Living by Grace

Colossians 1:3-8

COL-061

Our topic is "Thanksgiving for the Colossians," segment number 39 in Colossians 1:3-8.

What we have been trying to convey from this Scripture, that we have been studying about – the full reality of the grace of God, is that the spiritual life of a Christian requires daily nourishment for it to be sustained, just as the physical life requires food to be sustained. Everybody knows what happens to the body when it is not nourished with physical food. And it is obvious that that analogy should be very clear to every believer – that the same is true of your spiritual life. I don't care whether you're a young person, or whether you're an older person, unless there is nurturing and feeding of the spiritual life, it's going to go downhill, and you will become a spiritual casualty.

This is the great tragedy that some people still haven't learned of the prostitution of the local church ministry. The preachers are playing to the crowds. The preachers are playing for the money. The preachers are playing to entertain rather than to lead people into the deep things of the Word of God, through the kinds of deep waters that we have been going through in the last few services. And if you hang in there, and have an open mind, and a positive heart, you're going to make enormous spiritual advancement in your life.

The doctrinal principle that you must sustain the spiritual life is enunciated in Matthew 4:4 by the Lord Jesus Himself, where He said, "Man shall not live by bread alone (that takes care of the physical body), but by every word that proceeded from the mouth of God" – by all of Scripture, which God has spoken and recorded by all the doctrines of the Word of God. That's how we must live. Now, I need not tell you that this is mostly violated by Christians today and certainly our society on the whole. From one end of it to the other, it is totally ignorant of doctrinal principles. So, they do not live on basis of these concepts that sustain a spiritual life and an orientation to reality. The comparison of spiritual and physical life includes the fact that, with proper nourishment, both will grow. They will grow in strength, and they will grow in maturity.

And the opposite is also true. The lack of nourishment will cause your body to become weak and feeble, to wither away, and so your spiritual life will degenerate if you do not feed it. Feeding brings strength; lack of nourishment brings lack of strength. Now, immediately, those of you who are thoughtful people say, "Ooh, wait a minute. That's a very serious statement for you to make. There are not too many people in our country and certainly not in this congregation who are not well-nourished with food." I got to thinking recently as I drove along how hard it is to drive down the streets of the city of Irving because of all the easy places to eat. Here's the little taco house. Hot dog! They got a 58-cent taco. It's not right I should drive by that and not go in there and encourage them. So I zip in and buy a little taco there and a little bit down the line. Hot dog, two fish sticks for a 50-cent special today. Long John Silver is not always that long on silver. He ought to be helped. And you can't hardly drive anywhere but where there are all these specials. Now Wendy has a marvelous special, a bacon double cheeseburger for 99 cents. So we tooled in there, Mrs. Danish and I ordered two bacon double cheeseburgers, opened them up, no bacon.

I wrapped it up, went back to the counter, and said, "Is this the bacon double cheeseburger?" He said, "Yes." I said, "There's no bacon." He said, "Well it's just a bacon sauce for 99 cents." That's the end of the bacon cheeseburger for me, but at least it was an experience, an adventure. But everybody understands you feed the body, that's what strengths it, and the better food you feed it with, the better it'll be. Now it should be self-evident that the spiritual life is the same way, but you see the consequences aren't so terrific. When you don't eat for a while, the consequences soon become evident. And what we're trying to do tonight is show you the potential consequences of when you don't feed the spiritual life and how you can get to a point where there are very serious consequences. Some irreversible. Both physical and spiritual will degenerate if they're not nourished. But of these two lives that you and I have, here again, the Bible comes in and it tells us something relative to the importance of each one. And it tells us that it is more important for you as a Christian to sustain your spiritual life than it is to sustain your physical life.

After all, the physical life can only affect this life. But the spiritual life not being nourished, that's not only going to affect what happens to you now, but what happens to you in eternity. 1 Timothy 4:8 is a doctrinal principle enunciated on this. Paul says, "For bodily discipline is only of little profit." Now, that is not to say that physical exercise is not of value, it's of great value, it's of great importance. Ever since I saw Jack Lalaine with all those rippling muscles and then tried it in a mirror myself, which was not a photo opportunity at all. He lifts weight. So I'm going out, I'm dragging in my weights and I'm lifting weights. That has value, but limited value. When I try to flex my muscles, all it did was give me a terrible cramp. But get that thing going, get those muscles in there, and everything will be better, you'll feel better, you'll operate better.

But Paul says, discipline of the body exercise is only of little profit, but godliness feeding the spiritual life is profitable for all things since its holds promise for the present life and also for the life to come. Believe me, young people, there are a lot of terrible things in your life, a lot of mistakes you won't make if you listen to us now and feed the spiritual life. You can't feed the spiritual life where you're given triviality. You can go to a lot of churches and what you get is the potato chips and the junk food treatment. It's never going to sustain you when you come to the real powerful temptations of life, the real judgments that you have to make as a human being. It only takes and requires the sustaining of the great things of doctrine, of the deep things of the Word of God. And why should you not have people look up to you with great esteem as a young person as they did to the 12-year-old boy Jesus who could stand and speak to the highly educated rabbis about Scripture, and He knocked them off their pins because of what He knew and the connections He was able to make. And He wasn't doing that in His deity, He was doing that in His humanity.

He was doing that with all the capacities that you have for doing it. And the apostle Paul told one of his youngest associates, Timothy, he says, Timothy, don't ever let anybody despise your youth. Don't let anybody ever pass you off as a guy who doesn't know anything just because you're young. But you demonstrate yourself such a knowledgeable person and such a man of integrity that they're all going to look up to you, the elder and the younger and they'll be forced to treat you with respect.

Taking the Bible in hand to feed on the Word of God is an essential daily practice of the Christian life. It's just that simple. In Berean Christian Academy, our faculty and administrators gather each morning before school begins to read Scripture and to pray for our day. And I'll tell you that simple short 15 minutes exercise regularly yields to us spiritual insights, encouragements, and guidance for our ministry. I'm almost all the time grabbing a pencil and jotting down a Scripture that hits me with a new significance and a new purpose, something that currently can be used with great profit just reading the Word of God. And I don't care how you do it. I noticed my number two son when I was visiting him in Virginia Christmas time would get himself a cup of coffee in the morning and while people are getting up and roaming around, he'd get out there on the veranda, put his coat on, prop himself up in the chair and sit out there and read the Word of God.

That has more enabling effects than you can imagine. And you know that that is not easy to do and that most of us don't do that very often. We just don't think every day I have to take the Bible in hand, and I have to read it. In the academy we wish that our parents were more zealous in guiding their children to practice such a daily living in the Word of God. But many of those parents don't do that either. So why would they be saying to their children, I want you to sit down and read the Bible. I want you to sit down and read the Bible. Get yourself a quiet place, take a passage and read through a book. Just read it. Maybe you can tell me something about it.

That's why I remind you what I suggested to you this morning for your training of your sons and daughters who are junior and senior high level. Be an invaluable service to them that you require that they read these handouts that we have on the chairs here. It would give them an end run about a lot of disorientation that they get in the secular school system and from their peers, things that they will never hear on nightly news, things that they will never hear discussed in class because these are not the things that people want us to know about who are in the power structure of Satan's world system. What an easy thing for you to take advantage of! Hours of research and thought on just the handouts and take and capitalize on that for your children.

They might not think of it, but under your guidance they could do that. So the daily intake of the Word of God and the intake of doctrine, Sunday morning, Sunday evening service instruction has a valuable purpose of enabling a believer to build a spiritual maturity structure in his soul, to go all the way up to super-grace living. A life with God, which is glory land on earth. Doesn't matter how old you are, this is the kind of way you can live with God. Time precludes us tonight for us to stop and think about all the great people of the Bible who did just that. Just run your eyes someday through the 11th chapter of Hebrews. We've been reading that in our morning prayer meetings, the 11th chapter of Hebrews sometimes titled The Heroes of faith, and you'll discover that each one of those people were true to what God had to say.

They took in the Word of God, and they lived by it, and the result was that they were super kind of human beings. They lived in a glory land surrounding all their life on earth. Things were not always easy for them. The promises that they looked for that were not fulfilled in their day, but eventually they were all looking as it says for that great city. And I guarantee you they're all going to be up there in the new Jerusalem. A Christian of this kind is able to meet the good and the bad in his life with appropriate spiritual maturity and a victory provided by the Holy Spirit. You should not grow up spiritually stupid yourself, and you should not allow your children to do it. This is something, it is your duty as parents. It's a parent's duty to maintain your feeding upon the Word of God.

This is the kind of a Christian who will use his life in divine good works of the Holy Spirit. He will store treasures in heaven for himself because of rewards that God will give him for service. His daily preoccupation will be with God. Now, I can guarantee you that there were some people this morning that got to feeling very uncomfortable when we started talking about being preoccupied with Christ, waking up in the morning and what do you think of? Well, Lord, here's another day. I am your most high servant. I'm now going to proceed to my livelihood as my first service to thee. Please guide me through this day and the purposes that you have for me and in the ways in which I can exercise my particular spiritual gift. And you just begin going through your day of business and work and social activities with this consciousness that you are the servant of God every day and your focus is on Him.

I guarantee you, unless you're a spiritually mature Christian, you're never going to do that. And you're never going to find victory over those terrible things that come in temptation. The way Joseph in Egypt could turn his back on Potiphar's wife propositioning him to sexual immorality was because he had built a spiritual maturity structure in his soul. Therefore, there was nothing attractive to him about sin. This is the kind of Christian who is preoccupied with Christ storing treasures in heaven. This kind of a Christian functions with a spiritual maturity structure, which is a joy. It's a constant blessing to himself, and it's a blessing to everybody who comes in contact with him. Why should you old or young not be a blessing to everybody who comes in contact to you? Why should not the people that you associate with at any age level be ennobled because they've been in touch with you? Why should people not be able to look at you and say, "That's the kind of a person I want my sons and daughters to associate with – the spiritual maturity type of believer who is preoccupied with Christ."

And the world of Satan, he sees it as the sorry joke that it is, and it has no attraction for him. The super-grace believer throws all that he is into advancing the proclamation of doctrine. He can never do enough as the Jew could because all the Jew had to do was throw a 10% bone to God and that was it.

Grace

Now, in this age of grace, and that's what we're talking about, the Colossians concept of grace, that super-grace Christian, everything he has, everything he is he can never give enough to the Lord. Because of the presence of the sin nature, however, in the Christian, he can potentially destroy his spiritual maturity. He can fall from grace living into reversion under control of the sin nature. This happens when the believer neglects to feed on God's wisdom through the Bible or is negative to the sound of doctrine, which is taught by the pastor-teacher. The believer's mind we have seen now in Ephesians 4:17-19 the descent from spiritual maturity and combat readiness and to being a spiritual wimp. It begins with negative volition toward the Word of God.

See if we can diagram this. Negative volition to doctrine, that's where it all starts at. One way or another, I don't like what I hear, I'm not going to listen to it, or I'm not going to do it. Whatever it is. We have seen from Ephesians 4:17 that what develops then in the mind is a thing called a futility, and the word means emptiness. So, what happens is that the mind, which is supposed to guide you, can't do it. It's a futile effort, and so what you have is an emptiness of divine viewpoint in the mind. In the mentality of your soul there begins to develop an emptiness.

Now here's a very serious problem that some of you who've been reared and under Christian influence all your life think there can never come a time when your mind cannot get off center from God's point of view, but it can. And it will. Emptiness of the divine viewpoint in the mind because, as we've shown you before, when you're negative to truth that you've been taught, it doesn't go anywhere. You know it, but it does not influence. It does not take over that mind. Then we're told that the next thing that happens, Ephesians 4:18, you become darkened in understanding. Now I'm going to abbreviate here. I did that abbreviation years ago and the lady wondered why I couldn't spell better. Darkened in the understanding and we told you this morning, that means you can't think anything through, right? Whether it's on a physical realm of your life, a decision you have to make, or whether it's a spiritual matter, your mind is darkened. The next thing that happens is you become alienated from Holy Spirit lifestyle, the style of God.

You're alienated from the lifestyle; you're living like the world. You look at yourself and you say, Hey, I'm no different than every other guy around me. All these foul mouthed, dirty story guys whose minds are on corrupt things instead of the mind of Christ that I have as a Christian, I'm acting just like they do. What's happened here? God, my Father is not really my friend. Now the cold sweat begins to break out if you're a thinking Christian, but if you persist, Ephesians 4:18 says that this alienation is the result of spiritual ignorance. There is spiritual ignorance of human viewpoint. Human viewpoint now has come in and filled that vacuum in your mind that has been emptied of God's point of view. And then the end of Ephesians 4:18 says, the result is hardness of heart; and the word heart there means mind hardness of the mind.

Callousness

A number of things now begin to happen as a result of this callousness. Ephesians 4:19 says, "They are having becoming callous, have given themselves over to sensuality for the practice of every kind of impurity with greediness, they have become callous, they become hardened in their mind toward God." I'm talking to you as a Christian, he's talking to you as a Christian to become hardened toward God. And there comes a point in time when you pass the point of no return where you cannot peel the callouses off. You'll then die and go to heaven. And as people were aware this morning, several people expressed it this way. That was for me, but oh how I wish so and so was here. You were talking to that person. That's how it always is. The person who needs the instruction most is the one that Satan has brought down by not being here to be able to bring the life together.

So here's the hardness. Now this callousness toward God in every way. So what happens? This is the result of this chain reaction in Ephesians 4:17-18: "And they give themselves over," and this is an interesting great Greek expression. It says to betray themselves, a person who is a Christian betrays himself to something. He abandons himself to something that is other than the good things of God. He throws away his life. This is the same expression that you have in Romans chapter one, which is describing the moral degeneracy of the human race. When it turned its back in the early days upon the knowledge of God. Notice Romans 1:24, therefore having described the foolishness of rejecting the Word of God, having created their own gods, having taken the sun, the moon and the stars and called them gods having made gods out of animals, having made gods out of creeping, crawling creatures. The result, therefore, verse 24 says, "God gave them over in the lust of their hearts," and the heart is the mind, "to impurity that their bodies might be dishonored among themselves." God "gave them over." is the same Greek expression. God abandoned them. God allowed them to betray themselves. Romans 1:26. "For this reason, God gave them over to degrading passions for their women exchange the natural function for which is unnatural." They went into lesbianism. God abandoned them to it. They betrayed themselves and He finally let them go. Romans 1:28. "And just as they did not see fit to acknowledge God any longer, God gave them over to a depraved mind to do those things which are not proper." God says, "Fine, you've gone past the point of no return. Now I'm going to give you a mind that's going to take you down into every filthy thing you can imagine. You're on the slippery slope and the Lord stops trying to restrain. Your will is eventually going to take over."

"They, having become calloused," verse 19 says. "They have given themselves over to sensuality. The word sensuality looks like this in the Greek Bible. Greek word is aselgeia (as-elg'-i-a), A S E L G E I A. Aselgeia means shameful conduct, indecency. Isn't it interesting how tough it is to get people to be ashamed of themselves today? The things that people do publicly, that they declared they stand for, they should be ashamed of it, but they aren't. The way people dress, they should be ashamed of themselves. The way they speak, the entertainments to which they go. They should be ashamed of themselves that God could find and see them in places like that, let alone other people. And here it is, they have given themselves over as a result of this hardness now upon a soul Christians were talking about. Now, it is easy for them to descend into sensuality, into illicit sex, a life devoid of physical purity. Colossians 3:5 puts it this way, "Therefore, consider the members of your earthly body as dead to immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and greed which amounts to idolatry." Consider your physical body, which is the agency of sinning, all off limits to Satan and the world system. You can't do that if you're hardened toward God. Everything moves you to do these things that are against the Word of God. You have no concern for God's laws. What are you now? You're nothing but a barnyard animal.

Joseph

Moses

How can I come to it? Right here. Yeah. The Bible's all right. It's okay, but boy do I love the stuff out there that I read about in the world and my associates. So less and less concerned when we're reading the Word of God. The mind gets emptied of divine viewpoint. Now I'm in a darkened room. I'm groping. I can't figure things out. I don't know whether I should do this or shouldn't do this. I don't recoil against the wrong things the way I should. Now my whole lifestyle begins to break down. It's not the lifestyle of godliness, and now spiritual ignorance comes in. All I can work on is human viewpoint because it's all been sucked into the emptiness of my mind. That's the only way I can think. And now upon my mind is this hardness, this intensity toward God so that my soul is completely out of touch, and I go with the flow. And along comes the appeal to that immorality and it's done.

And here's how bad it is. Ephesians 4:19 says, "They give themselves over unto sensuality for the practice of impurity." Practice means to make a business of something. Impurity is a word for perverted practices, is talking about what God calls abominations, things like lesbianism, homosexuality, bestiality, prostitution, fornication, pedophilia, incest, all the worst kinds of degrading perversions of sex. And please don't anybody be stupid here tonight and suggest that we're saying that there's any wrong or improper or indecent about the sexual intimacy of a husband and wife. We're not saying that at all. Our enemies will say that's what we're saying. All we're saying is that it has its proper place. And when it's put in its improper place, then it's a viper and it's a poisonous serpent and it will hurt you badly and it's not worth it. But the sin nature, once you're hardened toward God, you've turned your back upon the Word of God. You haven't fed the spiritual life. There's no place else to go but to the sin nature and it's going to be bad all the way to debase your own manhood, your own womanhood from the image of Christ in which you were made in the mind of Christ, which you possess. Please remember that Jesus in His humanity faced all of this, and He rejected all the sexual evils and all the degradation. Now, Satan has brought a great slander against Jesus Christ through Mormonism. Mormonism teaches that the sisters of Lazarus, Mary and Martha, were two of the wives of Jesus, of the many wives that He had. That's Satan slander, and that is what Satan wants people to believe. And, furthermore, they practice every kind of perverted sex with greediness. That means with an insatiable drive so that they cannot be satisfied. They're eager to try out new evils which the sin nature offers without any regard to others.

And, of course, when you do break the moral laws, it always is because of personal selfishness without any regard to how this will hurt somebody else, what this might do to someone else's life, what the consequences long range may be to that life. So with greediness means desperately seeking satisfaction through sensuality, but it can never be. The only satisfaction we have is through the person of Christ and His ways through the Word of God and through the indwelling Holy Spirit. A good translation of this end of Genesis 39:19 would be "Greedy for the practice of every kind of impurity." Here you have the horrible picture of a mind which is indifferent to doctrine and lacking in personal integrity. Now this begins to show up in a variety of ways. Let's expand our diagram. When a person now has come to wear his soul in the mind, the emotions, and the will, which are the three facets that make up the soul. When he's now become hardened through this chain reaction that he's permitted to take step by step, there are certain things you'll discover about those people.

One, they're indifferent to the Word of God. They can be in church, or they cannot. They can read the Bible, or they cannot. They pick it up daily or don't. It doesn't make any difference to them. And when they are really out of sync with the Word of God, really out of sync, then they're the kind that say, well, I've had a lot of training in Bible all my life. I've been in the Word of God. I know these things. I can handle this. And they think that they are in spiritual capacity when they're not. When all they have is a memory. They're riding on a memory like our society. We have certain things in our society that we only ride on as a memory of our Reformation Christianity heritage on which the nation was built. But we don't believe those things anymore, and we have no contact with God. We're just going through the motions. This is what Paul once said, 2 Timothy 3:5 "Having a form of godliness but denying the power thereof." So this is a very subtle thing for a person not to realize someplace along the line how indifferent they become to the Word of God. Feed their bodies every place along the street; they'll stop to do that. But feed the soul? Indifferent.

Prayer

Next thing, they're negligent about prayer. Why in the world you want to talk to a God who's now a stranger to you? You're alienated from Him. Why would you pray? Now, the world doesn't even sit down and pray when it goes to a meal. Sits down, eats a meal. If he's one of the Simpsons, he'll say, why should we thank God? We earned the money for it, and people think that's cute. Or like the little boy from a Christian home who's used to sitting down and people praying before they eat, went to his friend's house and they all jumped in and he said excuse me, don't we pray before we eat? And they said no. And he says, oh, just jump in like the pigs.

It's not a very nice thing to say, but it's very accurate. You could even teach an animal to pretend he's praying. Do you know that? I found a little strange stray puppy walking around the Marine Corps compound when I was in China in World War 2. I picked up this poor little stray and I took it back to my room and I fed it. She was a little short-haired thing, and I called her Gretchen, very nice name, little Gretchen. And I began training her, and I taught her that when I put her food in front of her, I'd say, "Now, Gretchen, let's pray." And she'd put her paws down and she'd put her head down and then she'd wait. And then I'd say, amen. Oh, boom, boom. And she'd jump up and start nibbling. To this day, I don't know how in the world I got that dog to do it, but she went through the motions. I'd say, here's the food. She'd look at me. Let's pray. Amen. And she was doing it. I don't know whether you could teach a pig that or not, but at least human beings should have the decency to thank God. But when you're in this condition, you don't care about prayer, you're very negligent.

Then you are selfish in your offerings. Spend scads upon yourself, but very little upon the work of God. Not burdened for carrying that, riding and letting someone else do it. We have had some people get mad at us here at Berean church because we didn't think we should help them out financially when they were not helping themselves out with their own employment. So they were indignant about the fact that we said doctrine says, if you do not work, you don't eat. Now the government won't do that to you, but how dare a Christian group not play ball with me, being selfish in offerings.

And another thing that shows up with the hardness is a void Christian service. They're not eager to run out there and be there to help out when the church is doing things. When we're operating, working on something, they're not there. They're not there teaching those classes. They're not there helping to make decisions about what needs to be done in the Lord's work. None of that.

And then the worst part of all is a sensual lifestyle. That's where it all ends up. I'm sure you could add more things than that, but here's the progression. You don't feed that soul. You don't feed your mind with the Word of God. You'll go, Bing, Bing, Bing, Bang through this chain reaction, and you'll have such a hardness on your soul that you won't know up from down. You'll be blundering around in spiritual darkness, and then gradually this kind of deterioration will come and one day you'll be sitting there as your life collapses around you and wonder how it happened.

So what do we do about it? In Ephesians 4:21 says, now Christian, if this should happen? Please remember this first of all: "But you did not learn Christ in this way." But in contrast to this kind of degenerated Christian life from spiritual maturity, you did not so learn means you are not negative to doctrine originally. You believed the gospel. You were receptive to the Christian life, the techniques of the Christian life. You moved ahead and grew spiritually. Ephesians 4:21 says, "If indeed you have heard of Him." If in the first-class condition means you did hear of Him, and you have been taught in Him. You did receive doctrine just as the truth is in Jesus. You have been taught. You didn't make it usable truth. It was starred in your human spirit. You had that full epainos knowledge. That's the way you were. That's what you've come from. That's where you should have stayed. That was the prime of life for you. Now you have to remove this hardness toward God.

The callouses have to come back off. The Ephesians 4:22-24 procedure is first of all to repent of where you have come to confess your known sins and you have created the condition for the gradual removal of the callouses. You won't go back, and that hardness will not immediately disappear. That old man and Adam is going to fight you all the way. That in reference to your former manner of life, you lay aside the old self which is being corrupted in accordance with the lusts of deceit. To put aside what is that old Adam with all the sin nature lusts. Now when you have confessed, what do you do next? You forget the sin, you neutralize it. You don't have any guilt complexes. The Bible makes it clear that when God forgives, He forgets. How dare you keep remembering it and insulting Him and pretending that there's something He could not forgive you and make right?

I don't care what stupid thing you have done; you admit it, you confess it, and then you forget it. You don't go chain smoking, lighting one sin to another so that you constantly are out of fellowship. You put your shoulders back, you square up, He's brushed you off, and now you walk once more as the prince of princes that you should be.

Ephesians 4:23 then that you'll be "renewed in the spirit of your mind." How are you to be renewed in the spirit of your mind? This is where the problem began. This is perhaps clarified best in Romans 12:2, "And do not be conformed to this world." That is don't pattern your life according to human viewpoint world system. "But be transformed by the renewing of your mind." This word for transformed is an interchange and an interchange by the renewing of your mind.

How do you get your mind renewed? You get your mind renewed from human viewpoint to divine viewpoint by getting back on track with doctrine. You start taking in the Word of God. You start being a student of the Bible once more and being obedient to what you learn. And what the result will be? You will prove what the will of God is and that it is good and acceptable and perfect. You will be back on track and the callouses will start peeling off one after another. You'll be renewed in the spirit of your mind. Positive volition now and doctrine will prevent human viewpoint from occupying your mind. It'll get flushed out. So you'll put on the new man. Ephesians 4:24 "And put on the new self, which in the likeness of God has been created in righteousness and holiness of the truth."

Bible doctrine is the truth. The sin nature is not the truth. Righteousness and holiness is not to be found in human effort or the world system. It is to be found in the Word of God and what the Spirit of God enables you to do. The characteristics of the believer who has made Jesus Christ's Lord as well as his Savior now will be that he will have a spiritual maturity structure. And what will this person be like? The person who is restored from where he is gone downhill will close very rapidly. Ephesians 4:25-32. In these verses, we can't take too much time, but I'll point them out to you. There are five exertions for the Christian life. And it begins with a negative condition. A positive condition. And then the reason. So if these five exertions, there's something you should not do, something you should do. And the reason. Very illuminative. Here they are.

Number one, "Therefore laying aside falsehood." Stop lying. Be positive. Speak truth each one of you with his neighbor. Reason, "For we are members of one another." I was telling Mr. Danish today about a lady. I said, you know it's very hard dealing with this lady. She's like a relative of mine that I had that was always easily slipping off into telling something that wasn't true. This relative would be deceitful. Just anytime it was useful, this lady would lie. And I said, I realize that that's a problem with this person. It's very hard dealing with this person because this person has an innate sense of deceit and we're talking about Christians. We're talking a person who has moved down gradually in this chain to this destructive position. Now get back out and when you do, one of the things you'll do is say, I don't want to tell what's not true anymore. I am going to speak the truth. I will do it with grace. I'll do it with kindness. I'll do it with lovingness. I won't say more than I have to say. I'm not going to beat people up. But because you are my brother, you are my sister in Christ, I'm not going to speak deceiving language to you. You would be surprised how sometimes people will come to me and want me to participate in a deceit. I'd like to do this, but don't tell my wife, could you help me work this out? I don't want her to know. And I'd have to play a deceit on maybe some lady who's a good friend in the quality Christian because this guy's got a problem, and he wants to bring someone into a deceitfulness with his wife. When I listen to that, I know exactly where this guy is. I know how far he has gone down this, and I know he's on the road to a great tragedy.

The second exhortation, "Be angry and yet do not sin." The positive. "Do not let the sun go down on your anger." The reason, do not give the devil an opportunity. Be angry, but don't sin. There are times when you should get hopping mad, and yet don't let the sun go down on your anger. Go home and sound off all you can about all the lies that are being told politically. Talk to your television and then say, okay, now I'm going to bed. I'll see you tomorrow morning. Go back in peace because if you keep getting mad at somebody, then the devil's going to get a chance to bring you down see.

The next exhortation, number three: "Let him who steal, steal no longer (the negative). The positive, "But let him labor performing with his own hands." What is good? Reason, "in order that he may have something to share with him who has need." That's God's welfare program, and I don't care what the government or anybody else says with all of its unconstitutional way. This is God's program. Don't steal. And the greatest stealing thief of all is the government in its unfair taxations of taking the fruits of other people's laborers to distribute to favor people for their own election to office. But labor produced for your own hands. Now the devil uses this in a big way. If the devil can get people to steal, they can bring the Lord's work to a great injury, to a great hindrance because it keeps Christians from having the freedom to do what is in their heart to do. And this is one of the great problems you have that dealing with Christians who can hurt other Christians because they're thieves.

The number four exhortation: "Let no unwholesome word proceed from your mouth." Be positive. "But speak only such a word as is good for edification according to the need of the moment." The reason: "That you may give grace to those who hear." You don't have to listen to somebody's filthy language and dirty talk. And certainly as a Christian, that should not be characteristic of you because that is not a grace influence upon those who have to listen to you. And not grieve. Reason. "Do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God by whom you are sealed for the day of redemption." That's part of the reason. When you do that, you grieve the Spirit of God. Grieving the spirit of God is doing a sin.

The fifth exhortation, which will be characteristic of the Christian that has gotten back out of this hole over reversionism, is number five. "Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you along with malice." That's the negative. Stop slandering. Stop being bitter. Stop being angry. Stop saying malicious things about Christians, even if they're true. Positive, be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving each other. Reason, just as God in Christ also has forgiven you.

Isn't that a splendid passage? Ephesians 4:25-32, read it – five great expectations. Three stages to each one. A negative, a positive, and a reason that will give you a splendid goal for which to aim this week.

Dear God, we thank you for this Thy word. Pray Thy blessing upon these believers.

Dr. John E. Danish, 1995

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