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This is a conversational podcast that brings powerful moments from the Inspirational Media sermon library into fresh, engaging dialogue. Hosted by voices who care deeply about sharing timeless biblical truth, each episode unpacks key ideas from sermons, devotionals, and real-life stories — helping listeners reflect, relate, and rediscover hope in today’s world.
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00:00:00 Speaker: With talking about how do we come into fellowship with the father God? Look at first John one. What was from the beginning what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we beheld and our hands handled concerning the word of life. Note that it's historical. Another unique thing about our faith is that in our faith is the only instance in which God Himself has come into reality as a person. Our faith is rooted in historical fact, in practical, down to earth historical fact. God has walked among us and our hands have handled. And the life was manifested, and we have seen and bear witness and proclaim to you the eternal life which was with the father, and was manifested to us. What we have seen and heard, we proclaim to you also that you also may have fellowship with us. And indeed our fellowship is with the father and with His Son, Jesus Christ. Now I want you to picture yourself may seem blasphemous to do so, but picture yourself as God. You are God. You're alone and you're lonely and you want to have fellowship. Now, how are you going to have fellowship? If you create a being and you make him perfect and program responses into him? Will you have fellowship? No. So what is the one thing that you must give to the one you create? If you are going to have fellowship, call it out. What's the one thing you've got to give? Everybody got it right. Free will. You have to give that being you create free will or he will never be able to have fellowship with you. But since you are God, you also can see the whole panorama of history before any of it exists. And so you see that man will use that free will wrongly. And so from the ground plan of creation, you have to plan restoration and not only restoration, but the kind of restoration which will forgive, cleanse and heal and turn all the messes that people with their free will will get into into the glory which will enable them to have fellowship with you. And that means one thing. What that means is that there is no way you though you are omnipotent, which means all powerful. There is no way you can avoid paying the price. You yourself are going to have to pay the price. You're going to have to watch those sons tumble and fall. And though with your loving father's heart, you'd love to gather them up onto your knee and heal them, you know that before the time you must not, or they will not have learned, and they will not be able to give fellowship. They'll always be immature. So the price for maturity and for fellowship is that you're going to have to suffer and hurt as they fall. And you're going to have to let it happen, though everything in you doesn't want it to happen. And that's the price you must pay. And from this we learn what is the price that an earthly father must pay? That is the fundamental task and position of an earthly father. The same position held by the father of the prodigal son, who knew, even as he gave him his wealth, what that son would do with it, but knew that he had to pay that price. Watch him squander. Watch him lose it. Know that he would fall to the dregs and let him go, because it's the only way that son could come back. And when he came back, he had become a son. Whereas the first, the elder brother was still a performer and a servant. But he had become a son. And so every earthly father must pay that price of letting his children go, knowing they'll make mistakes. interceding but not managing, not interfering and waiting in pain until the sun has learned and comes home. That is what a father must do. Now, today we want to teach about coming home to Father God. And I was thinking about when I was a kid, and it was three hundred miles from Joplin or from Kansas City, western Kansas City, where we lived down to Joplin, Missouri. Grandfather Sanford's little farm was outside Joplin, Missouri. And in those days, I should show you how old I am. In those days, there weren't paved highways, just very, very few. And most roads were dust and corrugated dirt like corrugated box. You know, where you go over the ribs. And cars were not air conditioned like today. Nor did they have the suspension systems they have today. And so when we were to go from our home down to granddad's ranch or farm, that meant that we took baling wire and gum. Now, do you know what those are for? Repairs. Always. Somewhere. Somehow. Those bouncy roads would break something apart. So baling wire was to hold it back together. But the gum was because tires were not like they are today. And so from the beginning, we chewed gum so that when he had a blowout, you patched it with gum on the tires. And you chose your ruts carefully because you'd be in it for seven miles, you know, and you rocked. And I was seasick from the moment we started till we got there, you know. And the dust would billow in and you always got behind some big guy going slow with the dust billowing up. And then about two miles from there, mom took out her handkerchief and she'd reach back and say, Jackie, stick out your tongue. And she, you know, stick it in my mouth to get the saliva and then wash the face, you know? So you got to spit bath. And then it was such a relief to turn that corner and look up on the brow of the hill. And there was that farmhouse sheltered among the trees. And to know you were home, grandmother. Receive you with a hug. Got a good farm style meal. Granddad. Visit with you and hug up on you. And then you bring out the tub. And you sit it in the kitchen floor next to the big pot stove, and you pour water in the tub, and then you get undressed in front of everybody and you don't care. And mama scrubs up and down, you know, and then tuck you under those quilted blankets, many of them. Because in the morning when you wake up, there'd be frost on the floor. And then to hear grandmother creaking around the house in her slippers, putting out the cat and turning off the lights and closing the shutters and opening this door and closing that one. And there's no way I could tell you. But those of you who are old enough can remember how peaceful, how healing you had that good meal inside you. You were in a secure home. You'd been loved, you'd been washed. And that nausea of the trip, all that nausea was gone. And you were at home and you were at peace. That's what it is to come home to Father God. And the good news we have is that you don't have to wait until you die. That's not a picture of death and going home to heaven. The good news we have for you is that you can come into that kind of relation with Father God right now. And what we're going to do is just give you some clues about the things that you need to do to come into that kind of relation with Father God. We've talked about the necessity to forgive our earthly father in order to be reconciled to him. We have to do the same with Father God in order to be reconciled with him. We have to forgive him. before I say just what that entails and why we have to do that. I want to read to you once again. Second Corinthians five eighteen through twenty one. Now all these things are from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation, namely, that God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them. And he has committed to us the word of reconciliation. Therefore we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God were entreating through us. We beg you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. He made him who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf, that we might become the righteousness of God in him. How could we possibly. Forgive God? I mean, what did he do? To deserve forgiveness or to need forgiveness? There are a lot of us that are never reconciled to God, because we stubbornly insist that I'm not angry with God. He's good. He's love. I couldn't possibly be angry with him. And yet we are angry in deep areas of our heart. A lot of us, if we were to be very honest, would have to admit that there is deep inside of our heart a feeling of it wasn't fair that I should have been born into the situation that I was born in. So and so had such loving parents from the beginning, and my dad was never there for me, and my mother was always so critical and I had so much more to overcome than the next fellow. That's anger at God. God put us in the position where we are. He sent us to be in the family where we are. And we're angry with him. If in any way we would say, I wish I'd had another mother or another father, or I wish he'd made me different, I wish I had a different face. I sure would like a different body. I don't like my personality. God should have done a different thing with me. It wasn't fair that he sent me into the world to do the job that I feel like I'm called to do, and then he didn't acquit me very well. I got shorted on the brains. We're all angry In some way that God, if we have any degree of discontent about who we are, where we are, the relationships that we're in with others, with, with our Lord, and we need to forgive him. And forgiving another person, whether we're forgiving father and mother or whether we're forgiving God, never means that they were guilty necessarily. To forgive somebody is simply to recognize I have something in my heart against that one that is poison to me. I want to get rid of it. Because it'll kill me and it will affect the other one. I want to give it up. I want to be restored. I want to be reconciled in a love relationship. That's what forgiveness is. And very rarely do we perceive reality out there as it really happened anyway. We have to deal with what we thought we saw, what we thought we heard. We have to deal with our own reaction somewhere in the Scripture, and you'll have to look this one up for yourself. It says a man's folly brings his way to ruin, and his heart rages against the Lord, his God. It's hard for us to accept responsibility for what we really brought on ourselves. We've gotta put it somewhere. I want to share with you two stories of people who seem to have had no chance in their heart, raged against God, both because they thought that they were shorted on the blessing side of life and because their responses got them into trouble. It was a half a dozen years ago, I guess. This young woman came for counseling at the urging of her husband and her pastor and some others, some friends at the Air Force base in Spokane. And when she came in, she said, well, I guess I'll counsel with you, but I don't want any part of any counseling from your husband. And I said, well, that's alright. We don't have to counsel together. She also wanted me to leave the door open because she wanted a way out if she didn't like what I had to say. So I began just the same way we always do. Um, asking what the present problem is. Well, I'm not getting along well with my husband. Our marriage is fracturing. I just don't want any part of him. I don't want him to touch me. I don't want him to be head of our house. I. I just want him to leave me alone. And so the inevitable questions were asked. What was life like with your father and with your mother? And she began to describe how her mother was critical of her. But that didn't hurt nearly as badly as the fact that her father was just never there, except with a criticism that he would come and dump occasionally. But he was never there in any kind of an affirming, nurturing way for her. He just tended to his business. He was a body in the house occasionally, but there was absolutely no relationship at all. Her family didn't know the Lord at all. She started going to church with some friends of hers, but she went to the kind of a church that tried to scare you into heaven. She said the messages kept coming across again and again. If you don't come down to the altar tonight and accept Jesus as your Savior, you could go out and you could be killed tonight in a terrible accident, and then you'd spend eternity in hell. And so she didn't get much of a picture of a loving Heavenly Father there, either. But she came running down to the altar because she certainly didn't want to have a terrible accident and spend the rest of her life in hell. She said she started dating a young man in the church, and she thought, well, it's a good thing to date a Christian boy, but she wound up being raped by the boy. And when she shared that with her parents, her mother jumped all over her case and her father accused her of inviting that it was her fault. The guilt was piled on her. So it wasn't very difficult to understand with that amount that I've shared with you and more details that she shared, how she didn't want anything to do with a father figure. Her great cry was where was God when this happened to me? I came down and I said, I'll accept Jesus as Lord and Savior, and he was supposed to take care of me. Where was the Father God, when this awful thing happened to me? He wasn't there anymore than my dad was. And so we went into a little teaching about Father God and a little talk about forgiveness, necessity to forgive. And she didn't want any part of it at first. But as the wigs progressed, she let me pray just a little more and a little more with her. She finally got to the point of saying, well, maybe I could forgive my father and maybe I could forgive God. And I said, well, do you want to pray that the Lord will just make your heart willing? I said, none of us can make forgiveness happen in our hearts, but we can choose to invite the Lord to make it real and to bring it to completion. You know, if you're just willing to choose, that's enough for the Lord. He'll make it happen. And I said, I really think it would be good if you let John be in on that kind of a prayer. Oh, she just tensed up. But finally she says, well, okay. And so I promised I wouldn't let John touch her at all. And he came in and we prayed just very simply. And she chose to forgive her father, and she put it in her words. And and she also said. And and I forgive you. God. I didn't say a whole lot of her after that. She came back a couple of more times and we reaffirmed the prayers. But then she moved away. The Air Force has a way of transferring families, you know, without a whole lot of notice. Moved to Tulsa, and months later, I got a letter from her. She said, you will never believe what happened to me after I moved to Tulsa. She said, I looked around for a church where I could really be at home, and I didn't know anybody there. So I walked into this strange church and as a part of the prayer service afterward, she said, suddenly the pastor just stopped what he was talking about, and he looked right at me and he says, I feel like the Lord wants me to minister to you. And so he called her up in front of everybody, and he started praying for healing of her relation with her father and prayed a father's blessing for her. And she said he didn't know anything about me. But she says, God knew about me and he cared about me. He picked me out. He took the initiative toward me. That was tremendous healing for her to know that God would take the initiative on her behalf when no other father figure ever had. But she had to make that choice, first of all, to forgive God so that the block would be gone in her heart for her to receive that ministry of blessing and reconciliation from him. The other story concerns another young woman who was very angry with God. We were teaching at a Bible college in Alberta, Canada, and I noticed that there was this girl in the classroom, and the more we would get into the teaching, the more she would rock. She would double her knees up under her seat, and she'd grab her knees and she'd just rock and rock. And the more intense the teaching began or became, the deeper we were piercing to where her heart was, the more violently she would rock. It almost made us dizzy. I had to avert my eyes because it was beginning to affect me. She came to us for counseling afterwards and what we had suspected was confirmed that she had been so deeply wounded, clear back in the womb. What she was doing there was returning to the fetal position as she was rocking, and somehow she felt a little more secure in the rocking because she was being so very much threatened. She had been raised by parents who gave her absolutely no affection, but a great deal of criticism, and particularly from her father, came the repeated accusation when she would go out to date, boys, you're going to get into trouble. You're nothing but a slut. And it just stabbed her heart every time he would say this. And she tried to do the best she could to live the best kind of a life she could. But her father never trusted her. Always. That accusation that just knocked her down. And finally it got so bad in the family See that at the age of not quite fourteen, she left home. Well, a fourteen year old girl doesn't have much of a way to make much of a living. She couldn't find a job, couldn't find any means of supporting herself. And so she moved in with a guy who offered her some kind of shelter. And you know what happened? Then? She got into relationships with him. And then she felt like the slut that her father had always told her she was. And so she wound up, at age fourteen, as a prostitute. She cried out against God, you know, where are you people? Tell me. There's a God. Where are you? Why'd you give me that kind of parents? How did I get in this kind of a position? She was just full of anger. Nothing but anger inside. And yet the Lord has very, very long arms. And he reached out and found this girl through somebody who cared about her. And they had brought her to this school, which was really designed to administer healing to a lot of kids who got so mixed up that they they just fouled up in their education. And most of the student body was there because they were finding a new base. They were there to get enough of a base of love and healing so that they could get their head together so that they could go out. And some of them received healing very quickly, and they were going out into ministry. Some of them were going from the school into university situations. But she found a healing atmosphere in this school, and she could stay because people were holding her. They were just accepting her. And it was the only place she'd ever found acceptance. And so we said to her, you know, you're not going to be able to grow. You're not going to be set free. You'll always be a prisoner to the anger. You always have to respond to mother, father, authority figures. So long as you hold the unforgiveness in your heart. And so she made the choice. I'll forgive my dad. I don't know how to get it done. I don't know how to make my feelings get in line with my choice. But I'll choose to forgive. And God, I'll. I'll choose to forgive you too. She stayed there, and the reports that we have from people are that she continued to receive healing and restoration. There was a life redeemed, but she had to forgive Father God. That we may think, well, I don't have anything that I haven't thought of, that I haven't forgiven God for. And therefore, I want to put you through a list of questions. Some of you who have been in previous seminars have been through this list of questions. So I want you to go through it again and check and see if your answers are different. Okay. And it'll tell you how much you've been healed. Now you can jot the questions down and answer them very quiet, very quickly. Now, I don't know whether we started in the heavens or whether we started when we were conceived. But let's suppose for these questions that we did exist before, and we're up there in the heavens, we're sitting around watching the angels and the saints. Jesus comes walking into the room. He says, I'd like three or four volunteers to go to Earth for me. First question would you have volunteered to go to Earth? Answer that. Would you have volunteered to go to Earth? Now suppose he walks right up to you and says your name. He says. Would you go to Earth for me? Would you respond? Oh, boy. Hallelujah! Yes, sir. Right away or. Okay. Drat! Which way would you respond? Would you leap up to do it or would just obey? Reluctantly. Now, if you had to come to Earth but he gave you your choice, would you? Would you choose to be born in the time and place you were born, or would you choose some other century? When would you be born? When, when and where you were? Or would you born be born in like the nineteenth century or the thirteenth century or the first century? Where, where and when would you be born if you had your choice? Now, if he gave you your choice, Would you choose to be born to your parents, or would you pick out some other parents? Would you choose your parents or would you choose some other parents? Would you choose to be born to your father, or would you pick some other father? Would you choose to be born to your mother, or would you choose some other mother? If you had your choice, would you be a boy or a girl? Would you choose? Now we're going to quit preaching. Go to Medellin. Would you choose your face? Or some other face? Would you choose your body? Or would you rather be Charles Atlas or Gina Lollobrigida. Would you choose your mind, or were you under the bed when they passed the brains out? Would you choose your mind, your brain? Would you choose your character and personality, or would you choose some other personality and character? If you're a woman, are you pretty? Are you beautiful? Are you desirable? Are you lovable? Are you choosable? Would somebody choose you? Should they have chosen you? If you're a man, are you handsome? Are you good looking? Are you attractive? Are you desirable? Are you lovable? Would somebody choose you? Should they have chosen you? Do you like you? Do you like you? One final question. If Jesus walked up to you right now and said, I'll give you your choice, you can either go all the way through life or right straight up to heaven with me. Which way would you go? Now I have news for you. The news for you is that in any degree that you would not volunteer to come to earth and you would say, oh, drat. If you were ordered to come in any degree that you wouldn't choose your time and censure to be born in, in any degree, that you wouldn't choose your parents, you wouldn't choose your father, you wouldn't choose your mother in any degree, that you wouldn't choose the sex you are. You choose the other one in any degree. You wouldn't choose your face or Your body or your character or your mind in any degree that you don't like you, in any degree that you wouldn't choose to go all the way through life to that degree. You're angry at God. You're saying to God, you could have done a better job making me, you know, at least you could have given me a back that didn't hit you up every once in a while, you know, at least you couldn't. You could have given me a mind that didn't skip beats and forget things. You know, you could have taken thought for my stomach, you know. And I can tell you that by the same analogies I've used with those who've been through this with me before. If you create a beautiful nursery room and send your child in there, and the child comes out five minutes later and says, I don't like it in there, are you honored as a parent or dishonored. Which way? Come on, call it out. Dishonored. This earth, your life, your circumstances. That is the nursery. God has given you. If you don't like it, you dishonor him. You wound his heart. You give your child beautiful little toy and he's not too happy with it. If he does play with it, leaves it outside, up, down on the snow. Upside down. Does that honor you as a parent? No. But suppose this is entirely fictitious. He plays with it. He lets the neighbor kids play with it. He washes it, he waxes it and puts it away carefully. How do you feel now? Soaped know you feel honored. The news I have for you is that whatever that toy is little tricycle, little red, little red wagon, whatever it is, that is what God gave you. If you don't like it, you don't take care of it. You wound the heart of the father God, who gave you that gift. Your body, your heart, your mind, your parental situation, your family situation. That's where God chose to form you. And I'll give you a rule. The higher the service intended for the servant, the deeper the Lord plunges him into a troubled circumstance. The higher the service intended, the more the suffering. You can look in the scripture and see that. What about Moses? It's cast out. Hidden in the bulrushes. Received. Cast out again. Forty years in the desert. Struggle. Turmoil. Abraham, get up and leave your family. No children, but I'll give you one forty years. No, child. I'm still going to give you one now. Sacrifice him when you got him. Trouble, pain. The higher the service intended, the deeper God plunges the servant into trouble. Because Hebrews two eighteen. Because he suffered and was tempted, he is able to help those who suffer and are tempted the highest of all. Jesus suffered the most. We don't understand that, you see, and we we look at our life as a mess. We look at all the sins we did and all the things that were done to us. And we're angry because we don't trust Father God, that that was God's gift to make us become the strength to minister to others, and healing becomes complete when, from the father's lap, we can sit back and say, there's nothing in my life without which I would be better off. I needed that trouble to make me what I am. And thank you, father. From a full heart for that thing, a girl was raped. She needed that. Her husband was given a haranguing wife. He needed that a wife was given a beating, drunken husband. She needed that. You betcha. You betcha. God would turn that to glory. And so we need to forgive God. Now, let's just do that before we can, before we finish the talk. Let's just bow in prayer and do that. Lord Jesus, we confess that we haven't trusted either you or Father God, and we ask you now to walk back through the years and just forgive us our untrust and by faith, let's you just repeat it after me. Just by faith. Father God, I forgive you. I forgive you all my disappointments. And the times when I thought. You took no thought for me. I forgive you my loneliness, my separation from you, my hurt and my anger. Let me be forgiven and let me be taken into your arms. Thank you for that gift through our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen. You'll remember that earlier I talked about how a wife cannot really enter into a blessed relationship with her husband until she learns that she is worth something, that she is beautiful, that she is a gift of God to bless his heart. The same thing is true of fellowship that we have with the Father God. Until we learn to accept, appreciate, look with gratitude and compassion on ourselves as we are, as we were, as we were back at the beginning and present that to the Lord, we can't enter into real fellowship with him. Some of you will remember the story that we often tell when we're teaching about inner vows, about the young woman who came, who was so discouraged and upset with herself because she couldn't enter into a marriage relationship with a man, because her body had never developed all of its womanly attributes. No breasts. Nothing. And we found out that the reason for that was because she was, first of all. A failure as an attempt to abort, her parents tried to abort her because she was conceived in a war torn country. They didn't want to raise a child. Then she was a disappointment because she wasn't a boy. And then she experienced all the terrors of living in a war torn country, even to being in a bunker when a firebomb was dropped into the bunker. And then she was constantly uprooted. And in the process of all this, she made an inner vow. I do not want to grow up in a world like this. I will not grow up and be a responsible person in a world like this. And consequently, her body just obeyed that. And so, at the normal time to develop into a young woman, her body just didn't grow up. She had a child's body in, though. She was a thirty five year old woman. And so we prayed, enabling her to forgive her father, her mother, father God, for causing her to be born in such a terrible world. She just forgave the whole condition of mankind. Just on faith, choosing to forgive. And at the ripe old age of thirty five and a half, she began to develop breasts. In fact, she developed such a beautiful bosom that some people in Wisconsin who met her and heard her story said, the Lord really overdid it. But she discovered, she discovered a little later on. Now, in spite of the joy of the Lord setting her free to become the woman that she was, in spite of all the ministry of reconciliation that the Lord affected between her parents, in spite of the relationship that she was developing with the Lord, she discovered that there was a deeper dimension that was really keeping her from close fellowship with the Lord. And one day she sat down and she began to tell me about it. She said, I never shared this before, but she said when we fled to Argentina after the war, we had no money. We were just in poverty. T and I was ashamed of where I lived, and I was ashamed of the way we looked. And I shied away from people and I couldn't bring friends home. And I just felt so lonely. And she said then I was just undone when I didn't begin to develop like the other teenage girls. And I wanted to hide. She says, the Lord has taught me to know that I have something worthwhile to give. Now that I've been healed and I can share myself. And I love to pray for people, and the Lord has me in a wonderful ministry of sharing the life that he's given to me now. But she says, when I look back at that little girl that I was there, so ugly and so ill equipped, she said, I just shuddered. We prayed about that and I said, can you look at yourself the way you were then, with the same compassion that you would look on somebody, that you were trying to minister to, somebody who was ashamed and humiliated. Your heart would go out to that one, wouldn't it? And she says, oh, yes. He said, I just, I just want to gather that one up and, and just hug her and, and put her world together. And so I said, well, in prayer, let's do that. You just gather up that little one that you were, and you hug her. And let's ask the Lord to put her world together. And so we prayed that she, at the deepest level, would be able to accept and love herself, and that everything within her be reintegrated and reconciled to life and to Father God. That woman is blooming. She's free. Story. We spent part of August with her, and she's just radiant. The same kind of thing happened to us at a seminar in Spokane. We had a seminar where we only invited pastors, elders, people who were in active counseling ministry, doctors, nurses. And we thought, boy, we are really going to have something in ministry because these people are trained and they're dedicated, they're committed. And if groups and churches can sit around and pray for one another, oh, how much more effective it's going to be. At the seminar, they went to the seminars and they just sat there, everybody in a little pocket of isolation. Nobody was willing to open up at all. And at first we thought, well, it's just that because they're professionals, they think they have to have it all together. They're so used to helping other people, they they just want to be the big cheese, putting everybody else together. But we found out it wasn't that at all. For some reason, the Lord had called to that particular seminar a whole lot of people who were in the same position as the young woman that I was just describing. They could not accept the snotty nosed little kid that they used to be. They could accept themselves as ministering professionals with compassion and with understanding and with wisdom, and with the Lord's power to heal. But not that messed up little kid that they were. And so we took time in the middle of the seminar to pray that they be enabled to look upon the little kid that they were with compassion, and gather that one up in the arms and accept Themselves with love the next time they went to the ministry sessions. They began to share and healing began to happen. We cannot give ourselves to the Lord unless we accept ourselves. To present to the Lord will feel humiliated and ashamed and will run from his presence. But when we know that we're just loved in every condition that we have been in, or could possibly be in, that his love doesn't depend on our doing anything right. It doesn't depend in any way on our winning points by good service. He just loves us because he loves us. Then we can bring ourselves to him and we can jump in his lap. And we know we have a right to be there because he chose us out of the love of his heart and for no other reason. Now I just want to focus on one verse for the law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and death. I thought, well, Hallelujah, since I'm born anew and I've got the Holy Spirit, I'm free from sin and death. And the Lord came along and said, John, that's true. And Saint Paul does talk about that in other places, but that isn't what he's talking about. Here. Look again. So I looked at that second verse again and I saw spirit. So I thought, Hallelujah, since I've got the Holy Spirit, I'm free from sin and death. And I had scripture to quote at him. So I said, where the spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty. He said, John, that's true. He said, Saint Paul does say that. He says, that's not what he's talking about here. So you didn't understand that Scripture. Did you ever have the Lord take a scripture and just whomp something off the pages onto your eyes? He did that for me, so I'll read it again and show you. For the law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and of death. He's talking about the law. The law of the spirit of life and the law of the spirit of sin and death. Well, what is the law? Well, now Paul was trained by Gamaliel, and he knew how to use that word law rightly. But in this case he didn't. He used it poetically. And the Lord reminded me, he said, John, when Paul wrote, he didn't sit down and say, I'm going to write chapter seven, then I'm going to write chapter eight. He said, it's one thing. So he said, now look up above there. Look at the twenty second verse. And now watch how many times and ways he uses the word law. For I joyfully concur with the law of God in the inner man. But I see a different law in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin, which is in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will set me free from this body of this death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord. So on the one hand, I myself, with my mind, am serving the law of God, but on the other with my flesh, the law of sin. Wow. That's a lot of ways to use the word law. What the Lord revealed then is that what Saint Paul was saying is that while we're living on the earth, we build up inside of us a whole lot of practices which are really sin and death. And that's what he's talking about when he talks about the law of sin and death, the law of sowing and reaping, and we reap from those practices and we get death. Now, he said, how do you get set free from that? Will you receive Jesus as Lord and Savior? That washes away your guilt. Then, one by one, those old practices are crucified and they're brought to death. But now the point he's making is it is not enough to bring the old law to death. There must be a new one built in. And so you are not set free from the old practices until you replace them with a new set of practices. And it is the law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus which sets you free from these old practices. Now, what is the law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus? Come on, call it out. What is it? What's. What is Jesus law? Okay, you got it. But finish the quote. Love one another. How? As I have loved you. How did Jesus love us? Laid down his life. So when you learn daily, momentarily to lay down your life for others, then you are building in the law of life. See Galatians six two bear ye one another's burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ. That's laying down your life. So. Oh, God, I got it. God. And then he said, no, you didn't understand that either. See, I thought, well, Lord, if I just lay down my selfishness and do something for somebody else that's laying down my life. The Lord came along and said, John, your selfishness is not life. Your selfishness is death. I didn't say, lay down your death for others. I said, lay down your life for others. So I thought, well, if I just lay down my time and energy that's laying down my life for others. Lord came along and said, John, your time and energy is not yet your life. I said, lay down your life well, Lord, what is my life? He said, John, what was my life? Then he opened the scriptures, like on the way to Emmaus, you know. And he showed me the sun doth nothing but what he seeth the father doing. The father and I are one. Philip, have you been so long with me, and yet seest not the father? Jesus left heaven, but he never left his father. His father was his life. Where'd he go when he got troubled and tired? Come on. Where'd he go? To his father in prayer. Got restored. Now what he did. He went into the Garden of Gethsemane. And there, for the first time, he became alienated from his father. Because the Scripture says the father's eyes are too pure to behold sin. He sees it, but can't accept it is what it means. And he who knew no sin became sin. Jesus entered in across time and space, and he identified empathetically with every person who had ever lived, was living then, or would live. And he became our sin. Every bit of our grief, our hurt, our doubt, our hate, our jealousy, our murdering, every bit of our envying, every bit of our grudges. Jesus entered in and he became that. It was such a hard work. It broke his capillaries and he nearly died. God sent an angel to strengthen him. But when he had become sin for the first time, he was isolated from God the Father. That was laying his life down before he did that, nobody could hurt him. He had no evil in him. He couldn't attract evil to him, took him up to cast him over the city wall. He couldn't do it. Picked up stones, couldn't hurt him. No evil in him could attract no evil. But when he had our evil in him and will to allow it to happen, anybody could hit on him, spit on him, rail at him, accuse him. He had become our sin on the cross. He became the utmost of that when he cried out, come on! What? He cry out, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? He had become the depth of our isolation. He who hangs on a tree is a curse of God. The Scripture says. Now then, what is our life? And how do we lay it down? When we come to Jesus? We're washed clean in the blood. We're filled with the Holy Spirit. We come into a worship service and we're filled until we just radiate with his life. We go out from the service and somebody comes up to us and starts gossiping. And right then, we've got a choice. I'm not like him. I pay my tithes and I worship, or Lord, he's hurting. I'll open my heart. I'll take his death into me. I'll become his death. And then we don't feel so good. Or we go home and the neighbor's dog has gotten in the garbage again after we ask him to chain him up. And now we can either be mad at that guy, or we can say to ourselves, he would have been considerate unless something's hurting him. Lord, I'll take his hurt into me. And when you do that empathetically and you become one with that brother's evil, you don't feel so good. You hurt. You get all mixed up. And so what God wants is a people who are like heavenly ink blotters. And they run out there and they soak up the sin of the world into their own heart and body. Come into his house, get all cleaned up again, run out and soak up some more, come back, get all cleaned up, run out and soak up some more. That's what God wants is a people who don't hug righteousness to themselves but drink it. Now you say, well, that sounds kind of mystical and foolish. Is that in the scripture? I want you to look up second Corinthians four twelve, verse eleven, verse number golf above that tenth, always carrying about in the body. Speaking of himself, the dying of Jesus, that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our body. You see, Jesus lives in you. Do you want to be close to Jesus all the time? Then you gotta go where Jesus is going. And Jesus is the water of life. And where's the water of life going? Water's going downhill. Water's going to the place of suffering. So what God wants is a people in whom he can live. And Jesus can stand in front of somebody's tomb. Another Lazarus tomb and weep over their death in you. So you're always carrying about in you the dying of Jesus, that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our body. For we who live are constantly being delivered over to death for Jesus sake, that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our mortal flesh. So death works in us, but life in you. You see that? Bear one another's burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ. That's how you lay your life down. Every person you see who is hurting you. Open your heart as Jesus invites you to and you say, Lord, come in me and draw that man's death. That man's hurt right into me and on to the cross. If you do that, you get some benefits. One of the benefits is if you are if you've already died in an area and you identify with that and a brother, then you're transparent. It goes right through you to the Lord and burn. Burying is easy as it ought to be, but if you haven't died and you identify with somebody, gunk, the gunk gets stuck in you. And that drives you to the cross, and you come to your own death sooner. Second benefit. As you do that, you come to know the love of Jesus. And Jesus becomes real in every moment of your life because Jesus is moving through you to come to a brother. Brother came to me today and he said, how come when I get close to you, I feel like weeping? You know why? Because Jesus is entering into his sorrow through me and drawing it from him to himself. That's why. That's how you lay your life down. And all of that was to lead, to say what Paula told me needs to be said here. And that is that since the Father God entered my heart and is abiding in me for the first time, I could be a better father, because Father God was expressing himself in and through me. Now that's where we are to come. But this is the one thing that has a prerequisite, That is, he comes to those who obey Jesus command and lay down their life for others. He doesn't come to a newborn Christian. He comes to those who have been willing to pay the price, and who learn to lay down their life in intercession day in and day out for others. And that prepares the heart. It isn't that it earns brownie points, as Paula said that before. And what it is, it is that it prepares the heart for the reception of Father God into the heart. And Father God is the source of power. The words that I say, I say not on mine own authority, but the father who dwelleth within me, he doeth the works. I know the source of power. His father God. Listen to the Scripture. Every good and perfect gift cometh down from the father above, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to do to change our God is love in him is no darkness at all. Father God is so gentle, so safe, so secure. I can blow it totally and take a flying leap into his lap. And he'll hold me and he'll love me. That's Father God. I want you all to come home to Father God. But I do tell you, there is a requirement. You have to be willing to lay down your life day in and day out for others, day in and day out. And laying down your life means taking their burdens into you. Paula, come up to me. We do this all the time. She come up to me and say, have you been feeling afraid for the last hour or so? And I'll say, yeah, God has laid somebody's burden in our heart. Romans twelve one I beseech you, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice unto God, which is your reasonable service or spiritual worship. And so Paul and I, in order to get prepared for this, for three years, every night we said the same prayer. Lord, we give you our heart, mind, body, soul, and spirit. We give you our past. We give you our present. We give you all our future. We give everything we are into you. All our ambitions and hopes, our family, everything we give to you. You have permission, Lord, to call on us any time of the day and night. Lay a burden into our heart at any time. We are yours. And after we were the servant for a while. Then he said, no longer do I call you servants, but friends. That's the route you gotta lay down your life. That means you gotta bear people's burdens. You gotta hurt with people. You gotta be vulnerable. Let's bow in prayer. Lord Jesus, we thank you that you've shown the way to the father. No one cometh to the father but by you. We thank you, Lord, that you have laid down your life for us, and you've said that whoever would follow you must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow you. So, Lord, we want to take up the cross. We want to give ourselves to you to bear the burdens of others, to hurt for others. And so we do, each in his own heart, as much as he is able unto the degree of his faith. We say, Lord, we give ourselves to you. We do that in silence right now. Father God. You are so worthy to be loved and adored. You're worthy of all our life.