Death to Self and Personal Intimacy With Jesus Christ — Glenn Meldrum

A New Way of Thinking and Transformation

The old twisted way of thinking is going to produce the same twisted result. We have to have a new way of thinking. So becoming normal begins. You see, that's where it all begins. You will rise or fall according to the quality of your relationship.

The Consequences of a Shallow Relationship With Jesus

If you are shallow in Jesus, guess what? It's like you're putting Jesus a mile away from you, and you're keeping him so far away so you don't have to have him too close for him to approve. And so you're living in prayer.

You pray when it's just convenient, or you say, well, I pray on the way to work. You know, you're just perpetuating the same old joke. You're not wanting to invest. You're having a welfare mentality. That's it.

Personal Responsibility for Marriage and Change

Just repeating the same old thing. You don't want to invest in this life. So guess what? Because you're not investing in your relationship with Christ, you are not investing in your marriage. So you are being the same man or the same woman.

You've been through all the years. You're not going to change. You can go and say, my marriage is a nightmare. And you go and you run to the pastor and say, Pastor, will you fix my nightmare? But he can't fix it.

Because you're the creator of the nightmare. And the only way it's going to change is you've got to come and have a radical change in life and way of thinking by submitting to Christ. We'll look at that in just a moment.

Seeing Christ’s Work in the Lives of Others

But it begins by your relationship. If you don't have a deep relationship with Jesus, you will never conquer the twisted self. You will never conquer it. You'll be the same man, the same woman, 5, 10, 20, 30 years from now.

Because you never, ever dealt with it. Because you never wanted to get near it. And so you have to build the right relationship with Jesus. You know what this means? I put myself in Hebrew style. I can begin to look at people and see Christ's mark upon them, okay?

I can see some really good things and I can say, that I can see Jesus able to help me to live it. Look at this brother, look at this pastor. I can see the things. His mark is on these people. They're not Jesus anywhere close.

But yet we can begin to see what it's truly Christ-like. And how God begins to grace life. Amen. It's terrible. But it all comes from Jesus. You know, you were not created for sin. You weren't created for drugs.

You weren't created for sexual coercion. You weren't created for anything. You were created to love your God. That's why you were created. You were created to love Him, to serve Him, to worship Him. And only when you do that will you become an individual, returning back to what you were originally created to be.

Unbroken Fellowship With God as the Christian Goal

And so what should our goal be then as Christians? Our goal must become unbroken fellowship with God, which is the highest honor and reward given to man. That must be the goal. Not to know all the sports stats you could know.

Not to know all the stuff this world has to give. But to come to the place that you are longing to know your God more and more. And enter into that place of unbroken fellowship where you gaze upon Him.

You see Him. You draw near to Him. You become more like Him. And guess what? If you're a husband, it revolutionizes you as a man, that you might see your marriage change. If you're a wife, it changes you so radically, it starts affecting your husband.

But if you wait for each other to change, you'll never change anything. You'll just keep pointing the finger and doing the old victim mentality. It's his fault. It's her fault. And never find change. It is so sad how many marriages in the church are just in shambles, are just nothing but misery when Jesus designed them to be so.

Reckless Abandon and Immediate Obedience

The second part of becoming normal, the first is having to look at Jesus and it's our relationship. But out of that relationship comes the thing, and I know I've used this phrase many times when I preach here, it's the idea of reckless abandon.

We can only become normal through reckless abandon, which is reckless abandon. I like that idea. It comes from Oswald Chambers in his devotional, My Equals First Highest, right at 30-some-odd years ago.

And the idea is that when Jesus commands and He says, child, do this or child, stop that, you don't sit there and arm-wrestle. You don't debate it. You immediately respond. You say yes. You recklessly abandon yourself to this God.

Recklessly abandon yourself to His command, to obey Him. And do you know what that is? That is the untwisting of our rebellion that is so deep-rooted in us. We are rebels, right guys? We got that rebellious, right ladies?

Surrendering Rebellion and Yielding to Christ’s Lordship

That rebellion, that deep-rooted rebellion and surrendering to Jesus. Because if you're not surrendering, you'll never know true fellowship with God. And so this does come out of Romans 12, 1 and 2, that we give our bodies as a living sacrifice and so on, but it also touches the idea of Lordship.

Because, you know, here it goes back to extreme individualism. Guess what? I want to be king. I want to be king of my life, my agenda, my purposes, my culture. I want to define my destiny all about me.

But that's not Christianity. Christianity is me giving up my Lordship and bowing to the true Lord. Because I am just a usurper. In essence, I have had a coup d 'etat against the Holy God to rule myself.

And in that coup d 'etat, that rebellion will be my ruin unless I surrender to Him. You understand how I'm putting that? What's a coup d 'etat? It's when you have this military force that rise up and tries to overthrow a government.

You see, a coup d 'etat is an overthrow. And that's what we try to do. We have this coup d 'etat of our own rebellious nature. I'm going to rule myself. I'm going to rule my life. How many Christians have ruined themselves?

Because one way or the other, they come to the place, I'm going to rule my life. I'm not that man. And they go after their own thing because they overthrow God in their heart and kick them out to do their own thing.

The Danger of Rejecting Christ’s Rule

And what's happened? Think of it like this. Imagine that before they were Christian, they had this big, huge hunchback. They were all twisted, okay? They come to Jesus, and after a few years, he's untwisted and now starting to stand up a little straighter.

Not quite as twisted. But then Jesus has done all this work, and they have a coup d 'etat. They go and they overthrow the Lord Jesus Christ of Light. They drove off His reign. And all of a sudden, they become more twisted than they were before.

Do you understand? It just takes you back but further into the twisting because now you have tasted of God. You have tasted a little bit of more what it means to be normal, but now you've thrown off His lordship.

And you now are a greater slave than you ever were before. Because that's what happens if you are now more guilty. Because of it. General William Booth. You know, the early days of Salvation Army, they were absolute radicals.

If you've never read on the early Salvation Army, you need to read it, man. It's some radical stories of their abandonment to God, the laying down of their lives for Christ and so on. General William Booth made this statement.

He said, the greatness of a man's power is the measure of his ability to preach. Because you're going to have men preach that live like the devil. You understand? You're going to have a man preach.