The Secret GEOGRAPHY of the Christian Life

I am convinced that there is no way to bring a message without eternally damaging somebody listening. The others may all be gloriously delivered, but one person will be eternally damaged by what you said. No matter how careful you are. So, whoever gets damaged by this, just go, that’s what you’ve got to do, just go get worse off than you are now. It is true. You are a terrible person. We are terrible people as a result of the fall. We inherited it from our father, Adam. We are in bad shape. Now, if there is anybody on earth who does not know that it is a religious single brother, and some religious single brothers are married, but I’m talking about not single brothers, but religious single brothers, by gum, by golly, and by grit, they believe that they can somehow not be that way.

I saw something illustrated that really spoke to me, or it had a message with it, at least, it didn’t speak to me. Four of my close friends from the church went to Thailand and served there during the great refugee situation, and they sent me a postcard. On the back of it, they had just written one sentence: “religious single brother.” And what it was: a photograph of a young Buddhist who had built a rectangular box and had been placed over him, and the entire front of the box, and the back of the box, it rested on his shoulders filled with dozens and dozens and dozens of sharp pointed blades like swords and they were sticking in his body all over front and back. Ah man, I’m so glad he lived in Thailand and that he was a Buddhist. I could tell you stories forever of young men who either see their sinfulness and just grovel in their failure, or they want to see their sinfulness because they hear from me that they’re supposed to hear and see their sinfulness, and they’re really trying hard to do so, or there’s the brother who feels that he will not be this way. I shall never forget the man who said to me, Gene…boy, I hate to tell you this; this just still hurts… He said, “Wouldn’t it be possible? Isn’t it possible that someone could live so obediently to the Lord that it would not be necessary for that person to suffer?” I wanted to grab him and shake every bone in his body. If anyone could live so perfectly that the Lord would not need to cause him to suffer, the Lord would have to cause more suffering in that man’s life than any other man on earth to keep his self-righteousness in control.

It can’t be done. There is no righteousness. There is no conduct that can overcome the damage of the fall. I don’t think it’s possible for anybody in their 20s. Brother, I really don’t think they can even begin to conceive of the depth of the damage to the soul. I believe it begins to dawn on us in our early 30s, and from there we spend the rest of our lives in complete awe of the fall of man, and it gets more awesome with every passing year. I know I have never seen a young single brother or sister, or a young person of any kind, really go back and read the old saints. We must see how needy we are and how fallen, and all of these things. I’ve never seen one of them yet…really see. He only plays like and hopes he does, and goes around with all those swords in him, repenting of what a terrible person he is, but it’s all a show. I don’t know of anything but age and years that can show us how fallen we are.

And I want you to know something else. I’ve watched that 21- or 22-year-old single brother praying, playing like he sees how bad off he is, and I’ve seen him at 30, when he is found out in his weakness, and he is so devastated by true revelation; he cannot handle it. He ceases being a Christian; he walks off and leaves. He cannot handle the revelation of his weakness. So, I plead with you to just believe me for the moment. The soul was bent out of shape. You can describe it any way you want to. Theologians talk to us about the spirit dying, the flesh, the body becoming flesh, and the soul becoming the self-nature, or at least containing within the soul, the self-nature. Theologically, I can appreciate that teaching; I have never been totally won over by it. Not 100% but probably correct. I don’t really understand what the self-nature is. Now I experience it, but I don’t understand its source. I also know that my self-nature has been crucified on the cross of Jesus Christ, and I reckon that and take it as a positional truth in Christ, and I reckon in my relationship to the Lord that the self has been crucified with Christ, and it doesn’t do me one bit of good. I don’t get any more victory from it. I don’t get any more peace, and I don’t get any more deliverance. I’m sure you all do. You know what your place is in Christ, and you know your self-nature has been nailed to the cross, and you have taken that position, and you’re now victorious, and you’re walking in the faith walk. Is that what it’s called? The faith walk. Oh, the faith rest. Faith rest. You see it, you trust it, you believe it, you proclaim it, and you rest it there.

I’m looking at people who don’t even know what positional truth is. I can tell by the look on your face. You haven’t even found out what it is to be victorious in it, and here I am trying to deliver you from your victory, which you haven’t even claimed yet. Obviously, Gene Edwards isn’t all that excited about positional truth. I know I have been crucified with Christ, but I need…I’m more needy than you are. I need some kind of reality stuck with that. I really do. I need to at least touch that sometimes. That reckoning and reckoning and reckoning gets just as tired and weary as speaking in tongues, praying, reading your Bible, and passing out tracts. It all gets a little boring, and I think its roots all stem from intellectualism.

I always enjoy looking at the kind of guy who teaches positional truth. He’s always skinny, and he’s high thyroid, and if he weren’t a preacher or a Bible teacher, he’d be a scientist, and he’s trying to get some emotional little sister over there to reckon, and her washing machine is broken down, and her kids are crying, and her house smells. She hasn’t cleaned it in weeks. She’s right in the middle of her third nervous breakdown. And he’s saying, “Sister, reckon yourself and see your position in Christ.” That’s one of those wonderful panaceas that is a cure-all, but there are a lot of Christians running around who refuse to be cured by that cure-all.

I don’t mean to run down positional truth, but I do like every once in a while to take a swat at sacred cows. I just can’t help it. I just love to shoot a sacred cow every once in a while. And positional truth is supposed to be the ultimate end of all things. Doesn’t help me a bit. Never has, never will. Reckoning just doesn’t do a thing for me. I know who I am, and I know where I am, and I know what I am, but knowledge never did sit with me. That’s great for a German. I’m a Frenchman. Right.

Well, now we have a very fallen soul, twisted; the self-nature is there. We can no longer contact the other realm. It’s almost like on our biological chart, we have God here, the angels here, man here, and the animals here, and man falls from just a little lower than the angels to just a little higher than the animals, and he took with him the whole cosmos.

Have you ever driven along the roads of your country and observed the twisted evidence of the fall in nature? Have you ever been driving along in Colorado or Wyoming and seen the strata beside you on the hill and then seen that same stratum coming this way and then seen a section where that stratum has been pushed up, turned over, and is lying in that direction, literally on the other part of the mountain? If you open your eyes and look at your planet, there’s evidence everywhere of chaotic twist, turning, and desperate contortion of the earth, which I believe came at the time of the fall.

Here we are. We are almost a different species. In fact, when Adam…let me tell it this way. Adam and Eve went through a terrible, terrible change; they could only remember what they once were. The light went out. They were prone to sin. They lost their fellowship with God. They were cast out of the garden. The very earth on which they ruled had become a jungle where it had been a paradise, and they could feel things going on inside them. And oh, I’m sure the guilt and all the things that you and I live with today, that we lived with from the day we were born, came as new experiences to them, and they fell so far. I think of when the children were born, and the children didn’t glow, and the children have never seen God, and don’t understand what their mother and dad are talking about. Their children grow up, and they fight all the time. Their parents don’t understand this, and when one of them murders the other one, they see the corruption and the lust and the rebellion in their children as they spawn this breed so unlike what they themselves once were.

I will tell you that when Adam and Eve died, it was almost as if a species had become extinct, and in a real way, a species did become extinct in Adam and Eve because their children were not biologically constituted the way their father and mother were. I’m speaking biologically. Are you following me? They were not biologically constituted the way their mother and father were. Mama and Daddy were more regal than they were. Mama and Daddy had seen God. Mom and Daddy had heard voices. Mom and Daddy had walked with God in a place we’ve never been. Something died in them that they once had; I have never known it. It’s in me, but I’ve never felt it in me. It’s dead, and for it to be dead is virtually the same as it not being there. If you could have dissected Adam soon after he was created by the Lord, you would have found a living, pumping, breathing organ in there if you could see the unseen, but if you had dissected Cain, you would have found no such living, breathing, functioning ball of light in him. They were biologically different. One was alive and died, and the other one had never been alive. So, Cain, Seth, Abel, and the other children of Adam, descendants of Adam, were a different species.

In fact, I think the angels must have been standing around and saying, “Adam looked so young, but his offspring are just old. Adam would have lived even in his death. He looked younger than they did, and he lived so long. Look at his children. They’re getting wrinkled. They’re old. They’re old men. This is an old man, and so there came a term somewhere on the earth. It was given to this…may I use this paradoxical statement? A name was given to this new species. The name was “the old man,” this species not in the garden. Did you follow me? It is new, and its characteristic is oldness. It is a species that looks like this. It has a dead spirit, a contorted soul, and a sin-dwelled body. A damaged soul, a spirit dead to the other realm, and a body that is becoming flesh with every passing generation, and is driving the soul, leading the soul in many situations.