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Pastor David Mitchell
I had, how many of you ever heard of Dr. Carl Ball over at the Creation Research, raise your hand. Yeah, he's awesome. Creation Research Museum there in Glen Rose, Texas. And he's an amazing man, but I still get newsletters from him once a month.
And I forgot what Saturday it is per month he does a lecture. I don't remember. I wish I could. Anybody remember? Is it the first Saturday? I don't remember. But you can Google his website, look at it, it'll tell you.
And one Saturday each month he lectures and it's really awesome to go here. But in the recent newsletter, he had made just a statement sort of mocking the evolutionists. But one of the things he mentioned was he said that DNA requires proteins to exist and to help it, you know, duplicate itself.
And proteins, on the other hand, require DNA to even exist. And so there are many things you can talk about along those lines. One is you could just discuss the cells that we have in every living thing, especially plants in the plant and animal kingdom.
Well, everything has cells, but I mean the living cells. They have, if you look through a microscope, we brought a microscope in during the thing just to show them the microscope, but we didn't look through it.
But I got to show them some videos of things under electron microscopes, things like that. But when you look in there, that world is actually bigger than the world we live in. There's more stuff in that world than there is in the world we live in.
And when you look through a telescope, there's more stuff there in that world than there is in the world we live in. And God sees and controls and maintains all of that, every nanosecond of existence.
But we started looking at the things inside a cell. You got this little bitty cell, you got the inside of the cell, it's called the nucleus, which is a little dark area inside the cell. But inside that is a whole other world.
And there are things in there, DNA, for example, it's so small that you can only see it through an electron telescope, and you can only see it right at the moment when the cell's about to divide, because at that time, the DNA swells a little and gets big enough to see through an electron microscope, or you would never see it, at least not yet with our current technology.
But we've seen it, we know it's there. And DNA, of course, is what makes you be you and me be me, changes the color of our hair, the genes on there make our eyes a different color, and all of that. And that's just 1 of the entire material of DNA.
The other 99 were identical, because we're humans. And we're that close to pigs, by the way, not really. Not really. But I mean, you'd be surprised what percentage of DNA of a pig and of a human are the same.
You know, it's a lot. But it's the difference that matters, don't you think? But when you look at all these building blocks that God has put in there, and your cells, I don't know, something like 30 trillion cells each of us have, and each one of those is like a little machine that has to keep working hard every second of your existence, because cells die.
So if the healthy ones didn't duplicate, you would die within a month or less, a few weeks. But they're duplicating all the time, and they have to make an exact duplicate. And God has even put in our body enzymes that can check the duplicated DNA to see if it's accurate or not.
If it's not, it can fix it. Like, if it makes a bad copy, it'll fix it. And it's remarkable what's all going on. But the thing is, if you took any of those enormous amounts of components of a cell and removed it, it couldn't live by itself.
It has to live within the component of the whole cell. So all of it had to be formed at once at the same time. You can't have one part of a cell crawl out of a primordial soup and climb out over here and another one 10 miles over here climb and say, oh, here we are together, and then 1 ,000 and a million more parts and say, oh, let's make a cell, because none of them could exist on their own.
What's that principle called? There's a name for that, isn't there, Bill? The thing where, in order for the whole cell to exist, in order for any part of the cell, you need the whole cell. I've heard you talk about it before.
It has a name, but I can't think of it. That's it. Would you? Well, that's the whole idea, but there's a specific name just for that part. But when you start looking at these things, like, you have to have protein to make DNA reproduce itself, replicate itself, but the protein has to have DNA to exist.
So they both had to come into existence at the same time. And there's only one system known among mankind that says that that's how it happened, and it's Genesis chapter 1, verses 1 and 2. And in some places in the New Testament, the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God, and all things were made by Him.
So when God spoke, when Jesus Christ specifically spoke everything in the material world into existence, those cells were spoken into existence, mature, with all the parts. And the evidence shows that, but the evolutionists refused to admit it, and they start making up things.
You can read these articles. If you took enough science where you can make sense out of the words, you can read the articles and you can see where they introduce the lies, and they make the young people think that their theories are facts, when in fact they're not even, never even seen it before.
And so I was kind of sharing some of that with some of the older students, so they can start to learn to see the little hidden subtle lies that are written in their material. But the thing about it, in watching this little video of what's going on in every cell in our bodies and all the time, I couldn't stop thinking about it all week.
So I don't know if I was teaching them or me, but you know what, you realize you know these things, but it's just another way of looking at it. When you look at yourself in the mirror, you're not seeing yourself, you're seeing an elaborate carbon-based machine that God created to put you in and let you experience this beautiful world he made.
That's what you're seeing. That's not you. And I do agree in the literal physical resurrection, but that resurrected body won't be, it'll be as different from this one as the sun is from the moon. The new body will be resplendent like the sun.
This body is more like the moon, a reflection of Jesus perhaps, but the next one will be so different, it won't have components that can die in it. This one does. Did you know that your chromosomes have little protein tails on them?
And every year you live, that tail gets, or every time it reproduces actually, that tail gets shorter. And they don't know how it works, but they know that's related to aging. And that must have come into existence at the fall, right?
We grew tails. I was telling the kids, I heard a great sermon one time by a man named Johnny Pope, and he was mocking, he was mocking the evolutionists, and he said, you know what they believe, they want us to believe?
They want us to believe that there was this primordial soup, and that this little one cell creature grew some legs and crawled out on the beach, and he grew longer legs and he crawled up to a tree and he climbed the tree and grew a tail and became a monkey and jumped down and became a PhD.
And the preacher was arguing with the evolutionist, and the preacher said, I don't think we came from a monkey, and the evolutionist said, yeah we did, we came from monkeys, and the preacher said, then how come we don't have a tail?
And the evolutionist said, well because we don't need a tail today. And the preacher said, I could use a tail today, I'm driving down the highway, got both hands on the wheel going 70 miles an hour, wrap that tail around a Dr. Pepper, get a drink and head on down the highway.
I could be much safer if I had a tail. I could use a tail today, that's no proof, you know? And I heard a whole sermon on that once, one of the best sermons I ever heard. Kind of stupid, but funny. So I told the little kids, now it's funny, the big kids are too grown to laugh at stuff like that of course, they're sitting here like, but the little kids, they thought that was the funniest thing they ever heard, you know?
But I think it's just amazing when you think about this machine that God put us in. It is self-replicating, self-duplicating, self-correcting, until it's not. And there comes a time when it's not, and then we're changed.
We're changed into one that is resplendent compared to this one. One that has no dying cells, no components that have that flaw, it's not a flaw, it was built in it on purpose by God at the fall. So Ben, what was your neighbor's name, I'd like to call that out, I forgot.
William Lewis lives right across the street from Ben and Ashton, and they have a really close family, and he's sort of the patriarch, and he almost died of a heart attack, was it yesterday? And they observed the whole thing, but he had one of these, what they call the widowmaker type heart attacks, and they were barely, he sat, he was out there in the ambulance for many, many minutes, because they couldn't move him, because basically he was dead, and they had to revive him.
So they finally got a faint heartbeat, and moved him to Baylor in Dallas, and got him on a respirator, but he's doing somewhat better, but they wanted, Ben and Ashton wanted everybody to pray for them, because he's a real good man, in fact he's a pastor I think, and he's just like got a close family, and they were all just shocked, they were out there in shock.
Because he was sitting there playing with the grandbabies, and all of a sudden, boom, he just fell over. And so, you know, these bodies are like that, aren't they? They can have that happen at any time, and we know it, but the Bible said we should count those days, count the days, and stay humble, and realize that we only have a set amount of time.
And so thanks for letting me come speak to the kids, because it worked on me all week, but hopefully it'll work on some of them in their own way too. All right, well, how about we turn to Ephesians chapter 5, no I'm sorry, let's turn to Galatians chapter 5, and we've been in here talking about, actually Romans 8, 1, where it talks about the second part of the verse where it talks about that God's people are people who walk not after the flesh, but after the spirit, the second half of Romans chapter 8, verse 1.
Very important, because that is a symptom of salvation, it's not the cause of it. A lot of people get that confused and get it backwards, and Satan, of course, puts that out in the church on purpose, to cause people to think that we're saved by works, or by being good, or by not being bad, and different things like this, none of which could ever happen.
But it's an effect, it's not the cause of salvation, but the fact is that the effect is very real. So when we talk about a person who's born again, that has effects, it has to have effects, think about it.
Your body becomes the temple of the living God in a nanosecond of time, you can't be the same as you were before that happened. So there have to be many effects that can be observed by others as well, and that God observes, and that the self observes, many, many effects.
Well, some of these effects are good works that happen, and some are fruit that we bear, because now we're attached to Christ, and so forth. So we've been talking about that a lot lately. Now, we had sort of worked our way down to Galatians chapter 5, and verse, let's look there at verse 24 for just a second, I'm sorry, chapter 6, no, I got it right, chapter 5, I'm getting ahead of myself here, chapter 5, verse 24, and we went just a little past this, but I'm just going to review a second here, because these two verses, 24 and 25, relate to our position, and if we're not careful, we think that these are some kind of action that we're supposed to do to cause something to happen, such as maybe it makes us be saved if we do this.
Nothing works that way. There is nothing we do to save ourselves. God does all of the work in salvation, 100 of the work in salvation, all we do is respond, and all we have is effects. We don't have the cause.
The cause is not built into us. We take advantage of the effects. One of the most beautiful illustrations that Jesus ever used is when he likened it to physical birth. The baby is not the cause of his birth.
We all know that, especially the moms in the room. In fact, he's the problem. He doesn't help with the birth. He's the problem for the lady, right? It's a beautiful picture of salvation. We're not the cause of it.
We don't do anything to cause it. We don't think of anything. We don't plan anything to cause it. We just show up in God's family, and we're thankful, and we receive the benefits of it. Now, it doesn't feel that way, just like to the baby it doesn't feel that way.
The baby thinks he's the center of the universe when he comes into the world, and he sort of is, because we make him be that way, right? But he's not really, but he thinks he is, and a new baby Christian thinks the same thing.
Look what I did. I got saved. I accepted Jesus. I did all this. I gave up all my smoking and dancing, all those Baptist sins, and you do know Baptist. We talked about it at Sunday school, John the Baptist, the reason Baptists don't dance is because John lost his head over that.
So that's right. Isn't that right, Bill? You didn't cover that yet, but I'm sure that's coming later. But all of these things that we look at to do to get saved are Luciferian in nature. Lucifer is the one who comes up with the idea that humans do something to be saved, and every world religion in the world is based on that except biblical Christianity, and it's not based on it at all.
In fact, it says, yes, there are wonderful effects to salvation, but you didn't cause it and you can't cause it. All you can do is enjoy it. So when we start looking at verses that have to do with effects, we have to remind ourselves, this is not the cause.
Look at verse 24, and they that are Christ have crucified the flesh with the affections and lusts. That makes it sound like that we have to crucify our old man in order to belong to Jesus, doesn't it?
But that's not what it means. In fact, verse 25 says, if we live in the spirit, let us also walk in the spirit. That comes closer to helping us understand that we live in the spirit. Obviously, we know we didn't give ourselves life, did we?
God gave us the life, and God is also the one who crucified the flesh. We didn't crucify it. God crucified it by placing us in Christ when he died. The Bible says we were baptized into the body of Christ, and that in God the Father's mind, that transcends time, and we were as surely in Christ the day he died as we were the day he resurrected, and as we are now as we are seated in the heavenlies right now in Christ.
We're just as surely there as we are here in God's mind, right? So these things are effects. These things are what I would call part of our position as a saved person. We stand as a person who has crucified the flesh.
Now you have to understand, this is positional in nature, not experiential, because in our experience, we have not crucified our flesh. If we had, we would have the saintliest church in town, but we don't.
We're part of the same motley crew that everybody else is part of in Christendom, because of what you talked about in Sunday school is all the way back to John the Baptist. As far as you want to look anywhere you want to look, everybody has still got the flesh component hanging around, and it gets us all in trouble.
We can be as strong in faith as any saint in the Bible in one second, and the next day be as weak as any devil, right? Because of the flesh. So we talk about these things, but the wonderful thing is because we are connected to Christ, we have fruits of the Spirit, but we didn't produce those fruit.
It just hangs on us. We don't produce it, therefore it can't be the cause of our salvation. It's the result of it, and it comes from Christ, not from us. We've been talking about those. So, verse 25, I love it because it states a fact, is that we are alive in the Spirit.
That's on the inside of us, but then it says because of that, let us also walk in the Spirit. That's the outward thing that the world sees when it looks at us. Let us walk in the Spirit, otherwise we're hypocritical, because the truth is who we are is we're the new man.
We're the new man. We are alive in the Spirit. We should walk that way or else we're hypocritical. So when we do something fleshly, that's hypocritical. It's not really even us, and it confuses the world, but that's just how it is, isn't it?
But we're supposed to attempt to minimize that confusion and work at that in our own lives. We have a responsibility to walk in the Spirit, not in the flesh. Verse 26 sort of ends up by telling us some things we need to avoid, specific things, such as pride and glory, seeking vainglory, such as provoking others, which is interesting because in just a minute we're going to switch topics and stop talking about fruits of the Spirit, and we're going to talk about some fruits of the flesh, which is not the fun part to talk about, but the Lord talks about it, so we have to.
But look at this, vainglory, avoid that. Avoid provoking one another, which we're going to have several of the fruits of the Spirit work together to create that. Not just one, but more than one, several, will work together to create provoking of each other, and then also envying one another is to be avoided.
It's interesting that those three things are listed as a summary of this whole thing talking about fruits of the Spirit, and then it says, but avoid these things. So what's it saying in a specific way?
Avoid the flesh, avoid walking, avoid reverting to the flesh. So then all of chapter six of the book of Galatians talks about things you can do when we fail at walking in the Spirit. Now what, but a whole chapter on here are points, things you can do when you fail, and there are nine of them, there are nine things you can do listed in that chapter when you fail at walking in the Spirit.
So it tells us there's some cleanup we need to do because we confuse the world when we do that, we confuse our family, we may hurt someone, we may hurt ourselves, there's things we have to do. So we'll get to that.
I alluded to it, I think, for a few minutes in the last message. But before we get to that, we need to finish up chapter five. So let's look back at Galatians chapter five and start with about verse 16.
This I say then, walk in the Spirit and you shall not fulfill the lust of the flesh. So what is the best way to avoid doing wrong is by filling your day with good stuff. And can you just do good stuff in the flesh?
Nothing we do in the flesh is good in God's eyes, so we must therefore walk hand in hand with Christ. We must be Spirit-filled and walk in the Spirit and then we will not fulfill the lust of the flesh.
We won't sin during those moments. And this we are commanded to do, walk in the Spirit. So that is a responsibility. It is a choice that we make, isn't that interesting? And yet it's a choice that is so important in the Christian life.
Verse 17 says, for the flesh lusts against the Spirit and the Spirit against the flesh. It's good to hear that as you walk in the Spirit, the new man lusts against the flesh, which means it fights against the flesh.
That's good to know, isn't it? So we kind of know naturally that the flesh fights against the Spirit. We know that when we're walking in the flesh, our mind that we're in in that state does not want to hear anything from the Holy Spirit.
It does not want to think anything about the Bible. It wants to go headlong into its sin, whatever that sin is, and so therefore it lusts against the Spirit. But isn't it nice to know that when we're filled with the Spirit and we're walking in the new man, that that fights against the flesh?
And you will find your mind say, no, Satan may tempt you a little or your own flesh may put a thought in your mind, and you'll say, no, I'm not interested in that. You know, I rebuke that, I'm not interested in that, give me the mind of Christ.
And you walk victorious there for a few moments. Now the more of those moments we can link together, the better person we are. And so it says, for the flesh lusts against the Spirit and the Spirit against the flesh.
And these are contrary, the one to the other. They're like oil and water. They can't, I mean, they do seem to exist in the same person, but they don't join together in the same person. I remember when Brother Otis and I met, we had, I don't know, four or five or six fairly significant things we disagreed on doctrinally, and we decided we would, we had our own set of rules of Bible interpretation we came up with by studying several other denominational theologians and what they said you do to interpret Scripture correctly.
They all sort of agreed on one thing. So we put it together and came up with the Ten Commandments of Bible interpretation. So we decided and agreed that we would not cheat to win an argument. We would abide by those ten rules no matter what, because truth was more important to us than winning an argument, right?
And so what I found was, though we may have had five or ten fairly important differences when we met, when he went to heaven we only had one or two that we disagreed on. I can't even remember the second one, I probably would pop in my mind eventually, but the one I always remember, because it's funny, is he felt like the saints cannot see us and I felt like they could.
So we never came to agreement on that, and there might have been one other but I don't remember the other one. But the point is, as we study the Scripture together and walk in this life together and ask the Holy Spirit to be our teacher, our beliefs will become more and more in unity because that's the desire of the Holy Spirit, is that we have complete unity, and as long as we don't cheat on our Bible interpretation we will see things the same eventually.
So one of the things we disagreed on, way back then, and really what was interesting, that disagreement only lasted about a day, but one of the things that we disagreed on was that he had read books about this and heard theologians and preachers say it's the reason he believed it, and we have to be so careful with that, it needs to come from Scripture not from theology books or from preachers, but he believed that Christians could not be indwelt by demons.
On the other hand, my mentor was Dr. Erwin Freeman who was a Jewish believer who was one of the only Baptist exorcists I ever met, and he had the largest family counseling practice in Fort Worth for over 25 years, he and his wife, and a huge number of people would come in off the streets, Christian people who were indwelt by demons, and he would help them, and they were born again people.
So naturally I disagreed with Otis on that because I had studied that quite a bit before I met Brother Otis, he had read that from a couple of books and heard pastors say it is the reason he had his belief, and so I told him I disagreed with him.
Well the next morning at coffee I brought that up and I said, Otis, I just want to ask you a question. I said, if you have the Holy Spirit, where does he live within you, does he live in your flesh or does he live in your spiritual man, your new man?
He said, he lives in the spiritual man, Brother David, he's connected with my spiritual man. I said, that's right. So if you could have a demon, would he live in your spiritual man, the new man, or would he be connected to the flesh?
Okay, you're right. That's all he said. He didn't even think about it, he just said, you're right, because it clicked, he understood how it's possible. And the reason it's possible, in fact it's a fact, it's not just possible, the reason it happens is because we have both at this state.
We have this treasure, but it's in earthen vessels, and that earthen vessel can house a demon while your new man is connected to the Holy Spirit. Both can happen at the same time, but not if you don't want it to.
That's the cool thing about it. If you walk with the Lord and you don't desire to have an unclean spirit, then you won't have one, because it's as simple as saying, Lord Jesus, would you rebuke and bind this demon and cast him away from me and my family, in Jesus' name, by the power of his blood that he shed for me, amen, and it will be gone, because it can't stand that.
And Jesus, if you want to find one prayer that he will always answer yes, try that one. He will always answer yes in a nanosecond. That's my experience anyway. So as we look at this possibility, it becomes even more important that we walk in the spirit, not in the flesh, because we can even have demon influence when we walk in the flesh as a Christian, which can corrupt many people around us in all kinds of business that we're involved in and so forth.
So we see that the flesh lusts against the spirit and the spirit against the flesh and these are contrary, the one to the other, so that you cannot do the things that you want to do, it says in verse 17.
Now who is the real you that it's speaking to? The new man. The new man wants to walk with the Lord. The new man wants to accomplish great things for God in this life. The new man doesn't want to waste any time, he wants to use all the time to accomplish great things for God in this life, but you can't do what you want to do.
You can't do what you want to do because the flesh lusts against the spiritual you. So you can't always do what you want to do. Or I like the way Brother Ross Querry teaches it in the stock market stuff sometimes, he'll add this, he would say, it says here you can't do what you want to do yet, which means you can get where you can.
You can get where you can do more and more what you want to do by learning to live in the spirit rather than in the flesh, by learning to walk in the spirit as you live in the spirit. But if you be led by the spirit, you're not under the law.
You don't need the rules. They don't even apply. Now the works of the flesh are manifest which are these, and now we're to the part we don't want to study. This is not the fun part, this is not the cool part, this is where the rubber meets the road part.
Now the works of the flesh are manifest which are these, but do you know why it's important that we study these? You know you might ask yourself the question, why is it important to study the fruits of the spirit if we can't cause them?
All we can do is hold them. We bear the fruit, we can't cause it, so why do I even know what they are? Why do I need to know what they are? The reason we need to know what they are is so that we can recognize them because they are symptoms of something.
When we see the fruits of the spirit in ourselves, in our loved ones, and in our church family, we are seeing the result of a person or people walking with God hand in hand. That's what we're seeing. So it's not that we learn them so that we can do them, we learn them so that we can observe them.
Do you understand what I'm saying? So why is it important to learn the fruits of the flesh? So that we can do them? No, we don't need that help. We don't need that help, do we? We're born doing those, so are all of our beautiful babies and children.
But it's so we can recognize which mode our family and brothers and sisters are walking in so that we may help them or they may help us when the time is needed. Do you see the importance there? It's huge in the New Testament.
It's not so big in the modern church. We don't practice this enough, where we sort of watch over one another and answer to one another and call out things that we observe. Now, it should be with compassion, though, not with, ah, look at you, you know.
It should be with compassion, like, are you okay? Now I observe folks in our congregation doing that, though, and it's wonderful. I'll see you say to me or to someone else, are you okay? Because you notice a countenance, maybe.
It's just a slight change in the countenance. Listen, we know each other in this little bitty church well enough to sense those things by what we are looking at when we look at one another. You can tell the difference, too, between tiredness and something else, like it's something else going on.
And when you see the something else, that's what concerns you the most, and you'll want to know, tell me what's going on. That's good to do that. Now, I'll be quick to say this. If you're the person that's having the problem, don't be quick to confess every sin to brothers and sisters in Christ, because they're not God and they won't forget it.
So you go to the Lord with those. Don't come up here behind this pulpit and confess your dirty sins, all right, because I won't forget them. I'll think, well, every time I look at you, I'll say, oh, you do that, right?
You think that? You have that problem? So, see, that's a misnomer. And what's interesting about it, it's taught in most charismatic churches and the big modern churches that are rah-rah, they have home study groups, and I know this because I talk to friends of mine that go to them and they tell me these things.
In fact, I've done marriage counseling with couples that had a problem in their marriage because they followed what they were told to do at church, which was, well, you need to be totally open with each other and with your spouse and tell them every sinful thought you ever have and every sinful deed you ever do.
That is the worst marriage advice I have ever heard in my life and is nowhere in the Bible where it says that you need to be that transparent with each other. You know why? Because your husband is not your priest and your wife is not your prophetess.
They're your spouse. You need to go to Jesus. We're not Bapto-Catholics. You go to Jesus with those things. Now, if the Holy Spirit leads you to share something with your spouse, then you should do it, or with your pastor, then you should do it.
But you need to be very careful there because the humans won't forget anything, and sometimes they won't forgive either, and the Lord always will. The Lord always will, and not only will he forgive you and forget the sin, the Father's already forgotten the sin.
If he said, forgive me for that, you'd say, what? But Jesus is with us in time. He'll not only forgive us of the sin, he will give us the power to stop doing that thing, whatever that habit is. He will give us the power to stop it.
All right, so the only reference that I see anywhere in Scripture where it says confess your sins, in the context of the passage, it's to the elders of the church. And even there, it has to do with when you're ill because of some sin that you're doing.
So keep the context and do what the Scripture says, don't add to Scripture and say we ought to do things the Scripture never says to do because then you get in trouble. So, listen, I've got so much experience in dealing with marriage problems with couples.
I have seen these things play out. I am not giving you my opinion, I'm telling you what I've observed, and I know what Scripture says about it. I don't ever talk about stuff I don't know about with Scripture, but if I do, I'll say that's my opinion.
But when I tell you something that Scripture says, it's because I've studied it out for 40 years in many cases. So I'm trying to help you be very careful with how you deal with sin in each other's lives and at the same time be always noticing our brothers and sisters.
Now what do we do when we notice a countenance that's different? Well, we let them know that we notice it and we say, is there any way I can help you? That's the best to do. I wouldn't advise prying, you know, but if you can help, then help.
Now let's go into what they are. Look at verse 19. Now, the works of the flesh are manifest, which are these. Let's look at this little word manifest first. The word manifest is phaneros in the Greek, and it means literally shining.
Think about that, shining. Light has been shed on this thing to make it observable. So it means apparent or plain to the senses or easily seen. So the works of the flesh, God sheds his light on these things and they're easily seen by others and we think they're not, right?
Be sure your sin will find you out, right? I mean, adults are like children when they come to, especially if it's adultery or some sin like that. They're like little kids. They think they'll never get caught, and they always get caught, all right?
And so it comes from a root Greek word, which means shining. Light is shining on it. Light will shine on sins of the flesh. They will be apparent, and they are apparent, and here they are. The first one is adultery, and this Greek word means adultery, okay?
And there's no better translation than that, but it is interesting to look at the English word for adultery because it comes from an old Latin word, adulterere, which means to pollute or defile, isn't that something?
And it kind of shows spiritually what happens when a person commits adultery. They pollute themselves. They defile themselves and the other person. They defile their marriage. They defile their church.
It hurts many others, doesn't it? And it always comes to light, and so adultery is the first one listed, and it's very, very harmful because it creates a bad picture of one of the most beautiful pictures God's given us to give a picture of his relationship with the church.
He is the bridegroom. The church is the bride, and that is supposed to be a pure union, and our physical marriages picture that to the world, to our children, our grandchildren, to each other, and when we make that sin, start to say mistake, it's a little worse than a mistake.
It's always a mistake, isn't it? But when we make that sin happen, the very word itself means to defile. So I mean, it is a serious sin, and I get so tired of people that say, well, sin is, all sin is the same in God's eyes.
That's not true. I don't see too many cities that God has destroyed for eating too much ice cream on Christmas, but I see some sins where he destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah for a certain sin, so that's worse than eating too much ice cream on Christmas, if you see my point.
So God is wiser than we are, and to think that sins aren't different in his eyes, do you think murder, cold-blooded murder, is no worse than a little white lie? Of course it's worse, but if what you mean is that the little white lie is enough to keep us out of heaven, then that's true, isn't it?
Because God is holy, and we have to compare what we call a little sin, we have to compare that to enormous holiness, or infinite holiness. So when you make that comparison, then it's kind of true sin is sin, isn't it?
But only from that viewpoint. So there's a whole lot more in the Bible taught about how some sins are worse than others than there are taught that they're all the same. In fact, there's even hotter places in hell.
Why would you have that if all sin was the same? You got Hitler in one spot, and you've got some non-elect person somewhere in the world who never heard the gospel his whole life in a less hot spot, and the Bible teaches that.
Right? So, I mean, we don't understand any of that, though, do we? If we dwell on that, we don't understand any of that. God's ways are higher than our ways, his thoughts higher than our thoughts. We don't even like the way God does some stuff.
We would rather him just obliterate the non-elect, wouldn't we, so that they don't have to burn in hell? I would. I'd rather God just eliminate them where they don't exist. But God didn't choose to do it that way.
He chose to burn them in hell forever, in the blackness of darkness forever, along with the false prophets and everyone else who's down there. So God does what he wants to do, not what we want him to do, and we have to decide, well, do we love him anyway?
Once we figure out how he really is the best we can, do we still love him, or do we need to form a false god in our own image that we can love? And that's where we have to be so careful. We don't get to choose a different Jesus to love.
We choose the true Jesus of the Bible. And there are some things we may not like, but we choose to love him anyway, and realizing that his wisdom is higher than ours, correct? So the first thing we see is that these sins are manifest.
God's light is shined on them. They're manifest to each other, they're manifest to the world, and to the Lord who sees all things. Adultery is the first one mentioned, and it will cause a defilement. Now, it's outside the scope of this sermon to talk about how we deal with that in a marriage or in marriage counseling, but let me be quick to say that the very definition of agape love says that it endures all things.
What does the word all mean? It can mean every, or it can mean all kinds of things, but in this case, it means both. It means everything and all kinds of things. Love endures all things. So if you love your spouse, you'd be surprised what you can endure, even though you won't like it and it'll feel terrible, but you'd be surprised what you can endure.
And that's my counsel, that's my first counsel to a couple when they've had that problem in their marriage, is let's first talk about what love is. Then we'll talk about how to deal with the hurt, because we can deal with the hurt, but you can't change the fact that there's either agape love or there's not, right?
My counseling is a little different than some, I would guess, but I think adultery is a horrible, horrible sin, but it does not have to end a marriage. And the fact that some preachers teach that the only condition of divorce is adultery, that's false also.
There are many things that can happen to create a divorce other than adultery. So adultery doesn't need to cause a divorce, right? It doesn't have to cause it. So you just have to walk before the Lord and move through things like that if it ever comes up, and I do hope you'll get our help and counsel if you ever need it in that area, but I hope we never have to go through there together, but if we do, guess what?
It's not the unpardonable sin, because the only unpardonable sin is rejecting Christ, right? Okay? So, love is the biggest thing we have, and it covers a multitude of sins. Would you agree with that? Okay?
All right, now, what's the next one? Fornication. Wouldn't it be funny if we picked today to not have children in church? All right. That was not my choice, by the way, but anyway, pornia, it means to indulge unlawful lust.
I think we could leave it at that today, right? Okay. Now, what's interesting is they're very similar, but the first one has to have at least one married person in it, but they're not with their spouse, if you know what I'm saying.
So you have to have that for it to be the first one. The second one, neither are married. That's the only difference. Both are unlawful from God's viewpoint, as far as God's commands for us. He says so clearly not to covet thy neighbor's wife, and so it goes all the way back to the Ten Commandments.
God's will is for us not to have these things happen. Do they happen? Yes. Why? Because we have flesh. We're not just new men. We're also old men. And so we have to always admit that and deal with it in a humble way, even when we're the people trying to help the guilty party, perhaps.
We have to do it in a very humble way with an aim to help everyone concerned, all right? The third one, but let's think about those first two just for a second, though. Let's think of it from the viewpoint of looking at the world today that we live in.
Television, the way it is now compared to when I was a little boy. I saw a commercial yesterday, and I don't know why I'm flabbergasted anymore at anything, really. This was an Amazon commercial, which we all love Amazon, one of the greatest companies in the world, and you'd have to be watching very closely and have to have a pause and rewind effect like I have, because I never watch commercials.
I have it on a thing where I can just zip through them. And even zipping through it, my eye thought it saw something, so I played it, went back and played it, and I said, Charlotte, come see if you think this is what I think I'm seeing here.
And she looks, and she says, no, that's a boy. I said, no, that's two girls, all right? Smack on the lips in the middle, and it was that fast and then went to something else, and they put that in there where it's subliminal.
That fast and then something else, for our young people to see. They were probably college-aged people, or just out of college, about that age, which all the young people look up to that age, right? And there it is.
If it's in there with all, and then you had this sweet old black couple kissing, you know, grandma and grandpa kissing each other and all these good things, and then that, and with it, as if it's just as good as these other things.
So, that's the world we live in. We didn't live in that world when I was growing up, at all. So we are progressing towards the great apostasy, which is a falling away from the truth, and it doesn't only affect the church, it affects the whole world.
The secular world is apostatizing, too. The secular television rules and that world, it's always been secular, but it's falling away from the truth, too, just as fast as the church is. So, as we look at these things, and they're listed as fruits of the flesh, the reason we look at them is to observe one another, and know whether we're in a predominant state of walking in the spirit, or a predominant state of walking in the flesh, or if we need help, or what.
That's what it's for. You can look at your society, where you live, and know if you need to be looking for a cave to hide in, yet, or not. And I'm looking, just trying to see if you're awake. All right, the next one is uncleanness, akatharsia, in the Greek, and it means sexual impurity.
And I'm going to read to you from Ephesians, you don't have to turn there, but Ephesians chapter 4, verse 17 says, This I say, therefore, and testify in the Lord, that ye henceforth walk not as other Gentiles walk, lost people, don't walk like lost people walk, don't walk like your society walks, in the vanity of their mind, having the understanding darkened.
Now let me ask you something, does that sound passive or active to you in the grammar? Having their understanding darkened. Is that something they did, or something someone did to them? It's passive. So someone bigger than them did this to them.
Having their understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God, through the ignorance that is in them, that's the depravity of the human being, the natural man, because of the blindness of their heart, which we know from other scriptures is caused directly by Satan, the God of this world, you taught that in Sunday school today.
And so you have several things working here, you've got the depravity of the man himself, or the woman, the flesh just being depraved, will not seek God, and then you have the prince of this world darkening their eyes and deceiving them so that they cannot see God, and then you have their understanding being darkened, and that falls into the same word as a reprobate mind, it's mentioned in Romans chapter 1, and if you look that word up at its root meanings, it means a brain that does not function like God created it to function.
It is a brain that is not thinking right. That's the Democratic Party. And don't take that off the tape. Let that go on the radio. I wouldn't have said that when I grew up, because all of Texas was Democrat, but you know what, they were a God-fearing Democrat back then.
There's a difference. They didn't believe in killing babies, and they didn't say that homosexuality was a normal state of being back in that day. And many other things, contrary to scripture, that that party believes in and allows and talks freely about and almost flaunts.
So there's a difference. Anyway, I had to throw that in, it's a rabbit trail, but it's a very good one. So having their understanding darkened, do you ever figure out why you can't communicate with a Democrat?
Charlotte doesn't like this. Do you know why? You know why you can't communicate with them? Because their brain's not working right. That's it. Do you know that if I weren't the only little bitty preacher in this nation saying this, our nation would be better?
A lot of those Democrats go to church where their pastor says nothing about their mindset, because he's got the same mindset probably. Having their understanding darkened by someone bigger and greater than them, his name would be Lucifer, alienated from the life of God.
You know, the word life is associated with God almost every time you see God's name, and that's why they want to end life in the womb, because they're anti-Christ. The light, you talk about blinding, your brain cannot figure out for a moment how some of them call themselves Christians and vote for people who kill babies.
You can't figure that out. Don't try. You will never figure it out, because your mind has not been darkened. It was darkened, but when you got born again, you were brought into God's marvelous light by God himself, and he changed your heart, changed your mind, and taught you to think right with his word.
They don't have those things. They don't take advantage of those things, so their hearts are darkened, alienated from the life of God through the ignorance that is in them, and yet they call you and me ignorant and foolish and uneducated.
But I like to look at it from God's viewpoint. God calls them fools. He that says there is no God is a fool, who being past feeling have given themselves over unto lasciviousness, which is our next sin that's listed, number four, lasciviousness, to work all uncleanness with greediness.
So what is lasciviousness? Lasciviousness is similar to licentiousness. It means, it's been translated in the Greek New Testament as filthy, wanton, lewd, lustful, sexually unchaste. Licentious literally means disregarding sexual restraints.
Wanton means malicious and causing sexual excitement, lustful, sensual, unlawful, and so forth. So a licentiousness is a marvelous word for America today and for the world in Europe today. It is a total disregard for what God says is clean and pure and right in marriage and a total grasp of what Satan and the flesh would say is just wonderful outside of God's laws.
And licentious is a very important word. It's a very important sin of the flesh that can be observed. And when we observe it, we know that those are not fruits of the spirit and that that person, if they have a predominant lifestyle of that, they are not born again.
They might be a lost sheep though, it doesn't mean they're a goat because lost sheep run with the goats. I know I did, not with this sin, fortunately, because I grew up in a Christian home even though I wasn't a Christian until I was 24.
But you know, these things are things certainly to be observed. Now when we note the world at large around us today, their past feeling, and they have given themselves over, very similar to Romans chapter 1, only in Romans chapter 1 it says once they've done this, the next step is God then gives them over to a reprobate mind, a mind that cannot think right ever again, and they'll never be saved at that point.
Now you and I can't always judge what stage another person's in, so we can't judge whether that's a lost sheep who will be saved or whether that's a goat who will never be saved. But in God's mind, there comes a time when they practice verse 19 here, of being past feeling and giving themselves over to lasciviousness, so many times that God says that's it, you cross the line, I'm done, I'm not even, the Holy Spirit's not coming around you anymore.
You'll never hear the Holy Spirit, you'll never observe him, you won't be aware he's there, you won't think I'm here, and I've given you over to a reprobate mind, and you're done. And there are certain sins, 21 sins listed in Romans chapter 1, but there's one particular sin which I won't mention here because it's not the topic of this message, but there's one particular sin, the same one that Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed for, that is the result of this operation of giving oneself beyond feeling, the feelings, that's the conscience that God gives every human, giving yourself to the place where your past feeling anything is wrong, or feeling that a particular thing is wrong, and giving yourself over to that lascivious act so much that you want that more than you want God, which makes you God because you're worshiping yourself and your own body and the body of another inordinately, and then finally God gives you over to a reprobate mind that will never come back.
That's frightening, but it's the truth, so don't call me a hater because I told you the truth. The hater is the pastor who won't tell you that and will act like God's okay with any lifestyle you choose.
God lists them, he lists the lifestyles that he's pleased with and the ones that he's not, so it's not difficult to tell that your preacher's a liar, hold him up against scripture, right? I had a young homosexual man come up and thank me for saying these exact words in a huge meeting one time at the break.
He said, I've never heard a preacher say what you said today, and I thank you for that, a very effeminate young man, and he walked away, and that's something. So there we have it, I told you this wouldn't be fun, but we're not done with it, there's a bunch more, we'll pick it up next time.
All right, let's stand and have prayer together. We might want to have children's church next Sunday, though, because we're just getting started on this stuff. All right, Lord, thank you so much for your word and how it shines a light on all of us and on the whole world and on you, and Lord, it shines a light on the fruits of the spirit, it shines a light on the fruits of the flesh, and it differentiates between the two, and Lord, thank you that you give us these observations to make so that we might help one another, that we might hold one another's hands up when they're dragging, and Lord, that we could help one another, Lord, may we never all be weak at the same time, help some of us be strong when the others need us, and help others be strong when we need them, and Lord, that's what you put the church here for, and we thank you for it, may your Holy Spirit be always our teacher and our encourager and our strength, and Lord, continue to prepare us to make it through these end times when things will be more difficult for the Christian, and we ask all these things in Jesus' name, amen.