Colossians 1:13-14 - We Were Ransomed From the Enemy

Good morning, everyone. Wow, we're all back. This is getting a little lonely around here the last few

Sundays. Good to see everyone. Thank you all for making it in here today.

So the Lord brought us all back together, that's a blessing. So good to see you. Man, you know, we,

God ordained this event once a week. The Bible says as the end times approach, we ought to not forsake the assembly of ourselves together, and there's a reason for that.

We need each other. We need each other. There's way more enemies than there are us. I should say way more of the enemy than us.

And so we need each other. And the Lord has put his Holy Spirit in us and connected us to each other and to Jesus and to the

Father, and here we are. So I can't wait to see what he's gonna do today. Good to see you back,

Benjamin, as always. And I met a new friend back there, Lance. Good to have you.

He's gonna be able to stay for lunch. So you guys get to meet Lance, and he's got quite an interesting story how he found our church.

And I appreciate you being here, driving in. And then Jerry and Holly, I think we had a little extra, not base, but what would you call your voice?

It's kind of the next level up. It was booming out. Tenor? Okay, tenor,

I'm with you. Matt, do you need to recruit this one? No, it was a blessing to hear you singing.

And good to see so many of you here today. It's nice. I mean, I like it when there's just six of us too.

It's okay. But let me have you turning to Colossians chapter one.

Judy, I didn't see you come in today. Did you get through the locked door? I came in before.

I just didn't see you. You slipped in. I didn't see you come in. She drives like 600 miles to get here every

Sunday, and you don't know, it's more than that.

Okay. All right. Yannick and Tabitha are back with us, and that's answered prayers.

They went through the valley of the shadow of death this past week. Her dad passed away, and they had to go all the way out to Lubbock to be with that part of the family and for the remembrance service.

And while she was there, she was stricken with an illness and in pain all the way back towards the

Fort Worth area and had to stop at a little bitty town with a tiny little hospital. And I live in a little bitty town with a tiny hospital, and the

Lord was with you. You survived it. But she's doing well now.

The Lord's answered some prayers in her life, and she is doing well physically. And I know she and the grandbabies, and well, all of you, just takes time.

Time will heal, and you'll just remember all the wonderful, good, wonderful, happy times together with your dad.

Good to have you back with us today. Well, let's look at Colossians 1. We're in verses 13 and 14, and probably make our way a little beyond that.

If you would turn there, I'd like you to be looking at God's word and seeing that it's him talking, not me.

I'm just here. I'm just a messenger. That's it. I am called.

God knew my phone number and called to me one day and said, you're gonna preach, which made no sense because I was already out of school with two business degrees, running a family business, an only child.

My mom was an only child. My dad wanted to retire. So what do I do, right? And anyway, God worked.

He certainly had to make that real or I wouldn't have made that move, but I did run from it for about a year.

But here we are some 45 years later. And so let's have some fun together.

There's nothing to me, like there is nothing more fun than being in God's word. It's just now,

I remember when I was lost, like it was the most boring book I'd ever seen. Tried to read it. I'd get stuck in Leviticus and stop every time, even through college.

And when I was 24, God met me in my car, driving to work one day from college. I was just two weeks from finishing with an

MBA and heading to Mahea to the oil office to work that evening. And he saved me in that car.

Got home and all of a sudden I knew the whole Bible. It's been amazing. No, but I tell you what, all of a sudden

I found it interesting for the first time in my life. And that's one of the symptoms of salvation, by the way. And all of a sudden

I wanted to hang out with Christians, which I used to hate church. I wanted to be around Christians. And so thanks for coming today.

I feel better being with you. All right, so let's look at this. Colossians 1 .13.

If you went up in the context, which we're going verse by verse through this book. So we've had the privilege of going from verse one through verse 12.

So we know the context of this, but in case you weren't here for that, it's talking about the father. The father,

God, the father, who has delivered us from the power of darkness and has translated us into the kingdom of his dear son.

And we took a long look at that word translated because it's quite a fascinating concept, both in the

English, but also in the Greek. And you even have it in Hebrew because we had

Enoch was translated in the old Testament, if you remember that. And so very, very interesting study on that.

And then the very next verse says in whom, now we're talking about, are we talking about the father in this verse or the son at this point?

You always got to figure it out, right? So it starts out the father who has delivered us from the power of darkness.

And then it says he put us into the kingdom of his son in whom, so that's talking about Jesus, right?

Jesus in whom we have redemption through his blood, even the forgiveness of sins.

And we have to point out that in the Greek, that word is not redemption, it's actually ransom. And it's a slight difference.

They're almost synonyms in Greek, but there's a slight difference, an important difference. Every little jot and tittle in the

Bible is important. Don't ever miss a word the, or the word of. I mean, you wouldn't believe how important the word of is.

If you've been here the last two Sundays, you know, and for you guys that weren't, I might review just a little bit. Everybody here says

I always review for 45 minutes and preach for 10 minutes. But anyway, so it's true too.

I have to accept that criticism. All right, so we're gonna be looking at this word ransom that's found, it's translated redemption there in verse 14.

And then forgiveness, we talked about that last time, but the forgiveness comes because of the ransom. You're aware of that, right?

I mean, you would not have any forgiveness. I wouldn't have any forgiveness if Jesus had not bought us with a price, which guess what it was, it was his blood plus nothing.

That's all that saves us. And by the way, we had an interesting talk, Lance and I, that is why you have denominational problems and differences and splits and divisions is because they don't understand what salvation, what the actual cause of regeneration is.

And every church wants to say, it's these five things, it's these three things, it's these two things. And those are different, so they split up.

We're gonna talk about that at lunch. But the cause of our regeneration is that while we were dead in our sins, hath he quickened us.

Now you're saved, everything else is in effect. Now go home and think about that.

I got that from Charles Spurgeon, so I didn't invent it, but he got it from the

Bible. So I went and found where he got that from the Bible. And I thought, okay, he's right about that. Fascinating stuff, but this is important because when we talk about this topic of ransom, which brings the forgiveness, and that word for forgiveness is interesting because the very word itself lends the idea of like removal of something.

It's not just a covering, like we talked about in Sunday school, Dave Huber's talking about in Psalms where it talks about in the

Old Testament system, the sins were covered or atoned for. And it was pushing all the sins forward every year until the day of the cross.

And they all landed on that cross. All the sins of God's people landed on that cross in the body of Christ.

And he paid the debt for them and for all of his children looking forward in time because God's not bound by time.

And that's where the forgiveness comes from is this ransom. So the ransom is the key thing to take a look at.

We all wanna be forgiven and we are. We're in a standing of forgiveness. Did I make up a new word?

We're in a standing of forgiveness. I like it. Because we have been ransomed by someone far greater than us.

It's always in the passive in Greek, which is like math, as I've always said. Passive, which means someone bigger and stronger than us did it to us.

It's not something we did to cause it. So last time in sort of backing up this concept because one of the great rules of Bible interpretation is to let the

Bible interpret the Bible. So we went out and looked at some other scriptures that back up and support the idea that the ransom is something that God did for us, not something we do for him.

It's something that if he had not done for us, we never could have been forgiven. And so therefore we have to look to God at the operation of that thing that happened to us.

The thing that happened to me in the car driving to work that day. How did that happen? Did I just decide all of a sudden

I'm gonna be a good person? Yeah, I think I'll just turn my life around and I'm gonna be godly.

I'll be a preacher someday. And here I am still in college, been married a couple of years and everything in life seemed rosy.

You don't have a lot at that point. Sometimes you don't have a lot of the problems, the good things that come with having children, right?

But we didn't have that yet. So I'm just driving down the road. So I'm saying, oh, you know what? I think I'll just change and I'll stop being

God in my life and I'll let Jesus do that. You think I came up with that? See, that's the modern gospel.

That is the modern gospel. That's what is taught in almost every church around this country, except for some churches that actually study the

Bible. That's not how it works. What happened was the

Holy Spirit came into my car, came into my mind. He took my old dead heart and quickened it.

He took my blind eyes and he opened them. He took my deaf ears where I could hear the voice of God. And then he took my chin.

This is hard to find in the Bible, but look for it. Took my chin while I'm driving. And he pointed up and said, look, there he is.

What are you gonna do with him? Now, did I have to make an important choice? Absolutely. Responsibility is taught in the

Bible right next to sovereignty of God. They're right together every time you ever see it. They're both in operation all the time.

And he said, what are you gonna do with him? And I said, well, what do you think I'm gonna do with him? I'm hungry. He's the shepherd.

I'm a sheep and he's got the food. I want you. I want you to run my life instead of me.

Changed everything in a nanosecond. Oh, that's my favorite word, right? Changed everything for me.

And I was 24 years old and behind because God had planned for Charlotte and I to go teach a bunch of teenagers that had been saved in a big revival meeting.

Some years, not long before that, three months before that. Well, we didn't start teaching though for a few months, maybe six or seven months before that.

A whole bunch of teenagers, over a hundred and something teenagers had been saved in a revival meeting and they all knew the

Bible more than I did. And we were gonna be teaching. So I had to study. But man, I love that Bible.

So I did. So look at this. For you guys that weren't here last time, if you can quickly jot down these verses so you can look them up later because it's not what

I'm talking about today. But in reference to the ransom being something God did to us,

I want you to look at these four different things. If you weren't here last time, four different things that you could not possibly have done by yourself.

You could only have done it with Jesus. In fact, the Greek is together with Jesus. It's a little prefix, sum in Greek.

It means together with whatever the next word is. So in Colossians chapter two verses, now we're gonna get to this in our verse by verse study.

So I don't know why I cheated and went forward, but it supports this idea of the ransom so beautifully. And it all is in the same letter that he wrote.

So it's all the same idea. It's the same thing that the Lord is giving us in this letter.

So Colossians chapter two, starting with about verse eight, it starts talking about four things.

One is it says we are complete in Christ, but in the Greek it's co -complete. It means together with Christ, we're complete.

When we're by ourselves, we are not anywhere near it. And that word complete means mature. It means a human being as God intended for humans to be, a body, a soul, and a spirit, with that spirit united with the

Holy Spirit and one with God and walking in this earth and serving God with this body as the temple of the living

God. And that's how God intends us to be. And we are complete in that sense once we're born again and we're in Christ.

The second thing is we are co -circumcised. And that's talking about the circumcision of the heart.

And it shows very clearly in these passages in Colossians that Jesus is the surgeon.

It is even called the operation of God. Salvation is called, or I should say regeneration, is called the operation of God.

He goes more than just the regeneration. I mean, that is what we Baptists, I grew up Baptist, we took it off the sign though, but well,

I'm Spurgeon Baptist. I'm an old time Baptist, I guess. But when we say we're saved, what we mean is we're regenerated.

And we're still being saved, right? Because it's past, present, future tense. If you look at that huge topic of salvation covers a lots of things in the

Bible. But the regeneration, it comes from this ransom price that was paid.

And Jesus said it takes two things to get regenerated. You know what they are? Who can tell me what they are?

The water of the word, Jesus called it the water and the spirit. The book of Ephesians defines that as the water of the word.

So you have to have the gospel, the word of God, and you have to have the Holy Spirit come in your car and meet wherever you are.

It's different with every person. Every child of God gets saved in a little different way. And he awakens you because you've heard the gospel already.

And he uses that and he awakens you, and that's how it works. And this is the regeneration. Now, we are complete in him.

It goes beyond the regeneration. It goes into this bigger idea of salvation where he's with us in every day of our life.

In fact, the Holy Spirit is sealed with us until the day of redemption. No man can break that seal, not even yourself.

I know there's denominations that say, oh yeah, but you can do it yourself. Show me that in the Bible. It's not in there. Okay, you can't.

You cannot break a seal that God places. And so till the day you see him face to face, the

Holy Spirit lives in you. Now, whether you walked filled with him or whether you walk in the flesh is up to you to make that decision about every moment of every day.

Almost every moment to moment, you have to make that decision. And you just gotta keep on making it. And it sounds tiring, and it is tiring.

And yet God said he put this new man, he put this treasure called the new man combined with the

Holy Spirit into an earthen vessel on purpose.

So God intended us to have this struggle. Don't beat up on yourself too much when you sin, but you will.

You will beat up on yourself if you're saved. You will not like that you just did something that you weren't supposed to.

And you'll come back and go to 1 John 1 .9 and he'll cleanse you from it. And that process goes on and on your whole life on this earth.

And that's why we're complete in him. Because he is the one that washes it away every time.

He doesn't really even have to do it every time. Do you know that he did it in full 2 ,000 years ago? Because not only are you complete in him, and not only are you circumcised, in other words, given a new heart by the operation of God, but it also says in Colossians 2, verse 12a, that you had a co -burial.

You're buried in him. When he went in that grave, you went in there with him spiritually. No big deal for the father.

He's not bound by time. He put you right in there with him. And then not only that, but you had a co -resurrection in verse 12b.

So verse 12b says, wherein also you are risen with him, in the Greek that's soon, and in the word for risen.

So risen together with Christ through, now I want you to notice this, and I want you to circle.

You gotta get a King James version. I'm not a King James only guy. Don't get me wrong. But I will tell you this. I spent two years of my life studying manuscript evidence, and I will promise you in English, the

King James follows the true Greek better than any other English version, period.

Because you won't even find this word in any of the other versions. And it's the little word of. So take a look at it here.

Wherein also you are risen with him. I'm in chapter two, by the way of Colossians. I cheated and moved forward.

Verse 12, second half. You're risen together with him through the faith of.

Now circle that little word because it's not in the other version, but it is in the Greek. Of the operation of God, who has raised him from the dead.

So when God performed this operation, which has a connotation of power, dunamis power, where he raised

Jesus from the grave, he raised you with him, together with him from the grave.

Now you ask yourself, okay, what part do I play in my own salvation? And the point is, okay, were you here 2000 years ago?

Because if you weren't, then you didn't play any part in it. All you did is respond to it like a bride does to a groom, which you did do that.

That's your responsibility is to love the one who died for you and gave you everything in the world.

He wooed you. He had been wooing me my whole life for 24 years when he met me in that car. It wasn't the first time

I met him. He gave me a grandmother who had the largest Sonny Seale class in Texas.

Prayed for me to go to church and I would go sometime, but I hated it. But she prayed for me her whole life and it wasn't until a few months after she died that I got saved.

But a lot of it is because of the human effort she put into her grandson. Grandparents are important, aren't they?

All right, so yeah, amen. All of these things are happening because God ordained them to happen in the fashion that they do.

Not only did he ordain how his children would come to know him, but I mean that they would, but also how they would.

So here we have this operation that happened 2 ,000 years ago. And God obviously did it.

I'd love to just preach on that all day again. We just did it like last Sunday. So it's interesting the little word of, it does not say faith in the operation of God.

It says the faith of it, which in Greek means that the faith came out from that operation. So the faith that you had when you got saved was not worked up within your brain.

It was not human belief. It was a different sort. And we talked about that and I don't have time, so jot these down, because we talked about it last week.

Colossians 2 .13, that's what tells us that we were quickened together with him when he, and therefore he forgave us.

But now when we get into these others, Ephesians 2 .8 also says we're saved through faith without works, right?

But when you get into this next one, Philippians 3 .9, it starts talking about how this worked.

And it says that we were saved through the faith of Christ, not faith in Christ. Now, I just want you to think about it, study it when you get home.

What's the difference? Well, in Greek, it would be written this way. It would be written by the

Christ faith. Christ -faith, it's connected, it's his faith. That's the faith that saved you.

When you got born again, the Holy Spirit did about 33 different things to you, and one of them was he put

Jesus's faith in you, because his faith can walk on water. Yours can't. Yours is up and down one day to the next.

As soon as he doesn't answer a prayer, you doubt. You don't faith, you doubt. That, you would lose your salvation if you were saved by that faith.

You're not, you're saved by the faith of Christ. That's proven in Philippians 3 .9. You won't see it in any modern version of English, but it is in the

King James and it's in the Greek. And in Ephesians chapter three, verse 12, same thing.

Ephesians 3 .12. Galatians 2 .16, same thing. In the famous verse,

Galatians 2 .20, it's found in there twice. And the phrase faith in Jesus is sandwiched between the two faiths of Jesus, the faith of Jesus that he gave you.

It's all in there. So there's your responsibility side. It's all in there together. So that's what we talked about last time.

So as usual, there's my 45 minutes. Now let's preach a little bit. Go to Isaiah 59 in verse eight with me.

And we're still on this theme that we found in verses 12, 13 in Colossians chapter one.

So probably I'll head back over there eventually, but that's what I'm talking about, is this theme that you could never have been forgiven if you had not first been ransomed.

And the Bible calls this the operation of God, not of man, not of church, not of the holy ministers, but the operation of God on you as an individual.

And that's really what saves you. And it has nothing to do with any other person other than God did use other people sometimes to tell the gospel to you.

Might've been a mom, grandparents, a radio preacher, who knows? So God uses a lot of things to bring you to this point in time.

But in reality, even at the point in time when it's supposed to happen, one second before it happens, you don't want

God because the Bible says no man seeks God, none at all. No man ever seeks God on his own.

So you're not looking for it. And even if you were, you're blind. And even if you were listening to understand him from scripture, you were deaf.

And even if you wanted to be saved, you're dead. A dead man can't want to be alive, by the way, neither can he make himself be alive.

So this had to be an operation of God and God did the operation. And you were in Christ when he raised him from the dead.

And then at your point of salvation on this timeline that you're in now, there was a point where the

Holy Spirit quickened you. He woke you up from a dead stupor.

And you are different now. And if you're not, you need to question, okay, why am I calling myself a

Christian? Did I pray some little prayer, did he just come to my heart and save me? Amen, and think that that saved me? Well, let me be quick to say this.

That won't unsave you. It's okay if you prayed that because the formula is not what saved you or unsaved you.

But I have to ask, did the Holy Spirit meet you and put in you a new desire you never had?

And that's the great key. Like I know if you, it doesn't have to be theological. All it is, is just like he changed your want to.

He made you also want to go to church. And it's not even about church as much as he made you want to have a relationship with Jesus and take the chance of what if he runs my life different than where I wanted to go?

And you say, I'm okay with that. He put that desire in your heart for the first time. He said, I'm done with the fear of God messing my life up.

And I'm done with the fear of me giving up my own Godship and my own life because I have kind of messed it up myself.

That's why some of us, it takes us to get to be 24 before we get saved, I guess. I mean,

I knew in that car, I was not a good God of my life. And I was kind of happy when the

Holy Spirit revealed to me that there he is, if you just ask him, he'll be your Lord and he'll free you from every lesser

Lord, including yourself. The way of peace, they know not.

Now, this is a description of the human race, really. The way of peace, they know not.

Humans, when we are born into this world, we're born into a fallen, lost race.

People talk about total depravity. That, by the way, did not come from John Calvin. Nor did it come from Augustine, who taught the same thing 1 ,400 years earlier.

It came from Paul, but guess what? He was with Jesus for three years, or the better part of it, in the

Arabian desert. And that's where he got it. So that's where we all get this. Isaiah got it from the same source.

The Holy Spirit said, write this, Isaiah, write this. He says, the way of peace, they don't know.

Who's they? Humans, okay? The people you're surrounded by, by the way, kind of creepy to think about that.

There is no judgment in their goings. Now, I want you to think about what that means.

I know that's Old Testament, I mean, Old English, you know, King James verbiage. No judgment in their goings.

You know what that means? They don't know the difference between right and wrong. They call wrong right, and they call right wrong.

Who's they? Humans. They have made them crooked paths.

You want to talk about responsibility, humans make their own selves crooked paths.

And they walk down these crooked paths when it's a lot closer to you. We just went straight to where you need to go, but we go all over the place.

That's the state you're in before you're regenerated. That's the state you're in before the operation of God takes place in your heart.

That's the state you're in before the Holy Spirit wakes you up and shows yourself to yourself. And it's not done there.

Whosoever goeth therein shall not know peace.

So you have a lifetime of tribulation. There is no peace in your heart because the heart is empty.

Jesus isn't in there yet. Therefore is judgment far from us.

Now, it's not them anymore, it's us. And now even Isaiah said, okay, it's me too.

I do that when I'm preaching. And I'll say, now here's where it's going with you guys. And I'll stop and think, and me, and that, right?

That's what he just did. Therefore is judgment far from us. Remember what judgment means.

It's not talking about the judgment of God is far from you. This is old English. What the meaning is, the knowledge of right and wrong is far from us.

And humanism is the most ridiculous thing that's ever been invented. And in church, we call it Arminianism.

It's the same thing. It's just religious humanism. And that is that good things in and of them can come out of a human brain in and of itself with no other revelation or input.

Just because you're human, you can think up good things. And you can even think up new things that no one ever thought of before.

And you can do massive things just in and of yourself. And there's no truth to that whatsoever. No truth to it because it all starts with revelation.

If the human race did not have this book, I guarantee you America wouldn't be standing here today because all the principles for how to govern came from this book.

All the laws in Britain before America was here came from this book. England was called the empire upon which the sun never set.

And everywhere those businessmen and entrepreneurs went to get the gold from Africa and the diamonds and everybody, the biggest thing in the colleges and universities today is imperialism is so evil.

Well, guess what? It took the gospel everywhere. Because as soon as they went in to make the money, and I don't care if they were saved or not,

God was using them for his purposes because everywhere those industrialists went and imperialists went, the missionaries followed right behind them, the

British missionaries, some of the greatest in the world. And they told them about Jesus Christ. And before that, they were worshiping trees and rocks and animals or nothing or spirits or whatever.

So this book went around the world because of entrepreneurship. Think about that.

I heard that Billy Graham said the next big move of God will be through business evangelism.

We've been doing that 20 years, haven't we, Katie and Dave? There he is. He's in prayer right now.

I almost didn't see him. Dave Senior, same thing, you know, Ben, Matt, all of us,

Charlotte. A lot of you guys in the church have been praying for that movement.

But yes, God has worked mightily through that thing. And guess what? 100 years ago, he was already doing it.

Or you just go back to World War II times, right before World War II, he was already doing it.

These British business people went all over the world for their own purposes to make money for themselves.

But God used that desire in their heart to bring the gospel with them through the missionaries and change the whole world.

You go out in the Caribbean, more than half the islands out there are Protestant Christians.

And it's not like here. I mean, they're real. You get in a cab with one of them, he's telling you the gospel or something about the

Bible or he's singing or she's singing a hymn or whatever. And the other third are

Roman Catholic, which is certainly better than Islamic, right? I mean, because Spain founded those, right?

So the gospel went everywhere. And so this is God's will. Now, here's the problem.

When you're in a state of mind where you don't know right or wrong and you're not seeking

God and you have no judgment, you can't do anything with that information. Oh, you've heard it.

How many times did I hear it, Charlotte? From my mother and my grandmother and you did from your sweet grandmother who was dear to me.

They're all in heaven now, but yeah, but we didn't get saved yet. Why? Because the

Holy Spirit, the calling hadn't happened yet. It takes the water and the Spirit and the

Holy Spirit, guess when he comes to you and does that? When does he do that?

He does it when the Father tells him when to do it because the Father knows your spiritual birthday. He and Jesus don't do anything outside of what they've seen the

Father do. Nothing ever. They never do. And so you got saved exactly when

Almighty God wanted you to be saved. Not before it, not after it. And exactly when your birthday was gonna happen.

And guess what? Your death day is picked just like that. Book of Job says that there is a point where you're gonna die and you can't change the bounds thereof.

And so we better be ready. Now, if you're sitting here and say, well, how do I get ready if he's gotta call me? Well, are you worried about that?

Because if you are, he's already calling you. You see, he doesn't do that to goats. You got two kinds, right?

Goats and sheep. He only does that to lost sheep who look just like a goat, by the way. You cannot tell the difference.

Because we, I was 24. My life before 24, I was running with the goats. And liked it.

And they liked me. And you know, when I came home that day and told Charlotte something happened to me in the car on the way to work.

What? I got saved, I think. And she said, great. And you know, that a lot of my old friends didn't come around as much after that.

So God knows exactly when this is gonna happen. And so if you're even worried about it or fearful of your soul or wonder where you're going when you're gonna die, you're not a goat, you're a sheep.

You might be lost as a goose, but you're a sheep. And here's what I'll tell you about that. If you are that person and you're not saved yet today, this is something most people don't think about.

It is not the sheep who is responsible for his life. It is the shepherd's responsibility.

And it is the shepherd who will be held accountable if you don't go to heaven and you're a sheep.

And guess who the shepherd is? Jesus. He will answer to God Almighty if he doesn't get you there.

And do you think that's gonna happen? No, because he said, I will lose nothing, but we'll raise it up in the end.

So does that give you an excuse just to wait a while then? I wouldn't, because you don't know when your death day is coming.

Anyway, it's another subject, but it's all found right here in Isaiah 59. Don't you see it? That indicates you don't.

You're laughing about it. Okay. So, I must be getting tired of it because I can't see it now.

All right. So, whosoever goeth therein shall not know peace.

Verse nine says, therefore, his judgment far from us, knowing right or wrong is far from us. Neither does justice knowing right or wrong overtake us.

So you can't get saved by works because what's just and right is not going to overtake you and just say,

I'm gonna turn my life around. See, that's what most denominations and all the false world religions, the world teach that.

Salvation by works or religious system. That's the common denominator. But this word of God, the

Holy Spirit wrote here through Isaiah says, that ain't happening. Neither does right and wrong overtake you.

Right's not gonna overtake you. We wait for light. Now think about this.

Does a lost goat realize he's in darkness? I think he does, but he doesn't want out of it.

Does a lost sheep know he's in darkness? I think he or she does, and she doesn't want out of it, but it bothers her or him.

There's the difference. It bothers her or him. Okay, so we wait for light.

Yeah, that's right. Even before we were saved, we were waiting for light. We were kind of miserable. Even as a little boy,

I can remember I was sitting at home one Sunday watching black and white TV, and I'm only 45, and so it was

Sunday morning. My grandmother had said, David, come to church with me, and I made an excuse, because I hated going.

I loved her, but I didn't want to go there with her, and so I'm watching this little show, and it's a Christian show. On Sunday morning,

I had a Christian show, and it had a family and some kids, and the kids were going to church with their parents, and I'm sitting there watching that, going, ugh,

I should be doing that, ugh. It bothered me, but not enough to go, because I was not saved.

So yeah, we wait for the light, but at the time that we're waiting for light, it says we behold obscurity.

Now, what does that mean? Does the Bible not teach that Satan blinds the eyes of everyone who doesn't belong to Jesus?

He blinds their eyes, and it also says that he controls them at his will, not their will.

So they don't really have free will. They just think they do, because they're controlled by the will of Satan. Now, there we are, lost.

We're waiting for light. Let's say we're lost sheep. We're waiting for light, but we're beholding obscurity.

We just can't see it yet, and it bothers us, and we're miserable. I was that way till I was 24 years old.

Some of you got saved at a very young age. Bless your heart. That is the best life. You get saved young.

All right, so we wait for light, but we behold obscurity. We wait for brightness, but we walk in darkness.

This is the human race, and this is the very race that the modern church says, well, if you just come to church, we will show you stuff to do to get saved, and they're not even wanting to get saved, but they will do the stuff because they kind of like the bowling alley, and I'm not against the bowling alley.

We're gonna build one, aren't we, Paul? Put it over in the side of the gym. Absolutely, we want a bowling alley.

Yeah, we'd like a few more people in church, too, but until we get that, we ain't getting the bowling alley, right? Okay, so anyway.

Now, here we continue. We grope for the wall like a blind man, so we're trying to, imagine closing your eyes, and you're trying to find your way to that door to get out over there, and you're going down this wall, and you've kind of been here before, but now you're blind, and you're feeling that little hump over there, and you're feeling that, and you feel

Mary Ann's head and face, and you know you're close, and you get down there, and you find the door.

That is exactly what we're like when we're lost. We're like a blind man groping for the wall, and we grope as if we had no eyes.

We stumble at noonday. It can be the brightest sun in the world, but if you're blind, you don't see anything it's shining on.

This is the state of the lost. We are in desolate places as dead men.

Dead men do not arise in and of themselves. So I rest my case. All of that stuff we talked about last time that I gave you the verses for a minute ago, and in the

Old Testament, now those were New Testament, now in the Old Testament, we see it agrees, because God wrote it all, is that a lost man is hopeless.

He's without God in the world. He's without hope in the world, and he is lost as lost can even ever mean, and he ain't gonna save himself or do anything.

He has no way to grab hold of justice. The Bible, Scripture says, he can't just grab hold of justice and say, well,

I'm gonna be a good person, and I'll find my way into heaven. He's literally hopeless, and unless someone takes the gospel to him, which is our job, and unless the

Holy Spirit after that is told by God the Father to go visit that person, that person is never gonna be saved.

Well, you say, well, that's not fair. Take that up with the Lord when you meet him. So there we have all of this information saying that we cannot understand the things of God in our natural state or even seek

God. We are blinded. We call good evil and evil good.

I'm sorry. Yeah, that's what we do. We stumble. We walk as dead men. Therefore, we must be ransomed out of the kingdom of Satan.

Now, let me tell you this. If Satan blinds you at his will, as the Scripture says, how do you get free from that?

Can you ever, have you ever heard of a, my dad was in the FBI, by the way, back when kidnapping was a big thing, and the most famous case was

Charles Lindbergh. His child was kidnapped, and my dad was on that case, and unfortunately, the kidnappers killed the child, but the point is there was a lot of, kidnapping was a big thing back in the 20s, 30s, 40s, and 50s kind of started stopping in the 50s, and so here's this little child caught by some bad people, and he's their captive, and they got him tied up and locked in, and how is that child gonna get loose?

That's the picture of ransom, and so sometimes, if they were able to raise half a million or a million or whatever it would have been back then, and they pay that, sometimes they would let the child loose, but not by anything the child did.

It was by someone's bigger and stronger and more capacity and capability than they had had to set them free by paying a price.

That's what happened to every one of us sits here saved today, and if you're not saved yet, it's got to happen or you won't be saved, but guess what?

He's already paid the price, and if you're sitting there worrying about it, he paid the price for you, and so let me take your chin today and point it up a little bit.

Look up and picture Jesus there. He's the shepherd. He's got the food of your sheep and you're hungry. Even can lead you down the right path.

What will you do with him? Let's stand and have prayer together. Lord, we thank you so much for your word, and we thank you that it's living word.

It brings life to our spirits and joy to our hearts, and thank you for opening our eyes to it and our ears to be able to hear and understand your word, and Lord, we pray for anyone who might be here today who's not sure of their salvation, that if they would understand that only by the

Holy Spirit can they even be thinking about desiring Jesus, then picture,

Lord, have them to picture you as that bridegroom and themselves as that bride, and they just have to say,

I do. It's all there is to it, Lord. Help them to see that today and to take that action, and Lord, for the rest of us, we just pray,

Lord, you give us the spirit and the power and the courage to take this message of love to the world that hates it so much.

Lord, give us wisdom, though, that we might not witness to anyone that you don't lead us to witness to, that you might protect our physical lives in that manner, but Lord, the ones that you do lead us to make it impossible for us to walk away from them, and Lord, help this church, this church, to get better at witnessing everywhere they go, not on purpose, but just wherever they are, just to be sensitive to the

Holy Spirit saying, talk to this person, Lord, help us to be better at that, and Lord, we just ask you to go with us into our time of fellowship, bless the meal, and we ask it in Jesus' name, amen.

All right, you're dismissed. If you're visiting and don't know, we always have lunch and plenty for everybody. If you can stay, if not, plan to stay next time.

Thank you. Hey, Bobby, I didn't see you come in.

Are you hiding out there? Huh?