Walking In The New

Lift our Bibles up, wave them around, make Jesus glad, the devil mad, and let's say this together say, Heavenly Father, I've tuned in tonight and one thing I don't have to pray for is rain, because I've got rain now.

Hallelujah, thank you, lord, at just the right amount for my yard, my plants and Father, I thank you.

The rain of the Holy Ghost is present here tonight.

You're going to water the Word You're going to bring me fresh Word that I need to hear from my life so that I can accomplish my purpose in Jesus' name.

Amen, amen, amen, praise God.

Let's turn to three places Second Corinthians, chapter 5.

2 Corinthians 5 · chapter mention

And while you're turning, find Titus, chapter 3, and Romans, chapter 6.

Titus 3 · chapter mention Romans 6 · chapter mention

We'll start with Second Corinthians, 5, 17,.

Very familiar verse, and says Therefore, if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature.

Old things are passed away and, behold, all things are become new.

And then Titus, the third chapter, in verse 3, verse 4, excuse me, verse 4.

For after that, the kindness and love of God, our Savior, toward man appeared, not by works of righteousness, which we have done, but according to his mercy, he saved us.

And how?

By the washing of regeneration and renewing of the Holy Ghost, which he shed on us barely, no, abundantly.

He shed on us abundantly through Jesus Christ, our Savior, that, being justified by his grace, we should be made heirs according to the hope of eternal life.

And then one more verse.

It's Romans, chapter 6 and verse 3.

Romans 6 · chapter mention

Know ye not that so many of us as were baptized into Jesus Christ were baptized into his death.

Therefore, we are buried with him by baptism into death that, like his Christ, was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father.

Even so, we also should walk, or continue, in newness of life, and so all these verses are talking about newness, or renewed or new life.

I wanted to talk tonight about walking in the new.

It's vital for us believers to walk in the newness and the freshness of life.

When you look up Romans 6, 4 and the linguistic key to the Greek New Testament, it mentions that that word newness there is related to the idea of strangeness.

I mean, you know, when you're born again and you've been made a new creature in Christ Jesus, you're not the same person that people used to know.

I use Jesus as an example.

When he was risen from the dead, they didn't know who he was.

He said come over here and put your hands in the prints of my nails and put your hand in my side.

No, it's me.

So you know, he had the marks of the crucifixion, but he looked different.

And so there's a strangeness, there's a familiarity, and yet we're not quite the same.

There's something different about it.

See, that's what that newness means.

It's freshness, and it shouldn't be all the time, it shouldn't be just when we got saved, way back, you know, whenever that was it's.

It's that the verb there to be in Christ were new creatures.

We've been made new creatures.

That's continuing every single moment.

There's a regeneration that's happening all the time, constantly.

So we're constantly changing and growing in our spirit.

So, you know, roman six talks about in newness of life, life, that word life is Zoë, it's the Greek word Zoë.

It's the life that God lives, life as God lives.

It.

That's what Jesus came to give us.

He came to give us life.

He didn't come to make bad people good, he came to make, you know, lost people saved.

He came to get, make dead people live.

I was dead.

Now I'm alive, and I'm alive all the time, and that's the thing we need to walk in.

Yeah, we're surrounded by a world, largely, that's dead, that's separated from God and rushing to judgment.

And you know our job is to get a harvest out of that group of people.

We don't want to see them go to hell.

We want to see them, you know, saved.

And the gospel has the power, the gospel, the good news of being in Christ, that y'all you've got to do is say yes to him.

It's such good news that people need to hear that.

But at the same time, nations, peoples, are decaying.

They have the fragrance of death.

You know there's a verse in here, in 2 Corinthians 2, 15, 16,.

You know, we're the saver, or the fragrance of life unto life and death unto death.

What does that mean?

It says in them that perish.

We're the smell of death to them.

You know that's why a lot of times, people that are lost don't like to be around us.

They find it very uncomfortable.

I found that true in my own life.

I have a whole lot of people that I grew up with.

In my teenage years we have these class reunions and every one of them that's not saved.

They don't care anything about here and what I do.

You know, they don't want to know that, they don't want to think about that, they want to talk about the past.

Well, I don't want to talk about the past.

The past is when I was lost, but now I'm a new creature and so we're told in here in these verses, to walk in newness of life or continue that.

If we do, we'll be a fragrance of life and a beacon of life and a beacon of light in a dark world.

That's what the world needs right now is the church to be the church believers, to be believers, to be filled with the spirit of God, to have this washing of regeneration.

You know I like to use the new car illustration.

You know one of the.

You know I've had a lot of new cars and love car.

I'm a car person and I love cars.

And so, you know, every so often, even when they're not needed, I'll go buy a new one.

I know it's that's a wasteful.

Well, you know, whatever, that's my business.

You want to keep one until it falls apart, you go ahead.

I did that earlier in my life and so I got tired of working on old junkiepes.

But you know, one of the positives about a new car is that new car smell is just amazing, and then at some point we don't know how long it lasts.

Suddenly you go out there and it doesn't smell that way anymore.

It just disappears, it goes away.

You know, anything that just sits is just going to finally it's going to just sort of deteriorate.

That's just how it is.

You know, I went to the.

I had my truck washed and vacuumed and they asked me what kind of fragrance?

I said give me the new car.

Well, we don't have that anymore.

And I remembered that when the last time I had to put the new car fragrance in there, it didn't smell like the new car fragrance, it smelled like cherries or strawberries.

I'm like it.

It smelled terrible.

It did not smell anything like, you know, a new car.

So then I said, how about leather, if you got the leather smell?

And so yeah, we've got the leather smell.

It doesn't smell like leather.

I don't know what it smells like, but it doesn't smell like leather.

But I'm telling you, you know that new car smell.

You know, we have a fragrance of life under life and it has to be stirred up.

We have to be conscious of that newness of life.

We're challenged in these verses that I'm reading right now, to walk and continue in that newness of life, because we've been raised from the dead with Christ.

You know, I remember years and years ago my brother Bob, his wife Sylvie.

They had three young girls, lisa, don and Laurie, and little girls, you know, and they bought a big old station wagon.

He had a Ford first.

Then he bought this new Pontiac I think it was big, old, you know the fake wood sides and everything, and it had a real interesting back tailgate.

It had a tailgate that didn't open, you know.

It didn't fold out flat, it didn't open out wide, just the whole thing recessed into the bottom of the car and went under the third seat, the third seat in that station wagon, faced to the rear, and so the little girls loved to ride there because they could face out the back of the car and so that's where they always, you know, we had all this space in between mom and dad in the front.

Then you had the middle seat nobody's sitting there and then Lisa, don and Laurie sitting in the third seat looking out the back of the car, and they just thought it was so neat.

He would just turn a little key and that whole door would recess down into underneath where they were sitting and they would just hop out on the top of the bumper and get out of the car.

That way they didn't even go through the door, they went out the back tailgate.

So one day, you know, they went out there and it started smelling not so good.

It got worse and worse and it's still a new car and it lost a new car smell and started stinking.

And he finally had to take it to the dealer and they had to unhook all of that door mechanism and had to lift the floorboards up and get down under there and they found a ham sandwich that had fallen down in the space underneath that, the seats in the back, and it had, you know, decayed and you know that car was never the same, I mean.

But you know the Bible talks about regeneration.

You know, even if we've been backslid, even if we've done things we're ashamed of, you know the Holy Ghost can come in and regeneration can happen.

We can be washed with the washing of water by the Word.

I'm telling you we can regain that new car smell, if you want to put it that way.

You know, never the same, never the same.

You know talking about looking a little different.

When I first got saved I was still going to the Catholic Church for a few months until I heard, got grew up enough to hear from the Holy Ghost and find out that he was through with me going to the Catholic Church.

He wanted me at Lakewood and, but at first I didn't know that, so I was going to both churches.

I'd go to Catholic Church most of the time and then about once or twice a month we'd drive the drive out to Lakewood, go to Lakewood and, and at the time I was a Lecter in the Catholic Church, that's.

That's somebody that reads either one of the Old Testament verses or one of the New Testament verses in the mass.

So I participated in the mass by reading a portion of Scripture, and so I had to get there early and march in with the priest into the after boys and kind of ceremonial type thing, and you know dress up like you know with a suit and you know be presentable.

So the head guy that was head of the Lecters was there and he happened to be the other Lecter.

You know, this particular Sunday I think he was reading the Old Testament, I'm reading the New Testament verses and and he kept staring at me.

You know that little short Italian guy from Buffalo, new York, big old schnozola, you know he looked real Italian.

Now he was Italian and had that New York accent, you know.

And he said he said John.

He said I'm sorry to stare, but you just look so different.

He said have you lost weight or something?

I mean you should look different.

I said no, george.

I said what happened was I accepted Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior, I've been born again, I've been filled with a Holy Ghost, the evidence of speaking and other tongues.

I just let it all come out just all at one time, Just like that, like a fire hose, and he kind of blinked and his head went back a little bit and he blinked a couple more times and looked at me and says, oh, that's all it said.

I think he started smelling something that he wasn't, that he wasn't acquainted with.

But see, we're different.

We're different when we, when we're, we have to look, look, we can keep that all our Christian life.

It just has to be stirred up.

We have to stir it up.

Amen, we need to stir it up.

So Smith Wigglesworth one time tells the testimony of riding on a train full of preachers going to a meeting in Ireland.

And they're riding a train and he got up to go to the men's room.

And he's walking down the center aisle of this car, train carts going down the road, clickety clack down the tracks, clickety clack, you know.

And one of the preachers got up out of his seat as he passed him and he said, sir, you make me want to repent of my sin.

And he fell down on his knees in the middle of the aisle and began to weep and within a few minutes the whole car was weeping and repenting of their sins.

And some people got say, this is a car full of preachers going to a preacher's convention and some of them got saved and some of them were backslid.

I mean, it's amazing, just what was it?

It was, it was the newness of life that he walked in and it and it confronted the sin in their lives.

It confronted that other spirit that was trying to take over.

Oh, praise God, thank God for the Holy Ghost, thank God for the washing of regeneration and renewing of the Holy Spirit.

So let's look back at 2nd Corinthians, 517.

And again it says therefore, if any man, any person be in Christ, see the moment you get saved, that's when you're in Christ, you're baptized into Christ.

You're baptized into Christ's death and then.

So then when he's raised, you're raised.

So if any man, if any man, be in Christ, he is a new creature doesn't say he will become.

He became at one point and then it was over.

No, it's that.

That verb is is continual fulfillment.

So, every minute of every day, you're newer than you were the minute before.

You're constantly being regenerated, you're constantly being changed.

Now it's up to us then to stir that up, see, because if we don't stir it up, then nobody can tell the difference.

Yeah, it's kind of like, you know, leaving the leaving.

I was talking about this illustration the other day.

But when you leave the creamed gravy and the gravy boat out on the counter and you don't nobody's got the spoon in there taking it and putting it on their chicken fried steak, well, pretty soon what happens is get, a skin grows over the top of it.

You know, listen, there's, there's people walking around, they're saved, all right, but there's a skin, it's, there's a, there's a film over them, and it blocks this fragrance, it blocks this countenance that we're supposed to have everywhere we go Hallelujah, amen.

So old things are passed away and all things are become new.

See again that.

That is the present tense, present, perfect tense, which means continual fulfillment.

Every minute of every day you're becoming new, and a continuous action, not just back when you got saved.

The washing of regeneration by the word of God in Titus, the renewing of the Holy Ghost See, all of that speaks of newness, all of that speaks of fragrance, all of that speaks of cleansing.

Ephesians 5, 18,.

Be habitually and continually filled with the Holy Ghost.

Speak into yourself in Psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing, making melody in your heart to the Lord.

I spent a lot of time at one time in my life and around Brother Osteen.

Spent a lot of time around him and whenever he wasn't occupied in a specific task, he's praying another time and I and at first I, I, what, what, what did you say?

No, I'm just breaking another thing Got irritated cause he just speaking in other tongues.

He wasn't talking to me, he's talking to him, and so I had to get with that rhythm.

You know, on a trip, I mean he just sitting there in the airplane and 20 hour flight and he's praying in other tongues most of the time, or about that that I could tell him what was he doing.

He's stirring himself up.

He's keeping that fragrance going.

He's keeping that anointing flowing.

He's let.

Those living waters are ready to be tapped and that flood is ready to flood out over people that have need.

And and so Roman six says walk in newness.

In other words, that word walk means continue.

It doesn't just mean, you know, when you first get saved.

Continue in newness of life.

Yeah, we have to impose our fragrance of life and our countenance of light upon this world.

It has to be imposed, and the only way that we can do that is walk in the new.

So just three things tonight, just to.

These are things that you have heard and you just need to be reminded.

We all need to be reminded, especially when we have all this bad news hitting us.

I mean, I just, you know, I'm tempted, like you are.

I get so aggravated listening to all that's news and it's not news, it's propaganda and it's one sided.

It gets tiring.

How do we, how do we get over it?

Well, doing the things that I'm talking about tonight, we can walk in the newness of life.

We can keep that new car smell All right.

So walk in the new number one spiritually.

You know it's the word and the spirit.

Colossians 316, let's turn over there real quick.

Hope you're getting something out of this tonight.

I think we all need to stay fresh.

We need to all stay stirred up and on fire.

Colossians 316,.

Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, and all wisdom, teaching and admonishing one another in Psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with grace in your hearts to the Lord.

See, what happens is, when you get so filled and so stirred, you're gonna impact other believers, you're gonna impact your friends, you're gonna impact people that you work with here at the church.

Hear that you do the believer's ministry with.

And that's the way it ought to be.

When we stir ourselves up.

And so we have to feed our spirit on the Word of God and be continually, habitually filled with the Holy Ghost, the Word and the Spirit.

I've preached about this recently, about leaning depending on your spirit.

First, corinthians 14-4,.

He that prays in an unknown tongue edifies himself, and the word edify means build up from the foundation.

You know it means to rebuild, to repair, to restore.

See, sometimes we just get.

We get a little bit under attack, we get a little bit discouraged.

Hey, pray much in other tongues and your spirit will start getting built back up and you're gonna start repairing some things that, if you don't do that, you know you leave the devil, a door open for the devil to attack you.

Jude, verse 20,.

Building up yourself on your most holy faith, praying in the Holy Ghost.

So your spirit is you and you're continually made new and fresh.

And then, of course, as you do that, your spirit will dominate your mind and your body.

So walk in the new spiritually.

Then, number two walk in the new mentally, mentally, in your mind.

Romans 12-2,.

Be transformed by the renewing of your mind that you may prove what is that good, acceptable, perfect will of God.

Be transformed by the renewing of your mind.

When I was studying this, one time God says you know, you use the word renew and a lot of people they kind of lose the meaning of renew, save, refresh.

I mean, don't you have to use air freshener sometimes?

And so that's what we do.

We need some air freshener.

We need some freshener in our brain tissue because it gets stale up in there.

We start thinking the same old thoughts all the time, the worldly thoughts.

So as you feeding your spirit, you're actually renewing your mind to God, Bible truth.

That's exactly why you're doing two things at once when you read your Bible and pray.

You're actually doing what it takes to renew your mind.

And it says be transformed.

Transformed is a major word.

It means to look like something totally different.

See, that's what we've been talking about.

You look different.

Jesus looked so different after he rose from the dead.

His own disciples didn't know him.

They didn't know who he was.

So I mean, you know we have a lesser extent of that in this body now, but we need to get mentally refreshed, or renewed, or reprogrammed is a good word.

Reprogrammed, you know, you start reading your Bible now.

That's God's thoughts right there.

That's the.

These are the thoughts of God.

The thoughts of God are higher than our thoughts.

His ways are higher than our ways.

Where are his thoughts?

Where are his ways?

They're right here.

So that's why we need to read them every day.

When well, I've already read that, well, you need to read it again today because you need to have a fresh intake.

I mean, what?

What if you just had that glass of milk sitting out on the countertop and six months later you said you know what?

I need?

A glass of milk?

I think I'm gonna have this glass of milk.

You know, you probably have to take you to the emergency room.

Yeah, it just everything without it being used.

It just turns, it goes bad.

So let's stir it up and no longer conform to this world's way of thinking.

Be not conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.

So let's.

It's talking about this world's way of thinking.

When you watch the news on a continual basis, you're just getting this world's way of thinking about every single thing you can think, even if it's a good, even newsmax.

I can't watch newsmax very long.

It's it's.

I think they're telling mostly the truth, but I can't hear that all night long.

I can't, I don't wanna hear that.

It's all bad news to me.

I want I listen.

I have my faith out there.

I'm believing that God's gonna move in a mighty way in America.

God's not through with America and we're gonna have a revival.

That's what my faith's speaking and I don't want anything suggesting that that's not gonna be the case.

I don't agree with that.

There's a lot of people don't agree and they just think it's all over now.

See is since the FBI invaded Mar-a-Lago, they think it's all over.

What it's not all over?

No, we got a long way to go, hey man.

So you know the world's always looking back.

We need to look ahead.

It always thinks death.

It thinks victimhood.

We're looking to a bright future, praise God.

We're thinking life, we're thinking victory, we're thinking love, praise God.

And then the last one walk in the new, physically, and.

And so let's look at Romans again, your physical man, so important.

Verse 11 for.

But if the Spirit of him that raised up Jesus from the dead dwelling you how many of that's true?

See, holy Ghost Wells and you don't even Anybody to say it has to raise their hand.

Yes.

So if the Spirit of him that raised up Jesus from the dead dwelling you, he that raised up dead Christ from the dead, shall also quicken or make alive your mortal bodies, that by his spirit that dwelleth in you, I Just really believe that we don't have to die of all kind of diseases.

I don't believe we have to just get sick to die.

I believe that we can live as long as we are satisfied.

And just like the patriarchs of old, they would just gather the family around it's time to go home and they would gather their legs up underneath them and they just leave.

And they weren't sick.

I think about brother Hagan.

He died kind of at 83, but on the day he died.

Nobody knew he was gonna die, didn't prophesy I'm gonna die today, I'm leaving today.

No, he didn't tell anybody.

But he was sitting at home and sitting in his favorite chair and He'd just eaten his favorite meal and they brought him a big old bowl of strawberry shortcake and he loves strawberry shortcake and he had this big bowl and I mean it had the shortcake and then Strawberries and the whipped cream and man, he was just sitting there and eating that, shaking his head and smiling, and he leaned back and he left and he went to heaven.

I mean no sickness, no disease, no heart attack, no stroke.

You know, listen, you know we, we, we have a lot to say about our health.

If we're just speak health, if we won't, we'll speaks, don't speak sickness and disease.

I know many of you battling things.

Well, just, you know Psalm 103 5, something I talk about.

Say it, say every day, let's read it.

Get in front of you Psalm 103.

All these benefits, these are all benefits that belong to us and they're in the Old Testament.

We got a better covenant found upon better promises.

Who satisfies thy mouth with good, good things, so that my youth is renewed like the Eagles?

Hey, that's what I confess over myself, every morning my youth is renewed like the Eagles.

And besides that, you know, when I, after my open-heart surgery, god spoke to me.

He said I've reset your clock.

Please reset the clock to two minutes.

You know the, the two-minute warning, you know at the end of a football game, you know there, you know they have a play and then they have, you know, a penalty and everything, and they say please reset.

That's what I heard in my, in my, in my mind, when God spoke that to me and he reset my clock.

You know, really, the clock really means the clock ran out on that team going for the touchdown but the referee said, no, let's reset the clock.

And then they go in and they score and they win the game.

But really the game had run out of time but the but he, but the referee reset the clock.

Oh, my God reset my clock.

My clock had run out, praise God.

So I'm in charge of my clock.

Now pay more attention to my clock.

That is my mouth, so speak life to your body.

Look at all the people that aged in the Bible Abraham and Sarah, 190, 100 years old and 90 years old.

And I had a baby, zacharias and Elizabeth the same thing.

Moses lived a long time, abraham lived along 150.

Some audience I mean you know, wow, that's Bible.

I don't care, it's still people that had an old testament.

We've got a better covenant.

I don't think we've tapped into our health the way we can.

We give in to all of this, these spirit of lawlessness in our society.

And they're trying to sell us all these heavy drugs and every.

You know, if you watch television very long, they've got advertising after advertising of these drugs to help you with every kind of subject you can think of.

And when you go to buy those drugs they're so expensive that most people have to have financial help to get them.

I mean, they're making trillions of dollars off of sick people.

Sure, they want you sick because they want to bleed you dry before you die.

No, third John 2, god's priority is for us to prosper and be in health, even along life's journey.

They've been continue along life's journey.

So Proverbs 12, 18,.

The tongue of the wise is held.

So I speak to my body.

I speak.

I tell it how to feel.

I don't listen to how it feels, I tell it how it ought to feel.

And just one more little testimony in the Bible Testimony.

In my youth I had growing up around my family, my mother's oldest sister my mother was the youngest of four and her oldest sister, glaney, had married way back to an old wildcatter and his name was Jack and you know his family called him Daddy Jack.

He was kind of elderly, he was the elder statesman of the family because he was older than my dad and my uncles and they called him Daddy Jack and he was kind of old and little more gray-headed and, you know, kind of been over a little bit, and we would come to Referio from we lived in Houston We'd go to Referio to see my mother, would see her sister, and we'd stay there a couple of days and I'd be with my cousins and we'd be playing around in the house, my aunt's house, and they would come and they'd say Now, shh, y'all be getting too loud, you're going to have to be real quiet.

Daddy Jack's back in that bathroom, in the back room back there and he's laying down.

Doctors told him he had to have his rest.

You know he could just he could just dive a heart attack any moment.

So you've got to get.

You're being too loud.

You just quiet down now or go outside, because he's got to have his rest.

So we were always told how frail he was, how he was about ready to kill over dead.

Yeah, you know, that's what you think when you're a little kid you think he's going to die.

You know, right now, and it'd be a hundred degrees outside and he'd wear a jacket, he'd have a hat and gloves to drive this old, unair conditioned Oldsmobile, this ancient, rusty looking, look like a big roach.

You know, driving down the road He'd take me to go get a block of ice.

You know, for the ice box they didn't have a refrigerator, they had an ice box, anyway.

So I grew up with that, that old man.

See, he's old.

Well, I was still remembering.

It was 1958.

My aunt Glaney died.

She died of cancer and this old man, her grave wasn't even the flowers weren't wilted on her grave when he remarried and he was older than she was at that time and he lived at least another 30 years.

Oh, daddy Jack had died any moment.

Well, you know what I made up my mind.

If Daddy Jack can live that long, if you're being an old geezer, I you know, I'm serving God, I can live as long as I want to, so can you.

All we have to do is walk in the new.

Let's determine ourselves to walk in the new.

Amen, lift your hands and receive tonight.