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1305--Retaining Revelation--HearingGodSeries_128k
00:00:00 Speaker: Retaining revelation. And what I mean by that is that it's one thing to learn a truth. It's another thing to hang on to the truth, because only the truth we hang on to, and it's only the truth that we apply that is of any benefit to us whatsoever. Uh, you know, it says, um, uh, Paul says in the last days, uh, we can accumulate to ourselves teachers, uh, who will tickle our ears. And, um, we can be so in love with the words that they simply tickle our ears. That's all they do. They entertain us, but they don't go anywhere. And they don't. They don't change our lives. So what I want to speak on tonight is how do we retain revelation? And I want to start by looking at Luke four, Luke eight, excuse me, Luke eight. And it's just, um, the parable of the sower and the seed. Now, I'm sure we all know the parable, so I won't go into great detail on it. Although, having said that, um, I'm not sure the parable is actually understood properly by many, so we will come back to that some other time. But in Luke eight thirteen, Jesus just draws attention to a kind of seed, uh, and, uh, that falls among the thorns. This is Luke chapter eight. Uh, sorry, novice. Excuse me. Luke thirteen. Uh, those on the rocky soil. That's the one I look at. Those on the rocky soil are those who, when they hear, receive the word with joy. And these have no firm root. They believe for a while in a time of temptation, they fall away. Now, uh, while this is true about people, it's also true about any seed as well. Because the fact is, we're always going to be tested on and tempted on the words that we've heard. Uh, do you remember with Jesus, for example, he gets baptized in River Jordan and he's led by the Holy Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted. And remember, the word he's been told, uh, by the father is, behold, my beloved son, in whom I am well pleased. And yet the very first thing that Satan does when he comes to him, he says, essentially, the Son of God do this. Well, essentially the Son of God do that. And Jesus actually is being tested on what that word means and how he's supposed to apply that word. And of course, because Jesus comes back at Satan with the scriptures, he's able to correct Satan's, uh, temptations and and to reject them. So, uh, even Jesus himself was tested regarding the word that he heard. So we find that in the world there are people who will hear and receive the word with joy. We even are pleased to hear it. We hear it and go, oh, that is so good. But it says they have no firm root. They believe for a while. But in time of temptation they fall away. In other words, they don't retain the revelation. Now compare that with verse fifteen. Uh, the seed and the good soil. These are the ones who have heard the word in an honest and good heart, and hold it fast and bear fruit with perseverance. And as I say, I don't want to go into the whole parable, but each each word is worth looking at. But I wanted to make the comment here that the difference is the good soil. Uh, they're the ones who hold it fast. They retain the revelation. They hang on to it. So I'm going to say this. I want to say this. I want to say that the best way to retain revelation, because it can seem like such an experiential thing. You either hang on to it or you don't. But I believe it's a better. It's better than that. You don't have to be so hit and miss. I believe the best way to retain revelation is to find scriptures that actually can confirm your experience of the Holy Spirit. You see, we all will have experiences of the Holy Spirit. And I've come across many people who have had a touch of God. I remember, for example, years ago, working with a drug rehabilitation home in Christchurch, and there was a young woman there who was a heroin addict. And as I talked to her, I was astonished to find that she had once become a Christian. And I said, oh, really? What happened? And she said, well, I was at this meeting and there was this Australian preacher, and he was preaching up a real storm. And she said, and he began praying for people. And as he prayed for them, they fell onto the floor. And, um, and she said, oh, they're all phony. But she said, but as I listened, I began thinking. But on the other hand, that's a really encouraging thing to hear about Jesus loving me. And yeah, I would yeah, I'd like to know more about that. So she went forward for prayer and she said, I thought if he if he tries to push me over, I won't, I won't let him touch me. But as she got close to him, the guy turned around to pray for her. But. And she to her astonishment, since this presence of God all around her. And she fell to the floor quite without anyone touching her or pushing her. And she just felt this overwhelming presence of God. Overwhelming love of God. And now, at the time she went, she was an addict. She was a heroin addict. And so I said, so what happened? And she said, well, it was the most wonderful thing. She said, I lost all my desire for heroin. And for three or four days, I didn't want anything to do with heroin. And I just thought, oh, I'm free, I'm free. But she said, but after a while it wore off. So I went back to using heroin again. So when I came across her here, she was in this rehab house trying to get free again. But it it was a real wake up call to me to think, well, that's a sad, terribly sad that this woman could have had an experience of God, but then she didn't know how to keep it, didn't know how to retain that. And when I say it, it's not just that. It's it's more than that. It's it's hearing, hearing something from God and holding on to what you've heard, and it's retaining the seed. Because let's be clear on this. The seed. Jesus said, the seed is the Word of God. And what was what the problem was? She had an experience, but she didn't she didn't connect it with the word. And that's what I'm trying to say. I'm trying to say that the only way to to hold fast revelation is to find a scripture that confirms it, or that establishes what it is the Holy Spirit has done in your life. Um, let me give you another example. Um, I hadn't been a Christian very long, about six months, and I was, um, no, I'm saying about a year and a half, about a year and a half. And I was working with a whole team of on fire Christians who were going up to, uh, to Northland from Christchurch, uh, on a big old bus, an old bus. This was back in nineteen seventy five, which a while ago now. And, uh, the team was being led by a man called Murray Thompson, a Maori evangelist. And as we travelled on this bus, we were having a wonderful time. We were singing and worshiping and and enjoying each other's company. We'd got to know each other quite well beforehand. And, uh, so as we traveled, uh, I went through this, um, I was just having a marvelous time. I was the new kid on the block. I was surrounded by these wonderful older Christians, and I was just having a ball, and, uh. But then one afternoon, we were travelling up the desert road, and, um, I was having a snooze, as you do when you're travelling on a long trip. And suddenly the bus stopped and everybody got off the bus, and they began to jump up and down with excitement, because up ahead of us was this magnificent double rainbow right across the desert road. And, uh, so all these other folk would had jumped out of the bus and I woke up and they were all outside. So I went out to see what was going on, and here they were. So isn't this a marvelous look at this double rainbow? And they were so excited and someone was saying, wow, you can feel the presence of God. And to my horror, I couldn't feel the presence of God. And as I listen to their excitement at first of all, seeing this double rainbow, but secondly, this sense of God's presence with them. And I'm thinking, well, I can see the rainbow. And it's yeah, it's pretty cool, but I feel nothing. But for the last year and a half, I've had this wonderful time of walking with God, and suddenly I don't feel his presence anymore. And now I've learnt enough by that stage. After a year and a half, I've learned enough to know that these times come and there's times when you. It's like you are walking along a road and all of a sudden you go through a dark tunnel and one minute you're walking in the sunshine, next thing you're in shadow. And. And I knew enough that you just keep walking. Whatever you do, don't sit down inside the tunnel. You just keep walking. Because eventually you come out of that tunnel and you come back into the sunshine again, and you have that lovely sense of the presence of God again. So I thought, okay, I know what to do, I'll be fine. So I went back on the bus and and I just I didn't say anything to anybody. I thought, I'll get through this, but the following day I woke up and still no sense of the presence of God. And I thought, oh, this has taken a bit longer than I thought. And, um, so I waited, just kept pressing on and but following day, no sense of the presence of God. And then these terrible temptations began to come into my brain. When I say terrible, terrible for me. Because when I found Jesus, uh, he was the best thing that ever happened to me. He was astonishing. And I came out of this terrible. I was I was brokenhearted, I was, I was a complete emotional wreck when I found him. And, uh, so he really got me back on my feet. He'd helped me put things right with my parents, with friends, and so on. So I'd had a time of restoration and my soul had been restored a great deal. So I'm. I was very grateful to the Lord. But now all of a sudden, I couldn't sense his presence. And this nagging little voice started coming in my ear saying it was all a dream. And I thought, what? And this voice was just saying, Will you just imagine the whole thing? Yeah. You thought you had an experience of God, but actually, no. And I thought, oh. And I was thinking, is that me or is that external voice? But this real fear began to come into me thinking, what if it was just a dream? What if this what I thought was a wonderful experience, actually is just a delusion? And in fact, it's not true at all. And I began to withdraw, thinking, no, I don't want to engage this. It's too it's too big an issue. And I'm not going to go there. I'm just going to trust. But this voice kept coming back to me again and again. Are afraid of the truth, are you? And I'm thinking. Oh, so. Then I began thinking. So how do I know anything's real? And you know the classic old line. It's a Buddhist, I think. Buddhist parable. How do you know when you go to sleep, whether you're a man dreaming or a butterfly, or if, in fact, you're a butterfly dreaming you're a man. How do you know? Because that's one of the great existential questions. How do you know anything? Oh, I think it was, um, uh, was it Kant? Whoever said, uh, I think therefore I am, um, that one of the great existentialist answers was. Well, I think so. As long as I can think I must be, I must exist. So that's a good starting point. So I was thinking, well, I don't know about I don't care about my existence. I want to know if God exists. And then I began thinking, well, okay, I think I exist. That's alright. But how? How could I know God exists? So I'm stumbling around in this darkness thinking how do I know anything? And then all of a sudden I thought, well, wait a minute, I've got a Bible and it's whatever, wherever I exist, it's in the same realm as my existence. So there's me and there's a book. And in this book it describes a man called Jesus who lived two thousand years ago, who said, you must be born again. And as I was thinking this, I could feel this nagging voice begin to fade away. And I began to feel this new flood of confidence come into me. And I thought, so the Bible is as real as I am in whatever realm that is. And this book describes a man who also lived on this planet two thousand years ago. You know for sure. And he said, I must be born again. And a year and a half ago, I had the very experience he talked about. I was born again and that's what changed my life. So yes, I've had the experience, but I've also got the scripture that says, you must be born again. Now that was the turning point. I found myself turning on this voice and saying, get out of my face, devil! Leave me alone! I know where I'm going. Get out of my way. And I found this wonderful confidence. Come back. And this presence of God began to come back into my life again. And I realized I was fine. So I began thinking about this, though, thinking, so God, what was that about? Lord, you're back with me now and it's great. And you've tested me and so on. But but why? Why is it such an important thing for me to be tested so severely? Because it was really scary. I mean, I was thinking, am I losing my mind? Have I been diluted? Where am I going? How does this work? And, uh, instead, uh, and it's been a real scary time. But instead, I felt the Lord say to me, he reminded me that passage in first Corinthians three where Paul says that the day will come when what we believe will be tested through fire. And he said on that day, are your works of your hands will be sorted out, whether it's wood and stubble, or whether it's gold and silver and precious stones. And I began realizing that every experience we have will be tested by fire. That's how it works. And then I began seeing that I'd built this wall very carefully in my own life. I'd built this what I thought was a good on a good foundation. But some of the things I'd put into the wall were actually just wooden hay and stubble. So when the fire hit, those things burnt. But the thing that I've been holding on to that was true, which was the reliability of the Scripture, which was reality of Jesus, which was the fact that he'd once upon a time said, you must be born again. That was gold and silver and precious stones. And that survived the fire. So I was able to go back through my experience of the last one and a half years and acknowledge and begin to see that some of the things I've been believing were simply rubbish and needed to be burnt up because they were going to otherwise undermine my own foundation. But these things that had survived the fire now they became solid rock for me. They became solid foundations for me. I could hang on to forever. So I'm just using it as an example of how, by finding that scripture, by stumbling on to that verse again, Jesus said, you must be born again or you won't see the kingdom of God. You won't enter the kingdom of God. Finding that scripture, it confirmed what actually had happened to me as an experience. So when people say, I don't like being talking about being born again, I think, well, suit yourself. But as somehow it's a wonderful description, because that's what happened to me, that that's the only way to describe what happened to me. I was born again. So that scripture confirms my experience. Um, what I want to come to tonight, though, is, is what I think, though, and that's a personal one. But I want to go and come to one that I think is actually happens for everybody as well. And this goes back to when I first became a Christian, um, a bit earlier. That was a while ago, that one. But this was about a year earlier. I had become a Christian in August nineteen seventy three, which, um, is just over forty years ago now. And I'd had this wonderful experience. As I mentioned, I went from being broken hearted and emotionally fragile to regaining my life, to regaining relationships that I'd lost, being restored to my parents. Um, finding God was just a wonderful time for me. And so I started off with a hiss and a rule with this wonderful experience. But, uh. In early seventy five, early seventy four. Excuse me, I began having another problem. And this was that, again, I was losing the presence of God And I thought, uh, what am I doing wrong? Alright, I'll try harder. I'll read my Bible more. So I was poring through the scriptures and that didn't do it. And I was reading lots and lots of stuff. But it wasn't life to me. It wasn't changing me. It wasn't helping me at all. So I thought, oh, okay, I need to I need to pray more. So I was praying and praying, God, where are you? You know, I want to feel your presence more. And nothing happened. And I thought, oh, well, never mind. I'll just go on to church and we'll sing more. So I was going to church on Sundays. Two, two messages, two services on a Sunday midweek meeting. I went to two or three as well. So I was going to meetings. I was assembling with the saints. I was reading the scriptures, I was praying, I was, I tried fasting. Nothing seemed to work. And I was again beginning to get worried, thinking. But I'm doing all the right things. How come? How come I'm. I'm struggling here. And then, uh, I went to a meeting, and this meeting was the right meeting to go to. Uh, it was it was a man called one Ortiz. One Carlos Ortiz, who was an Argentinian preacher. And, uh, one Ortiz was speaking on the New Covenant. And what he did that night was he began to explain the deal that you and I have got with God that everyone has got with God. And he began to give me a biblical underpinning, a biblical basis for the experience we all are supposed to have and supposed to keep. So what I want to talk to now, I want to use now is to explain the new covenant, because that's the basis for all of us of our faith. Alright, so let's turn to Hebrews chapter eight, Hebrews chapter eight, and we're going to start from verse um Stephen. And the writer of Hebrews points out that God had to change covenants. That there was, um, an old covenant. There was a new covenant that God made with Israel, but it didn't work. So, uh, it didn't work because of the weakness of the of the Jews. So the Lord said, I'm going to make a new covenant, and I'm going to change the way I do things. Now, this covenant, uh, is the is the foundation of the Christian faith. So let's let's go through it carefully. Verse seven. For if that first covenant had been faultless, there would have been no occasion sought for a second. For finding fault with them. Speaking of Israel, he says, behold, they were coming, says the Lord, when I will affect a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah, Not like the covenant which I made with their fathers on the day when I took them by the hand to lead them out of the land of Egypt. For they did not continue my covenant, and I did not care for them, says the Lord. So, uh, notice he's beginning by contrasting it with the mosaic covenant that was made when Israel came out of Egypt. So he says this verse ten, for this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord, I will put my laws into their minds, and I will write them on their hearts, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people, and they shall not teach everyone his fellow citizen and everyone his brother, saying, know the Lord, for all will know me from the least to the greatest of them. For I will be merciful to their iniquities, and remember their sins no more. So, uh, for those reading in the Bible, it follows the tradition that I'm reading a new American standard. Uh, verse eight, right down to verse twelve, in capital letters, which is to tell the reader that this is the direct quote from the Old Testament. In fact, uh, from my recollection, this is the longest quote there is in the New Testament of the Old Testament. It's quoting Jeremiah thirty one, verse thirty one to thirty four. So it's quoting four verses of Jeremiah, and it's quoting a very large segment. And as I say, I think it's, it's I'm, I could be wrong, but from my recollection it's the longest quote, direct quote from the Old Testament there is in the New Covenant New Testament. Alright. So the writer of Hebrews is trying to remind the Jews that, yes, you've had a great covenant with Moses, but it didn't work. It failed to achieve the goal. And what's the goal? Well, look, in verse ten, I will be their God, and they shall be my people. And verse eleven, they shall not teach everyone his fellow citizen and everyone his brother, saying, know the Lord, for all will know me from the least to the greatest of them. You see the goal of the covenant. The goal of the Old Covenant was that everybody should have a personal, intimate relationship with God. And it's that intimate relationship with God where everything goes wrong. If we don't understand it, this is how we can lose this. Now, I'm not saying we can lose it because, um, it can be easily taken away, but we can lose it because we don't know how to defend it. So it's not random when it goes. It's often being slowly whittled away inside us. We're to learn how to retain it. That's what I'm saying. Alright, so what is this covenant? Well, firstly, it's not like the old covenant. No, the old covenant was different in that when they came up to the mountain. This is in Exodus nineteen when it came up to the mountain. Moses went up to the mountain, and the Lord said, okay, I want you to be my people, my unique people of all the people on the earth. But then Moses went up on the mountain, and he received these tablets of stone, the Ten Commandments. So as he came back down the mountain, he had this covenant. But the covenant that was made with Israel in the first instance was written down on the tablets of stone, two tablets of stone, and they were called the ten words. So in Deuteronomy five I think it is at the beginning of Deuteronomy it says that the entire Old covenant, the mosaic covenant, is made in accordance with these ten words. So the Ten Commandments are a. Uh, what's the word? Um, it's a description. Or it became the way of considering the entire old covenant and are written down on tablets of stone. Now, after that, Moses went up on the mountain, and this time he wrote down another six hundred and something six hundred and three commandments, I think it is, uh, wrote them down on parchment, uh, which he brought back, and they put them inside the Ark of the covenant, along with the tablets of stone. So there was released alongside the Ark of the covenant. So there was these two parts to the law, the Ten Commandments on tablets of stone, and then the rest of the commandments on the parchments. Alright, so, uh, that's how God wrote them. But notice the difference in the New covenant. Verse ten for this is the covenant that I'll make with the house of Israel. After those days I will put my laws into their minds, and I'll write them on their hearts, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. So we see then, that the whole place where the law is going to be written is very different. Instead of being on a tablet of a stone of tablets of stone, instead it's going to be written on the tablet of the human heart. Uh, instead of being externally, uh, read and understood. Instead, it's going to be written in our minds. So it's inside us, which speaks about an incredible experience that we're supposed to be having if we're part of the New Covenant. And the New covenant is that God will cause us to know. He'll cause us to know. So he says, I will do it now. This is the thing that really got hold of me, was I began to see that. As I listened to one of his speak, I began to see that my problem had been that I was beginning to trust in my own mind. Uh, you know, that's a big trap for maybe especially for guys. But I know certainly for me that because I prided myself on my intellect, uh, that was my downfall. I prided myself, my intellect, and it led me into all sorts of stupidity. And, uh, that's why I got a broken heart. But, uh, having become a Christian, I just as surely went back to relying on my own understanding and my own mind. And I thought, in that case, I need to go and read the Bible, read the Bible, study the Bible, study the Bible until I get a hold of it in my own mind. And I began to rely on the flesh, I began to rely on my own efforts. And here's the difference to me. When you read the Bible, if all you're doing is reading it for your own education, then you'll get educated, but you won't get revelation. If, on the other hand, you're reading it saying, God, I'm trying to find your will. I'm trying to understand you. Please talk to me through these words. He will change it from being just external ideas that you remember to becoming written in your heart properly. And that's what revelation is. Revelation is different from education. It's different from information. Revelation is where you get it because God has taught it to you. And that's what I think we need to learn first of all, how to get it, but secondly, how to keep it, how to retain it. So let's turn to Ezekiel thirty six now, because as I listened to one, Ortiz, uh, he went on to talk about how, uh, Jeremiah was prophesying to Israel, um, at the time of when Israel was in Babylonian captivity. And Jeremiah was prophesying in Israel at the time when Jerusalem was about to be taken by the Babylonians and destroyed. And, uh, Ezekiel, however, had already been taken to Babylon. So these two prophets were prophesying at the same time. And Ezekiel thirty six, uh, we find another promise, but this time it's coming, um, in a slightly different form. And it's, um, verse twenty six. So Ezekiel thirty six twenty six and these are the words that Ezekiel prophesied to the Babylonian exiles. Verse twenty six. He says, moreover, I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you. Then I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh, and I'll give you a heart of flesh. I will put my spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes. And you will be careful to observe my ordinances. Uh, you will live in the land that I gave to your forefathers. So you'll be my people, and I will be your God. So notice in verse twenty eight it's got the same goal. The whole point of this covenant, the whole point of this promise is, is to come to a place of intimacy again with God, where we are his people, and he is our God. So with Jeremiah, we see that the the goal is that we come to this and keep this close relationship with God. The same with Ezekiel thirty six. Uh, the goal of Ezekiel thirty six is, so you'll be my people and I will be your God. So both of these prophets were prophesying the same goal, but but Ezekiel, uh, puts it in slightly different phrases, doesn't he? So, uh, let's go back to verse twenty six. Uh, moreover, I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you. And as I, as I learned, um, as from one of that day or that night in Christchurch back in nineteen seventy four. For, um, uh. Behold, I give you new heart and put a new spirit within you. And I began seeing how in my own self efforts, I had begun to think my Christianity was all about me and about my self-discipline. Uh, just to explain a little bit more on that, in my non-Christian days, I was used to being, uh, careless. I was very worldly. I'd given myself to pleasure. I'd given myself to wine, women and song, as they say. And, uh. So I'd had very little self-discipline, very little self control. Having become a Christian, I thought, right, I've got to be different from that. So no more women, no more wine, no more song. And, uh, I literally got rid of all my my rock and roll records and my, all my music records. And I began listening to scripture and song. It was the only music around at that point in Christian circles back in the seventies. And, um, uh, I became celibate and and I stopped drinking and getting stoned. So I thought, okay, this is what I'm doing for God. But in my repentance, I began thinking, so therefore it's about what I do. And I began to subtly rely on my own efforts. And when I heard one Ortiz read these words again, I suddenly realized what I was doing. And I began to realize my mistake because it says, verse twenty six, moreover, I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you. And I began to see that I suddenly began to trust myself instead of trusting God. And that's a trap. So I had to go back to the Lord and say, God, you can see my heart. I haven't been doing this because I'm trying to get away from you. I've been trying to do because I'm trying to get close to you. But it doesn't work. And he's saying, yes, I'm glad you're getting that now. So you need to start trusting me again, that I'll give you the new heart and I'll give you the new spirit. But I will do it. You've got to learn to let me do it. You have to learn how to keep trusting me. Now, see, that's the point. As long as you're doing it, who needs God? You're doing it. So one of the great secrets of the Christian or the spiritual life is learning to embrace the fact that you can't do it. Uh, Paul says in Romans, Romans seven that he said, I've come to see that that dwells in me. No good thing that is in my flesh. In other words, in your old carnal nature, in your old ideas and your old ways of doing things. And Paul said, there's no there's nothing good in me. It's just unreliable. It is who I am, but it's unreliable. I've got to learn to instead say, God, I don't want this old heart. I don't want this old spirit. I want what you want to give me. I want you to change me. My whole dependence is on you, and you suddenly shift from trusting in yourself now to trusting in God in a whole new way. But let me say this. It never stops. It never stops. We are never come to the point where we say, that's it. I'm fine. Because, uh, just think of what Jesus, the illustration Jesus used with the vine. He said, I am the true vine. You're the branches. And he said, unless you abide in me, you will bear no fruit. And he said, if you and if you do stop abiding in me, what happens to a branch when it's cut off from the vine? Will it just withers up and dies and there's nothing you do with it. You just put it on the fire and burn it because it's useless. It's gone. Now just think, what does a vine. Sorry? What does branch do on a vine? What does it do? It produces fruit, but it produces fruit by. being joined. That's it. All it does, all it branch does is it's just. It's just joined to a vine, and it's the sap going through the vine that produces the fruit. But the moment we start thinking, I'm doing fine now, I don't need the vine. I'm fine at that point, we've left the vine. At that point, there will be no fruit. At that point, there'll be no sap going through us and it never changes. It will never be different. And it's a trap for older Christians especially. You know, there's traps for new Christians. There's trap for older Christians. Well, the trap for older Christians is we begin to think, well, yes, that's what I did in my early days. I didn't have to do that anymore. Uh, I've heard Christian leaders even say, uh, in some missions where they majored on discipleship, where they say yes, when people come to us, they learn about discipleship. But yeah, I yeah, I did all that. I don't do that now. And I'm thinking, what, you're not a disciple anymore. And sadly, that's what they're saying. Yes. I don't have to worry about repenting anymore because I've done that once or twice or twenty times. I don't have to do that anymore. Well, I don't think you know yourself very well if you think you don't have to repent anymore, because repentance is not a one off thing. It's something you do every time you get something wrong. So unless you've become perfectly sinless, you're always going to need to repent sometime. So we must retain a repentant heart. We must retain this dependency on God. We are never complete apart from him. That's how it works. Now I want to wind us up by just making this one last comment. Uh, from verse twenty six. Still, I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you. You see, we can't put a new spirit within us. We simply can't do it. It's only God who can do that. And that's why I, like in the Pentecostal church, is what they call the Tarrying meetings. I'm not a huge fan of church tradition, I have to say, Side, but I think it's actually a good thing to do sometimes to simply do what the old time believers used to do, which is simply to wait on God. There's a time when you simply take time out from your busy week and you wait on God. Now, of course, we can all do that individually and it's fine. But I think it's time to do it together as well. And I think it's no accident that revivals, whenever they hit over the last two thousand years, whenever revival is hit, it's always come because somebody has waited on God, has set time aside, prayed, fasted, called on God, and said, God, we need you. And it's that acknowledgement of our bankruptcy, our inability to do it that actually creates the right conditions for God to move. So I'm not saying that God is somehow dependent on us. I am saying, though, that he can't cooperate with us until we're willing to cooperate with him. And at that point, he can start doing stuff in us. So let's stop now for the session, and we'll come back. All right. So we're up to Ezekiel thirty six. And we've been looking at verse twenty six. And the first part is. Moreover I'll give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you. Now I want to just unpack a little bit more of verse twenty six, the contrast that God offers us. I'll remove the heart of stone from your flesh, and I'll give you a heart of flesh. Now, this, um, this metaphor, uh, can be quite tricky, uh, because, uh, sometimes in the Bible, uh, stones are good, sometimes they're bad, sometimes they're neutral. Uh, sometimes in the Bible, flesh is good, sometimes flesh is bad, and sometimes flesh is neutral. So every time you read passages like this, we have to unpack them a little bit to make sure we're getting it right. Now, the fact that God's going to remove the heart of stone means it's bad. The fact that he's going to give you a heart of flesh means that's good, right? So that's the best way of figuring out which is which is what is God doing with what? Um, so at this point, I want to look at the good side of flesh, uh, as opposed to, of course, you read in Galatians where Paul says, for the flesh is always at war with the spirit. At that point, he's referring to the bad part of our fleshly nature, our old nature, as opposed to our new men, that we are a new spiritual being that we are. So when you read flesh being contrasted with spirit, spirit is obviously good. Flesh is bad when you're contrasting spirit with stone. Stone is bad. Flesh is good. All right. So let's let's unpack this then. What what does this mean? Okay. Here's the heart of stone. We're going to compare from just riding on board here. Stone. So I'd like you just to think for a minute, uh, what are the characteristics of stone are hard. Compare that with flesh. What's flesh like? Soft. Yeah. Stone as dry. Frigid. Cold. Fleshes. Warm. Stone as dry. Dry. Yeah. It's unless you wet it. Otherwise it's dry. Right? Yeah. Why would you compare that with Felicia? Okay. No, no, you're right about it. Not. It can't be. It can't be. Can't be molded. Is that a bad thing? Change. Flexible. Not flexible. Flexible, okay. Inflexible. Flexible. How was that? All right. Rigid. Of rigid. Rigid. Hard to hurt. Hard to hurt. Is that a bad thing? Don't be a good thing. What's another way of saying it's hard to hurt? Uncomfortable. What's a hallmark of flesh? Yeah. You can't, you can't. It's insensitive. How about that? Insensitive. Insensitive? Insensitive and insensitive. Yeah, that's what I'm trying to get. That's good. All right. What else? One last thing. Particularly. Well, being too sensitive is not good, too. Now we'll come to that. This stage is what's good about executive okay. So comparing stone with flesh. What else? One. One more particularly. No blood. And there's blood flowing through flesh. Yeah. So what does that tell you? It's alive. Yeah. This is dead. Stone is dead. Inanimate flesh is alive. Now, the reason I like doing this is because this is the promise of God to every human being on the face of the planet. So this is for you and for me. And I have to say, this promise is the most commonly claimed promise in my life. In forty years of walking with Jesus, I have claimed this promise more than any other promise. Now, the reason I do it is because many times when I find myself with what feels like a heart of stone, and here's the description of my inner life. Sometimes. Sometimes I feel that my heart is so hard and I desperately want to have a soft heart. Sometimes I feel like my heart is totally cold. I have no warmth in me whatsoever. I just feel totally devoid of sensitivity, totally devoid of of human feeling. Sometimes I think, what's wrong with me? Well, I've got a heart of stone, for goodness sake. Normal. Okay. Uh, I feel, I feel too, I'm too. I'm too hard. I'm too rigid with some things. I want to be flexible. I want a heart that's flexible. Uh, worse. A heart that's insensitive when I don't have any empathy for what someone else is going through. I want to be sensitive. I want to I want to be able to relate to people properly. Because that's the Jesus is the perfect man. And when he's faced with Martha and Mary grieving over Lazarus. Lazarus. Even though he's going to raise Lazarus from the dead, he still weeps, you know. And that famous verse, the shortest verse in the Bible, if you want to memorize a verse, Jesus wept. Yeah. Now, that's a wonderful verse. Why? Because it points to the sensitivity of Jesus face to face with the real grief of his friends. He weeps with them, even though he's going to bring that to an end. He's going to raise Lazarus from the dead. He enters into the moment with them, and he walks it through with them. He's sensitive. And here's the clincher for me. The heart of stone is dead. It's cut off from God. And what I want is, I want. I want a heart that's alive to God. It's alive with God and in God. So for me, sometimes when I go into a worship meeting, I don't know what I've been doing that day, but I go into worship meeting and let me say this sometimes going to a worship meeting be the best thing you can do because it can reveal a state of your heart, and there's nothing better for you than to birth a bunch of people who just are totally crazy about Jesus. There's nothing better for you because it helps you deal with attitudes in your heart, and you begin to look at your own pride, your own self consciousness, your own, whatever it is. And so for me, when I'm in that state and I walk into a meeting, I find myself critical of people who are on fire for Jesus. At that point, I look at my heart and almost certainly my heart is going to be hard, cold, rigid and sensitive. And at that point I'm saying, Lord, here I am again. Got a heart of stone. Please help me with this. Lord help me. Give me the heart of flesh. You promised you would give me a heart of flesh because I can't do it. I can't do it. But you can. You can give me a heart of flesh. You can make me heart. It's soft, it's warm, it's flexible, it's sensitive, it's alive. So that's why this verse, you know, saying before about retaining revelation. You see, it's one thing to know you've got you start off with this. When you first become a Christian, I was astonished to find when I became a Christian, I got a conscience I hadn't had a conscience for years. I was used to being a liar. I mean, I was twenty three years old, a young man. What young man of twenty three hasn't learned how to lie like a flatfish? What young man hasn't learned to lie his way into a woman's affections or to get what he wants? That's what you do. That's how you get along in the hard, cold world. And young men learn that quite hard. I went to sea and I learned it from guys at sea. I learnt it from the hard knocks of life. So I got used to. When you're in trouble, you lie your way out of it. You never confess. You lie, you out of it. When I became a Christian and the Lord said, no, go back and put all those things right. That was pretty hard. But I began doing it as I went back and put all these things right. I found, to my astonishment, I regained a conscience. And I'll never forget the first time I told a lie after I became a Christian. I blushed and I thought I just blushed. World. At twenty three years old, I've just regained the ability to blush because I lied. Whoa. So I went to the person and apologized. Look, I'm really sorry I lied to you. That was a lie. It felt so good to have a conscience actually worked again. So to me, that's. But here's the thing. After forty years of walking with the Lord. What happens to your heart? You still have this battle. Every now and again, I still find myself with a heart of stone. And at that moment, I go back to the Lord and go, Lord, here I am again. And see the temptation is the devil whispering in your ear, saying, see, you're not changed at all. You're just the same old creep you always were. You're just the same old, hard hearted, unfeeling, insensitive, wretched person. Dead to God, dead to everybody else. You're just a wretch. And if you're not careful, you can go. Yes, devil. You're right. I might as well give up on following Jesus. And I got friends who have done exactly that for me. Now, when I find myself in this state, I go, oh, good, now I can diagnose my problem. I need heart surgery right now. I need to go back to Jesus and say, Lord, here I am again. I've got the heart of stone. I've identified it. I've. I can see it's in me. Please take it out of me. The heart of flesh, a heart of stone. And give me the heart of flesh. That's what I want. That's what I desperately need. And he's come through for me for forty years on that promise. So that's. That's why I love this verse. Now look at verse twenty seven though. It it just gets better. Not only will he give us a new spirit which is speaking of the new human spirit, let's be clear on that. It's a a new spirit is speaking about a new. Oh, just one other thing on heart. When it says heart. It doesn't mean in the English sense of the word heart or the bumper sticker sense. You know, we have these bumper stickers, I heart New York or I heart something, uh, meaning I love New York or I love this, whatever it is. And so in the Western world, we draw a heart, and the shape of our heart is like this because it represents the human heart, right? That's not how a Jew thinks of heart at all. When it says, you love the Lord your God with all your heart. They don't mean this. They mean heart like the heart of a tree. What's the heart of a tree? Cool. Yeah, it's the whole inner core of the tree. So when it's saying love the Lord with all your heart, it's saying not just this. This warm thing that pumps in your heart, in your body, pushing blood around your system. It's same with your whole inner core of your being. Love the Lord your God with all your heart. So. So when he says, I'm going to take you out of your, uh, put a new heart within you, he's saying, I'm going to totally do a new change within you. And a new spirit speaks about the attitudes. Spirit is the motivating force of our lives. Our spirit is the thing that keeps us moving. Uh, when you get angry, for example, uh, you can get into a spirit of anger or a spirit of fear when you when you feel, when you become fearful. Those are human attitudes. And of course, there can be a demonic side to it too. And I've seen people set free from spirits of fear, uh, demonic spirits of fear and demonic spirits of anger. But what what it's talking about here is the new human spirit. When you're born again, you do get a new heart and you get a new spirit. Alright, so that's one part verse twenty six. But look in verse twenty seven, the Lord goes on to say, and I will put my spirit within you. And here's the beautiful thing. Here's where two become one. Remember, Paul says, uh, that he who's joined himself to the Lord has become one spirit with him. That's not saying our spirit doesn't exist. That means our spirit becomes one in the sense of having the same purpose, the same desires, the same goals, the same plans as the Spirit of God. Just as Jesus and the father are one, we too can be one. So here we see that the New Covenant doesn't just include our us having a new spirit, but also that God Himself will place our spirit within us. And here's the big deal for me. I will put my spirit within you and cause you to walk in my statutes. Now, I told you before about wine being the man who was teaching us back in nineteen seventy four. And, um, to illustrate this point, he got his Bible and he put it on the pulpit and he said, cause you to do something. What does that mean? And he said, well, look, here's my Bible. What if I cause it to move? And he put his finger behind his Bible and he pushed it, pushed it, pushed it across the pulpit till it fell on the floor. Now, for me, as a young Christian, I'm thinking, what? Why has it been doing with this Bible? It's horrible. So it stuck in my brain. He did that. He did that. But. But the illustration is perfectly wonderful because the Bible is just sitting there. It doesn't have a life of its own. It's just a book. It's a wonderful, extraordinary supernatural book. But but is just paper. You know, the supernatural things in the words, not in the paper or the letter. So when he pushed now, having said that, I still shocked to see him put the ball on the floor. I can't I can't do that. I can't even put my own Bible on the floor. If I put it on the floor, pick it up and put it somewhere else anyway, that's my fault. Um. The thing he did, though, was he showed what it meant to cause the Bible couldn't move by itself. But he put his finger behind it and he moved it, and he said, that's what God would do in your own heart. God will cause you to walk in his ways. And that changed everything for me, because I began realizing I'd gone back to trusting my own ability to motivate myself. So let me say this sometimes in the morning when I wake up and I've had a I've had some pretty rough times over the forty years I've been a Christian. I've had wonderful times. I've I've lived in the Rockies, in Colorado. I've lived in the Himalayas up in Nepal. And so I've literally been in the heights and I've been in spiritual heights as well, where I've had wonderful revelations of God. But I've crawled through the mud a few times, too, at the bottom of the valley. And I have to say that there's times when I have lost my motivation. There's times when I have just completely run dry. I've run out of every ounce of strength within me. And at that time, I came back to verse twenty seven and I say, Lord, you promised that you would put your spirit within me and you would cause me to walk in your ways, because right now I don't have an ounce of motivation left in me. I am out, I'm empty. At that point. Can I just make this comment? That's what Jesus meant when he said, blessed are the poor in spirit. Uh, I understand the Greek word there is bankrupt. Blessed are the bankrupt and spirit. That means you are totally empty. You have nothing. And Jesus was saying, it's a bad thing. He said, it's a wonderful thing. Blessed are the bankrupt in spirit. Blessed are the bankrupt in spirit. That's a state of blessing. When you finally come to the place where you go, I can't do it. And God says, great, now you're getting it, now you're getting it because you can't. But let me do it. Let me in. Let me do it now. Uh, when I heard this teaching from one Ortiz, uh, he went on to say about how we therefore, uh, will all know God, we'll all have a personal revelation of God, and therefore we don't need people telling us what to do. Um, and can I just make this one comment when it says you have known that anyone should teach you? For all shall know me from least to the greatest. Let's be clear on that. That when I come and stand to teach, I'm not here to teach you about having an intimate relationship with God. That's something only you can do with the Holy Spirit. What I can do, and what any teacher should be doing, is not being a guru, but instead helping you understand what the scriptures say so that you can understand the scriptures. And you'll find that when Paul talks about teachers, it's usually in relation to teachers of the law or teachers of the scriptures. That's the primary goal of a teacher is to help us understand the book. So teachers may be great in Greek and Hebrew and Latin and all in any other language they want to get into. Uh, and they can help you understand the text. But at the end of the day, no one but no one can teach you actually how to know God except the Holy Spirit himself. And that's what the New Covenant is given to do. Jesus said, When the Holy Spirit has come, he will guide you into all truth. He will guide you into all truth. He will do it. He. So it's the Holy Spirit we're supposed to rely on to be our teacher right now. Why not? Having said that, because I'm thinking, what a wonderful man. Uh, two minutes later, he. He disillusioned me completely by thinking. So I began to realize that even he wasn't perfect because he then began saying, you saying, you know one thing I find silly in the church in New Zealand. He said, I hear the pastor say after the speaker has spoken, Will somebody here please take brother such and such home for lunch? And he pleads with the people to volunteer, and he says, why do you do that? In Argentina we don't ask anyone for volunteers. We tell them, hey, you're taking them home. And I thought, hang on, that's the exact opposite. What he was just teaching regarding the New covenant. The new covenant. Not that somebody orders you around and tells you what to do all the time. Then encourage you to hear God. So I realized that the man, even though he had a wonderful revelation, he still was trying to work out work it. He still hadn't got some of the fine tuning right. So that encouraged me too, because I thought, that's great. He's a great preacher and he's getting it wrong so I can relax. You know, it doesn't matter if I get it wrong. Sometimes we all gonna make mistakes. Alright, so that's one or two. Um, now, why was this so important to me? This was important to me because I needed to learn how to retain the revelation Location of the New Covenant, which I had got right when I first became a Christian. But then it lost. Over the next six months, when I first became a Christian, for example, it was on the condition and one of the one of my Jesus friends that I was talking to as an atheist, right when I first met them, I was a radical atheist and fiercely anti-Christian. And one of these Jesus freaks said to me, Graham, if you let God into your heart, let Jesus into your heart, he will change you on the inside. So the things you now love, you will hate, and the things you now hate, you will love. And I thought, nah, it doesn't work like that. Philosophy doesn't work like that. You don't get a heart transplant with philosophy. You just change your mind. You think, oh, I used to think that. Now I think this, but you don't. That doesn't change your motivations. It just, you know. So I just dismissed it as being philosophically impossible. But they were trying to tell me about a spiritual experience. Variance. So eventually, when I humbled myself enough to get down on my knees and say, God help me, Jesus, come into my life. And I had this radical conversion. I changed overnight from loving stuff into hating it. And I began to hate the very things I loved. Uh, for example, I, um, I went to Rescue College in Masterton, which was an Anglican boys school, and I hated, hated going to chapel. Uh, we had to go, um, I think it was once a term which was four times a year. That was the requirement of the school. You had to go to a church service once a term in four terms. So. And the Anglican church, the services are very simple. They're an hour long, but I'm thinking four hours of unrelenting boredom. Man, that's a huge, heavy burden. How can how can anyone bear to go to church for four hours? That's horrendous. I became a Christian. You couldn't keep me away. We were going to Bible studies every night of the week. And if we found two on Sundays, we'd go get a two on Sundays as well. Uh, and friend and I used to hitchhike out to Lower Hutt to a church up there. It was really hot, and it was a real move of God there. So we'd go to that church twice on a Sunday and we'd go to these midweek meetings as well. The very thing I hated now I started, I loved it. Um, I used to love marijuana. I used to think it was the most wonderful thing since sliced bread. Um, I'd worked as a barman, so I kind of got used to alcohol being making people abusive and fighting and brawling. But with marijuana, people became friendly. So I like marijuana, right? Um, I knew I was different, though, uh, when I became a Christian, the Lord spoke to me about that stuff. And so I got rid of it, and, um, my heart changed completely, and I began having these wonderful experiences. It was so much better than being high. And I began realizing that marijuana gives you what seems to be revelations, but the counterfeits, and in fact, they're not they're not revelations at all. They're just fancy baubles that actually aren't real. I'd get a revelation, for example, and write it down really carefully. Oh, that's such a great revelation. I wake up the following morning. Go! The moon is blue. That seems such a great idea last night. What? What what is this? Doesn't make sense, right? So anyway, I began to walk in the Lord. But every now and again I'd be tempted. Would I like another smoke? No, no, I won't, I won't, I won't, but I still want to do sometimes. I knew I was really different though, when one day I was down in Christchurch and an old mate came to see me, and I was actually in the bath, and he walked into my bathroom with his great big joint. Big fat joint. And he said, oh, Graham, I got the most fantastic stuff from Thailand, man, you're going to love this. And I looked at him and I laughed, and I said, Brian, you can't be serious. He said, Greg, you've got to try this. This is fantastic. And I laughed again. I said, Brian, that stuff is so dumb. There's not a way in the world. I go back to that. Why would I go back to that? It's nonsense. What? I've got so much better. And I thought, whoa, I'm really different. I'm really different. I'm changed, you know? So what I'm saying is, though, that I got that I. That's what I heard. That's what I heard this Jesus freak saying to me when I was an atheist. Jesus will change the desires of your heart. He'll make you love stuff that you now hate. He'll make you hate things you now love. That's how he does it. Six months down the track. I've forgotten that's how he does it. And I'm thinking, oh, how he does it is if I just got to read the Bible harder. I've just got to pray more. I've just got to go to more meetings. I've just got to. I've just got to. I've just got to. And what have I done? I've gone back to the old covenant, which is saying, this is what you've got to do. And I suddenly put myself back under the old covenant again. So, uh, this was a, a wonderful revelation for me. Now, the day that I really began to appreciate it, though, was and I apologize to anybody who's heard the story before, but, um. I'd been a very, uh, worldly young man, as I mentioned. And, um, so having become a Christian, I had to sort my life out a lot. Uh, I got rid of all my music, as I said before, and I began listening to scripture and song. I got rid of my drug usage, and I. And I began going straight. Uh, I stopped, uh, sleeping with a woman. I stopped doing all these things I've been doing. But I went a little bit too far to thinking of anything was pleasurable. It had to be sinful. So I not only stopped doing sinful things that were pleasurable, I stopped doing perfectly legitimate things that were in case they were sinful. So, for example, I stopped reading newspapers. I stopped reading magazines. I just read my Bible. I stopped watching television, I stopped going to movies, and I stopped doing anything that I thought was enjoyable in case it was worldly. uh, at one stage. At one stage, he even got rid of all my clothes and wore a boiler suit so I wouldn't be too worldly. Uh, simple and simple living. And, um, so that was part of my the pendulum swinging from being totally hedonistic to becoming ascetic. Yeah. Ascetic is where you don't do anything. It's enjoyable. And can I say this to just put something in here? Um, there's quite a call in the church today for us to go back to some of the traditions of the early church. Uh, they don't mean the early church as described in the Bible. They mean the early church as in the second century. Can I say it's rubbish? Absolute rubbish. It didn't work for them. Why would it work for us? They were getting away from the scriptures, not going into them. So there was a move, for example, for what they called the Desert Fathers, where these guys would go out into the desert and live ascetic lifestyles thinking they're going to hear God. But my question is, did Jesus do that? Is that really how Jesus worked? Of course he didn't. It's how John the Baptist worked. Before the Holy Spirit was given. Before the day of Pentecost. But Jesus being filled with the spirit, that's not how he worked. So we're following the wrong models in this case. And some of these cases, God's not into asceticism except for times when he's trying to teach you something. Fasting, for example, is legitimate for forgoing the pleasure of food in order to press into God. But it's only for a time. If you fast all the time, you're going to die. Uh, it can be even be a fast of drinking liquids. Well, be careful with that one. Because if you don't drink liquids, um, you will die even quicker than not eating food. So, uh, asceticism is as a lifestyle is actually not accurate to the scriptures. It's not a true gauge of spirituality. But that's where I went to. I went to asceticism. So one day, and I was used to let me say this, I was used to hearing from God. I had this conversion that was marvelous. The Lord taught me about repentance and sorting things out. But I thought, okay, this Bible is the best thing I've ever found. I've got to read the whole book from cover to cover. So I started from Genesis. Now Genesis is great. A lot of great stories, a lot of marvelous people and exciting things happening and God intervening and fantastic. You get to Exodus where he starts off great, this big, big escape from, um, uh, from Egyptian captivity. Marvelous. But then suddenly, whammo! And I'm smack, smack into the law and I'm into Exodus twenty, and next thing, I'm building the tabernacle. And I'm going through verse after verse about the tabernacle, and then I start reading through Leviticus, and then I'm reading about feasts and festivals and Sabbaths and, and I'm just totally stuck. And I'm thinking, I just don't get it. So I began praying and I saying, well, Lord, you've been teaching me all this marvelous stuff out of Genesis, and now how about this? But, I mean, how about these festivals? How does this work? And what are these Sabbaths? How does that work? And I can't make these days fit. They don't make sense. So I'm praying, saying, God, help me understand the Sabbath. Help me. Help me get it. And to my horror, instead of God answering me by going, well, it's easy. It's just this, this, this which which he'd done with some things. Uh, instead, the sinful desire begins to pop up inside my heart. I want to go to the movies. And I'm thinking, oh, no, no, no, it's my sinful heart. So I'm going. Get out of it. You're a rotten thing. Stop! Lord help me! Help me understand the Sabbath. And this desire gets stronger and stronger. Stronger. I want to go to the movies. I want to go to the movies. And it gets stronger and stronger and stronger. Until finally I'm thinking, well, if God's not going to answer me, I'm mad with him. I have a bit of a tantrum here. I'm going to go with the sinful desire. I'm going to go to the movies, and I'm just going to enjoy myself because, God, I'm willing to give up anything for you. But if you're not talking to me, Why should I bother? So? So I took some money I put aside to pay for an electric bill coming up, and I went down to the bus stop. As I got to the bus stop, just as I got there, the bus closed its doors in front of me and I thought, ah, God's going to stop me going to the movies. So I thought, well, I'm not going to stop at this. So I ran and I ran through the lights. The bus stopped for a red light. I ran through the red lights, and I got down to the next bus stop before the bus got there. And as I got onto the bus, I thought, ha ha, gotta beat you. I caught the bus. So I'm still mad at them. I'm still telling them off and I'm sure he's really scared. Really bothered. But. But I felt better. So, um, I'm sitting on the bus and I'm thinking, okay, I'm going to the movies, but what am I going to say now? I've been looking at what's on on the movies for a long time. So I look out the window and here's this great poster up on a on a billboard for a movie called Fiddler on the roof. So I look at that and I think, well, it's a family movie, so, okay, it's sinful, but, but it can't be too sinful if children are allowed to go and see it. So I know I'm going to. I know I'm going to repent. I know that Jesus is the best thing that's ever happened to me. So I know, I know, I'm going to turn back to him, but I'm going to sin just a little while. So I'm going to go and I'll go and sin watching a children's movie, a family movie, because that would be too much. That would be too sinful. There'd be no sex scenes. There'd be nobody getting stoned. There'd be no murders. It'll just be, you know? Okay, so, uh, in I go. Now, as I'm going into the movie theater, I walk into the movie theater as I'm walking in the door with my ticket in my hand, I'm thinking, ha, ha, God, I beat you. You tried to stop me coming, but I'm here. And I want you to know I'm really mad with you. And I'm just going to enjoy this movie. And then I'm going to repent. But I'm going to enjoy this movie. So I sit down to watch this movie. And as I watch this movie, I have no idea what this movie's about. But as as it movie starts, here's this guy sitting milking a cow and he's singing that song. If I was a rich man and I listened to this song. My heart began to melt because this man tevia, he's singing to God and he's saying, God, would it spoil some vast eternal plan if it was a wealthy man? And I thought, that's what I want. I want to have a relationship with God where I can talk to God like a man talks to his friend when he's teasing God. For goodness sake, here I am shouting at God. He's teasing God, and he's not complaining. He's just saying, God, I know this is my lot and I'm going to walk my hard yards, but couldn't I just have some more money? Could not be richer. And I thought, that's what I want to. I want to be able to talk to God real be, to have a real relationship where he really is my God. And I'm really his, his people. That's what I want. So I thought, oh, okay, this movie's not so bad. And then came another scene. And there's the mothers running around trying to light the set of candles. Mhm. And I'm thinking Sarah. Why are they lighting them now. And it suddenly dawned on me they're they're Jewish and they're lighting the Sabbath candles. But it's it's sundown on a Friday. And I'm thinking, why are they doing that? And it suddenly dawned on me that I'm used to reading the Bible through Western eyes. And for us, our days grow from midnight to midnight. But that's not how the Bible was written. The Bible never mentions midnight to midnight. It actually mentions in the Jewish way of thinking, sundown to sundown. So for a Jew, of course, the Sabbath begins at Friday, when the sun goes down and finishes on Saturday when the sun goes down. And that's when the first day of the week begins. Actually, it's Saturday night, so we think Sunday begins at midnight. Midnight. For a Jew, it's actually earlier by five or six hours because it's actually it's sundown on a Saturday. So when they say we gathered together to break bread on the first day of the week, you see this classic mistake in all the churches today. They say, oh, we have a we have a we break, we break bread on on the first day of the week. What they mean by that is they meet on a Sunday morning. They have break bread. What the Bible means by that was actually they got together on a Saturday night to break bread. And you can read about that and acts because Luke talks about when they got together on the first day of the week to break bread. They're up in an upper room and the room is full of lamps. It's night time, for goodness sake. But because it's full of lamps, the room is really warm. And so Eutychus falls out the window and dies. And Paul goes down and prays for and raises the dead. Then they go back up to the room and they have a meal. And then Paul carries on, talking right through the whole night. So it suddenly dawned on me that here I am praying, saying, God, teach me about the Sabbath, teach about the Sabbath, and he's not answering me. And all I've got is a desire to go to a movie. And my first understanding of that desire in my heart is it's got to be sinful. It never dawned on me. It could be from God. And then I began to say that actually, I could go back and revisit this whole episode and go, oh man, I'm so stupid. I prayed for God to tell me about the Sabbath. He answers by giving me a desire to go to a movie. He sovereignly moves me on to the right time, to the right movie. I mean, just looking out the window. I didn't know what movies were on. I looked at them. I looked out the window and saw the the the billboard. I think, oh, okay, I'll go to that movie. I walk into this movie and here's the answer to my prayer right there. And it's happened within an hour or two of me praying. It's a very quick answer to prayer. God's taught me about the Sabbath. Now that was such a revelation. But I began to see, too. Here's the big deal. Not only had he got a revelation about the Sabbath, but helped me then understand large segments of Exodus and large segments of the law of Moses, because the Sabbath actually has a phenomenal revelation of Jesus in it. But that started me off in a whole new revelation of Jesus. But it also taught me about true spirituality that I had to come back to. What was the New Covenant? The New Covenant is I'll give you a heart of flesh instead of a heart of stone. I'll put my spirit within you And I'll cause you to walk in my ways. Now, that desire to go to the movies didn't come through my brain. It didn't come in my understanding. It came from a desire of my heart. And I had to learn a whole different way of moving, a whole different way of thinking, a whole different way of understanding. And let me say this now, after forty years, the primary, the primary way that I received guidance from God is through a desire in my heart. Now, that can sound incredibly risky to people who are used to discipleship. And back in the seventies, there was a whole movement on discipleship, which was all about, you come under my thumb and I'll tell you what to do. And they missed the point completely, because that's the law of Moses. The law of Moses is you find a guru and he tells you what to do. Or you find a rabbi and he tells you what to do. Or you find the book and it tells you what to do. It's external to you. The new covenant is I'll write on your heart. I'll place my spirit within you. And I'll cause you to walk in my ways. And sometimes that causing won't even be intellectual or rational. It'll be a simple desire. Now that's why it's so important to have a good conscience. I had learned this the hard way. And that's why, for me, getting a new conscience was wonderful. Because the conscience is irrational. Now it can be educated. It can be. We can have a bad conscience because our conscience doesn't know the truth about some stuff. And we can be internally condemning ourselves over stuff that God is actually saying is fine. So Paul says, happy is he who doesn't condemn himself and what he approves. But that's part of being truly spiritual, is learning how to work with the soft parts of your innermost being, your consciences, these desires. And let me say this, Paul in Galatians five, when he's describing the fruit of the spirit and the fruit of the flesh, he says, here's how to work out which is which. If it's a desire that's coming from your flesh, it will outwork itself. Actually, let's turn to Galatians five on this very quickly. Galatians five. So I'm not saying you go with every desire in your heart. I am saying, though, that we need to learn to walk by the spirit. This is Galatians five verse sixteen. Paul says, I say, walk by the spirit. You see, that's the goal. The goal is, Paul says in Romans eight, as many as are led by the spirit. These are the sons of God. Sons. They're not talking about gender. It's talking about having come into an inheritance. That part of your godly inheritance is you've become a son. When you're a child, you don't have anything. When you become a son, you become an heir. So when Paul says as many as are led by the Spirit of God, these are the sons of God. He's saying, this is your inheritance. Your spiritual inheritance is that God will lead you by His Spirit. Or here in Galatians five sixteen he says, walk by the spirit, and you will not want to carry the carry out the desire of the flesh. Now notice at this point flesh is bad. It's been contrasted with spirit. So he says, for the flesh sets its desire against the spirit, and the spirit against the flesh. For these are in opposition to one another, so that you may not do the things that you please. But if you are led by the spirit, you're not under the law. So here's the way out of this whole dilemma. Instead, having to worry about what's right and wrong from a book, instead you start saying, Lord, what do you want me to do? And he will lead you into what's right. He'll lead you into what's good. And how do you know what's good? Well, it tells you the deeds of the flesh are evident. If the desires of your heart are immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, outbursts of anger, disputes, dissensions, factions, envyings, drunkenness, carousing as if they're the desires of your heart. That's your flesh. That's not bad, is it? Easy way to recognize your flesh. Ish in a design like that. That's your flesh. But look what he goes on to say in verse twenty two. But the fruit of the spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. When you find these things in your heart, that's the fruit of the spirit within you. So now these are these are not, um. These are not easily attained overnight. Let's be clear on that, uh, verse, uh, verse twenty four. Now, those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. If we live by the spirit, let us also walk by the spirit. You see, it's one thing to come to life by the spirit. It's another thing to learn how to walk by the spirit. It is a practice thing. It is something we have to walk out. We have to learn how to do it. Or take Galatians, uh, sorry. Um, uh, Hebrews, uh, Hebrews five where it says solid food is for the mature, who, because of practice, have their senses trained to discern good and evil. There's a practicing. We've got to learn how to how to train our senses, our inner senses. This is not an intellectual answer. It's an inner sense of what's right and what's wrong. Now, all I'm saying from that, though, is as you have these experiences, that's where you need to find the scriptures that underpin underpin it and establish it as being reliable. So that's why I've turned to Galatians five. I'm saying, okay, as you have these experiences of these desires in your heart, you want to know which is good, which is bad. Well, Galatians is written to help you figure out which is which. So this is how you retain revelation. You retain revelation by finding the scriptures that will help you keep it and defend it. So just to wind up, uh, I began this whole session by talking about, uh, we need to learn how to retain revelation. And I'm saying that one way to retain revelation is by finding the scriptures that actually teach it. So you can defend it. In my own case, as a new Christian, I didn't know the scriptures well enough. So when I said to people, look, I'm having trouble with, I can't find the presence of God like I used to. They would say, well, you need to pray. I go, oh, okay. So I'd pray. And I talked to someone else and I'd say, well, you need to read your Bible more. I read the Bible more, or I'd go to church and I say, you need to come more often to church. I go to church. So in the end, I bet all my teaching was actually coming from externally to me. And I began just doing, doing, doing, doing all the right things. And I had to learn that actually, when your heart goes cold, don't do more. Go back to God and start claiming the new covenant. That's the answer. That's the answer. Go back to what the scriptures teach, the scriptures teach, heal, give us a new heart, and a new heart will be made of flesh and not a stone. The new heart will be soft, warm, flexible, sensitive, and alive to God. That's the best thing. It'll be alive to God. It'll sense God. It'll feel his presence. If, on the other hand, you find yourself with a heart of stone, it'll be hard, cold, rigid and sensitive, dead, cut off, separated from God. So the antidote to having a heart of stone is not. Try harder. The answer is go back to God and say, God, you promised. And that's my only hope. You promised. And I'll just finish on this one last thought. Uh, you know, we're supposed to have faith like Abraham. And I've heard so much stuff on how we've got to have faith. But I have to say that most of what I've heard on Faith sounds like a lot of hard work to me. You've got to confess the right things. Watch every negative thought. Make sure you don't say a single wrong thing, because any wrong thing you say will come on you. What I feared came upon me. The classic word from job. Absolute nonsense and a twisting of that scripture. But people teach that and they say, just make sure you get your thoughts right, get your ideas right, make sure everything's perfect, get it all lined up. And that's why you have faith. That's not how you have faith. That's not how you have faith. What faith that Abraham have. Well, God said to us, God said to him, I'm going to give you a son. And it says, Abraham believed God, and it was okay. Now what did Abraham do about having a son? He took his own initiative. Exactly. Instead of trusting that, God said, I'm going to give you a son. Instead, he went, oh, well, it hasn't happened yet, so I better go and make it happen. And Sarah said, yeah, you need to make it happen. So instead he had a relationship with his, one of the maids in the house, and an absolute disaster. Hagar turned out to be the mother of, um, Esau instead of Isaac, who was the promised son. So Abraham stopped trusting God, began to rely on his own self-effort, and had a disastrous outcome with Esau. When he came back to faith again and said, God, I'll trust you. At age ninety nine, when he couldn't do it, he had no hope of doing it. He trusted God. And Sarah, at eighty nine, trusted God. She had no hope of having a child and they had the promised child. That's the faith that Abraham had. Abraham believed that if God said it, he could do it with Abraham couldn't when Sarah couldn't. That's the faith Abraham had. Yeah, and he got Isaac. Now hear that? As clear as you can. It's not that he got all his thoughts right. It's not that he got his life perfect. He trusted that what God had promised he would do. It even says in Romans, Paul makes a comment. Uh, it says in hope against hope. He believed. That's faith. That's the faith Abraham had when everything seemed hopeless. He still believed God and had hope. So in hope against hope, he believed. So that's the new covenant. The new covenant is when I can't do it. There's no hope of me getting there, no hope of me achieving it. Well, it's not about you anyway. It's about him. Can he get you there? Of course he can. Can he change your heart? Of course he can. Can he make you fit for heaven? Of course he can. Can you do it? No possibility. That's what it means to be bankrupt in spirit. No possibility.