and she said 'Oh,
I do love you, because of Christ, Christ loves you too.'
And she said, 'Please don't tell me that Jesus love
me.' And Marge said, 'What are you talking
about?' She said,
'Do not tell me, ever, in my life, that another person loves
me-because every time I have believed that, my life has been
crushed. Do not
tell me that Jesus loves me.
I'm in the hospital now from trying to commit suicide,
and if you convince me that there is someone else who loves
me, and I find out it's not the way you say it is, it will
drive me over the edge. Please, don't tell me that Jesus loves
me. I'm afraid
you might make me believe that.
And if it's not true, it will kill me.'
And of course, Marge is persistent, and that girl is
born-again and involved with an active ministry now.
But many of us are like that.
We have so many wounds and so much baggage that we
are really afraid, because all the love we have experienced
in our lives has been so conditional, and when people who
have told us they love us, family members, wives, fathers,
husbands, mothers, whatever, and we have done one little thing
wrong, all of a sudden all of their venom has come on us or
all of their abuses come on us, and all of a sudden here's
Jesus telling us that he loves us with a foreign love, so
foreign that it's origin is not only outside of humanity,
not only outside of this universe, it transcends the dimension
that we live in, it is the origin of all love, and the reason
that any other love exists is because of the love that he
has and the love that he is.
And it is not measured by any standard that we have
ever known, and it is the one love that we can cast ourselves
upon and never be disappointed.
And how many of us still are afraid to believe this
evening that he loves us more than we love our own children.
That he loves us with a foreign and unconditional love. I pray, if you are struggling with that
assurance, that this evening, at the end of the evening as
we worship, that you would ask Christ to give you that assurance-that
in all of your imperfection, that he loves you.
You know, some people think Jesus is like Santa Claus,
and 'he's watching us, makin' a list, checkin' it twice, gonna
find out who's naughty or nice.' And the truth is, Jesus watches us as
his children because he loves us so much he can't take his
eyes off of us. "Behold all of you, continually, consider
this, how foreign is God's love, that you and I with all of
our problems and hang-ups and baggage should be called the
born-ones of God." And it isn't just called, it's named-the
idea is, we are named now, amongst all of his creation, the
born-ones of God. That
is our name now, we are the children of God.
"Because of that, the world does not know
us." It didn't
know him. Don't be discouraged because your relatives
say 'What!?' 'God
spoke to you today?
We've been a little worried about you anyway, you go
to church Sunday morning, you go to church Sunday night, you
go to church Wednesday night, Christian bowling leagues, we
were worried about you anyway-now God's talking to you?' 'Is is alright if we nail you in your
room for awhile, you're fine.'
It says 'Because it does not know us because it doesn't
know him.' John says "He came into the world and
the world knew him not", "he came unto his own" the Jews "and
his own received him not.
But to as many as received him to them he's given the
power to become the sons of God." That he walked in the midst of his own
creation and his own creation didn't recognize him. The reason that he came that way is so
that he could be with us, Emmanuel, God with us. He could have come and glowed [like he
will at his 2nd coming].
When you listen to John the Baptist say in John chapter
1 around verse 32 "I would not have known him, except the
one who sent me to baptize him said 'the one you see the Spirit
descending upon him as a dove and abiding upon him, that is
he who baptizes with the Holy Ghost and fire.'" John the Baptist said 'when I looked out
in the crowd, if Jesus Christ, if this was 2,000 years ago
and Jesus was here this evening sitting in a crowd, you could
not pick him out.' You know, it wouldn't be 'there's the
guy glowing in the back.
See that little glow that guy's got.
Turn out the lights, quick, we'll find him. [laughter] He's the one that's lit up.' Or, 'Look at the one who's floating off
the ground there.' Or as soon as you hear this guy talk to
you, you hear classical stringed instruments in the background,
you hear accompaniment, you know.
There wasn't any of that like in the movies.
And that's why he came and was born in a manger, in
a stone feeding trough, that's why he came as the lowliest
of men. He came
because he wanted to be approachable to everyone of us with
all of our pain and all of our hang-ups and all of our selfishness,
he came that way so that none of us would stand back and say
"I don't want to get near him, he glows, if I get too close
I might get struck by lightning or something." No, he came the way he came, so that every
man in every condition could walk up to him and say, "Heal
me, heal my son, take away my leprosy if you're willing. Lord have mercy, come quickly, my daughter
is dying." And
there was no thing about him that would dissuade us.
Isn't it interesting now how afraid we are sometimes
to ask him. Well, you know it says 'don't be discouraged
when people don't believe
that you're God's children, because they didn't recognize
him either.' "Because it doth not yet appear what we shall
be, but we know that when he shall appear we will be like
him, because we will see him as he is."
(verse 2) And
the idea, it says in 1st Corinthians 15, "In a
twinkling of an eye we shall all be changed, in a moment"-in
an atomos in the
Greek, the smallest measurement of time. In the blink of an eye, which is one fifty-fifth
of a second if you're interested. Before we can be embarrassed, everything
we are embarrassed of will be gone.
It isn't that you're going to be in an argument, and
suddenly be caught up there in the middle of it all embarrassed. The idea is, corruption will put on incorruption,
mortal will put on immortality, in the twinkling of an eye,
and at the speed of light we'll be changed, and there will
be nothing in us that draws back or is ashamed.
"It hasn't yet appeared what we shall be,
but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, because
we shall see him as he is"-we'll be able to stand in his
presence. If we're able to stand in his presence,
that means that everything that cannot be in his presence
will be removed from us.
[Now that's a deep thought.]
Consider what kind of foreign love that is.
[Also, when John wrote this he had not seen Jesus in
vision, as he is now, on the Isle of Patmos. He only knew what Jesus looked like as
he was when he was with him, as a human being. So John is saying "it doth not yet appear what we shall be
[like in the resurrection]: but we know that, when he shall
appear, we shall be like him; for we shall see him as he is."
John and the other's had not seen Jesus as he is
(with the exception of Paul, but Jesus was so brilliant in
front of Paul on the road to Damascus that Paul really couldn't
tell what he was looking at). In Revelation 1:12-18 John saw Jesus as
he is, in his glorified state.
We shall be like that in the resurrection.
That is what John is saying here.
And Jesus has now shown us in Revelation 1 what he
is like, and what we will be like in the resurrection.
Pastor Joe missed this observation, even though he
got into 1 Corinthians 15.
Just thought I'd add this, as it is appropriate to
the passage. So
to see what Jesus is like right now, and what we will be like
in the 1st resurrection because John said "when he shall appear, we shall be like him;
for we shall see him as he is"-look up and read Revelation
1:12-18.]
"And every
man that has this hope in him"-in Jesus-"purifieth
himself, even as he is pure."
(verse 3) Now here's the interesting thing,
none of us can purify ourselves.
But it indicates that if your hope is in Jesus (Yeshua),
that it becomes a purifying factor in your life.
You know, if your hope is to retire at 30 after you
make your first million, if your hope is in getting this new
car, this new date, getting this new house, getting this new
job, you will be disappointed ultimately in all of those things.
It says "If your hope is in him, that it will purify you, even
as he is pure." Because
if you're living every day saying "come Lord Jesus, come today",
you know that you have to be in the light, you have to be
honest about your weaknesses, you have to be continually confessing,
you have to stay "prayed up", you're asking him daily to cleanse
you, to lead you, to fill you [with the Holy Spirit], to walk
in his presence. If
we have our hope in him, we purify ourselves, just by that,
even as he is pure. Consider what foreign love that is. If you're here this evening and you don't
know Christ as your personal savior, you can know him, but
the idea is, are you afraid to know him?
This is how much he loved you.
The Bible says they stripped him naked, that is after
the Bible tells us they beat his face so bad that he was not
recognized as a human being. The nice pictures we see of Jesus with
a crown of thorns and one drop of blood running down his cheek
has nothing to do with reality.
He was beaten so bad he was not recognized as a human,
his beard was
ripped out of his face Isaiah tells us. The flesh was ripped off of his back by
the cat-of-ninetails.
He was brutalized, he was spit upon, for you.
God is not going to prove that he loves you in any
lesser way. Throughout the New Testament, this, in
this is the love of God manifest, that he sent his Son into
the world-1st John 4:9-to die for our sins. I encourage you this evening, before you
leave. You need
to ask Jesus to forgive your sins.
Look at this room full of people.
Is everybody nuts and you're the only sane person?
Look at this conglomeration of people that would never
ever hang with each other unless something supernatural [happened]-I
mean, there's cool people, square people, fat people, thin
people, old people, young people, black people, white people,
Indians, Asians, look at this room! There is no reason in the world that we
should be together.
It is supernatural.
It is because we have the most important thing in our
lives in common-that is we have met the risen Christ.
And you need to do that before you leave here this
evening. He died
for you, he loves you.
I encourage you, before you leave, come down here,
we'll pray with you, we'll give you a Bible, we'll give you
some literature to read. We don't want your phone number, we don't
want your address, we're not gonna hock you for anything,
you know, we don't get a commission on the sale.
Our minds are blown [away by all of this] and our lives
are free, and you need to be free.
If you're here this evening, and you have never really
been able to receive his love, even as a believer, you have
not enjoyed the freedom that he wants you to have, the assurance
that he wants you to have, as we stand.why don't we all stand,
and as we worship I want you guys that have struggled with
assurance just to ask him to bathe over you, to cleanse you,
and to touch your life, and to encourage you.
Those that are backslidden, that are not looking forward
to his appearing because of the way you're living right now,
tonight is the evening, turn your life around. You'll find him with a very foreign love,
waiting for you once again to turn to him that he might wash
you and cleanse you and just recharge your batteries and blow
your mind afresh." [transcript of 1st John 2:18-29;
3:1-3 given by Pastor Joe Focht, Calvary Chapel of Philadelphia,
13500 Philmont Avenue, Philadelphia PA
19116, © Calvary Chapel of Phila. 1996]
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