Tape 4 - Cleansing Through the Blood

Park Meadows Church

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The first chapter, I mean, the first letter of John, the first chapter, verse 5, first epistle of John, you got that?

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Page 1342. On the left hand side of the page, verse 5 starts at the very bottom.

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This then is the message which we have heard of him, and declare unto you that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all.

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If we say, if we say that we have fellowship with him, and walk in darkness, we lie, we lie.

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If we say we have fellowship with the Lord, if we say we are Christians and walk with the Lord, and we have fellowship with darkness, we walk in darkness, we lie and do not the truth.

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But, if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship one with another, and the blood of Jesus Christ, his son, cleanses us from all sin.

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If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.

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If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.

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If we say that we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us.

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A lot in those few verses of Scripture, from verse 5 to verse 10, an awful lot, it just says that if you say you have fellowship with Christ, if you say you are a

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Christian, if you say you are walking with the Lord, and you live in darkness, you are a liar. If I say that I have fellowship with the

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Lord, and I am a Christian, and I live in darkness, I am a liar. And I try to make

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God a liar by trying to change it. Very simple. I want to talk to you tonight, last night we talked about reconciliation, how we are reconciled, and the first thing that happens after you are reconciled to God, the first thing that happens after you get a pardon from the

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Lord, the first thing that happens after you become a Christian, when you receive Christ into your heart by faith, the very first thing that happens is you are pardoned by God.

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You get a pardon in your hand. God removes all the guilt from your life, and the next thing that occurs is the cleansing that happens to your life.

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There is a cleansing that takes place, and I want to talk to you about cleansing through the blood of the

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Lord Jesus. Let's pray together. Father, as we talk about the wonderful cleansing power of the blood of the

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Lord Jesus Christ, we thank you that it's more than just being saved. Lord, it's more than just getting a pardon from our guilt.

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It's more than just removing the guilt from our lives. Lord, there's a stain upon our lives.

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There's a defilement that's there. Father, even though we are found not guilty, you've given us a pardon, and we don't have to pay for it.

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Lord, the Lord Jesus has paid for it still in our lives. There's that stain of sin that permeates our inner being, and within ourselves we have that sense of defilement, and we certainly know that we've been polluted by sin.

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We thank you that, Lord, right along with the reconciliation comes the cleansing by the blood of the

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Lord Jesus Christ spiritually and by faith. If we exercise our faith in the blood of Christ, it does not part of the job.

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It does all the job. It does it completely and perfectly, purely, truly, verily, and indeed it does.

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And Father, for that we're grateful. Teach us from thy word, and may the Holy Spirit of God illuminate our minds and make our hearts receptive to receive the things from the word of God tonight and use those things to make us more effective

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Christians and happier and more confident people, because we ask it in the name of Christ until he comes.

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Amen. The verse I want to use out of that passage of Scripture is verse 7.

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If we walk in the light as he is in the light, we have fellowship one with another. In the blood of Jesus Christ, his

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Son cleanses us from all sin. You don't get cleansing unless you walk in the light. That's what it's saying.

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We walk in the light. If we do walk in the light as he is in the light, then we will have fellowship one with another.

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If you don't have fellowship with Christ, then the blood does not cleanse you from sin. That does not mean that you're not saved.

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Pardon, reconciliation, and cleansing are two distinct things. They are related, but they are not the same.

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Reconciliation simply means that you get a pardon, you get the guilt removed from your life, and you're saved.

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But that doesn't mean that you are cleansed from the result of that guilt.

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That comes by being in fellowship with the Lord. That comes from walking in the light.

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The first blessing that comes from reconciliation is cleansing from sin. Cleansing, a definition, simply means deliverance from the pollution of sin, not the guilt.

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Reconciliation takes care of the guilt. The pardon takes care of the guilt.

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Cleansing takes care of the pollution. Guilt of sin concerns your relationship to God.

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With guilt before God, you are separated. When you have guilt before God, then there is no link of communication.

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When you have the guilt before God, you are alienated from him, separated from him, and in the possibility of being lost forever.

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But that can be hooked up and still you are not cleansed. Guilt concerns your relationship and our responsibility to either make good our misdoings, our sin, or our transgressions, or to bear the punishment for them, and that's guilt.

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Pollution, on the other hand, is the sense of defilement and impurity which sin brings to our inner being.

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Pollution is that sense of defilement. It is the sense of impurity which sin brings to our inner being.

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It is of the greatest importance for every Christian who desires to enjoy their salvation, provided in by God, to understand what the scripture says about the cleansing.

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If you do not understand what happens by the cleansing of the blood, you cannot enjoy your salvation, and that's why, again, a lot of Christians are not happy.

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They don't understand who they are and what they have in Christ. They just don't understand it.

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So, in order that we might understand it, let's understand what the word cleansing says or what it means in the

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Old Testament. In the Old Testament, God spoke to a man named Moses. I'll not go into detail. You know the story of how

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God spoke to Moses and gave Moses and the nation of Israel through Moses some laws.

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He gave them a procedure. He gave them 613 specific laws in one area.

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He gave them 10 laws in another area called the Ten Commandments. He gave them Levitical laws.

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He gave them all sorts of dietary laws. He gave them laws concerning war. He gave them laws concerning marriage.

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He gave them laws, civil, ceremonial, religious, judicial. He gave them political and military, all kinds of rules and regulations

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God gave Moses. Now, there were two ceremonies, specifically, that were to be observed by God's people in preparation for an approach to God.

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We said on Mount Sinai last night that God gave the law, but He also gave the tabernacle. The law says guilty.

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Guilty. And the only way you can get away from the law is to get a pardon. Get a pardon. And on the other hand, the tabernacle says, here's the way you've come to me.

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Here's an approach. Now, in the tabernacle, there were two ceremonies. One of them was the offering, which was a sacrifice.

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We talked about it. Killing an animal. They'd kill an animal or a bird. And there was another one, and that was the cleansings, the washings, or the purifications.

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The cleansings or the purifications. Now, both of these were to remind the people how unworthy and how sinful they were and how unworthy they were to approach and draw close to a holy

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God. Now, as a rule, all that is ever preached and all that is ever taught in our churches is that the offerings are a type of Christ.

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The killing of the animals, the lambs, and the goats. And I, myself, preach an awful lot on that. How they are types of Christ, and you hear very little about the washings or the cleansings or the purifications being a type of Christ.

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And yet, they are probably the deepest. They are probably the most significant part of being a type of Christ.

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The book of Hebrews emphatically mentions the cleansing as figures of, quote, for the time being in which were offered sacrifices and divine washings.

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They are figures of the Lord Jesus Christ and everything that he does. Now, one of the more important cases, let me use this as an illustration, was anyone who got around a dead person.

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Now, if anyone was in a building where a dead body lay, or if he touched a dead body or even some bones of animal or human, it didn't make any difference.

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Anything dead, he became immediately defiled and he was declared unclean for seven days.

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For seven days he was considered to be unclean. The reason for that being, the wages of sin is death.

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And the Jewish people knew that death is a result of sin. If Adam and Eve had not sinned, death would never have come into the world.

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In the Garden of Eden, when God made Adam and Eve, there was no death. There were no carnivorous animals. There was no attacking of one animal to another.

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There was no deadly serpents as we know them today. There were no thorns on the rose bushes. It was just an

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Edenic condition, a place of total bliss and happiness, a utopia, if you please.

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And when sin came in, not only was man cursed, but the Bible says the animal world was cursed and also the earth itself groans unto the day of redemption.

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The earth itself is cursed by sin. And so the Jews knew that death was the result of sin and it signified that to them.

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And it made everyone who came into association with it unclean. Now, in order to get that uncleanness taken away, they had a cleansing process.

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They used the ashes of a young heifer who had been killed and burned.

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And you'll find that if you want to look it up sometime in Numbers, the 19th chapter. They took the ashes of the burned heifer and they mixed it with water.

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You say, ah, what's all that stuff mean? You can't understand your Bible until you understand it.

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That's what it means. So I'll continue. Ashes mixed with water were sprinkled by means of a bunch of hyssop on the one who was unclean.

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They took the ashes, mixed it with water, and it was sprinkled upon the person with a bunch of hyssop, a little bush, on the one who was unclean.

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And then he had to go immediately and bathe in water after which he was considered to be kosher or ceremonially clean.

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And that's all the word kosher means. Ceremonially clean. Clean according to ceremony.

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Clean according to ritual. Clean according to a rite. Clean according to the ordinance.

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Clean according to the law. Clean according to the rules and the regulations. Now, the words unclean, cleansing, and clean were also used with a leper.

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Very strange that leprosy, which was considered a living death. Now, the one was talking about physical death.

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But leprosy is considered to be a death while you are alive, indicating to a spiritual death.

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You can be spiritually dead and be physically alive. You can breathe and eat and live as husband and wife and young man and young lady and still be dead spiritually.

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And so they considered leprosy a living death. Now, for a leper, if you'll check out sometimes

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Leviticus chapters 13 and 14, you'll find that a leper who was to be cleansed mixed the blood of a bird.

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There were birds that were used for sacrifices, and you'll find out which ones in the Old Testament. You go back there and read it. They took the blood of a bird and mixed it up and sacrificially offered with water, mixed it with water, and mixed it all together, and they sprinkled it on the person.

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Then he went and bathed in water, and seven days later, after that had occurred, he was sprinkled again with the sacrificial blood, and thereby he became ceremonially clean again.

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Aren't you just grateful that all you've got to do is confess your sins to the Lord and you don't have to go in through all that stuff?

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But that's what they had. And now, the reason I say that is we criticize the Jewish people an awful lot.

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We talk about in the Old Testament how sinful they were. We talk about how rebellious they were. But you look at what they had to go through to get their sins forgiven, and then you check your own life.

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If you had to go through what they had to go through to get their sins forgiven, we wouldn't have five or ten people sitting in this congregation tonight.

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When it's free, by grace of God, you can't get most of them in. I know what happened if you lived the way

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Israel had to live, so be very careful of your criticism of those people. They had to go through a whole lot.

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Every time you sinned, you had to wait seven days before you could offer a sacrifice to the Lord, seven days before you could take the

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Lord's Supper or Passover as they had it, seven days before you were considered to be an outcast to the community for seven days every time you sinned.

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You think about that for a while. And yet, that's what we come up on here, and there's a twofold difference.

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Now, let me point out a twofold difference between the offerings and the cleansings. And this is most important.

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If you understand this, you understand the Old Testament. Offerings had a definite reference to the transgression or the sin or the iniquity for which reconciliation had to be made.

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A cleansing had more to do with the conditions of the person's life which were a result of the sin.

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Or to make it a little clearer, offering, nothing was done to the offerer himself.

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It was all done to the animal. It was all done to the sacrifice because he had to have a substitute to get the pardon.

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Offerings only dealt with the pardon of guilt, the removal of the guilt. And that's what had happened.

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He saw the blood sprinkled on the altar or carried into the holy place by the priest. But in the cleansing, what happened to the person was the most important factor.

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Defilement was something that either through disuse or outward touch had come upon the person so that the washing or sprinkling, the cleansing must take place upon him.

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In the Christian life, all you've got to do to get rid of your guilt before God is to ask Christ to come into your life and you are pardoned immediately.

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But in order for you to be cleansed from the result of that guilt and the result of your separation from God, something must be done in your inner life.

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And that's the ministry and the job of the Holy Spirit to come into your life and to cleanse you.

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In the offerings, something was done for the person and in the cleansing, something was done to him.

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To him. All right? Now the words of cleansing, you find them in other places in the Old Testament. We just talked about it in the

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Old Testament. David in Psalm 51, which is probably the greatest of all the penitential psalms or psalms of repentance, it's after he got caught with Bathsheba.

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And after they had their episode, he says, cleanse me from my sin, purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean.

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You know, she used the word hyssop. He said, cleanse me. The word that David used in the Hebrew for cleansing is the word that is most frequently used for the touching of the dead body, which was the worst uncleanliness that you could have if there be such a thing, was to come around death.

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And yet David said, that's the way I feel. I feel like I'm just a dead person, and I ask you to cleanse me like you would somebody who was defiled by being around a dead person.

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And then he prayed for more than pardon. Of course, he's praying for purity within.

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And he used that same word again when he said, create in me a clean heart, O God. I believe that's Psalm 139. He said, create in me a clean heart,

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O God. He says the same thing in Psalm 51. Search me, O God, in 139. Ezekiel, the same word refers to the inner condition.

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Chapter 24, verses 11 and 13. In Ezekiel, when speaking of uncleanness being melted out,

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God says, because I have purged thee, and thou was not purged. I've purged you because you were not purged.

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You were right with me. You got right. You got my forgiveness. But you weren't purged inside. And any time you purge something, any time you clean something out, you've got to get down into it, don't you, ladies, you housewives?

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You take an old bottle, you put some soap suds in it, you shake it, or you stick a swab down your hand, you stir it around, or you run a rag or something down your neck.

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You've got to purge it out. You've got to clean it out. And God's got to get us purged before we can be of any earthly use to him whatsoever.

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Ezekiel 36, verse 25. Thee will I sprinkle clean water upon you, and you shall be clean from all your filthiness, and from all your idols will

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I cleanse you. Malachi used exactly the same word in chapter 3, verse 3.

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He says, referring to the Lord, He shall sit as a refiner and purifier of silver, and he shall purify.

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And it's the Hebrew word for cleanse. He shall cleanse the sons of Levi. Cleansing by water, by blood, by fire, are all types of the cleansing which will take place under the

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New Testament, an inner cleansing and deliverance from the stain of sin. Just because you get your guilt removed doesn't mean you're clean.

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If we walk in the light, do you read your Bible every day? Then you're not clean.

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Do you pray every day? Then you're not clean. Do you share your faith with people as God gives you opportunity?

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Then you're not clean. Do you get along with your God? Do you get along with your Lord? Do you study his word?

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Then you're not clean. You're defiled. And you need to be cleansed. And I don't care how old or how young you are.

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This is the truth from God's word. It stands true. Well, there is a blessing that's indicated in the

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New Testament about cleansing. Mention is often made about a cleansed heart, pure heart.

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Pure is the word for clean. The Lord Jesus said in Matthew 5, verse 8, Blessed are the pure in heart.

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Blessed are the clean in heart. Blessed are those who are cleansed. Blessed are those whose heart, and the heart refers to the real you, that inner being.

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Blessed are those whose inner beings are cleansed. Also, in 1

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Timothy 1 .5, Paul said, He speaks of love out of a pure heart. He also refers to a pure conscience.

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A clean heart and a clean conscience. Have you got a clean conscience? I guarantee it'll get you a lot of sleep.

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If you've got a clean conscience. If you've got a clean heart, it'll get you a lot of rest and sleep. You say, well,

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I just can't sleep. I'm so troubled. I just don't know. People ask me all the time.

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The pastor asked me today how much I slept. People ask me all the time. High in the name of heaven.

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Listen, when I go to sleep, I sleep. And I get about four hours a night. When I go to bed, but when

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I go, when it comes time for me to sleep, I sleep. I don't dream. You say, everybody dreams.

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No, of course you do. No, I know how to stop from dreaming. We talked about that when we talked about occultism and witchcraft.

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Dreaming is just a trick of Satan to keep your mind functioning so you can't. You ever go to sleep and get ten hours sleep and wake up like you never slept?

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Yeah, that's why we talked about occultism in January. Witchcraft. Oh, yeah, I've learned. Now, when

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I go to sleep, when I sleep four hours, I sleep sounder or more sound in those four hours than most people do in eight.

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Now, I hear everything goes on. You can't walk by my door without me hearing it. I hear it, but it just doesn't bother me.

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It just doesn't bother me. I hear everything going on, car door slam, people talking. Oh, yeah. It doesn't bother me.

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I can get up right in the middle of those four hours and go get a drink of water, come back in, hit the bed and go on again. Never bother me. I've learned the secret about that.

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You say, man, you're weird. Now, well, that's possible, but let's look at another possibility.

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There's another possibility. Maybe you're weird. Maybe you're weird.

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You read the life of the Lord Jesus and he didn't sleep much. You read about in those three years.

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He was on the move. He just grabbed sleep wherever he got it. Whenever you sleep, if you sleep, but you see, trouble, what?

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Clean heart, clean mind, that's what he's talking about. Simon Peter said, love one another with a cleansed heart fervently.

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That troubles me. I go into a lot of churches. Not only do people don't love one another, but those who act like they love one another really don't.

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You know the people that criticize me most are Christian people. The people who cause me my biggest problems in my ministry are

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Christian people. The people who lie to me the most are Christian people. The people who cause me the greatest trouble in my life are those who call themselves

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Christian. Now, whether or not or not, I wouldn't know until I got a testimony out of them and checked it out with the word of God as best as you can determine.

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And then you still won't know because the Lord said that there are going to be tares just look like wheat and you can't tell until the harvest time comes.

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We won't know whether they're really Christians until the Lord comes. But I'm just telling you that many people act like they love one another when they really don't.

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Husbands, wives, mothers, dads, young people, dads. Why? Just manipulation. Getting what you want.

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And you find the same thing true in Christianity. In Acts 15 .9, we read of those described as the people of God that were purified, they were cleansed.

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They cleansed their hearts through faith. The purpose of the Lord Jesus concerning those who are His, you find it in Titus 2 .14.

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And purify or cleanse, cleanse unto himself a peculiar people, zealous of good works.

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Are you zealous of good works? You're supposed to be a peculiar person. I suppose one of the greatest tragedies of Christianity is that most

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Christians don't want to be peculiar. They don't want to, they want to look like everybody else. We don't want to be different. That's the biggest trouble with young people in schools today.

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It's the biggest trouble with adults in society. We don't want to be set apart and people say, look over there, there's a

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Christian. No, we want to do like they do and act like they do and go where they go and think like they think and do all the things they think and do and live like they do and still think we're going to walk with the

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Lord and reach them and you're not going to do it. You ought to be a peculiar person, zealous after good works.

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And when you find a Christian that's really fired up for God, everybody thinks he's gone bananas. He's off the deep end.

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I've just never seen anybody go off the deep end for the Lord. I've never seen anybody love Him too much, never seen anybody serve

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Him too much. I've never seen anybody could sing too much about Him. I've never met anybody who knew too much about Him.

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I find just the opposite. And if you want to get there, you walk downtown with your Bible. I challenge you, take it to school with you, young people.

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Take your Bible to school. You'll find out in a hurry how much you love the Lord. Take your

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Bible, take your New Testament on your job with you. And during your lunch hour, and I believe you ought to work, but on your lunch hour, get your

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New Testament out and sit down and eat your lunch and read a little bit out of the Scripture. You'll find out in a hurry who your friends are.

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You'll eat your lunch a long time by yourself. Ain't nobody going to come around and sit with you. But that's where it is, and that's where it counts.

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But dear people, this is just what the Lord says now of ourselves in 2 Corinthians 7 -1. It says, let us cleanse ourselves from all filthiness of the flesh and the spirit.

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Not just the things you don't do outwardly, but you got to keep your spirit right with the

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Lord. All these teach that cleansing is an inward work wrought in the heart and that it is subsequent or after being pardoned by God.

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It can happen very close to it, but it happens afterwards. The blood of Jesus Christ, His Son, cleanses us from all sin.

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It does not refer to pardon, but it refers to the effect of God's grace in His children.

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And that it refers to more than pardon is in verse 9 of the Scripture we read. He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins.

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And there's pardon. And to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.

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You get pardon from your guilt through faith. And you get cleansed from the stain and the pollution of sin through that same faith.

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By the application of the blood of Christ to your life. Now cleansing comes after pardon, and it's a result of it.

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First of all, in Hebrews 9 -14, it talks about your conscience is purified. How much more shall the blood of Christ purge your conscience from dead works to serve the living

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God? Many of you people here tonight, bless your hearts, and you are the faithful ones. Some of you live like God's dead.

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You act like God's dead. You don't act like you serve a living God. If you serve a living

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God, your life will be different. We're going to be excited about we have a living

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God. Buddha's dead. Confucius is dead. Muhammad is dead, but Christ is alive.

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Live like it. Well, Brother Freeman, I don't feel like it.

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I kind of feel kind of bad. I mean, you know, I'm a...

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Well, what difference does that make? That doesn't mean that you're not with the Lord. That doesn't mean you're spiritually... You ought to be rejoicing in Christ.

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Cancer, leprosy, pneumonia, tuberculosis, polio, none of those things hurt your spiritual condition.

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You can rejoice in Christ through them all. And I can name you those who are. I can name you a young man.

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I think I used him as an illustration to you some time ago. Down in Weatherford, Texas. A young boy's hands are folded like this.

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His legs are all drawn up from muscular dystrophy. He can't even feed himself. He can't comb his hair.

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He can't shave. He was a minister amusing the church and struck down about 26 years of age.

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He's just a little ball of flesh huddled up in a bed. His mother has to do everything for him.

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He can't even move by himself. And the first thing he wanted to know when

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I walked into his room was, Are you a Christian? Do you know my

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Christ? Do you know the Lord? Then he began losing his voice as it began to progress.

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And he began to weep. And he found out he was losing his voice. They said,

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What are you crying for? You've been so happy in the Lord. I mean, you've just been rejoicing. You've been influenced.

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And he influenced my life like no young man has influenced my life in years. I thought,

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Here's a little ball of flesh rejoicing in the Lord. I've got arms and legs and I travel and I see and I speak and all these things.

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And I can rejoice in the Lord too. Surely if he can. And I began to search.

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And I found that my rejoicing does not depend upon what circumstances I find myself in. Whether I've got money or don't have money.

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Where things are going good or not going good. It just doesn't make any difference. I'm rejoicing in the Lord in all of it. And he began to cry.

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And he said, Well, he said, It's not that I'm not happy in the Lord. He said, I'm just wondering how am

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I going to witness if I can't talk? And here he's dying. He's dying slowly.

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He's worrying about talking for the Lord and he can't even get out of the bed. You walk all over town and don't open your mouth for God.

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Think about it for a while. Think about it for a while. But you'll have a chance to tell the Lord about it. You'll have a chance to present your case.

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You'll have a chance to explain it all to him. What you need to do is get cleansed is what you need to do. You need to get your heart cleansed and serve the living

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God. Hebrews 10 .2 The worshipers, once purged, should have no more conscience of sin.

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Sin has no more power to rule. Once you are purged by the Lord, sin does not control you.

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It doesn't have dominion over you. It doesn't become the practice of your life. It doesn't become this thing that you continually commit those sins.

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You don't continue living it. You fight them. You resist them. You will sin, yes, but you're resisting and you're fighting.

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And you continually work on it with the Lord until you get the victory over it. You're working on another one because you'll have another one.

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But you can get victory over them. Some of them you get victory instantly. And sometimes it takes time as you grow in the

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Lord. But don't tell me you can't get victory over them. Because you can. You can.

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The heart that's cleansed. Hebrews 10 .22 Having our hearts sprinkled from an evil conscience.

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The heart includes your understanding, your mind, your will, your thoughts, and your desires. Having those things sprinkled with the blood of Christ.

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How often? All day long and all night. The Holy Spirit is constantly sprinkling your conscience. He's constantly sprinkling your heart.

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He's constantly sprinkling your interbeing. Just like they sprinkled the veil. Just like they sprinkled the leper.

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Just like they sprinkled the one who touched the dead person. Just like they sprinkled them physically and realistically.

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The Holy Spirit is constantly by faith, spiritually, sprinkling your life with the blood of Christ.

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And constantly purging and cleansing you from those things.

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The blood exercises its spiritual heavenly power in the soul. The old nature is hindered in manifesting its power.

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It's hindered in taking control of you. And I use the illustration just as a fountain stream purifies everything that's in it.

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As long as Jesus Christ stands at the right hand of God the Father, and you walk in the light and have fellowship with him, you're going to be constantly cleansed and purged.

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But if you take a little rock out of that stream and flip it over on the field, flip it over on a bank, it will immediately become contaminated by germs.

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Disease. You take that little rock, and as long as it sits in the middle of that stream, you can take it out of the middle of that little mountain stream and put it in your mouth, and there won't be a germ on it.

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That'll hurt you. All germs you'll get is passing from there through the air. See, once you get out of fellowship with God, then you get contaminated with the germs of life.

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You get contaminated with the germs of the world, and you get diseased. And gangrene of sin sets in your life.

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And it just begins to move and just begins to grow. And before long, the cancer of indifference, the contamination of complacency, takes over your life, and you have no earthly use to the

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Lord whatsoever. Just contaminated and diseased. And walk around saying, Oh, I'm a Christian.

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There's power in the blood, we sing. I stand amazed in the presence of Jesus the

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Nazarene. Stand and crown him Lord of all. And no more mean that than a man on the moon.

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Just that, it's what you've always sung, and that's why we've always done it. Ah, listen.

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In the Old Testament, cleansing was necessary for every single sin that those people committed.

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Every single sin, they had to get a cleansing from it. In the New Testament, cleansing simply depends upon the

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Lord Jesus Christ being able to do for you what he says he'll do. That's right.

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You don't have to get the cleansing. Every single sin you do, it is constantly being there.

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Now, if you don't confess it, he's going to cleanse it, and he's doing it, and we call it chastisement.

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It is discipline. And the chastisement, there are degrees of chastisement. Chastisement might mean that you just don't sleep good for a while.

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It might be that you lose your peace of mind for a while. Chastisement might mean that you get a little financial difficulty in your life.

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It may be that you get a little sickly every now and then, and then if that doesn't work, then God just progresses with it, and then finally he'll just take your life.

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Finally, he'll just kill you. K -I -L -L, kill. K -I -L -L, kill.

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Oh, you'll still go to be with him. But he's not going to let us run around down here and carry his name around and degradate his name.

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He's not going to let us come around and make a mockery of his name. It's like I talked to the young people the other night.

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Some of you didn't like that. I understand that. Other parents didn't like that, and the young people didn't like it either. But I'm not going to have a bunch of 14, 15, 12, 13 -year -old kids sit in one of my services and desecrate the house of God because they don't know any better and they care less about God.

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I'm not going to stand around and talk about the Lord Jesus Christ and my Lord and your Lord, almighty and everlasting God, and let somebody sit there and desecrate the house of the

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Lord. I'm not going to do it. I'll never do it. Too long we've let it go by, and the reason they do it is because parents don't teach them.

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No kid becomes a rebel overnight. You've got to teach that kid to be a rebel. You get with them and pray with them and share your lives with them and read

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God's Word with them and work with them and have times with them and spend time with them and be the mother and dad you ought to be to them, be the grandparents you ought to be to them, and work with them and all that, and I guarantee you

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God will work in their lives. But just let them go like they want to go, and brother, they ain't got but one way to go.

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And Satan just reels them in. He just reels them in. Oh, yeah, through that old nature where faith sees and desires and lays hold of the fact of Christ, the heart can abide every moment under the protecting and cleansing power of the blood.

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Let me close by just saying how can you experience this blessing of cleansing?

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What are the conditions? Are there any? Well, there are. First of all, you've got to have knowledge about it.

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You've got to know about it. You can't experience anything you don't know about. You've got to know about it. It's necessary.

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It's all they receive through the blood of Christ. But if you will compare all the Scripture in this

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Bible, compare all the Scripture where cleansing is spoken of, you will soon feel that there is more promise to the

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Christian than just the removal of his guilt, just than the more of reestablishing that communication between him and God or hooking back up that link of fellowship and communication.

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You will sense that there's more to it than that. One will sense from these Scriptures that there is not only the washing away of the stain but the cleansing away of the effects of sin in that life.

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You don't have to go out and sin every day. Nowhere in the Bible does it say you have to. You don't have to sin every day.

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You can go long periods of time without sinning. Nowhere does it say you've got to sin every day.

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Nowhere does it say you've got to sin every week. If you don't want to do it, you don't have to do it.

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The trouble to us is we like it. We enjoy it. There's something else.

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The knowledge, there must be a desire. There must be a desire. Most Christians are too pleased, and listen to me carefully, please.

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Most Christians are too pleased to postpone to the future life the experience of the words blessed are the cleansed in heart or blessed are the pure in heart for they shall know

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God or they shall see God. Now we're too content. We don't want to be holy.

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Most Christians rebel against being holy in their life. Most Christians do not.

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They want salvation, but they don't want to be holy. They don't want to be holy. They want to be happy, and I told you when

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I was with you last time, and I'll repeat myself for the visitor's sakes. Christ never died on the cross to make you happy.

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He died to make you holy. He died to make you holy, and there's a big difference in being holy and happy.

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If you're happy, you're not being holy, but if you're holy, you will be happy. Oh, yeah, you say, well, are you saying that you're holy?

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No, I'm just saying that Christ is, and you better be. Christ is, and he says, be ye holy as I am holy, but Christians don't want to be holy because if you're holy, that'll cut down your date life.

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It'll cut down your business life. It'll cut down your social life. It'll cut down on a lot of things if you get holy because a lot of people just don't want to be holy.

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They don't want to be around, quote, holy Joes. They don't want to be around, here he comes, he's going to talk to me about the Bible again.

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I know he's going to do it. Here he comes. Well, they know you shouldn't call her for a date because she always prays before she goes out on a date.

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No, he's going over to her house. They don't serve any liquor. Maybe they'll serve you Coke or something over there. Yeah, man, you got to pray to every meal, don't you?

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But other Christians, they like people to say, oh, he's a good Joe. You know, they're not religious.

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They're religious, but they're not fanatics, you know. That's what most Christians like. There's got to be a desire, dear people.

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Purity in heart is a characteristic of every child of God. But there's too little longing to be really in all things at all times pleasing to the

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Lord. Too little longing to please the Lord in everything. And I believe that every hour, that ought to be our desire.

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And the third condition is a willingness, and here's where we get to the nitty -gritty. A desire for it, and a willingness to separate yourself from everything that is unclean.

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That means that every teenage kid in that high school or junior high school that's lost, you have no business making them your close personal friends.

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That means as a mother and dad, you have no business having lost people as your personal, close, intimate relationships where you spend more time in the company of lost people than you do

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Christian people in your fellowship. My Bible says what have you as a believer what have you as light to do with darkness?

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What have you as righteousness to do with unrighteousness? Come out from among them and be ye separate. You must be willing to separate yourself from every worldly amusement.

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First, well, don't you believe in going to movies? I don't have time to go to movies. Movies have never done anything to help me in my life.

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All they do is cost me money. And take up my time, you can go to a movie and spend three hours down there watching some junk from Hollywood and you won't spend 15 minutes a day reading

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God's Word and you're going to tell me it's not sin? You go down there, you say, well, I go to a movie and start witnessing and the usher's going to throw you out.

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You can't go in a movie and talk. You can rationalize it and try to justify it in your mind but it won't hold true.

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And if the Lord Jesus Christ walked into a movie today, I guarantee you they wouldn't be watching the screen. He'd be up there on the screen preaching a sermon.

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I've just got better things to do with my junk.

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It just doesn't do anything for you. Well, it relaxes me. When you walk with the Lord, you are relaxed.

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That's one of my problems. I'm too relaxed. People say, man, you're loose.

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Stay loose with the Lord, my soul. Get all uptight and all wrapped in all this stuff.

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No, we must have a willingness to separate ourselves from every single thing. And I have a little rule of thumb that says when in doubt, leave it out.

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If there's any doubt about it whatsoever, 99 times out of 100, it'll be wrong. That's what a doctor says when in doubt, cut it out.

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You go to a doctor and they say, I can't figure out what it is. We got to what? Explore. Can you imagine? I don't want no doctor exploring around down in me.

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We don't know what's wrong. We don't have any idea You got x -rays, look at that.

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You ain't going down in me looking. Go prowling around. And did you know that if you'll read the medical journals, you'll find that most exploratory surgery turns up nothing.

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They sew you back up and say, well, we couldn't find anything. I want him to exhaust everything he's ever can do before he ever goes digging around in the

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Jew. No siree. It's just that simple, dear people.

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But you see, we like to explore, don't we? Man's curiosity keeps him exploring.

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He likes things that are different. He likes to know about the future. He wants to know everything. And God says, here's what you need to know right here.

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There it is in that book. I had a 15 year old girl wrote me from Miami, Florida, chewing me out when

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I was down in a revival. That 15 year old girl wrote me the right act in a letter. And then she signed it in Christian love.

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She did everything but call me names. She said, I'm just 15 years old. But I know a lot about the

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Bible. I don't know all I know. But I know a lot about it. I have forgotten more than most 15 year olds know about the word of God.

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I'd find out more in one week about the word of God than most 15 year old kids know. And yet, she said, well,

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I know Randy Perry and I don't know who Randy Perry is. She said, but I know Randy Perry and he does it and he's a soul winner.

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I don't answer letters like that. I come very close. Usually I do and then I tear the letter up. Usually I go in and dictate to my secretary about a two page letter.

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Boy, I just said, oh Lord, forgive me getting in the flesh, my soul that's wrong. And then I just say tear it up and don't mail it.

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I get them from adults too. See, people like to explore and they don't like to separate themselves.

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And when somebody tells you something's wrong in your life, they tell me something's wrong in my life.

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I've got just a few faithful people that I can go to and ask them to evaluate my life from time to time and sometimes

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I don't even have to ask them to, they do it anyway and they tell me and I don't like it, but I know they're honest and I know they see things in my life that I cannot see myself.

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You see, because when you start going into a backslidden state, when you start drifting away from God, you'll never know it yourself.

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Till you hit bottom, and when you hit bottom, then the shock wakes you up. But dear people, let me just say that there has to be a willingness to separate yourself from everything that is unclean.

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Cleansing cannot occur when separation from and giving up everything unclean does not exist.

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Cleansing will not occur as long as there's anything unclean functioning in your life. As long as you're going to all these places and doing all this, uh -uh, it won't.

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Cleansing cannot have the full blessing of God. You can be committed to God in everything you do and are and hold back one little bitty thing.

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It may be just joining a church. It may be being baptized and following the

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Lord and believer's baptism after you were saved. It may be holding a Sunday school job.

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It may be ushering. It may be if God speaks to your heart about anything and you hold back one little thing, you cannot and will not have the blessings of God on your life.

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Because that one sin is enough to separate you from fellowship. If we walk in the light as he is in the light.

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See, it's a comparison. You got to walk in it like he is. Then we have fellowship one with another.

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And the blood of Jesus Christ, his son, cleanses from all sin. The last condition is you must have faith in the power of the blood of Christ.

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It's not as if through your faith that you bestow some efficacy on the blood. No, the blood always has its power, but our unbelief closes our hearts and hinders its operation.

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Unbelief stops it from working. Let us believe that there is cleansing through the blood and he who by faith commits himself to the

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Lord Jesus and believes that this can and will take place, that cleansing does occur.

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And you know how a weary traveler going down an old river road or an old dirt road would follow along and see a fresh stream flowing down.

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He would step out into that fresh stream and bathe in it, plunging into the water to experience its cooling and its cleansing and its strengthening effect.

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Then we need to lift our eyes and see by faith how ceaselessly, how perpetually a stream flows from heaven above to the earth beneath.

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And it is the Holy Spirit's influence through whom the power of God's Son cleanses from all sin and it has a divine meaning that is wider and deeper than you have ever imagined in your life.

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But if you will understand as long as you have fellowship with him and walk in communion with him, you are cleansed.

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You are cleansed. So what we've got so far is once you ask

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Christ to come into your life, you're saved and you can't lose it. You're not removed.

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But you see that separation that you had previously has brought about an effect in your life.

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There's a stain and pollution and defilement. We sense that we're defiled and God says,

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I'll take care of that. I'll just cleanse you within. And so he sends the

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Holy Spirit into your life and he comes in and he does the cleansing work.

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All you need to do, dear people, is exercise your faith in it and live with it.

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And when you will, I guarantee you, it'll thrill your heart to know that you are never guilty, you are never unholy, you are never dirty, you are never unworthy in the eyes of the

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Lord. You never are if you're a Christian. Why? Because the pardon is there and the cleansing is there all because of the blood of the

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Lord Jesus Christ. Are you pardoned?

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Are you cleansed? You say, I'm saved. Are you cleansed?

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Are you walking in the light? That's the best way I know to say it, just like the Bible says it. Are you walking in the light?

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Do you read your Bible every day? If you don't, you got sin and rebellion in your life. Rebellious if you don't read your

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Bible every single day. It says you ought to do it. Every day, feed on the word.

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Feed on it. You don't miss many meals. No, you don't miss many meals physically.

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Breakfast and dinner and supper, you're hunting for it. Snacks in between, we hunt for it. That's the way we are. But it says you ought to have a spiritual diet the same way.

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Feed on the word. Meditate on the Lord.

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Talk, pray, pray, pray, pray and talk to the Lord. If you don't, sin in your life.