A Spiritual Body — G.W. North

Reconciliation Through the Blood of Christ

Unto you, that of old time my priest, even my high priest, the chiefest and oldest, came in, he who was as the ancient of days, among his people, came in unto me, where I dwelt behind the veil. It was a veil, my beloved.

I did not hang up a curtain, for men do not veil their faces with curtains. The veil hid my face. I was veiled. And he came in unto me, and he just brought unto me that which I required for atonement.

Even a few drops of blood, he lingered not more than a few seconds, and was gone, because it was only the blood of atonement. But now my son hath come in unto me, and he hath stayed with me, because his was the blood of reconciliation.

That man, my son, stayed with me, and he is with me now. For I have effected reconciliation. Thou art reconciled unto me, my child. Reconciled. Not in thine own strength, not by thy prayer, not by what thou hast done.

For what hast thou done? Nothing that could be accepted here with me. So I send my son, and he came to you. Now he has come to me, and he is with me. For thee, my child, thou art reconciled in to me. He took you on.

He took you in, and he brought you in to me. Thou art reconciled. And I will eliminate from thee all thoughts to the contrary. I will take them away out of thee. I will remove thy fears. I will take away thy trepidation.

I will take away thy hesitancy. For in this thou art depending on thyself. It is a form of pride, my child. And Lucifer was cast out. He is not reconciled. He is out because of his pride. The pride has turned upside down and become fear in thy heart.

Receiving God's Gift Rather Than Trusting Self

Now look not to thyself. Say not, I am wretched, I am undone, I am wicked, I am weak. Say not these things. For my son said to me that thou art reconciled. And he is my word. He was not only my word to thee, he is thy word to me.

He is the word, and all mankind has spoken in him because I chose it so. I am God, not thee. And I have done this thing. And this is my gift to all mankind. And wilt thou have it? Wilt thou yield and receive it?

And wilt thou forsake and give up everything else? And turn away from all other things? For to me they have no existence. They are not and they have no power. For I the Lord thy God hath moved in my own strength and have established that forever for all mankind.

Therefore know that thou art reconciled. And let him who rejects it, reject it. And let the unjust be unjust. And let he that's filthy be filthy still. Change not values, for I do not change them. I have moved in holiness and purity.

And I have called thee to myself. It is thy values, thy standards, thy thoughts, thy life that must change. And that not of thyself, come thou then, and stand in the glory of thy Lord. For I have made myself known in my Son, and he hath made thee known in my presence.

And one day thou shalt know as thou art known. That is as I know thee. Thou shalt know thyself. Don't try to know thyself. Do not try to analyze thine own thoughts and motives. Listen to me. I am thy God and I will tell thee the truth and make of thee an entirely new person.

Choose ye then, choose this day, choose now, for it is I that doth speak unto thee. Dear Father, everything's light. It is light. Yea, thou hast made me light. And hath given me to be the light of men.

Men should become men of light and live in the light, walk in the light. Yea, that our conversation should be in heavenly places, and our sight be at thy face. Father, where there is only glory, everything is God, and for God, and everything else is passed away.

The Gift of Salvation, the Holy Spirit, and Eternal Life

When you go from the definite to the indefinite article, often in your Bible, you get down to reality. The gift, yea, it's salvation. The gift is the Holy Ghost. The gift is eternal life. Gifts, without any sort of denominating thing, no sort of definite article, they're there, but these are the things.

Prophecies, healings, they're gifts, all right. They're not the, the, the, point out of the mind. The gift of God. All the others are included, if you've only got sense enough to see. Go in and have them.

Well, this is what it says in Romans, he that spared not his own son, but delivered him up to us all, how shall he not also with him freely give us all things. So they're all there, once you get the gifts right, the basic things.

Hallelujah. Go into them, go on, what are you holding them back for? Amen. Hallelujah. They're all included. Praise God. Hallelujah. How can you have Jesus then without everything that's in him? By sheer unbelief.

You've got them, but unbelief, hesitation, holding it back. That's all, they're all there. Hallelujah. Praise God. It's time some of you got it. Hallelujah. Hallelujah. Hallelujah. I sort of, just about torn this morning as to what to talk to you about.

The Spiritual Body and the Victory of Resurrection

There's so much that the Lord has been pouring into my heart whilst I've been sitting here. And I think really, I want to talk to, lastly, the thing that brother here was praying, Lord, you've given us a spiritual body.

And some of you might've thought, well, that's not true. We haven't got our spiritual bodies yet, but you see, there is a spiritual body and there's a body of the spirit that should be your body. And when your body becomes a body of the spirit, it will become a spiritual body before you get to spiritual body.

Does that sound like contradiction? It's as clear as mud to me. Mud is M-U-D. It's very clear. It's easy to spell and it's simple and there's nothing about it at all that the whole Lord, the thing the Lord wants us to know is the total victory of Calvary and the total work of the resurrection and the great consummating presence of the Holy Spirit.

Hallelujah. Would you have said that Jesus Christ had a spiritual body whilst he was on earth? Yeah. Same body when it became a resurrection body out of the tomb. Hallelujah. You see, this is why the only time in the New Testament the word revival is used, it's used about Jesus.

Revival really only has to do with the Old Testament. They had successive waves of revival because they weren't regenerated. But the Lord Jesus Christ, he had the only thing that was worth reviving. I told you about this.

I won't tell you where to find the verse. Just keep reading your Bibles. That's how I discovered it. You just keep reading and learning. And it says that the Lord Jesus both died and rose and revived.

Amen. That's the only thing that's ever said about revival in the New Testament. Isn't that wonderful? Why? Because he had, well, that life just revived. All other lives have to die and get born again.

You see, that's the simplicity of it. And he revived. All that he was before he went into the tomb was revived. Marvelous, isn't it? And it's such a glorious thing. That life was so perfect that he was revived and it just flowed on again in that same glorious unbroken life that he had since he was born.

Yeah. And how God managed to compress all that marvelous eternal life into a little baby form, that it should grow up to be a man, is one of the miracles of the ages. How he did it. But he did. You know, he commenced something absolutely new.

Until that time there had been miraculous births on the earth. Isaac's was a miraculous birth. And John Baptist was a miraculous birth. But the Lord Jesus Christ was a new birth. He was absolutely new.

And into the earth came the Lord, compressed into that little tiny frame. And it was all there. Hallelujah. And he maintained that marvelous life as God intended he should to preserve it for us. He laid it down at the cross.

Christ's Voluntary Death on the Cross

He said, no man taketh my life from me. Do you remember what he said there in John chapter 10? He says, no man taketh my life from me. They didn't take his life on the cross. They sought to destroy it and found him indestructible.

He laid his life down. And only during this week I've been talking. I seem to do this all day long. This time it was in the privacy of my little sort of cage up there where they locked me up. Malcolm keeps coming and saying, you ought to go out, you ought to go out.

I was talking with someone and I said this, you see, your real trouble, my dear, is this. Let's imagine Jesus Christ now. He'd come to the cross. They'd nailed him on the cross. He hung on the cross. And it was impossible for him to die.

He'd have been hanging there to this day. You say, well, it's impossible, it couldn't be. But he would, you know. He was eternal life. He couldn't kill Jesus. He, in the end, gave his life. He yielded it.

He would have been hanging there to this moment. You say, well, that would have been the miracle of all miracles. Some people are trying to live that life of the miracle of all impossibilities. They're hanging on the cross, but they won't yield up and give in to die.

It's a trouble. They won't do it. And they say, oh, it's terrible. Stop it, I've been going through hell. You say, well, that's right. And you can have all the sin in the world still hanging on the cross.

That's why Jesus hung on it. To bear the sin, don't you see? It's when you die. That's right. And you don't do that till you give up. See? You've got to stop it. There's power for you to do it. That's why the Holy Ghost has come.

It's totally impossible outside of the home. It's totally impossible outside from the glorious Holy Ghost. Imagine it. Go on, let your imagination go. You've let it go on some wrong and rotten and filthy things in your time.

Now let it go on something that's right. Imagine Jesus Christ hanging on the cross to this day. Impossible to die. Hanging there in the agonies of the succeeding centuries and millennials. What do you think of it?

That's what you're trying to do. You're trying to accomplish the impossible. There are some things that God couldn't even do. He couldn't redeem you without giving up his life. Jesus couldn't do it. Couldn't do it.

He couldn't save you. He couldn't change you. Without, on that cross, he sovereignly. Now note this, and this is why he wouldn't take the palliative. This is why he wouldn't take the drug. They tried to drug him on the cross.

He wouldn't take it. Crystal clear, he hung there in all the consciousness of deity. Alive and awake until sin was dealt with. And then he should yield up his life with the sovereign power of God. That's why it's the death.

There's never been a death like Jesus. Millions have been. Oh, I don't know. I suppose so. Crucified under Roman rule. But he sovereignly brought the power of God with the full weight of eternity on it and died.

That was that. And when you do that, that will be that. We like to preach about this is that. Let's have some that will be that. That's the end of it. Oh, God, kill me. Oh, God, do this. Oh, God, do that.

How many of you sob this kind of thing up, if not with tears in your heart? Oh, God, I wish I could be dead. Oh, Lord. Well, that's it. You hang on that cross and you go through a transfixion and an inward mental crucifixion and the devil will tell you it's horrible and you won't believe the truth.

Because old Adam will accomplish his own salvation by hook or by crook or by nails or by thorns or by anything. He'll accomplish it himself if he can. He won't have a gift. He won't. He's too proud. He comes from Lucifer.

He won't have it. Well, at least glory be to God. There are some who come to their senses. They come crystal clear. They don't have the drugs. They don't have the alleviations to their pains. They see the thing clearly.

And it's, Lord, I give up. Stop it. The way you've been living. Stop it. You're wrong. You've always been wrong. You haven't gone under the divine principle of proper life yet. You haven't seen the revelation of the cross.

Dying to Self-Justification

Their minds were blinded. I said yesterday morning, even to this day, when Paul is read, the veil is upon their minds. For it's Paul that reveals it. Reluctantly or well, let's say when Moses is read, the veil's on their minds, you see.

To this day, the veil's on the mind. When we come to that place, drop away into the gutter. Let your blood run into the ground. Let it be stamped on. Let anybody, whosoever will take advantage of you in your helplessness, let the bulls roar.

Let the unicorns toss you about. Let the dogs bark. Let the lions crouch. Let the gamblers gamble. Let the flies come and settle on you. Let anything come. Run out. Finish. Let your bones come out of joint.

Let everybody see. You're finished. Utterly finished. That's that man finished. Hallelujah. That's that woman gone. Praise God. Self-justification. Standing up at the last minute when you ought to be lying down has been your trouble.

They took Jesus down from the cross and buried him. Pilate wondered if he had been a long while dead and he inquired. And they said, yeah, he's been dead a long while now. So Pilate handed over the body to these two disciples of Jesus.

One, perhaps both of them quite secret because they were two really high ups, Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea. And they took him and they just quickly embalmed him and put him in the cross, in the tomb.

You know that had there been time, Jesus, it would all have been ruined. It's so marvelous how God plans. Had there been time, they would have disemboweled him and they would have put spices inside him and they would have preserved this most wonderful carcass in all history.

They would have preserved him, see? Disjointed, ugly. Just saved from putrefaction. That's what they would have done. But God, he had the crucifixion arranged just right. They could only just have time to sort of keep him.

Well, we'll keep him like this till we can get at him after the feast day. We'll really do it, you see? And the Lord said, oh, no, we're not preserving that. That's dead and finished. Glory be to God.

That's you, who rose up. It's all over. Lovely. God's delightful, isn't he? As well as precise and eternal. But beloved, he leaves us no room for self-delusion. None at all. He showed us very clearly.

And I talk to you like this because I discovered all this about myself. You've got to discover the cross for yourself. You haven't got to discover it to preach, preacher. That's why you've never got it over properly, because you haven't discovered it for yourself.

Paul's Crucifixion With Christ

That's why Paul said to the Galatians, you remember, in Galatians chapter 3, he said, O foolish Galatians, who hath bewitched you? Before whose eyes Jesus Christ hath been evidently set forth, crucified among you?

How did Paul get it over like that? He only did it by words. At least that's what they heard. The cross wasn't preserved. There weren't chips of it here and a little bit of it somewhere else. You see, they might even have used the same cross for other people to be crucified on since Jesus.

I wonder, did you use the same gallows, didn't they, when they used to hang people? They used to get a new rope, I believe. Don't do that now, we're ruled by psychologists. But the whole thing, beloved, is that Paul set forth this cross.

He set forth Jesus Christ among, crucified among. And why could he do it? Because two verses earlier he's told you, I was crucified with Christ. Nevertheless, I live. No longer I. See, that's why he could do it.

Nobody else can. They set forth magical words of precious biblical things that take people so far, willing souls yielding up to be wooed by the artistry of the man. Paul set forth the cross. There it is.

If others bewitched them, he didn't. And the whole glorious thing is there. I see, I see. I can remember the times when this blinding thing came on me. See, Paul got, God got hold of Paul and he started him right.

He gave him a vision of the light that was above the brightness of the noonday sun, blinded him, put him down in the dirt. Paul, you've got to get your eyes open. You're as blind as a bat. He hadn't got enough sense because he kept kicking against the bricks.

And seeing that I lived and sometimes dwelt in a bat house out in the bush, not so long ago, I know what bats can do. He went down on the dust, blind, blind, before whose eyes have Jesus Christ has been evidently set forth.

Have you ever seen it? They saw it first in a man. He set it forth from his own inward state. He did not read the closing chapters of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John for they were not written. Yeah. Yeah.

It's amazing. He set it forth from his own inward experience. Oh God, every preacher on the earth today had to do that. What if you took our Bibles away Lord? Would there be any true Calvary anymore? Calvary is a personal experience, not a masterpiece of writing, though it is that it's that it was God's personal experience and it's got to be yours, man.

Hallelujah. It's got to be yours, woman. Oh, not to atone for your sin, not for anything like that, that you've been relieved of. Amen. But there's one thing you are not excused. That is death. You've got to die and rise again.

We can't have revivals of religious people. Finished. Christ revived. Revived. All that marvelous life revived. And you can recall him now as by the precious inspiration of the Spirit, the records of his life are written from the details of the coming of the angel to Mary right through those years that God wants you to know about and has obscured some because he doesn't want you to know about them because they're not really vital to you except they were summed up in one statement of his father when he stood in Jordan and his father said you thou art my beloved son in thee I'm well pleased.

He pleased the father for 30 years. That's that. You know how perfect and good it was then. Hallelujah. And then he went and lived this life and it's all there, Belani. It's not just there so that you should see the miracles.

It's not just there so that you could rhapsodize about multitudes being feared or Jairus's daughter being healed or Peter being saved from sinking in the sea or Lazarus being raised from the dead. It's not just there for that.

It's there so that you should see the man that did it because people keep seeing the things he did and preach them up. They need to be spoken and not the man. See this lovely character. See this glorious holiness.

Seeing the Glory and Character of Jesus

See his tenderness. See his majesty. See his humility. See his glory. As John said, this is what John had to say. So, so prefacing the rest of his gospel, comes for us the 14th verse. He says, and we beheld his glory.

We beheld his glory. This is what John saw. John saw the man. You say, well, I thought his gospel was the gospel of the son of God. The same. The same. But John saw the man and he saw God. Matthew saw the man and he saw the king.

Luke saw the man and he saw the man. Mark saw the man and he saw this utter slave of humanity and God. This love man. Oh, hallelujah. This man who never defected, never deflected, never slipped, never, never failed.

This glorious one who at the last should have cracked because everybody forsook him and fled. Turned around and said to the women that were weeping, don't you weep for me. He said, don't weep for me. Weep for yourselves.

His compassion was flooding out in the midst of his impending agonies and everything. Glorious Jesus. I love him. I love him. Just that. Nothing else. And as I pointed out the other night in resurrection, when they said, aren't thou only a stranger that you don't know these things, what things he said.

As though he'd never noticed them. See, we all notice the things because we will live in the spectacular. We love the spectacular. We, we, we love it. What things he said, doesn't that reveal perhaps more than anything else to him.

This lovely, lovely Lord. Hallelujah. Now this is the life that's revived for you, my beloved. And if you prefer your own way of going on for that, you deserve to be damned. And there's no plea that's acceptable in heaven for you.

If you won't accept the plea that Jesus has taken for you. So I'll get my mother to pray for me and my father-in-law, will you? Will you? Please don't ask them if you've no intention of being what God wants you to be.

See, there's one plea. And if you don't accept that, there's no hope for you. But hallelujah, he's there, that glorious one. Now that's the life. And his body, when he lived on earth, was a spiritual body.

All right. He, in other words, he transposed, if you like, spiritual truth into human, physical, bodily truth. So that when he stood before Pilate, or anything else, or just taught, he could say, I'm the truth.

I'm the truth. I am God's faithfulness to you. You've seen the truth at last. Amen. And he's still the truth, beloved. And the Holy Spirit is the spirit of that truth. And he has come to make it clear to every one of us, we can have this life.

Blessed be God. Beloved, I want to exhort you, never let go of that. Never accept anything less than that. Never opt for something lower. Never settle for anything, even though it be decorated with powers and I don't know what.

Never have anything lower than this. For this is the life. Praise God. And the Holy Ghost has come, that we may have it. John starts off his epistle saying, of his fullness have all we received. That's right.

You've received of his fullness, doesn't matter who you are. You might be, I don't know, I don't think you are, of course, but I just want to say this. You might be the worst character in your village, or town, or the worst person in your home.

You know that. You might think it's someone else, but they think it's you. You might be the worst person. But beloved, the whole truth is that you can have the best. You can have such a complete change.

God will do this thing in your life, if you will let him. But if you settle for anything lower, it's no good complaining. Lord, that's why I like old Oswald Chambers book. My utmost for his highest. It could be translated, his utmost for my highest.

Well, that's what it's all about. What the Lord has done for me, and what the Lord gives to me, and I can see, and I hope you can see this with all clarity, that the blessed spirit has come to make this available to me.

Amen. Do you see that? Do you see that? Then your eyes are opened. Your eyes are open, and you can see what it's all about. You can see beyond heaven itself. You say, what? See beyond heaven? That's just preacher's talk, isn't it?

Jesus is raised highest above all heavens. This is what the scripture says. So that you get your eye off heaven, see right through heaven. Hallelujah. Just like you can see through the earth. I don't mean literally.

But you can see through the world, and you can see through sin, and you can see through the devil, and you can see through all this. You see. You see through all heavens. It's him. Not heaven for me, Lord.

Glory. Is that right? Now that's literally the revelation of the scripture. It's him. And the blessed spirit has come to you, to reproduce him in you. That's what he's come for. Wonderful, isn't it? We know when this sort of thing, it's queer.

We human beings are always queer, aren't we? But it's very funny. But there's something reactionary about us, or responsiveness, you see. As soon as that's, you know, he's come to me to reproduce Christ in me.

Glory. Don't you feel like that? You want to use your inward arms. You've been free enough with your outward ones, hitting this and clouding that, reaching into things you oughtn't to have touched. See, the Holy Ghost has come to me to reproduce Christ in me, in this mortal body, so that my body could become, being a body of the spirit, can become a spiritual body in that sense.

I'm putting it in quotes, in that sense. Now then, beloved. Oh, this is wonderful. Let's do some reading. I think perhaps we've come to a point where we'll read the scriptures. You don't have to read them, but you can remember them and quote them, right?

Just to say, it was put on the page because of short memories. And make sure, too, it didn't drop into mere tradition. Hallelujah. And we look in this first Corinthian letter, and I think we'll just take a verse or two, and it says this.

The Resurrection Body in 1 Corinthians 15

I want to drop on it properly. It's in the chapter on the resurrection, of course, 15, 1 Corinthians 15, verse 38. It's God who gives the body, verse 38. I've slightly changed it, but I haven't changed the truth.

It's God who giveth the body. He gives the body that pleaseth him. All right? He gives the body that pleaseth him. And to every seed his own body, you see. Oh, the truth of this. Who was Jesus? The seed of God.

He was the promised seed, promised to Eve in the garden, promised to Abraham by repetition and confirmation, sung about by David in the Psalms. Can you remember a psalm where he sang about it? Sun's hot.

Can you remember a psalm where he really sang about it? Well, all right, let me tell you one. Psalm 24. The seed shall be counted for a generation. Hallelujah. You see, that seed in God's reckoning was counted for the generation, the new generation, the regeneration, that seed.

And to the seed he gave the body. That's right, isn't it? Yes. The seed was conceived in Mary and he gave it a body. Hallelujah. We called him Jesus. Or at least he did, so we do. Call his name Jesus.

This is the seed, the body, the life. It was all in it. Body had to be in it. If Jesus Christ hadn't put his body into it, if his body hadn't been right, we wouldn't have been redeemed because the blood came from the body.

The power in the blood came from the life. The life came from the seed. The seed came from God. Hallelujah. That's why he had to tell us, you neither know me nor my father. Hallelujah. It's a tremendous thing.

Anyway, God gives to every seed his own body. Then he drops out of that which is the great mystery and spiritual secret which we've seen in the verse and he comes into the other world that we know so very well.

All flesh is not the same flesh, but there is one kind of flesh of men and another flesh of beasts, another of fishes and another of birds. There are also celestial bodies and bodies, terrestrial. Isn't this marvellous?

He's talking about creation. But don't you see, as we were thinking yesterday morning versus together or the last two mornings, the tabernacle was patterned on personality and life. So is all nature. Flesh, bodies, celestial bodies, you see it.

There are heavenly bodies and earthly bodies. What have you got? Now in the physical, you see, in the physical we've all got earthly bodies. So what we've got to do is to make our bodies heavenly by making them spiritual by the Holy Ghost.

All right? This won't make you a wonderful star in God's firmament that ought to circulate all the churches quickly to let them see your brilliance. God has his stars. He holds them in his hands. Consult John in Revelation chapter 1.

That's right. He has his heavenly ministers. They are stars. Never covet to be one. Never. If God puts you there, he puts the stars in their places. Leave it to him. Aspire to the highest. But don't try and be a star.

Because you see, I reckon that if you are trying to be a star, your mind is mixed up with the films still. And you're thinking about glamour, whereas he's thinking about glory. A totally different thing.

Glamour is spit and polish on the surface. I don't know whether Mr. Koji would like to hear me calling his stuff spit and polish. That's it. That's what it is. But glory is nature. It's innate. It comes from the inside.

It's not put on from without. Hallelujah. Marvelous, isn't it? Well, let's get really down to this, it says. There are bodies celestial or heavenly and bodies terrestrial or earthly. But the glory of the celestial is one and the glory of the terrestrial is another.

That's right, isn't it? See, I said, oh, it's hot. I moved out of the glory of this celestial body up there. It's a bit hot. I'm ever so glad that I sort of get used to it. I don't want it on the back of the neck when I'm preaching.

And there are glorious bodies on the earth. Now, not glamorous bodies. Keep that glamorous flesh. I understand that. Glorious bodies on the earth. Hallelujah. Do you know a glorious body on the earth?

The church of Jesus Christ. What's the church made up of? Glorious bodies. Glorious people. Isn't that right? Who's the glorious person? We're the one that's like Jesus, of course. And listen, I don't want to shock you that Jesus never preached the sermon in his life.

I know they say the sermon on the mount. It wasn't that. It was an exposition from the spiritual point of view of the Ten Commandments and the truth contained in it. We know that God, a teacher come from God, not a preacher.

Of course, he's a preacher by our standards, but not by what earth turns out. And the whole glorious thing about it is you find this exactly in all the stars. None of the stars, the apostles preach sermons.

You can read it. Paul said he was appointed an apostle and teacher of the Gentiles. Marvellous, isn't it? I just dropped these little things as we go along. Of course, he preached as well, but we're following our trail.

Here's the trail. He says, the glory of the trestle is another. There's the glory of the sun, another glory of the moon, another glory of the stars. One star differeth from another star in glory. That's actually true.

Old Paul differed from Peter and John differed from them both. Not in their ministry, not in their message, but aren't they all different? Have you ever read them to get acquainted? Hallelujah. They differed in their glory.

And the Lord wants us to see and understand this. And then he goes on and he says, so also is the resurrection from the dead. It's sown in corruption. Hallelujah. That's right, isn't it? We were thinking last night about people losing loved ones.

But let's come into the spiritual and let's come back to Jesus. It was surely sown if it had been left in corruption as anything could have been. It never was, of course, it was preserved. That's the wonder of God having these people around with their preserving spices.

It never did corrupt. Hallelujah. But they never mummified him. So don't you get mummified, will you? And don't get too daddified either. We've got to see, beloved, what we're doing, moving here. It was sown, that blessed body, it would have been in corruption.

Glory to God, it wasn't. It's raised. And where resurrection is concerned, it's in corruption. Hallelujah. Blessed be the name of the Lord. It's sown in weakness. That's right. It's raised in power. Dunamis, that's your word.

That's regeneration by our preaching. Amen. Raised in power. Why do you receive the power? To be a witness to him that he's raised from the dead. It's regeneration. As clear as anything. To be a witness to him.

Raised in the power. Glory be to the name of the Lord. Hallelujah. The Bible only teaches one truth if you look into it properly. And on we go. In this whole glorious truth, it's sown a natural body. It's raised a spiritual body.

There it is. There is a natural body. There is a spiritual body. And so it is written, the first man, Adam, was made a living soul. The last Adam was made a life-giving spirit. Howbeit, that was not first, which is spiritual, but that which is natural.

And afterward, that which is spiritual. We move between the spiritual and the natural in this realm. God takes this whole thing up for us to see it. Amen. Sown in weakness. When you get so weak that you give up struggling against God, and not so all-powerful, the old man is never stronger than just before he dies.

And when you get weak, crucified in weakness, this is what he wrote in the second letter of the Corinthians. Jesus was crucified through weakness. Hallelujah. Amen. And when, beloved, you see these great truths, and God wants us to understand it, sown in dishonor, sown in corruption, praise the name of the Lord.

Grace, Romans 7, and Freedom in Christ

Let's see this, beloved. Corruption, dishonor, weakness. Who's ready to admit it about themselves first, before they can come into the spiritual? Or who will keep saying, I'm not so bad, really. I'm not as bad as all that, you see.

But you are as bad as all that. Or you were. The Lord cuts it right off. And suddenly, Jesus shouted, and yielded, and went through with the plan of God for you and me. Finished it. It can all finish.

It can, in you. And because it can, it must, in you. And because it can, and must, and you believe it, it shall all be finished in you. And because you accept the promise in faith, then I want to say, it is finished.

Glory. Isn't this so wonderful? And all this great trouble that I have in myself, I want to bring to myself like the great apostle Paul did. Instead of talking about someone else when it got to the very nasty things, he talked about himself.

He brought it all out from himself. What had happened in him. He didn't say, now you, you know Mrs. So-and-so, she lives in number so-and-so, now we're going to talk about her this morning. He didn't say, now you know that man over there, he thinks he's great, but you know, this is what's going on inside, and I'm letting you into the spiritual secret.