Colossians 1:13 - Delivered From the Power of Darkness, Pt. 1

The Natural Knowledge of God and the Need for Divine Revelation

Or if I sit out there and I look at the creation, I can see that there must be a God. I mean, who put the Big Dipper up there, right? I mean, there's order in everything. So there must be a creator, there must be an engineer, there must be, you know, someone who designed it all.

But I can sit out there like this and say, okay, know about God, nothing happens. There's nothing in my carnal brain that can know anything about God. Nothing. And then fortunately for me one day when I was 24 years old, I was still just finished, had two weeks to go in the graduate program at Baylor MBA program.

And then I had to take comps and take class in the mornings and drive 40 miles to our ranch and where I was running the oil company for my dad already. And in that car on the way to work that afternoon in Mahea, the Holy Spirit called to me.

He woke me up. I shouldn't have been asleep driving anyway, but he woke me up, he opened my eyes, he opened my ears, he quickened my dead heart and spirit, and he showed me Jesus for the first time and he was irresistible.

I was a hungry little lamb and he was a shepherd with food. And I was a businessman, so I didn't know the right way to pray, but guess what? It doesn't matter because no preacher can show you how to pray to get saved.

That's just some kind of Baptist concoction. But I just said, Lord, I've always known about you. My mama taught me about you, but today I want you to be my boss for the first time instead of me being my own boss.

And guess what? He saved me. But guess what? I was already saved before I prayed that because I was saved at the moment that he quickened me in that car going to Mahia that day. And everything changed in my life.

Calling to Preach, Seminary, and the Importance of Studying the Whole Bible

And some years later, I got called to preach. I just felt a call that God wanted me to be a preacher, which was really weird because I was an only child running an oil company, family business, a fourth generation family business.

And my dad had already retired and thrown the keys over and a deed to it and given it to me in Charlotte. And who's gonna run it if I go to seminary, right? But I ended up studying theology under Dr. Freeman, Rocky Freeman, and whose stuff is on our website, by the way, it's amazing stuff.

And I inherited his entire library and he used his library to teach me theology. And that was my seminary. And I'm really happy it worked that way because now when preachers come up and say, where'd you go to seminary?

Brother David. And if I were to say Southwestern, I'd say, oh, you're one of those. Or if I were to say Bob Jones University, which I don't think exists anymore, but if I said that, they'd say, oh, you're a hardliner.

But so whatever you say, they peg you. And if I just say, I'm kind of just self-taught like Spurgeon was. Spurgeon, the prince of preachers never went to college or seminary, did you know that? I just say, I don't know, I'm self-taught and I had Dr. Freeman helping me and that's it.

And they don't have a clue where I'm coming from. So I have an advantage, I like it. But the main thing is to study, right? Study to show yourself approved unto God. And as we walk this walk, we see so many false teachings, but Jesus warned us about that, did he not?

In the end times, he said, there'll be many false teachers. He said, don't be surprised if they look like angels of light because Satan himself looks like that. And so when you see these ministers, they all look good.

That's why I didn't wear my jacket and tie today because I wanted to use that as an illustration. You're gonna have a jacket and a tie on and look really good, never a sweater, but anyway. And like, if you don't study the Bible yourself, you don't know what they're telling you is true.

In fact, even if you're studying quite a bit, you got to really watch whoever's preaching and make sure that what they say is actually fits the whole of the Bible. So you need to know the whole of the Bible to know if it fits.

Otherwise, you don't even know if it's true. It can sound really good. So I have enjoyed pastoring this church since 19, well, I didn't pastor it in 1980 when it was founded. Charlotte and I were founding members of it.

We were laymen. I wasn't called to preach yet. And then when I got called to preach, I served as associate pastor under the founder of the preacher of the church and then two other pastors. And then I became the pastor.

And now that's over 40 years ago, I guess, right, Charlotte? I'm not good with time. So 40 years ago, at least. And this church has been a church that just is in the word. And I've joked so many times, we don't argue about the color of the carpet and have fights and then people that come in and want to fight.

I've noticed that if I really preach this, if I just get into this, they will leave. They just don't stick around. And so we got plenty of space from the folks.

That have left through the years.

It's not like they left last week. I remember when brother Otis came so many years ago, he was with us 13 years and then went to heaven. And now how many years has it been since he went to heaven? 10, maybe.

But from the time he came, when he first came, within three weeks, three families had just left because they didn't like his strong Bible teaching and they accused him of teaching something he didn't even say.

And I had the tape and I said, well, back then it was CDs, right? I mean, cassette tapes. And I said, I got the tape right here. I'd go visit him to try to keep him from leaving. Here's the tape. He didn't say that.

I don't want to hear it.

Well, but you're saying that he said this. They claimed that he said, your prayers are meaningless. You know, you don't need to, your prayers are meaningless, which is ridiculous. I said, I got the tape.

Let's listen to it. Nope, don't want to hear it. He thinks our prayers are meaningless. And so I come back and tell brother Otis, I'm glad you're here, brother Otis, but you ran three families off. And he said, they weren't supposed to be here anyway,.

Brother David.

Great attitude and probably absolutely the truth. All right, well, let's take a look at this. Who hath delivered Jesus, who has delivered us from the power of darkness and has translated us into the kingdom of his dear son.

Now, look at this first part of it, because two things happened here. We got delivered from something and we got translated into something. And so let's look at his first part, who has delivered us from the power of darkness.

And you talk about the Godhead. I mean, Jesus says, I am, well, the scripture says about him in the book of Colossians that he's all of the fullness of the Godhead bodily. In other words, he's all of the fullness of God in a body.

And so that was Jesus Christ. And here we have where it says that he translated us into his dear son. Now you're starting to look at the father and or the Holy Spirit. And you see, that's how we get born again, by the way, is two things have to be present.

You've got to have the water and you got to have the spirit. Jesus said that, and it's recorded in other places in scripture too, where that's how you grow as well. The water is the water of the word, that is the gospel.

So you have to have heard that Jesus died and was buried and rose again to save his people, to die in their place, to pay the sin debt and to ransom his people from the world of flesh and the devil, right?

You have to have heard that's the gospel. And he rose again, he's alive and he loves you and he's calling you to himself. That's the gospel. You've got to hear that, that's the water. And then the spirit is required in order for salvation because no man, the Bible says, there's none that seek God, not one.

It says that in the Old Testament, the book of Isaiah, but it says in the book of Romans, there's none that seek God, not one. So if that's true, man is depraved. He is so depraved in his fallen nature that he doesn't want God.

You can just, you want to test it? Why didn't you get saved two seconds before you got saved?

Because you didn't want to.

What about two days before you got saved? Because you didn't want to. And so when the Holy, so that's why it says the water and the spirit, because unless the Holy Spirit had come into my car, I mean, the first thing that I prayed after he quickened me was my mom's always told me about you.

So that's the water, right? The water of the word. I'd heard the gospel. I knew about Jesus.

I just didn't want him.

I wanted David.

I liked David being God. That was pretty cool. I was a humanist, right? In the truest sense of the word. I made every decision about where I would go, what I would do, and I liked the fact that I could make those decisions.

And then when the Holy Spirit quickened me and showed me Jesus, God of the only true God, the one who looked around and said, you know, I am he, and I've looked around and there is no other, that God, when he woke me up, my ability to be in control, to be Lord of my life just diminished down to nothing.

And it looked horrifying to me at that moment. And I asked him to do that. I didn't know the phrase be Lord of my life because I didn't know anything much about the Bible yet, but I knew what boss meant because I was a businessman.

So I said, I want you to be my boss instead of me being my boss. And so I was delivered from the power of darkness right there in that car. And I was translated into the kingdom of his dear son. And it was the Holy Spirit who did this for me on behalf of the father.

And that's what's talking about in verse 13. But this little phrase who had delivered us from the power of darkness, I put the little word really with a question mark there. What are we talking about here?

Delivered us from the power of darkness. What is this power of darkness? People around even, especially in America, secular people don't seem to even think there is such a thing as Satan. And they certainly wouldn't want to talk about it.

But God Almighty says that there is a power of darkness and you've been delivered from it. At the moment that I was delivered from it in that car, I was not aware I was a slave to Satan. I thought I was free will agent.

I thought I made every decision. Little did I know that I was influenced to make every decision by the powers of darkness. And because you don't know that when you're lost, right? You're blinded, you don't know that.

You don't even believe it's there. Well, I sort of believed it was there because I grew up in a Christian home, but I just didn't think about it. So this very thing that we're delivered from, a lot of people don't even sense that it's there while it's working on them.

So this word for delivered.

Is in the aorist passive indicative in Greek. And what that means is obviously it's the same in English. When you see something that's passive, that means that whatever this verb is, this thing that happened to me, in this case, I was delivered.

It means I did not deliver myself. You see, now that would help the modern gospel a lot in most of these churches around the country, especially in America, who seem to believe that if you pray some prayer formula that the particular church you're in gives you, and you do whatever the things are, they say you have to do to get saved, that you'll get saved because you did those things.

Oh, I grew up believing that, didn't you? I don't care if you were Baptist or Methodist or whatever you were, you grew up believing that because that's what pretty much in America is taught now. And yet the Greek is like math.

And the Greek says, it didn't work that way. It's passage. It's not active voice. If it was active, it meant you did it. It's passive. It means someone bigger and higher than you did it to you. So when I'm driving that car headed to Mahea to go to the office to work that day with my head full of junk that the graduate school had taught me that morning, I was not looking to be delivered.

I was happy. People used to ask me,.

Well, what was going wrong in your life.

That made you wanna get saved right then? Because see, that's the American gospel is like it's all humanistic, like stuff bad had to happen. Other people had to say just the right words and tell you exactly what to pray and then you got saved, right?

It's just not how it works. And it's funny because it used to bother me when I was a young Christian, like a new Christian people would tell me,.

They tell you testimony,.

Tell us all the bad stuff that happened that caused you to want God all of a sudden. And I couldn't think of any, my life was great. I mean, think about it. I grew up in a family with a great grandfather who was a junk dealer with a sixth grade education, lived his whole life working in an oil field, dirt poor, but he made money doing what he did because he had a skillset no one wanted to do.

So he had no competition and he saved money every week. And when he was 60 something, the pure oil company said, Mr. Brown, would you like to buy this oil field? It was the largest oil field in the world when it came in, in Mahea.

I don't know if you knew that, it's pretty cool history. And he said, yeah. So we went and borrowed the other 80 from a bank in Dallas, bought the Mahea oil field and took our family from poverty to wealth.

That's my great grandfather. My grandfather had a business degree and was really good with money and accounting and so forth. And he's the one that became a great stock trader and bond trader. And he took it to another level.

And then my dad took it to another level. And then my dad taught me all the skillsets all three of those men had while I was still in high school. So I was, my mom was an only child. My grandmother, my mom's mother was the only favored child of Captain Brown that started this whole thing because he had one son that he disowned, he was so bad.

And the other one was killed in a plane crash, a company airplane crash. So my grandmother was like an only child. So she inherited the whole thing. My mother was an only child. So she inherited the whole thing.

And I was an only child and I inherited the whole thing. And by the time I'm driving home and Charlotte and I move home, my dad says, here's the deed, it's yours. Then I get called to preach, isn't that weird?

But God worked it out where all that worked together. But the thing is, I didn't have anything bad going on in my life to cause me to want to get set. I was pretty, I was pretty set up actually in this life as you look at this world.

And I met the prettiest girl in the world when I was 17, married my childhood sweetheart. We were already married. We married after I graduated with my first degree. So I was in the MBA program. We were married already.

So I'm in that car, just happy as I can be, right? Had no absolute human reason to get saved. But guess what? It's in the passive. Indicative just means it's a fact. It's just a fact, it's real, all right?

Passive means I didn't do it. Someone bigger and stronger than me reached down into that car and saved me. And he separated me and delivered me from the powers of darkness. And he translated me into the kingdom of light.

What is this power of darkness? Well, it's interesting. We've studied this word power a lot. Who can tell me what the, you've heard brother Otis, you guys or brother, if Kenner was here, she would just in a second tell you what the word is.

This normal word for power in the New Testament is what? Dunamis, right. It's kind of a physics word. If you study physics and you study what power actually is, that's what the Greek word means. Well, guess what?

This word where you were delivered from the power of darkness is not that Greek word. It's not dunamis, it's something else. This is something else operating here. And so rather this word is exousia. Exousia.

And it comes from a little Greek word I'll tell you about in a minute, but actually what it means, it is kind of has to do with the word, English word ability, the ability to do something, the privilege to do something, the force or ability to do it and the freedom to do it.

Now that give you goosebumps if you stop and think about this is talking about Satan. The devil has this power. It's not dunamis, it's different. It's exousia and it means he has the freedom to do what he does because God Almighty has given him the freedom to do it and the ability to do it.

Now that's power from God. People don't think of it this way, but it's what scripture says. Listen, I asked brother Otis one time, why'd God make so many lost people and narrow is the way and few there be that go to heaven.

Why is there way more lost people? Why'd he do it that way? Brother David, the lost people don't understand. And if they did, they wouldn't like it, but they serve God too. They do exactly what God put them to do here on the earth.

And he said, actually what God put them here to do is to put everything on the shelf that God's children need. I went, wow, I never heard anything that profound in my life that morning at breakfast when he told me that, right?

Well, did you know Satan is the same way? Satan may not like it. He may not believe it. I think he's the greatest unbeliever there ever was. He just totally lacks any belief in anything, but he wouldn't like it or believe the fact that he does exactly what God put him here to do.

And nothing more. Read the book of Job chapter one if you don't believe me. Nothing more, but he does exactly what God wants him to do. And one of the things God did is he gave him this exousia, power and freedom and ability and privilege to do what he does.

Satan's Limited Authority and the Meaning of Exousia

Now, a lot of what he does happens to us and certainly to the lost world. But even as a Christian, you still fight this. I remember the time when Jesus was led by the Holy Spirit, which is an interesting thing to talk about, led by the Holy Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by Satan.

God led him there. The Holy Spirit led him there to be tempted by Satan. And the devil tried to use the Bible, which is what modern creatures do all day long, all day today across this country. They use this very book to teach stuff that's not even true.

Stuff that's harmful. Stuff that gets Christians their focus on totally the wrong things. And Satan did that with Jesus. And Jesus defeated Satan with this same Bible. He said, no, that's not what that means.

You misinterpreted that, Satan.

You need to reread it.

It says this, and this says this, and this says this, and I'm not gonna do what you're saying because you're a false liar and you've been a liar from the beginning. And I'm not gonna do it. So he had complete victory over Satan.

And the Bible at that point says, and Satan left him for a season. That's freaky. That was the last time Satan tempted Jesus. Who do you think was there in the garden of Gethsemane when he knew he was about to go to the cross and he was sweating blood from his forehead and he said, God, Father, if possible, let this cup pass from me.

Who do you think was tempting him to not wanna go to the cross? But isn't it wonderful that Jesus added at the end of that prayer, nevertheless, thy will be done, not mine. Or you and I would fry in hell forever.

I don't know why I was looking straight at Pam when I said that, but we would, wouldn't we? I guess I was trying to pick the holiest person and say, even you, even you, Pam. Yeah, yeah, we would. So if that's true, then Satan keeps coming back to you.

Yes, you can defeat him with this word and with prayer anytime you want. But when we show you how simple it is, dear Lord, you told me in this book that I could have the mind of Christ. So right now, whatever this stuff is that just got put in my mind, take it out and give me the mind of Jesus and help me think like he would think if he were here in this situation right now.

And furthermore, Jesus, would you, not me, I get a kick out of charismatic Pentecostals where they're gonna rebuke Satan. No, they're not an apostle, they can't do that. They're not Jesus, they can't do that.

But you can ask Jesus to do it. You can say, Jesus, would you bind and rebuke this demon or whatever it is and send it away from me and keep it away from my family? And I like to add this, and put a herd on them next time they come back.

And they instantly have peace at that moment, right? But guess what? Only for a season. And then they come back. And that will be your life till the day the rapture happens or you die and meet Jesus face-to-face, then that'll be over.

But till he does, the Bible says, you will fight that fight every day, many moments of every day. This sounds tiring and it is tiring, but you can do it. Because just like God gave Satan this lower form of power, this exousia power and freedom to do what he does, he gave you dunamis power, which is a higher form of power, which is the power of God.

And you're gonna see that word later, but it's the power of God to overcome that every single time it comes back at you. So don't ever think you get saved, it makes life easier. It just makes you more aware of the bad stuff happening, which in some ways makes it work harder, but you have a power you didn't used to have against the power of darkness.

And besides that, you're going to heaven when you die, because you can't mess up what God did to you because it was passive. He saved you, you didn't do something to get saved, so you can't undo it and lose your salvation.

Isn't that a nice message? I mean, all of it's in the Greek, it's like math. The fact that it is aorist, which by the way, aorist means without regard to time, it's an eternal word. Think about that. So who hath delivered us from the power of darkness in my car driving to work that day, something without regard to time, something outside of time and space and not limited by it in any way at all, named God, sent his spirit into my car, into time and space, and saved my soul and delivered me from the power of darkness.

And the Greek proves it because it is aorist, which means it's outside of time without regard to time. It's passive, which means I didn't do it, which means I can't undo it. And it's indicative, which really means I can't undo it because it means it's a fact now.

I am a saved person who has been freed from the power of darkness and delivered into the kingdom of God's dear son. And if you just know more of the story, you go, okay, well, that's nice.

Why'd God do that?

Because David was such a nice person or Pam was such a nice person. No, the key is right there. He delivered you into the kingdom of his dear son. He did it for Jesus, not for you or me. It's Jesus that loved us.

He knew us from the foundation of the world, read Ephesians chapter one. He knew us from before he made anything, read Romans chapter eight. He knew us and loved us before he made the worlds, read the whole Bible talks about it.

And so he says, even before anything was created, the Bible tells that Jesus loved everything that God's plan had in it. And then when Jesus spoke forth the universe, Jesus looked at all the planets he had created and he looked at the earth and he said, that's the one I like.

And he looked at the humans that were gonna be on there and said, I like those. Bible says all that, now I paraphrased it, but the Bible says all of that. And so when time came and Adam and Eve sinned against God and fell, the entire human race became a lost race, which would have been lost forever, except that God said that Jesus was crucified before the foundation of the world, which means the Godhead had already determined that those people that God knew before he made anything would 100 every single one of them be saved and of them, Jesus would lose nothing.

And he sent him as a shepherd to gather his sheep and to bring us home. And he can't fail. No man comes to me unless the father draws him. That's the calling of the Holy Spirit that happened to me in that car.

No man comes to me unless the father draws him from outside of time and space, reaches into time and space into your car. And you can be going fast because that's me and saved me from the powers of darkness in a moment of time, did over 33 things to me, gave me over 33 gifts and sent me home to tell her something happened to me on the way to work today.

And here I am preaching, which makes no sense in my life. This is totally beyond the scope of humanity. It's beyond the scope of humanism. It's beyond the ability. If you wanna look at this word, exousia, humans don't have the exousia to save themselves.

They sure don't have the dunamis, but they don't have the freedom to save themselves. They don't have the right to save themselves because they have already stricken and smitten Jesus and nailed him to the cross with their own sins.

By defying God, there's none that seeketh God. We've all gone our own way. We've all gone astray. And that's the state we're in when he saves us. So yes, it's passive. He did it to us because we had no ability.

We had no power. We had no knowledge.

We had no ability. It's like he said, we are in the world without hope and without God at the moment he saves us. And then in a moment, all that changes and you're set free from the power of darkness.

So this power, we know the word now, Satan has these abilities and this freedom to do these things that he's going to do. Now that word comes from a smaller Greek word, existi, it sounds like exist in English, wouldn't you agree?

And it literally means what is right and lawful. So that's where it gets this root meaning of Satan has the ability that God gave him to do the stuff that he does. And when you start to look at what he does, it is to put a darkness and a blindness on all of the lost race.

And 100 of the race is lost. And that's why this modern gospel that you just make, like you come down and you talk to the preacher and he says, well, Jesus died and there's a gift he's given you. And you just got to decide to reach out and get it.

And when you do, you'll get saved. If that were true, none of us would be saved because we didn't want the gift. We wouldn't reach out to get it. We wouldn't even know about it, but we wouldn't want it.

And no one would be saved that way. But that is the modern gospel. And Satan has the power, freedom, and ability to keep you blinded where you won't even know what that means or do it. So how's that gospel gonna work for you?

The true gospel says you're driving in your car or whatever you do in your life. And you're going down the highway, just happy as a goose, everything working great. And all of a sudden the Holy Spirit comes in that car and blows your life up and saves you.

Totally turns like 100, 180 degree turn in your life in a moment of time. And then you spend the rest of your life learning how to live that life and trying to not be a hypocrite. It's crazy, isn't it?

It doesn't work anything like modern churches teach you how it works. And I'm not saying we're the only one that's got it. I mean, go read Spurgeon. Now you go back 120 years, nearly every preacher understood these things.

I don't care what the denomination was on the sign. They understood these things. You look at now, they don't. Just in my lifetime, it's changed. From 1980 when this church started and I was saved some years before that, 70, 72, three, four, five, 76 is when I got saved.

No, eight, 78, I forgot it was after the graduate degree when I got saved. But man, things have changed even among what church preachers are preaching and even who the preachers are nowadays. So what about this word darkness?

We got saved from the power of darkness. Well, skatos, sounds kind of bad, but you know what it means? Shadiness or obscurity. So Satan, who's the prince of the power of the air, but the prince of the power of darkness puts a shadow or an obscurity over how salvation works so that all human beings are totally blind to it in their natural state when they're born into this world.

That's why it's so important for parents to teach the gospel in their home all the time. I don't mean to sit down and have a formal thing, but just everywhere you go, talk about what God's done. And when you see a rainbow or when you see a cloud or you see an ocean or you see a lake, tell your little child, didn't Jesus make a pretty cloud today?

So like to them, it's just dad or mom, just this part of everything we're doing, God is there. And if you just keep doing that, then when you start teaching them scripture, then they say, okay, this is like, yeah, this is normal.

This is what I grew up knowing. And even then you can't save them. But you know what you can sure do? You can give them the water of the word again and again and again and again. And people that have a problem with this doctrine that God has to do the saving, especially moms, because they say, well, God, I got kids.

I don't know what, now I don't know if they're all gonna get saved. I always just tell them this. Well, would you rather it be where you have to live such an exemplary life and live perfect? And they look at you and that's how they get saved?

Or you would rather an all knowing, loving, all powerful God do the saving? Okay, I agree. I mean, that's just how it is. But I always say this too. And I've run this past a lot of the folks in our church and just see if they think it sounds logical.

But I say, you know, if it is true that God chooses who gets saved, Jesus chooses who his bride is gonna be, so to speak. If that's true, don't you think it's logical that God would put a lot of those little sheepies in a Christian home where they hear the water of the word every day growing up?

Wouldn't that be logical? Now, not all of them come out that way, but bunches of them do. So don't worry about that stuff. Listen, if God gave you kids and you got a Christian home and God has already saved you from the power of darkness and translated you into the kingdom of son, you don't think that's gonna rub off on your kids?

Of course it does. There's examples, I can't explain them, but there's examples in the book of Acts where people were told to go home and tell your family and the whole family will get saved. You remember those?

They're in there, aren't they? So don't worry about that. But here's the thing. He is the power of shadiness and obscurity. Probably make a pretty good politician. Probably make an excellent president of the United States.

And it comes from the little Greek word, skia, which means shade or shadow. So let me talk about that. We got a little bit of time. Turn with me to 2 Timothy chapter two. 2 Timothy chapter two. And verse 23.

My wife shared this passage with me, but now Charlotte, a couple of years ago at this point. And I never stopped thinking about it from that morning when she shared it with me. Almost every week I'll think about this.

And I think I saw what she was wanting me to get from it, but I got a lot of other stuff from it too. And so let me see if you get something from it. And I'm gonna read it to you in the context of this exousia power that Satan has, this freedom and ability to do what God put him here to do.

And think about it. I mean, this may well reveal something to you you have never seen before. And I'm gonna throw out this. It's not what the sermon's about, but is there such a thing as free will? Do human beings have free will?

Did Adam have free will in the garden? Like some theologians say, well, he did. He did until he fell and then he lost it.

Well, that's a theory.

You know, you read theology. One of the cool things about it is so much of it is false. It's just theories that men think up and put it in their theology book. It didn't come from the Bible and it may be right or it may be wrong, but there is a theory that Satan had, I mean, sorry, Adam had free will until he fell and then he lost it.