All right, would you open your
Bibles to the 48th chapter of the book of Jeremiah? Jeremiah
48. As Scott was reading his scripture,
I was thinking, I almost wished I'd have picked that to preach
from. Maybe we'll get to that another day. But all the scriptures
are of good to us. Father, bless this message now.
Bless me to preach it, to preach it in truth and apply it properly
and honor Christ. It's in his name we pray, amen.
Jeremiah chapter 48, verse 10. A curse on him who is lax in doing the Lord's
work, a curse on him who keeps his sword from bloodshed. Now there is a warfare going
on in the world. It's a warfare that began with
Satan's rebellion against God. Now we don't know exactly the
nature of that rebellion. It's never particularly described
to us, but we know that he fell. And it is my belief that immediately
upon his fall, he showed up on earth to cause ours. Some believe
that he fell before God made the earth as we know it. They
believe that there was a creation before this one and Satan ruined
that one. And so what we read is the first
seven days of creation is actually a work of recreation, but actually
the language will not bear that up, nor will Moses's words or
God's words in the law when he was given the law of the Sabbath,
he said, In six days, God created the heavens and the earth and
all that in them is, and on the seventh he rested. Well, the
creating the heavens and the earth, that's the first verse
of Genesis chapter one. And then the six days come later,
and then the seventh, and that's it. So I don't believe Satan
fell before the earth was made and Eden created and Adam and
Eve put in it. I believe actually that he rebelled
and being cast out of heaven, he took up his work here. This warfare continued on when
Cain killed Abel. It reached a fever pitch in the
crucifixion of the Lord Jesus Christ. It has revealed itself
in the various heresies that arose in the early church and
were dealt with by the apostles of Christ in the scriptures. This battle has cost the natural
lives of the martyrs. Every real martyr in the Church
of God. This issue, this battle that
we're going to talk about is the battle for which they died. This battle has gone on in all
ages. As I said, it began with Satan,
reached this earth through Adam and Eve, and was revealed in
Cain's hatred of Abel and murder. gone on up until now, it's happening
now, and it will continue until the Lord returns. It goes on
in the world at large, and it goes on in churches, even in
ours. We must never allow ourselves
to think that this particular battle line is secure even among
us. It goes on in the warfare between
the flesh and spirit of a believer. Paul says that the flesh wars
against the spirit, and the spirit against the flesh. And while
there may be many different fronts on which that battle goes on
in the mind and heart of a believer, There's really, in the end, only
one issue at stake. Now, the first sign of the decline
of any professed Christian or any professed church or denomination
is when they leave off this warfare and take up another warfare. No church is perfect on this
matter because there is no perfection in this world. But some churches
have left this battlefield altogether. It's not at all what they are
about. They're fighting other battles. The battles they're
fighting may be good and useful battles in things pertaining
to this world, but they are not the battle to which our Lord
sent us. But the health of any church,
well, it's not to be measured in its numbers. People tend to
think the bigger a church gets, the better it is. One time, somebody
asked Brother Scott Richardson, said something to the effect,
man, I wish we had more people in church. He said, more people,
more problems. And that's true, and it's not like we don't want
more people, but at the same time, we're not interested in
just gathering up a group of people. That's not the purpose that any
church was designed to serve. We have a bigger purpose even
than that. It's not to be measured, that
is, the health of a church is not to be measured by its worship
schedule or worship style. Some people think that the more
the church has got going on, the better it is. I tend to think a little bit
the opposite. Quite often, and I've seen this,
you know, you look at the advertisements for churches, they got something
going on every day. They have some kind of activity
for some group of people going on every day. And folks can actually
get downright exhausted trying to keep up. But I think that sometimes that's
done because they think, well, if we keep them busy, they won't
get in trouble. Kind of like they do with teenagers, you know,
keep them busy and they won't get in so much trouble. And they
try to do the same thing with church members. And if they can't, you know,
they know they can't get people to come for simple worship all
the time, so they have all kinds of other activities that they
merely say a prayer in front of it, so it seems like it's
something religious, and then they feel like they've done something
religious even though it was something else entirely. Busy, busy, busy. That's not
how you measure the health of a church. You can't measure it
by its financial statement or any such thing. The health of any church can
be determined by the battle in which it is engaged and how devoted
that church is to the prosecution of that war. Now we're talking
about war here, and the Lord said, blessed are the peacemakers.
How are we talking about the church being at war? Well, it's
a war to make peace, is really what it comes down to. And it's
certainly not anything like the wars that men, natural men start
and carry on with one another. But it is a war, it is a battle.
And we don't even measure the health of a church by how successful
she is in this warfare. A church may faithfully go about
this warfare, with all the power that it has, and it seemingly
make no difference at all in those with whom she conducts
this warfare. Fellow that visited our church, the very epitome of the religion
that I left, remember he was preaching in
the chapel Cedarville College when I was there. And he made some remark about
small churches. And somebody says, well, don't
you like small churches? He said, sure, for about three
weeks. So he thought that there was
something wrong with the church if they had not grown dramatically
within three weeks. I'm sure we would get a low grade
if he were the one doing the grading. What is this warfare? The warfare
in which God has called every one of his people to be engaged.
It is nothing more or less than the continual warfare in the
spiritual realm over the sufficiency of Jesus Christ. That is the battle line in which
all the church's warfare is to go on. Now, I didn't just pull that
out of my hat. I didn't say to myself, I need to preach a message
on the sufficiency of Christ and the battle we engage, so
I'm going to find some scripture in the Bible about going to war. Actually, this whole chapter
Jeremiah 48 is a pronouncement of judgment on a country known
as Moab. Now Moab was inhabited by the
descendants of Lot through his incestuous relationship with
one of his daughters. So they were sort of connected to the Israelites. Lot was the nephew of Abraham,
not a direct descendant. But Lot did worship the same
God as Abraham, and for all of Lot's horrible faults and deficiencies,
the Bible calls him a righteous and godly man. You say, I could
be a righteous and godly man, and yet end up having children
by both of his daughters. Well, it just shows you what
righteous and godly people can fall to. And also teaches us that maybe
we need to rework our understanding of what
it is to be righteous and godly. But Moab, the descendants of
Lot through one of his daughters had always been a thorn in the
side of Israel. So the Lord pronounced judgment
on the land of Moab, a lasting devastation. If we read in verse
eight, it says, the destroyer will come against every town
and not a town will escape. The valley will be ruined and
the plateau destroyed because the Lord has spoken. Put salt
on Moab for she will be laid waste. Her towns will become
desolate with no one to live in them. Now, we don't carry
on warfare like that in the modern world, at least what we might
call the civilized world doesn't. We do what we can to avoid civilian
casualties. We make an effort to target only
what is called military targets. But in this day, when war was
carried out, it was designed not only to destroy whatever
military might be, but simply to lay waste. to the entire region. People, men, women, children,
cities, cattle. And when they got done with that,
they would salt the land. Why? Make it so it won't grow
anything. Make it so that if there were
any that escaped the sword, they had no way to live in that land
anymore. And so the Lord is calling for
an utter desolation of Moab. And he says that anyone, and
this is in verse 10 what we read, if there's anyone who's lax in
doing the Lord's work, this judging work, a curse on him and anybody who
keeps his sword from bloodshed. Whether by laziness, whether
by maybe some relationship with the people in Moab, maybe they've
got kindred there. Or maybe they just don't agree
with what God's doing. Or maybe they have 21st century
sensibilities and you just don't go ahead and wipe people out.
But for whatever reason, the Lord says there's a curse on
him who keeps his sword from bloodshed. Why would God be so harsh on
Moab, even to the point of cursing those who would not participate
in its destruction? Well, verse seven tells us. Since you trust in your deeds
and riches, you too will be taken captive. And Chemosh, that was
their god, will go into exile. together with his priests and
officials. Why was God going to visit such
desolation upon Moab? They were expressing the most
widely practiced version of Christ is not enough. Now they were
doing it, I agree, in only a typical or illustrative fashion. But
what were they saying? They were saying our deeds are
good enough. They had heard of God's judgment
on Israel. They said, yeah, but we're good
enough. He won't come here. And we're rich anyway. We could
call up an army. We could hire an army. We're
in good shape. When I read those words, do you
know what I thought of? When the Lord Jesus wrote those
seven or dictated those seven letters to the churches in Asia
and got to that church in Laodicea, he said, you say we are rich
and increased with goods and have need of nothing. Never was such a proud statement
made as that. It's just the same statement
as what the Pharisee said when he said, I thank you God, I'm
not like other men. And he began to describe what
he thought was his riches, which would preserve him from judgment. I fast twice a week. I give a tenth of everything
right down to the smallest portions of the spices that I have. And I'm not like other people. There are very few people in
the professed Christian world who would come right out and
say Christ isn't enough. Christ is not sufficient all
by himself to save his people from their sins. And yet when
you listen to them, no matter how much they may say Christ
is enough, in the end there's still something left for the
sinner to do. something which Jesus Christ
himself does not do or does not work in them, something which
they must perform out of the power of their natural selves
in order to make the work of Christ effective. They'll say things like, God's
done all he can, now it's up to you. Well, then evidently
God, Christ is not enough. If God's looking for something
from me, it will mean that he did not
find everything he was looking for in Christ. And as I said, the biggest manifestation
of that is when people boast. Boast about what they are, boast
about their riches. I go to church two, three times
a week, I tithe or more. I contribute to charities. I
read my Bible every day. I pray. We always stop and give
thanks for our food before we eat, even in a restaurant. Is there anything wrong with
doing those things? Of course not. But there's death in boasting
in them. If anyone were to think that
those things brought to them the blessing of God, they have
become like Moab. And if there's anything that
raises the ire of God, the wrath of God, it is this. to declare what he
has done to be insufficient. To declare that we in ourselves
have anything. To declare that we are righteous. To declare that we are rich in
the things that God is looking for. And that will be The battle line,
yea, is the battle line in every church and it is the very place,
any church that degrades itself, that is any church that over
time falls and becomes a place of darkness, you can be certain
it started right at this point. Is Christ enough? The whole book of Galatians is
devoted to that very question. And Paul says in Galatians chapter
five, that if we fall to the persuasion of legalists who say
there is something we must do other than simply trusting Christ, if it's in the least of things,
then Christ becomes useless to us. In all the time that we have
been together as a church, this has been our warfare. I'm not saying that it's been
our warfare in the sense that we get all red-faced about it.
We don't have to get red-faced about it. I'm not saying I never
did. I'm just saying we don't have
to because our red face isn't what gives and give power to
the battle. But we have, by the grace of
God, stood on this line. And to the best of the abilities
that God has given us, we have stood at that line. Christ is
enough. We've done so because God has
not called us into any other battle. There are a lot of things going
on in this world which, well, I wouldn't have any problem
saying that the devil's involved in it, but it's still not where
our battle is. Our battle is not over any particular
sin which men might commit, no matter how awful it is, no matter
how much it may offend us. Understand this, the least of
all sins offends God worse than the worst sins offend us. So if we could take those sins
that we think are so prominent or that we count as so awful
in our culture, that is if among Christians, conservative Christians,
what they count as so awful, and the two primary ones in our
day would be homosexuality and the whole gender business, and
then abortion. Those are the two that most of
conservative Christian religion, they're fighting on that front. If you could, turn every gay
person straight, turn every supposedly gender-fluid
person to what it is they are, if you could shut every abortion
clinic and cause no one to seek them,
this country would still be as lost as it is right now. And one reason I think that these
sins are able to achieve such magnitude in our day is precisely
because the church did leave this line, the sufficiency of
Christ. They saw the moral ills of the
day and tried to fix those. They saw the social ills of the
day and ran over there and tried to fix those. I'm glad there's
some people trying to do that. But that's not the warfare we're
called to. And the more the church devotes
itself to this warfare of setting forth Jesus Christ and Him crucified,
setting forth the sufficiency of Jesus Christ to save His people,
here's the thing that happens. First of all, if God sends a
revival of that kind of preaching, it's normally because there's
some people of His He's intending to call. But that kind of preaching produces
true converts. And just as the Lord said, you
are the salt of the earth, The mere presence of true believers
in this world improves the conditions of this world. God has not called us to anything
else. In Mark 16, verse 15, he said to his disciples, go into
all the world and preach the gospel to all creation. Sometimes I think, you know,
if the Lord were to return, and I don't mean, you know, return
to bring it in, just if he were to show up and speak to all the
churches in general, he would say, I gave you one job. One job. How hard is that? One
job. It's a spiritual battle. Paul says in Ephesians 6 verse
12, for our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against
the authorities, against the powers of this dark world, and
against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms. Now, we turn on the news And we see what's going on in
the world. And it cannot help but offend
a believer. Because this world is against
God. But as we see greater and greater
manifestations of the world's rebellion against God, it would
be very easy for us to look at those people and think they are
the enemy. They are not. They are the poor
souls that have been made captive by the enemy. They are deluded,
they are deceived. When we see them doing things
which we find particularly offensive, whether it be in the moral realm
or the religious realm, whatever it is, our heart should break
for them. Because they are lost. And they are lost not in the
sense that God doesn't know where they are, they're lost in the
sense they don't have a clue where they are. They don't even
know they're lost. As they carry on all their sinfulness,
they think they're doing well. As they conduct their religion
of works and of trying somehow to qualify for the blessings
of God, they think they're doing well. As they try to force us to go
along, they think they're doing well. They think they're serving
God. Our Lord said this to his disciples.
He said, when they kill you, they'll think they're serving
God. When they persecute you, they'll think they're serving
God. It's a spiritual battle. They aren't the enemy. They are
the deluded captives of the enemy. Now, to refuse to enter this
battle is to bring a curse on oneself. That's what it says
here, a curse on him who is lax in doing the Lord's work. Curse
on him who keeps his sword from bloodshed. Now, that almost sounds
like we're trying to guilt people. No. The church doesn't operate
on guilt. It doesn't motivate by guilt.
Why would there be a curse on him who is lax in entering this
battle and who would keep his sword from bloodshed? Because
those who will not enter this battle themselves on the other side
of the line. It never fails. They will have,
they will eventually succumb. Now what it proves is they never
really were believers. We understand that. We understand
the theology behind that. But we're just looking at things
as how they play out. Those who will not stand for
truth will eventually fall for something else. those who are unwilling to say
THIS is the truth, and nothing else is. Christ is enough, and
nothing more is needed. Eventually, they will be talked
into adding something to Christ, and that always brings a curse. It proves that they've never
really been delivered from the curse. Now, this battle that
Christ is enough. How is it carried on? Well, then
as much as it's a spiritual battle, it's got to be carried on with
spiritual weapons. And Paul says, we don't use fleshly
weapons, and that's why we don't go out for one thing. That's
why we don't use guilt. Why? Guilt's a fleshly thing. Now, when I say we don't use
guilt, we are not trying to guilt people into becoming Christians. We will tell them about their
guilt before God, that they might understand what their problem
is. But we're not going to say to them, well, you know, if you're
not going to believe like we believe, well, you're not worthy
to be around us and we're going to shun you. No. We don't pressure anybody. The
only kind of pressure you and I can exert is fleshly pressure
and fleshly power never produces spiritual results. Never. That's why we don't do that invitation
thing. I was raised in it. And I went forward several times. Raised my hand. Had some pretty
powerful emotional experiences. Got saved. Rededicated my life. Messed that up, rededicated it
again. Gave myself the full-time service. Why? Well, it's always
during an evening service, and you're kind of emotionally vulnerable,
and the preacher knows how to manipulate you, and they sing
an old, slow, sad song. And you get to thinking, yeah,
I'm not what I ought to be. I need to take a stand for Jesus.
And I need to show it. And you do. And what seems so
powerful Sunday night is gone like so much fog when the sun
comes up on Monday morning. Why? It was flesh. And what does the Bible say about
flesh? All flesh is like grass and like the glory of the flower
of the field. The grass withers and the flower
fades away. Anything produced by flesh is
flesh. No, it's a spiritual warfare
and it's waged simply by a declaration of the truth. Paul says in the
book of Ephesians that we must put on the entire armor of God. And the interesting thing is
in all of that armor there is only one weapon of offense. It talks about shield, it talks
about bucklers, it talks about a helmet and a breastplate and
all of that. Those are all defensive things.
There is only one offensive weapon. It is the sword. And it says,
it's the sword of the word of God. And what is the word of
God? Peter says, it's that which by
the gospel is preached unto you. We use a spiritual weapon. And
with spiritual weapons, Paul says, we cast down strongholds
in everything, every imagination that sets itself up against the
knowledge of God. We don't try to pass laws to
make Christians out of people. We don't try to set up enclaves
or, you know, some of the people that came over here from Europe
and settled early on, they were trying to establish the kingdom
of God as though it's something that can be actually seen. And
we were, you know, they said we want to, and politicians love
to quote this, at least some of them do, you know, a shining
city on a hill. They actually thought that they
were going to accomplish something spiritual by establishing a fleshly
community where everybody covenants together to be good. It didn't work too well. Why? You cannot accomplish anything
in the spirit by the means of the flesh. You can't do it at
the point of a sword. That is not a real sword. The
only sword we use is the preaching of the gospel, the preaching
of the word of God, which can be summed up to this, Jesus is
the Christ and Christ is all. He is all that God has required. He is all that God provided. And he is all that God has ever
accepted. And he is sufficient to the salvation. of everyone he came to save.
We don't come with an offer of salvation, we come with an announcement
of it. You say, what's the difference? Well, when you offer something, you're acting as though people
have the power to accept or reject your offer. Well, they certainly
can accept or reject any offer I make. And I know that we do
appeal to people. But God announces salvation into
the hearts of His people. He just simply declares that
it's so. And when He declares that into the heart of one of
His people, then they believe. Paul says that the grace of God
was given to us before the foundation of the world and then later it's revealed
to us. Brother Tim James put it this
way, I'm paraphrasing, he said that God planned what he would
do, he prophesied what he would do, he came and did it and then
he just goes and tells the people what he did and that's true. and everything that God says
about salvation concerns his son. Paul said, I am an apostle
of Christ called to preach the gospel of God, the gospel concerning
his son, not the gospel of the church, not the gospel of the
baptistry, not the gospel of anything other than Jesus Christ.
When you quit setting forth Christ in one fashion or another, then
you have ceased preaching the gospel. How is it that we can
detect that the battle line, this battle line, is either being
abandoned or lost in some sense? Well, first of all, we notice
it at any time in any church where the sin of man is minimized. And I don't mean particular sins
of people. Churches love to talk about how
bad other people are. Many churches do. And they'll pick out some sins,
and you can be sure the ones that they pick out, well, one
of two things has happened. The preacher who's preaching
against sin, he'll pick out sins he's never committed. Because
who wants to condemn himself in the pulpit? Or as Brother
Tim says, an old preacher told him early in the ministry, he
says, find out what a preacher's preaching against all the time.
That's what he's got a problem with. He says, so you find that preacher
who's always preaching against self-righteousness, he knows
what man's problem is. Because self-righteousness is
a declaration that Jesus Christ is not sufficient. There has
to be some of me in it. But when man's sin is minimized,
and by this I mean that People talk about man's character and
man's life as though it can be divided into good and bad, and
they'll say things like that. I believe the judgment, your
good is going to be weighed against the bad, you know, and whichever
is heavier, that determines, you know. Well, then we are all
absolutely lost because there's, according to the scriptures,
we've never done anything good yet. And I'm past the halfway
point, so I don't have a chance to come up with it. If I could
be perfect from now on, I'm sure I'm not going to come up with
enough for all the evil of nearly 65 years of life. Everything man touches, he pollutes.
Everything we've ever done is unacceptable to God. Therefore, when churches begin
to speak of the abilities of man, when churches begin to act as
though man has within himself the power to obey God, or even
the power, naturally speaking, to choose to believe, he's beginning
to minimize the sin of man. That means that church is backing
away from that line. You can tell it when man's will
becomes paramount. When they say such things as
God has done all he can or all he will do and now it's up to
you, will you accept it? The scriptures say that the will
of God is an issue here, or is the issue. Paul says, it's not
of him that wills or of him that runs, it's of God who shows mercy. I know that everybody who is
saved by God does choose Christ. But they choose Christ because
before the foundation of the world, God chose them. And the
Spirit of God came and took the things of Christ and showed it
to their hearts, gave life to their hearts. And then when their
eyes were opened, sort of made a choice. I like what one fellow
said and I can't remember it was one of the old time preachers
but I can't remember exactly how he put it, I mean exactly
who it was but he said, choose Christ. He said once you've seen
Him there is no choice. See people make choices between
things that are basically equal. But if I said, would you like
a nice soft bed or a sharp stick in the eye? Is that a choice?
No, that's not a choice. Would you like a bowl of ice
cream or a punch in the nose? Well, that's not a choice. It
may look like one, but it's not. And when a man is shown Christ
by the Holy Spirit, I say, man, I mean any human. When a person
is shown the glory of Christ, there is no longer a choice in
his heart. He will follow. And he will realize that all
he's had before was just a sharp stick in the eye, compared to
the glories of Christ. God's will is paramount in this. The leper came to the Lord and
he said, If you are willing, you can make me clean. Now, the
leper was certainly willing to be cleansed at this point, and
he knew that Jesus Christ had the power to do it, but he knew
the whole thing lay with Christ's will to do it. I will say this,
and I say it with all the passion I can in my heart. Anyone who
comes to the Lord Jesus Christ Seeking cleansing from Him, we'll
get it. But this I know, if they come
to Him seeking cleansing, God's already begun a good work in
them, because they'd have never come unless He'd have done it. When man's righteousness is magnified,
as we were making a trip here when we moved here back in 1987.
We took a trip and saw family and church families and stuff,
you know, because we figured once we got to Iowa, we might
never get back to that end of the world. At least that's what
it seemed like to us. And my mother-in-law arranged
for me to preach in a little church where she played the organ.
It wasn't where they were members, but she would go there and play
the organ for them because they didn't have one. Didn't have
an organist. And I preached to them, have
you ever met the God of the Bible? And one of the things I spoke
about was the holiness of God, the righteousness of God, and
how in light of the holiness and righteousness of God, we
are all sinners and our righteousnesses have become as filthy rags. And I press that point home because
I know that men, they just reject that. They'll admit they've done
bad things, but they won't admit that that's all they've done.
And when I got done, their preacher stood up and said, well, I'm
glad all you good people were here to hear that. And I thought,
well, evidently you didn't hear it. Oh, when man's righteousness
is magnified, they're backing up from the line. When man's
spiritual powers are set forth, and when man's faithfulness becomes
the issue. Then no longer are we doing Lord's
work. We have put our sword back in
its scabbard. Now understand when I speak and
when the scriptures speak of this being in a warfare it does
not mean that we're mean. It does not mean that we use
any kind of fleshly expressions or anything like that to get
people to confess Christ. It means we take that one spiritual
weapon put in our hand. And in keeping with the picture
here, we keep stabbing, trying to draw blood. Where is this battle carried
on? Well, it's carried on in the world. We go out into the
world. The Lord says, go into all the
world and preach the gospel to all creation. I've not gone into
a whole lot of the world, and it wasn't until Miles McKee lit
a fire under me that I went to any other country other than
this one, preaching the gospel. And you know something? I don't
need to preach a different gospel over there than I do right here.
Why? Man's the same everywhere. His
need's the same everywhere, and Christ is the Savior everywhere.
When the Bible says He's the Savior of the world, it doesn't
mean He saves everyone in the world. What it means is He's
the only Savior the world's got. And He is the kind of Savior
that everyone in the world needs. And He's all the Savior that
anyone in the world needs. The battle is waged in the world.
It's our essential message to the world. Jesus is the Christ
and Christ is all. We point people to the person
of Christ, who He is. We point them to the cross of
Christ and describe to them how He bore the sins of His people
in the presence of God and suffered for them everything that a holy
God can do in response to wicked human beings. And that He did such a good job
of it. He put all those sins away, and they are gone, never
to be retrieved again. And God raised Him from the dead. We preach Christ and Him crucified,
for therein is all the sufficiency of Christ revealed. And there we do our battle. And
then this warfare goes on in churches. Thus far in our congregation,
we have not, to my recollection, had any real uprising over this
issue. Anyone who disagreed with us
on this point simply left. But I was asked to go talk to
one who had stuck around for about a year and then left. And,
I generally don't go chasing after people like that because
I don't have anything new to tell them. If a year of preaching
the gospel over and over to them wouldn't get them and keep them,
what am I going to tell them if I go over to their house?
Same thing they heard from me. But this particular person sent
me a book and asked me to read it and wanted to talk to me about
it. And it was all about how the King James Bible is the only
Bible we ought to use. And so I went to talk to him. And he said this, he said, you
have left the battle or you won't engage the battle. And evidently the Lord had nothing
to say to him because he gave, I mean, I was tongue-tied. You know how it is, you go away
from conversation like that and you think, man, I wish I'd have
thought to say this, you know, because it seemed so easy later
on. Why didn't I think of that? Remember Henry saying, if you
felt like you had nothing to say, maybe it's because God had
nothing to say. to that person or to that congregation. But later on I thought, and I
wished I'd have thought of it then, I'd say, no, it's not me
that left the battle. Because what translation you
use is not the battle. The battle is over whether Christ
is enough. Pure and simple. Every heresy
the church has ever experienced has been an attack on that truth. And then lastly, this battle
goes on in our minds. That's why if you don't, if you're
not willing to draw blood in this battle, you're gonna fall
to it. Because it goes on inside of
you. And if you don't recognize it, and by the spirit of God
put it to death, And I'll tell you this, you'll put it to death,
but it's like a zombie, it just keeps coming back. So it's a lifelong battle. But if in your own heart you're
not willing to put up a boundary line and defend it, Boundary
line that's saying Christ is enough. He's all my hope. He's all my righteousness. I
look to nothing else. I plead nothing other than Jesus
Christ. If you don't draw that line and
call it the battle line and stand there and kill anything that
tries to breach that line, Well, one thing, it will prove
that that's not really what you believe. That's what it will prove. But
in time, you will not only in your heart, but in your outward
profession, you'll go to the other side. Because this is not
a war. This is not a battle in which
one can remain neutral. You can be sure that your flesh
is not gonna give up. May God grant that each of us
from a newborn spirit will engage this warfare, engage it with
love, not intending to kill people, but rather to wage war against
the spiritual forces of evil that stand opposed to Christ. Do warfare against them. And
maybe in the process, God will use you in his work of setting
free those who are being held captive by the enemy. And in
so doing, you will also provide a protection to your own soul
because you'll be constantly defending that line in your own
mind. Nothing more. Nothing less, nothing
else, just Christ. Eric. You can take out your hymnals and
turn them to number 45. Ye servants of God, your master
proclaim.