Romans 15:16 - How Cleansing the Inner Temple Cleanses the Outer Court, Pt. 2 (01/08/2023)

Good morning. That was a beautiful choice of songs for today, I thought. Some of my favorites, and you sang quite well today. Good to be with all of you. I have a note I want to read to you here from the Hernandez family that was here with us not too long ago.

The missionaries, remember? They're going on the field in Mexico. Very nice thing they sent, and picture their two daughters on the back, and so it's good work. But they won me over, and let me see. Matthew's gone.

I was going to get Emily to do something for me. You can tell her for me. I wanted to get online. We need to order some, go to a church supply, and order some little envelopes that let us designate gifts, and I want to pass them around and get you to think about this.

Just one thing I don't like, and I've seen it done in a couple of churches I was in growing up, or one church I was in growing up, actually. I don't believe there's ever a time you're supposed to give more than you can and then expect God to give you more because you gave more than you can.

That's not something a church should be telling you to do. Now, I know the story in the Bible about the widow and Jesus, but if you read context, it's not saying that pastors ought to use that passage to try to get you to give more than you have and not take care of your families because you gave that money to the church, and then you expect God to give that back.

That could be presumptuous. You don't know what the Lord may or may not give you back, so that's not good practice. But what I would like you to do is pray about if it's a dollar or two dollars a month or five or ten or fifty or whatever that you could give extra above what you're giving because we need that to run the church and school and everything, but extra, and then whatever it adds up to, we could send to this family every month.

Wouldn't that be cool? But I mean, we'll vote and see if you want to do that. It's just, I would be for it, but I mean, we will definitely have a vote on it. In fact, we could vote on whether we want to do it now, and then when we pass those around and get them in, it'll give us an idea how much we could actually send them for now, and we can always increase it in the future, or if they don't serve the Lord, stop it, you know, and things like that.

So could we, let's see who can jot down. Let's do some minutes right quick. Who wants to make a motion that we call this business meeting to order? Thank you, sir. Who would second? There's the second, Dave Huber, and so all in favor of deciding what we can give the Hernandez family in the next coming days, but then whatever we decide we can give, sending that to them monthly, would you say aye?

Aye. All opposed, say nay. Okay, I believe that carried. So that's great because we used to have quite a number of missionaries, and through the years, we started out independent Baptist, which was very legalistic through the years.

We're not like that anymore, and so many of those missionaries were of that belief and still are, so we just dropped them off through the years, and we don't have any other than our school. To me, our school is our biggest mission work, but I think this is a good opportunity.

The Lord sent us one family that I believe we could support, and it would be great, and so I'm glad that you guys feel the same. So we'll get those envelopes. Matt, I was going to ask Emily to go online and order us some envelopes that let us designate the gifts above and beyond the normal budget.

Well, she doesn't have to do it now, but I mean, it's something. Now, Charlotte and I will not be with you the next two Sundays. We're going on a vacation together, and Dave Huber will be bringing the main service message, and Ben will be doing the Sunday school, and then we'll be back.

The Sunday I get back, Charlotte and I'll be here, but I'm not going to preach that Sunday, so we're going to have John King preach that Sunday, and because he comes a lot of times and preaches when I'm gone, I want him to preach sometime when I'm here.

Not that I haven't heard him preach. I have heard him preach. I heard him preach his first sermon. He was called to preach in this church. He was saved at a tradeway meeting in Dallas. I believe the meeting was in Dallas where he was saved one year, and they started driving over, joined the church, then he got called to preach, and now he's in the ministry, but anyway, we'll be back to hear him for that.

Oh, that's right. That happened last time, didn't it? Oh, really? I don't remember that. Interesting. He preached the lights out. Pretty good, so whenever we get those envelopes, if you get them before next Sunday, pass them out, and Ben, are you listening?

So you and Dave get everybody to pass those out. Give them about three minutes to write a number on it. You don't have to put money in it. Just write a number on it and say we could give this much per month without hurting our family over the next year.

We'll collect those, and we'll decide how much the Lord can help us to give this great family. I was so impressed with the message that he gave while here. Just amazing to me for a young man like that, but that age, I should say.

Also, the Sunday school lesson today was just fabulous. I mean, it was kind of sad, though, because it was on a passage. It seems very clear to, I think, everyone in our Sunday school class and several commentators that we have read in the past, some we've respected in the past, totally got it wrong in their commentary, and you have to ask the question why.

It's just sad to see, but I mean, Dave said this, and it's true. None of us would get everything right if we wrote a commentary. Most likely, we would have some human error in there. I wouldn't because I'd get all you guys to proof it before I printed it, and you would tear it to smithereens, but anyway, it's sad when you see that.

It messes with your mind a little bit. It does me. I bet it does you guys, too. You just hate. You don't like to see that, but Ben gave some reasons for it in his opinion, and there's another reason I was thinking of, too.

You remember this week when we were talking about a YouTube video I saw, which was a young man that was talking about Matthew 24, specifically the verse that says when the generation that sees these signs will see everything come to pass.

Remember that verse? He was talking about that verse, and I think he got it just so badly incorrect as far as his mode of interpretation of that passage, and I asked several of my sons and sons-in-law to listen to it and tell me what they think of it.

Well, I'm going to blow that now because I'm going to tell you a little bit about what I think of it here, but don't cheat. I want your own thoughts on it, but the thing that I think happens with some of these guys when they're very young, in their 20s, they go to seminary, and they get this scholarly attitude.

It's sort of a scholarly pride, and they read some very smart people, which I like to do that, but the thing is what you don't want to do is get to the point where you want to be like them so much that you just start taking everything they say with the same authority as the Bible, and so what can happen, and what you tend to do then is you hone in on a certain, if you're writing a commentary on verses through the Bible, or even if you're preaching verse by verse like I do through the Bible, you can hone in on one little section so much with such intensity that you want to figure this thing out, and maybe you're seeing some new things in it you never saw before, and you forget the rule that says this, whatever your new idea is, it has to fit with the whole of the Bible.

It has to fit every verse in the whole Bible, or it's not right. Your interpretation isn't right, so what they do is they read a lot of other commentaries and books that they've read from very scholarly individuals who convince them that it sort of means this thing they're wanting it to mean, and they forget to look at some very clear passages elsewhere in the Bible that prove it doesn't mean that.

I mean simple, clear, just day and night clear passages that prove it cannot mean that, and they forget to go do that work, and I've seen it again and again. It's hard to explain how PhD scholars do this.

How did they get their PhD? How did they finish school with that sort of attitude? But anyway, it happens, and Ben, I think that's part of what we saw in your lesson this morning was especially with McGee.

I think I always love to listen to him on the radio when he was alive, and I've got his commentaries, but he did want to be viewed as a scholar, and so I think that's very important to him, and he's listening to me from heaven, so I don't want to say too much negative because 99 .999 of the stuff he says is great in his commentary, but he was overly influenced by other scholars to the extent that sometimes would misinterpret passages without seeing very clear things, and that happens.

It probably happens to all of us, but I remember when I first met Brother Otis, he believed in the day-age theory. Do you know what that means? If you're familiar with that, like that the six days of creation, each day was a millennium of time, and that made it sort of fit with evolution better.

Well, Brother Otis's generation didn't have the advantage my generation had because by the time we get to my generation, the Christian scholars had finally caught up with Darwin and had been able to show that the evidence actually backs the Bible better than Darwinianism, but when Otis was a young man, they had not gotten there yet, and they were kind of overwhelmed by it, and they all scrambled to try to protect the Bible by changing it to make it fit Darwinism, which is always a mistake to change the Bible to make it fit anything humanistic because you don't need to do that, so Otis, he had a room with a wall here and a wall here, floor to the ceiling, full of books, scholarly books.

They're out, most of them out of print now, and he'd read all those old intellectual theologians who had tried to make it fit through things like the gap theory, but one of them was the day-age theory.

Totally false, but it felt good because at least it made it where this poor old Bible didn't have to be proven wrong. You never have to defend the Bible, really. It will defend itself. You just need to know the Bible and quote it to people.

It will defend itself. This book will be here long after anything that science pretends to think is scientific is gone because the science I studied in high school, by the time I got to college, it was wrong, and they had changed it, and now Colin tells me all of that was wrong.

I don't know how he knows all that stuff, but son-in-law Colin, but there was a time when they were saying that all of the kingdom literature in the Bible, the second coming of Christ in the millennial kingdom, none of that could possibly happen.

It's all allegorical, and the reason is because Israel no longer existed as a nation. It was destroyed in 70 AD, and so if you go back prior to 1948 when God put it back there again, there were scholars saying none of this can happen because there's no nation of Israel, so the poor Bible was wrong, and yet in 1948, out of the blue, just out of nothing, all of a sudden, Israel's a nation again.

It totally was a miracle, but they didn't see that. God can't do that, so this stuff must be, this literature must be allegorical. You see what a mistake it is when you try to change the Bible to fit men's whims.

Anyway, that was a great lesson, but wow, quite a few scholars that I respect really, really, really missed that one, so we always need to use the ten rules of Bible interpretation. If you don't have a copy of it, let me know.

I'll email you a copy, and it's believed by almost every, it's one of the few things I've seen that different denominations tend to agree on, including the Roman Catholics. I mean, they're a little off.

Theirs is a little different because they have other things that they think are authoritative besides the Bible, but as far as how to read the Bible, a lot of what they believe is the same, so there are rules we should be following, and when we cheat on those rules, you end up embarrassing yourself by writing a commentary that sits there for the next 40 years, people reading it, and you're totally wrong with something just obvious that you should have caught because you broke one of those rules, so we don't want to be doing that in our church, and we're always open to anyone bringing up a question saying, hey, did you see this verse, though, that what you said doesn't seem to fit this, and if it really truly doesn't fit this, and this is also interpreted in context and with all the rules, then we'll take it back, apologize.

That's just how it has to be. Unfortunately, when you write a book, that's hard to do, isn't it? It's hard to, at least you have to write a second book and refute your book. All right, well, let's go into scriptures today and kind of pick up where we left off.

The Tabernacle as a Picture of the Believer

We've been talking about how the wilderness tabernacle, along with Solomon's temple pictures the Christian in the sense that the outer court is your body, your flesh, the inner court is your soul, and the holy of holies is your spirit where you meet where you can meet with God, and remember the priest, the high priest could do that once a year.

Well, you are a believer priest. The wonderful thing is that because of the cross and the finished work of Jesus, you can meet with God any moment you want to. You can come boldly into his presence as a priest into that holy of holies, which since now your body is the temple of God, not that wilderness tabernacle that pictured your body, and the highest part of you is your spirit, and that's where God meets with you.

The holy spirit is in there with you. As the Bible says, when your spirit becomes one with the holy spirit, that you become one spirit. Isn't that interesting? And when you're in that mode, we call that being spirit-filled, you cannot sin and you will not sin.

You'll see a few verses that picture that today, I think, if we get to them. It's always a big if. So we were in 2 Chronicles chapter 29, and we talked about how they first prepared the door of the temple because they hadn't been going in there.

Well, that picture is you're not meeting with God, right? You've gotten in a mode in your life where you're just kind of going along doing worldly stuff and the stuff you need to get done, and you're not taking time to meet with God, and that's just not a good picture to have.

And then when we got into 2 Chronicles 15 8, we noticed that when they went in to clean out the house of God, they were instructed to do that by the king. They had to start on the inside and clean that up first in your thought life, and renew the mind, and all those different verses that we looked at with regard to that.

Okay, wonderful, beautiful verses talking about put off the old man and put on the new man. So we kind of covered that pretty well, I think. And then after they cleaned out that holy place, the inner part, then it moved back on out to the outer court, and we just started talking about that last time a little bit, and I'll pick it up there.

So they had to repair the doors, they had to go inside and start in the innermost parts, and clean everything out, and even put back in there the utensils they used to do the sacrifices. Everything had been either removed or destroyed or let go corrupt, and so they had to clean all that up.

They finally got all that done, and now they're ready to start the worship again that they were supposed to do, and the daily sacrifices they were supposed to do to picture Jesus Christ when he would come in their future.

What's so amazing about it is it took many different sacrificial animals and different types of animals to picture the one Jesus Christ. Like you had doves, and all these things picture different attributes of Jesus.

You had goats, you had sheep, you had two goats, you had the sacrificial goat that would be killed for the sins of the people, God's people, but you had the scapegoat who was not killed, but the sins of the people were put on the head of this goat.

He was sent into the wilderness never to return. That pictures that moment on the cross, however many moments it was on the cross, when God turned his head from Jesus and separated himself from Christ, and Jesus literally took our sins to hell, if you want to put it that way, at that moment, and paid for our sins.

The sin debt was paid, and after that was done, Jesus said it is finished, and then he died, but what's that time period when he was separated from the father is pictured by that scapegoat that was sent into the wilderness.

He wasn't killed, but he was sent into the wilderness to never come back with the sins of the people on his head. That is a picture of Jesus Christ suffering hell for you and for me, and what's interesting is even though that happened during a few moments on the cross, we don't know how many minutes on the cross, you multiply any number times infinity, the answer is infinity, so Jesus suffered that infinitely for you and for me, and you say, well, how can that be?

Well, we cannot understand that because we're not in God's dimension. We're in a three-dimensional world. God is probably at least 17 dimensions, or 13, I guess. Brother Bill was the last thing. Brother Bill taught us about that.

Our physics professor, Bible teacher, used to be here, and he went to heaven in 2022, but he said it. Scholars have said it. I think he said about 13 dimensions for Jesus to be able to reappear and come through a wall without disturbing the molecules in the wall and then eat fish with them and stuff.

13 dimensions. Do you realize we're in three-dimensional world? If you went one dimension higher to fourth, you cannot even picture anything about it. Try drawing something in four dimensions. You can't do it, and people have tried.

Now, we can do mathematical formulas where we can do the math for four dimensions, but you can't picture it because with our minds, we cannot understand even one dimension higher, and we try to figure out things about God.

If they're not in the scripture, how are we going to figure it out? Even when we're with Him in eternity, we won't figure God out completely. We'll be learning new things about Him all the time for the rest of eternity because He's infinitely wise, and we're finite, and even though we'll live forever, we're still not God.

We're not infinite, right? So it's a beautiful thing to think we can learn about someone that we love that much every day of all of eternity and keep learning. Well, when you look at the little scapegoat, it is a picture of Jesus in the Father's view always paying for our sin in an eternal way so that our sin is never not paid for.

That's double negative, but it's good preaching, I guess. I don't know. It's interesting that in order for us in three dimensions to even try to picture what Jesus did, you had to have all these different animals picturing different aspects of it, and that's the only way to put it in a three-dimensional world, and we still, all we can do at best is chew on it and think about it and talk about it and try to understand the best we can what He accomplished for us when He died on the cross and rose again.

So they went in and they cleaned out all the things where that's supposed to be pictured, where they offered those little goats and doves and cattle, calves, and all the different things they would offer.

They got that finished up. Now it moves on out into the outer court, which pictures the body again. So what's amazing about it with us as believer priests, we have to make sure that the inside is working right first.

We have to make sure that we are spirit-filled and we are not walking in the flesh. That before we go out to face the people God wants us to minister to, that we are spirit-filled and not walking in the flesh.

And once we are, we become a spirit-controlled, soul-controlled body, and all of a sudden this body can be used for God, because this body by itself is prone to go against God and to be more like Satan than like Jesus.

If you think about it, your mind, which is part of your body, it's your brain's like your liver, it's just an organ. It is just as prone to go against God as it is to do anything good for God. In fact, it's so bad God couldn't even fix it, so He killed it.

Your old man was crucified in Christ and He made you reborn into a new man or woman. That new man or woman will not sin and cannot sin, but the problem is the old flesh is still hanging out, so sometimes we get into the flesh and we do sin, right, in this life.

But at the rapture, that'll be taken care of, because that old man will be gone. Won't that be something? That'll be a weight off. But anyway, when we are spirit-filled, we cannot sin and we will control this mind and make it think like Jesus would think, and that will control the body and make it do good works.

It's the only way we ever do good works, is together with Christ. It's your spirit up here somewhere and the Holy Spirit, they become one, and now I can do good stuff, but it's not just me, it's me and Jesus.

It's never just me. If it is just me, it's not a good work. It was something I did for a selfish reason. Maybe not even thinking I knew that, but it's just not it. I remember Brother Otis asked me one time, Brother David, if you talk about it and you know that you did a good work, did you really do a good work?

I mean, that's a hard question, isn't it? Then he asked this one, he said, so let me ask you this, when you do do a good work, do you ever really know you did it? Think about that. So I'm not sure what the answer is on that one, but anyway, it's good stuff.

So now picture this, they've gone in and they've cleaned out the inside of that tabernacle, which pictures your highest part of you. It's your mind, and now see, I don't think your spirit can ever be defiled, your new man spirit, which is that's when your spirit came alive, when you were regenerated, you were born again, your spirit came alive, that's the part of you that can't and won't sin, but your soul is an interface between that and this body, and it'll go either direction.

It could go either way on you, and that's why you have to be, and your soul is the closest thing to talking about your mind, your brain, your thinking, your emotions, your thought life, and now the highest part of your thought life and emotions is controlled by your spirit though, and it comes, it filters through your brain into this world, because your brain's physical, that's how that works, your spirit is spiritual and invisible, but for other people to see the real you, which is your spiritual self, it has to go through the soul and out through the body and through your eyes, and they can look in your eyes, and they can see your spirit in a sense, I think you can do that with brothers and sisters in Christ, don't you, and your kids and your parents and all that, so it has to start on the inside, and that has to be right, the spirit has to be connected with the Holy Spirit, and then controlling the mind, which controls the body, and then we can get into some of these places like we see in Colossians chapter 3, where last time we talked about the verse that said, put on the new man which is renewed in knowledge after the image of him that created him, see that's the regeneration, see when you got saved, it had nothing to do with religiosity or some little prayer you pray, like the churches teach, even Baptist churches, they all teach the same, you know, pray this little prayer, Jesus come my heart, say amen, that is not it, salvation comes by the Holy Spirit calling you and regenerating you, while we were yet in our sins, he quickened us, he brought us to life, that's the cause of your salvation and everything about everything else is an effect, but the thing about it is once we are regenerated, then you have the ability to walk in the flesh, in which case you will sin, and I say you, I'm always including me in the you, okay, it's man, mankind, or you can do like Colossians 3 10, put on the new man, that's your new regenerated self, the real you, put him on, which is renewed in knowledge after the image of him that created him, that is a new creation when you get saved, it is not fixing the old you, the old you ain't fixed yet, remember that, it's a creation just like you were born in your mother's, before you were born in your mother's womb, you were created by God and he knew you from the foundation of the world, he knew everything about you, but you came to life right there in that womb and you were born into this world and later you had a second birth, well that first birth is quite the miracle, wouldn't you agree, physical birth, I mean that, do you really think, I mean we're so used to it, we just accept it, but do you really think that that is a a simple thing that ought to happen in nature, like do you really think that if there were no God and you had a big bang and it blew up and created a bunch of dirt which coalesced into two balls of dirt called planets, that out of that dirt anything could happen that has any design to it without a designer and that out of that dirt you could just have these things, little one-cell things and then they turn into like a lizard and then he gets some wing, climbs up a tree, gets some wings, he becomes a bird and then he grows a tail, becomes a monkey and then he jumps down, becomes a PhD at a college or university teaching Darwinism, do you really think that if that's the way that it worked that that dirt could have figured out how to take one cell in the body of a woman and turn that into a human being in nine months with every organ and if you just took one organ, if you just took the eyeball of a human being, you cannot explain how that could happen by chance, no matter how much time you put with it, the math doesn't work, there are physicists who have done the math, the math, there's not enough time since the big bang happened because they claim they know when it happened, right?

If you take all that time, there's not enough time to create an eyeball, let alone the human it's in and if they believe that stuff, wow, you know, like it's the Bible put it pretty clearly, an atheist is a fool, he that says there is no God is a fool and so now you have this amazing miracle called physical birth, we got lots of babies in this church and they're the most fun thing in the world but they started with one cell, now it's just magnificent but you take that and you want to switch over and talk about the new birth, it's like it's even if you want to say a bigger miracle, I mean isn't that almost like saying the glass is full or not full, like it's either full or not, you can't say it's more full, I mean it's either full or it's not full, right?

So, I guess it's either a miracle or it just ain't a miracle but it's just from my viewpoint, it's a bigger miracle than physical birth, is the spiritual salvation of any of us in this room and Ben made that pretty clear in Sunday school when he said, look, it should not have been a problem for us to understand that God hated Esau because he's in the same state we were all born into this world in, the problem should be figuring out how God loved Jacob, how did that happen, that's what we should be thinking about, that's the miracle and it is the miracle, then the whole world gets it and even the church world gets it backwards, great job on that Ben but here we have this renewing that takes place, it is a spiritual birth where you, the new you and thank God if you are one this morning because you never see heaven if you weren't, if God had not done this operation on you, it's called the operation of God and that new you was a creation of God, it says so clearly, put on the new man that was in the image of God and created by him but if you keep going in that passage then you look at verse, well if you go to Ephesians chapter 4, similar passage in Ephesians chapter 4 verse 23, it says and be renewed by the spirit of your mind, see that's your spiritual level but that mind, the mind part of you which is your soul has to be renewed by reading scripture and by the Holy Spirit teaching you the scripture and that's called a cleansing by the water of the word and verse 24 says and that you put on the new man which after God is created in righteousness and true holiness, put on the new man when it says which after God it means which like God, your new man is like God in the sense that it's created in righteousness and holiness, not that God was created but your new man is a creation that is like God in the sense that it's righteous and holy, do you see it's not just first John that teaches your new man cannot sin, this verse in Ephesians chapter 4 verse 24 proves it, mark it, Ephesians 4 24 proves your new man will not sin, cannot sin, it's created in righteousness and true holiness by God, now but here's where verse 25 is where it starts moving from there, once you get that in order and that's a daily thing, it's not like these charismatics, I mean I love them but I like to pick on them too, they like to say well I'm a spirit, we're a spirit-filled church, you ever heard that like well I'm spirit-filled and to them that means well I'm that way all the time, now once done it's like they don't believe in eternal security but they believe in eternal spirit-filledness, so yeah I'm spirit-filled, no that's not how it works, it is a moment-by-moment decision every day, moment-by-moment decision, you're in the flesh and you say I don't like that, I'm going to be in the spirit, new man tell the old man what to do, it's a willful thoughtful choice you make moment-by-moment every day and the better Christians make that choice more often during the day than those who are weaker and that usually comes from years of being in the word more, I would say this, I could be wrong but I don't know about it, I think the ability to walk like that is directly proportional to the amount of time you spend in the Bible, I think that, I mean and I'm saying assuming you're saved and the Holy Spirit's helping you interpret it and all that, it's directly proportional to how much time you're spending in the Bible, so you could have been really a strong Christian like last month and this week, not so much, think about that, that's just the reality of it, God did it this way on purpose though, the treasure is put in earthen vessels so that God may get the glory, right, it's all part of the best and only plan, but now watch this as the new part is connected, your spirit's connected to the Holy Spirit and at that point you're invincible with regard to other people and Satan and the world system because you won't sin, you're walking hand in hand with Jesus, you won't sin when you're hand in hand fellowship with Jesus during those moments, you cannot and you will not and look what happens starting with verse 25, start to show how it goes down into your body, the physical part that's pictured by that outer part of the courtyard part of the tabernacle, which is, you know, where the Gentiles could worship, that part of you, that fleshly part of you, which is prone to do wrong when it's in the control of the new man, which is you, your spirit and the Holy Spirit, watch what happens, verse 25, wherefore, what does that mean, why is the wherefore there, got to ask how do you say it, why is the wherefore there, it's there because you put on the new man, the verse we just read, so now your spirit filled and you're going to walk out in the world that way and you're going to keep thinking that way for the next hour or two or all day or how long you can and look at what the result is, look at verse 25, it goes down into your body, that part of you which everyone else can see and hear and touch and all that and it says, wherefore putting away lying speak every man the truth, well guess what, the old man does not always speak the truth, does it, it only speaks the truth when it's convenient, it speaks a lie when it gets you out of trouble, that's the old man, right, okay, but the new man speaks the truth with his neighbor, for we are members of one body, we're all linked together when we're saved, then it says be angry and sin not, let not the sun go down on your wrath, so now like when you get mad at somebody because it's something they where they treated you wrong, you cannot live with that and go to sleep that night, you got to fix it before you go to bed that night, boy that's great advice for a marriage, for a man and a woman that are married, Charlotte and I have practiced that forever, we will not go to sleep if we don't fix it, not one night and it should be that way with friends too, you should, if you any Christian brother or sister where you get wrong with, make it right before you go to bed that night, if you have to call them, if you got to drive to their house, whatever, make it right and so you only do that though when you're spirit-filled, you see, so here is the outer court, everything the world can see, now it's affecting your body and causing your body to come under the control of you and God and so be angry and sin not, neither give place to the devil, so now the devil tempts you and you say, well you know what, I'm not going to hang out around that thing that he's tempting me with, I will move away from it, you see, you see how this works and the world sees that and they say, wow that's powerful, God has changed that person because I remember how they used to be, but pray to the Lord that they don't see you when you're not spirit-filled, right, because then that confuses them, but if we can piece together more moments of being spirit-filled, then we become a witness, a light and salt in this world that affects and changes the world, when Billy Sunday used to come through towns like Corsicana when he would leave, or a bigger town, let's take, let's take Dallas, when he would leave, there'd be the prostitutes would leave town, the beer joints would shut down, it would change blocks and blocks and blocks of the city, people would be walking down the street, just regular people singing hymns just because that man came to town, when's the last time you saw something like that in America, well we don't have enough people getting it right in the spiritual part so that it comes out into the body part and shows to the world and they say, wow that's, you know, that's all the proof I need, I see Jesus, that's all the proof I need, and so neither give place to the devil, verse 29, let no corrupt communication proceed out of your mouth, that would be good in a marriage, don't you think, what about child rearing, do you let your kids call the other kids stupid, well if you do, you're stupid, I like that one, didn't you, yeah, you don't let them, you say, well you don't mean, you don't, it's all boys, you let them scrap, right, not only do I not let them scrap, I don't let them call each other names, and they get to visit my study if they do, and it's always a weapon for that, and guess what, all five of mine, they would rather hang out together than with anybody in the world, and their spouses, they just love each other, but if I had let them fight all the time at home, do you think they'd be hanging out with each other now, absolutely not, so it's all here, let no corrupt communication proceed out of your mouth, but that which is good to the use of building, edifying, that it may minister grace to the hearer, and you force your kids to live that way, you don't let them say stuff that tears down the other person, it has to build them up, or you're not allowed to say it in this house, and it should be true in the church, problem is, when you leave here, I don't see what you're doing in your house, when you get here, you're perfectly behaved, as am I, but we need to pull this into the home, because we already look, we've already lost our country, because of not doing this, we've already lost it, but there's no reason to lose our church, and our our homes, we can be in a safe place in our homes, and in this church, if we will just do these things, no matter what's going on around us, and stuff's going to go on around us, we're in the beginning stages of the end, I believe that, so did my grandmother, and she's wrong, but I think I'm right, verse 30, and grieve not the Holy Spirit, you mean you can grieve, let me ask you this, can anything you do affect God, that depends, depends on whether you're talking about father, or the son, or the Holy Spirit, if I want to make it easy, can anything you do affect the father, no, and I mean in a way, that would cause him to change something, he was going to do, not at all, but can it change God with us, in time and space, which would be Jesus, or the Holy Spirit, absolutely, can it affect him, yes, can you grieve the Holy Spirit, yes, because he's in time with us, now look what it is, that grieves him specifically, in the context, grieve not the Holy Spirit of God, whereby you are sealed, unto the day of redemption, what was the verse right before it, let no corrupt communication proceed out of your mouth, that doesn't build people, so when you do the opposite, and you tear people down, even if it's, especially if it's not in their presence, you're gossiping with somebody else, about someone else, you grieve the Holy Spirit, now what else grieves the Holy Spirit, look at verse 31, let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and evil speaking, mentions that again, so that's doubly emphasized, be put away from you with all malice, and be ye kind one to another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another, even as God, for Christ's sake, has forgiven you, there's how we're supposed to be, and when we're spirit-filled, that's how we will be, and when you're a tear, that's how you cannot be, the greatest symptom of salvation, is love for the brethren, I believe that, I can't prove it, but I've taught it a million times for 40 years, and I'm not changing, unless you show me why I should, I think the greatest symptom of salvation, is love for the brethren, because that changes, when you get saved, you didn't used to have it, you didn't want to go to church, where the brothers were, you didn't want to be there, you didn't want to read the Bible, a lot of stuff changed, but the thing that changes, is true love, unfeigned, unfaked love, the Apostle Paul talks about, that can only come from the Holy Spirit, so all these things, when we don't have them, we're grieving the Holy Spirit, why?