Foundation Stones #5 – Living by a Life Not Your Own | Christ Within You & the True Christian Life

Now you may not understand what I’m about to tell you, but listen anyway. In my studied judgment, God reserves the right to no longer live up to His promises if that promise is made into a method. I know of a group of Christians who have gone to seed on what is it? 1 John 1:9. I believe if we confess our sins where He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all righteousness, only they say it like this “if we confess our sins he is faithful just to forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness,” but that has ceased to be reality. There’s nothing wrong with me, I confess my sins, and pretty soon, you know, somebody starts working that, it becomes a con, you start conning God. You know what I mean by con? Confidence. A confidence game. You begin tricking God.

You go sin and you confess it, but God says in His word, and He’s got to be faithful to His word. If I confess my sins, He’s faithful just to forgive me of my sins and cleanse me of all unrighteousness. He’s got to do it. Therefore, I go sin. I confess it. I can do all the sin that I want to. That’s eventually where it comes. God will say, “Hey, don’t tell me what I’ve got to do.” But not one word, not one dot of his word will pass away, and He promised that He’s going to be faithful. I don’t have to be faithful to that kind of conduct. I’m not going to be tricked. You’re not going to trick Me.

I said that in the presence of a certain situation. I said that in spirit, and you forced Me into a mold? You’re trying to make me a machine. I’m not a machine. I’m a living God. God will not be bound by anything, especially methods that people pull out of the scripture. I said that to tell you that your relationship to Him, no matter what I teach you about Him, must remain a living relationship based on intimate fellowship with Him and not on some verse that promises some magic thing, some magic union, magic relationship, or bond.

He lives and places Himself even above His promises. He will not be played games with. He is a holy God. Beware the man who’s got a method. Beware the man who has a faithful promise God will not break.

I watched a young man call on the name of the Lord one night. The Bible says if you call on the name of the Lord, you’ll be saved. Doesn’t it? Does it not? I saw a man calling the name of the Lord one night, and he didn’t get saved. But it says he would get saved. Well, maybe in heaven somewhere I’ll find out he did, but the truth of the matter is he didn’t mean it. There’s a world of difference. There is the heart behind it.

That’s why we need a lot of living reality behind the things we hear. It’s one of the reasons we need the church, so that method will not begin to be the tail that wags the dog. Beware of the method merchant. Do you understand what I’m talking about now? Does what I just said make any sense to you at all? Roy, did that make any sense? Okay.

You’re going to face that in the next year. You will find someone who will be peddling a promise of God that God probably will no longer honor because it has ceased to be a living relationship, and it has literally become a way to force God to do things for a man’s own personal lust or His own personal gain, which is lust. That’s a verse of scripture out of the book of James. You ask and have not because you ask to fulfill your lusts. And sometimes we can lust for the pleasures of God, when sometimes the Lord wishes to give you His cross.

Well, I’m off the subject here, but let me come back. These young men were dealing with 12 men who had lived with the Lord, who had over and over again been embarrassed, who were so thickheaded and heavy ears could not hear. Do you have any idea how stone deaf those 12 men had been when they were with the Lord? Count up how many times in the Gospels He told them He would be crucified. How many times did they hear Him say it? Not once.

Now, there are some young men listening to these brothers speak. The Lord helped those brothers a great deal in the four years He lived with them. Three and a half, four years, He lived with them, but He never helped them nearly as much as the day He could help them no longer. The greatest thing the Lord ever did, other than coming in to dwell inside those men, was the day He forsook them by being crucified and being murdered, and their God was dead, and they were shattered men. You know what happened to them that day? They became broken. And that’s the best thing that can happen to you is when you break.

You no longer have the strength of your own will. They were going to have Jerusalem as a capital, and they were going to sit on 12 thrones. Now they were just hoping to get out of that town with their life. They just wanted out of there without getting killed themselves. They were broken men. Thank God that 3,000 people had 12 broken men in front of them. A broken man will not be, a truly broken man will not be a legalistic man. And if a man is broken and legalistic, then he’s not broken. I’d like to repeat that. If a man is legalistic and broken, then he’s not broken. Because if he’s broken, he is broken because he has learned the enormity of his own weaknesses and his incapacity to live the Christian life, to do what God expects of him.

Those 12 men knew they were failures. And you know, the gospel of Jesus Christ has got to be preached only by failures. It cannot be preached by successful men. It has got to be preached only by broken men. And boy, there are just so few of us who are willing to be total failures. Absolute total wrecked failures who can’t get anything right, and never do anything right, and never succeed.

We have to have little personal esteem, and these men had nothing to be esteemed for by Saturday afternoon (the day between the cross and the resurrection). They were cowards, and they were wrong. They had bet on the wrong horse. Excuse me. They had bet on Jesus Christ, and they had bet on the wrong person. He ran off and got himself killed. Do you understand how disillusioned those men were? How dumb and stupid they felt? How sorrowful they were that they lost someone they loved so much, but also how stupid they felt, and it was good for them. It was really, really, really good for them.