Romans – The Play Part 9, Ep 1

Number one: You cannot live the Christian life. You clear on this? Are you clear on this? Oh, wait a minute, I heard Penny say something. This is my second point. What did Penny say? Okay, we’ll come back to that in a minute. Penny said, I thought you said Christ in you. Did you? Is that what you, Christ in you? Alright, in just a minute, I’m going to throw doubts on that one, too.

Now, saints, I can’t emphasize enough this point: You cannot live the Christian life, and you cannot do good; it’s basically the same thing. Our concept of the Christian life, you can’t do good, you can’t fulfill this desire within you. And we get those two things mixed up – the Christian life and the desire to do good become one, and they are virtually inseparable within our inner man, not inmost man. In our understanding, we can’t separate them. You can’t live the Christian life. Let me just show you something. I hope the rest of the sisters who are married will not be offended. But this is Vicki. You see Vicki here? Little bitty thing. She weighs about 70 pounds. Soaking wet, she weighs 70 pounds (laughter).

Vicki, every time I’ve ever seen her, she’s been smiling. She smiles at times when I would die if I were going through what she’s going through. She’s always talking about the Lord. She’s so sweet. I want to tell you something, Vicki: You, in the long haul, will never be a submissive wife. Now, can you believe that? Look at that little old bitty sweet thing sitting over there. She just does everything her husband tells her to do. I don’t doubt that one of these days she’s going to bite him in the knee. She’s going to get full up with this stuff, and she’s going to start shouting, screaming, and throwing things. ‘I’ve taken enough of all of this; I’m going to take off,’ and after that day, she’s going to fight him tooth and nail all the way. If you try to be the wonderful submissive Christian wife that is presented to us in Proverbs… Proverbs… There’s the… There’s the… There’s the… There was… There is a… There’s a book that just recently came out: The Woman of Proverbs 31. And the whole book was about how to be this kind of woman.

Well, you might as well tie a guy’s legs together and then teach him to be a ballerina. There’s not a woman living who can do Proverbs 31; the guy who wrote that was a male chauvinist. I’m sure I don’t mean that, but anyway, I would rather believe that that is the bride of Christ. That woman never existed; if she did, she was miserable. That woman was being taken advantage of. You remember, Andy, when you looked the whole world over and you found this girl and you really believed she was going to go along? You know why Andy did that? It’s because Andy’s a coward and he’s afraid of girls. He was looking for a girl whom he figured he could really cow easily. And she looked so sweet. She’s never going to submit to you, Andy. She isn’t. This woman is not a Christian; She’s not going to be a Christian, and she can’t be a Christian. Oh, we got something going here. And yet marriage is built on the supposition and expectations of these things.

I was just going to say, now, Joanie, I know when you married this dear brother, and I know when you courted him and he courted you, and he just looked great, didn’t he? Now think about it. Go back and think about it. Sister, he hid so much from you. She’s not putting it on here; is that or is that not true? Didn’t he hide so much from you? How much? You were probably willingly blind. You were at least naively blind, but how much that brother hid from you is from sea to shining sea. And you’re still discovering stuff that he hid from you, and later he told you. And you tried to…that’s fine, that’s right, sweet, aren’t you? And you wallpaper over all that stuff. And yeah, it hurt. And it’s right. One day, it all ended. And Joni cannot live a Christian life with this guy who hid so much from her. She just can’t handle this. You, in turn, are a two-faced hypocrite for treating this poor little girl this way.

You not only did not live the Christian life, but you left us the impression that you could and would and were living the Christian life. And sailing this fraudulent ship, you got one of the sweetest, most innocent, naive, precious little gals in the church and stole her away. Amen. And then Joni discovered that Joe was utterly incapable of doing any of the things that she had expected a Christian husband to do. Say amen, Joni. Huh? That’s true? Most of it’s true. It’s the part that’s not most of it that bothers me. You see, there are some good things about Joe. There are some really good, commendable things about Joe. Those are the ones the Lord is after. Joni’s after the others. The Lord is after those in which… in which… yeah, but he has all the instrumentation he needs. I realize he is, but Joni will take care of those things as a handmaiden of the Lord will take care of those things that are known to be improper. God will take care of those things in which you are really a good Christian.

I mean, your greatest strengths as a Christian and a saint, just take this as truth: your greatest strengths have another side to them, like a coin; they have weaknesses. Your submissiveness, young lady, and your willingness to be such a gentle, nice, and loving person is covering up your inability to deal with reality. You, brother, with your strong leadership ability—which we thank God for in the church and wouldn’t operate without you—nonetheless have a dark side. You also want your way. And there’s the strength, which is blessed of God, but comes with it the double-edged problem of the weakness. And one day, when God comes after you, the most Christian part of you, it will be the darkest day you have ever lived. And some of you are going to forget this.

You cannot live the Christian life. I want to recommend that you be very careful about all the Christian books you read, because virtually every one of them is written on the supposition—simple supposition—that you can. You can. They don’t tell you how to, they just assume you can, and then show you all the things you have to do now. And I come back to thinking: if we had a list of all the things in the world that books have taught us to do—good Christians wrote them, and they’re all good Christian things—how incredibly many demands there are.

For instance, just think about all the books that have been written by Christians on how to lose weight, assuming that you can lose weight. It’s built on the supposition that you can lose weight; that you, as a Christian, can lose weight. I don’t know of anything in the world that can convince us so quickly that we cannot live the Christian life as going on a diet. A diet of…yeah, of anything, of any kind. Yeah, something like that.

I had apple juice for breakfast this morning; it almost killed me. I never drink apple juice for breakfast. How did you know that? My grandson told you? Did he? Alright. I cannot take sweets. This morning, I had apple juice for breakfast. So, I drank that stuff. No one is going to believe me, but for two minutes, it tasted so good. When I put it down, I said it. I said it out loud. I said, “I’m going to suffer from this the rest of the day, but for two minutes, I’m going to enjoy this.” I know I can’t live a Christian life. What I don’t know is what to do about it.

Well, that’s point number one, and that is: please, please be impressed again and again and again and again—your personal efforts are of no value. Brothers and sisters, I don’t mean to leave you now in some vegetable place where, “Well, I can’t do anything, so hand me a beer and give me a cigar. I’m going to just sit here until God does it.” You know this is pure unadulterated licentiousness. This is again the flesh; even the Gentile heathens do not approve of this. Then what do you do?

And this is my second point. That point is: you are waiting for me right now to tell you how to live the Christian life in the Spirit. I know you are. I cannot. That’s exactly it. And it’s exactly what it’s like. It is not me, but Christ in me. “Tell me how to do that, Gene, so I can get up and go do it.” That is the instinct of you. Don’t just sit there; say amen. It is the instinct of you; even now, you’re waiting to find out the engine of the Christian life so you can go do it. How? “Christ in me must do it.” How’s that? How do you do that? How do you do that? Are you going to hand out some material I can read on how Christ can live in me? Because that’s what I want. I want that. And I want to do that. How many steps are there in having Christ live the Christian life instead of me? So, in a way, we’re really…we’re locked in here, saints, in some inevitable struggle. That’s exactly what it is; it’s a half-Nelson; it’s a catch-22.