301 ~ INHERITING THE RESURRECTION LIFE - Part 1

We welcome you to the We Are Zion sermon podcast.

We are a church based out of Chennai, India.

We are thrilled that you tuned in today and hope that you will

be refreshed, revived, and energized by what you hear.

Our desire is that you will live life with a renewed sense of

purpose that stems from a vibrant faith in Jesus.

Jesus is the giver of life and when we invite him into our

heart, he brings new life into every aspect of our life.

This Lent, we pray that you will experience this new life in

amazing ways and carry its power into the world so that all may

know the way, the truth, and the life.

As we just saw, we are talking this entire month and a little

bit more right up into Easter about inheriting this new life,

inheriting the resurrection life.

And today we're looking at Part 1, which is basically death to

sin and alive in Christ. Now what does this look like?

Right? Something has got to change.

That's what I gave. You know, the subtitle, if I'm

going to call it death to sin and alive to Christ, my subtitle

is something has got to change. What do I mean by that?

You know that when we become believers, when we start

following Jesus, when we call ourselves disciples of Jesus,

when we have accepted him through the, you know, just

praying and inviting him in, at that moment of salvation,

everything changes. I think it was Eugene Peterson

who said it's literally like being transferred from the old

country of sin into the new country of grace, right?

And being dead to sin and alive in Christ, he says, is like as

if you were living in this country of sin.

There's a whole country of sin, but you moved house into the

country of grace. That's what it looks like.

And I really was, you know, when I was mulling over it and

looking at these different chapters called the apostle Paul

writes a lot about this. In fact, it seems like his

life's mandate to encourage people to find Christ so that

they can live out this new life. And the new life looks nothing

like the old. Irrespective of, and you think

about it, Paul, he was a Jew. He had the law and the prophets

in his hand. He was victimizing and

persecuting the the sect of Christianity.

He was doing everything that he thought was right to, you know,

serve his God to advance Judaism.

And God meets him and says, why are you persecuting?

And then his life is dramatically changed because of

that experience. And he says that you know what,

I'm the worst of sinners. He talks about his past being so

fanatical and says how he missed the mark and how God had rescued

him. And so sometimes, you know, when

we think about this dead to sin, alive in Christ, we sometimes

count ourselves out of that thing.

You know what? I was really not dead to sin.

I didn't do such bad things. And so we're going to be looking

at what this looks like practically.

But before we look at the practical outworking of it,

we're first going to understand what it actually means to be

dead to sin and alive in Christ. And we're going to be looking at

Ephesians chapter 2, verses 4 to 7.

Ephesians 2:4–7

And before we even get there, I want to just give you this, you

know, statutory warning that this is a lifelong process.

Walking in freedom, living a life to Christ is a lifelong

thing. It is not one and done.

What Jesus did on the cross was one and done.

But us working out our salvation on a daily basis with the help

of the Holy Spirit, it is an everyday thing.

It's a lifelong thing. There was someone who told the

evangelist Stanley Jones this. He was an expert in airplanes,

this friend of his. And so he told Stanley Jones

that it takes twice the power for the machine to rise from the

water as it does for it to fly. The earth and water seem loath

to let it go. What does he mean by that?

It is hard to let go of old sins and old patterns and addictions

and the things of the past in pursuit of the new life in

Christ. It is hard work.

It is hard, and thanks be to God that we don't do it alone.

The Holy Spirit is the one who provides us the fuel and the

ability to actually be transformed.

It's really not about us striving because salvation

itself was a gift. We didn't do anything to earn

our salvation. It was grace.

And therefore even the sanctification process is

mediated by the the amazing work of the Holy Spirit.

So even as we get into this, I don't want you to be

discouraged. I don't want you to be

disheartened. I want you to look at this and

say, Holy Spirit, I'm giving you room.

Help me to live dead to sin and alive to Christ.

We're going to be looking at Ephesians 2 verses four to

seven, it says. But because of His great love

for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ

even when we were dead in transgressions.

It is by grace you have been saved.

And God raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the

heavenly realms in Christ Jesus in order that in the coming

ages, He might show the incomparable riches of His grace

expressed in His kindness to us in Christ Jesus.

If you look at this, it's talking about how salvation,

like I said, is an act of God's grace, his favor upon our lives.

It has nothing to do with something we earned.

And then he also says that we went just, yes, we were saved to

reconcile us to God, to bring us back into close communion with

God. But it's also so that through

our lives, through us, he would display his kindness and grace

to others. So it's always twofold.

It's not only about ourselves. Salvation is also about others,

right? And so this made us alive.

Made us alive is actually a quickening of the Spirit.

It's enlivening someone. And when Jesus rose from the

grave, every believer or in him received that resurrection power

as well. They and us included.

We are alive with Him. That's what it means.

What does it mean to be dead in our transgressions?

The word there is actually Necross.

The necros means, as you know, the word necrosis, something

that is rotting and decaying and damaged.

And imagine that when Jesus found us, each of us, we were

dead in our transgressions. And then because of his work on

the cross and his rising from the dead, we were made alive in

Christ. So while salvation's main

purpose is to draw you and me back to our Creator, I believe a

secondary purpose is that we would live for him, so that a

watching world, you know, draws others to him.

I was reading the story of how this man found a little dog with

a broken limb at his gate. And so, feeling pity for the

little animals, a little stray, he took her in, nursed her back

to health so that the limp disappeared and she completely

became better. And one day she disappeared.

You know, after enjoying a couple of weeks of just running

around the house and recovering and coming back into full

strength, the dog disappeared. And the man was heartbroken.

He thought, wow, was the dog really that ungrateful?

And he was grieving about it for a few hours when the next

morning when he woke up there was a scratching on his front

door and lo and behold, the same dog had returned and not alone

had brought another dog in who was also limping in one limb.

Almost as if to say, you healed me, you saved me.

Can you do the same for this guy?

That is our job as believers. We were not saved just for

ourselves. We were saved so that others

would see God's work in US and say, hey, I want what you have.

And in Ephesians, Paul goes on to say that we were created in

Christ Jesus to do good works which he prepared in advance.

So we, we are not saved by our good works because it's just

grace, but we are saved to do good so that many come to the

saving knowledge of Jesus. So my question to you is this,

are we living a life that is so transformed, so changed that the

world that watches us says, hey, I want Jesus because Jesus did

that for them. I want Jesus in my life too.

I was reading a couple of stories about how the Christian

minority should have increased globally, but the main deterrent

to the growth of Christianity is Christians.

Did you know that Mahatma Gandhi said I love Christ, but

Christians not so much. He actually said this.

It is a first class human tragedy that people of the earth

who claim to believe in the message of Jesus, whom they

describe as the Prince of Peace, show little of that belief in

actual practice. What a tragedy indeed.

I was reading a person on Instagram had written about how

he's friends with a Jewish rabbi.

And you know, his question to the rabbi is how come you still

haven't accepted Jesus? And he said, well, Jews judge a

rabbi by the behaviour of his followers because, you know, a

rabbi had these followers were apprentices, talmid, that's the

word. And these guys just did

everything that the rabbi taught them.

They lived out what he taught. And my question and you know

that the teacher's reputation travel through the students.

So our question is, does our life communicate our rabbi's

teaching? Does our life translate as the

Master speaking through US, doing through US, or are we a

deterrent to the gospel being spread?

Is my life a deterrent? So coming back to this idea of

new life in Christ, this is just something I want to leave with

you, whether, you know, we actually are impacting the world

because of the new life we carry.

But how do we understand this new life?

What is this new life? You're probably saying, I've

read it probably just axiomatically like I have done,

and we're going to go through it verse by verse from Romans

Romans 6 · chapter mention

chapter 6. And you know, Romans, I have

this mind block against Romans where it just feels too

difficult to understand. But I want us to read it.

We're going to read it in chunks and just kind of understand it

and then get to the practical application of this Romans

Romans 6:1–14

chapter 6, verses 1 to 14. What shall we say then?

Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase?

By no means. We are those who have died to

sin. How can we live in it any

longer? Don't you know that all of us

who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his

death? We were therefore buried with

him through baptism into death in order that just as Christ was

raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may

live a new life. We're going to just pause there.

So he's basically talking about how every new believer in the

early church and even today, one of the steps we encourage a new

believer to take his baptism. It's not a compulsory thing.

We don't, we don't stuff, you know, stuff it down someone's

throat. But it is preferable to walk

through the waters of baptism to actually identify with Jesus, to

publicly declare, hey, this is who I'm following.

And also to ascertain that you know what?

I am dying with Jesus when I go under the waters, and I'm being

resurrected with him when I come out.

So it's a powerful symbolism, one that, you know, a lot of

people argue with us about. Should I get baptized?

You know, I love Jesus and all of that.

And we only have one explanation for that.

If Jesus did it without argument, I don't think we need

to be arguing about it, right? Jesus tells John that let's do

this to fulfill all righteousness.

And so Jesus did it. I think I want to do what Jesus

did. That should put an end to any

argument. So baptism is important in just

symbolizing this deeper truth that I'm being baptized into

death. I go under the waters

symbolizing death and come out a new creation on its own.

It's just a ritual. It doesn't mean anything on the

surface of it, but it is representative of a deeper

spiritual truth. Continuing to read, it says For

if we have been united with him in a death like his, we will

certainly also be united with him in a resurrection like his.

For we know that our old self was crucified with him so that

the body ruled by sin might be done away with, that we should

no longer be slaves to sin because anyone who has died has

been set free from sin. So Paul is basically making a

case for resurrection. He's saying, hey, you know what?

If we have been united in his death, it's like an equation.

United in death, therefore united in resurrection.

That's what he's saying. But he's saying that when you

die to sin, you're basically no longer a slave to it.

And when someone dies, think about it, If you, if you've had

a loved one go through prolonged sickness and then enter glory

through death, you, you have this sense of relief that

they're no longer suffering, right?

They're free from the brokenness of earth.

And that's what he's talking about.

And it's the spiritual reality that he's talking about.

Here is what the gospel writer said, that whom the sun sets

free is free indeed. And so the death and

resurrection of Jesus has set us free from sin and death now and

forever. Continuing to read now.

If we died with Christ, we believe that we will also live

with him. For we know that since Christ

was raised from the dead, he cannot die again.

Death no longer has mastery over him.

The death he died, he died to sin once for all, but the life

he lives, he lives to God in the same way, count yourselves dead

to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus.

So basically, if you look at this, the whole point is this

you and I died to sin when we accepted Jesus and we live

alive, vitalized, revitalized, just to enjoy communion with

God. You know, in the Garden of Eden,

that was the thing that was lost, the communion between

Adam, Eve and God. They would walk in the cool of

of the day, enjoy each other's company, talking as you know, as

you know, deep friend, there was a deep friendship.

There was so much love and open communication which broke at the

tree of good and evil when they consumed the fruit.

And in Jesus dying and being risen again, that communion was

being restored. Isn't that amazing?

So that you and I can walk close together.

So you and I can walk with God close together.

Continuing to read. Therefore do not let sin reign

in your mortal body so that you obey its evil desires.

Do not offer any part of yourself to sin as an instrument

of wickedness, but rather offer yourselves to God as those who

have been brought from death to life, and offer every part of

yourself to Him as an instrument of righteousness.

For sin shall no longer be your master, because you are not

under the law, but under grace. This is a very loaded set of

sentences. He's basically giving them a

command. He says you come into this new

life. Let not sin be the thing that

drives your life. Your old life, whether you liked

it or not, was driven by your passions, your desires, your

flesh, your lusts, your desires, your ambitions, but now in the

new life. This is a life mediated by the

Spirit of God. Do things which are pleasing to

God. Do things that He leads you to

do, which will edify others, which will bless Him.

And you know, you're probably thinking, well, I don't do these

terrible sins that, you know, probably the Bible lists.

Maybe you know, you feel, you know what I thought I was saved

once. I think that covered it.

I thought the blood of Jesus covered all of it.

I just want to help you reframe that because when Jesus came to

the earth, when you look at the Gospel writers, they would talk

about what Jesus taught them. And one of the things Jesus did

was he redefined sin to the people he was teaching and to

us. In the Old Testament, there were

these serious commands that were given to Moses up on the

mountain where he was received over 40 days.

God gives him instructions, and then following that, there were

more instructions given. So the people had a lot to keep

track of. But in the New Testament, Jesus

broadly classified it into two. He said love the Lord your God

with all your heart, soul, mind and strength.

And he said, love your neighbor as yourself, which kind of

summed up all of the law, right? But he also changed the way we

view the law. So basically, he said, you know

what? If you look at someone with

lust, you're committed adultery. He said if you were cursing your

brother or you call them an idiot, you were actually guilty

of being in front of the Sanhedrin, accused of murder

because you were slandering someone.

You were killing their reputation.

He talks of judging others as sin.

He says don't fixate on other sin and overlook yours.

He talked about how being fake and hypocritical was such a big

sin. He talked about people having

insidious ideas that spread and corrupted others like the East.

He reframed the idea of sin. And you know, in doing that, he

made us look at it through the lens of grace, that we are saved

by grace, but this grace cannot be stretched to to ripping it

apart. And this grace has been given to

us so that we walk everyday mindful of this grace involving

the Holy Spirit in our lives so that he helps us move past old

patterns into freshness. So in this reframing, like he

says over here, don't let sin reign.

He's talking about stuff that was ruling and reigning in your

life, needing to make an exit so that there would be room for the

new life. And he says offer every part of

your life, which means every part of your body, what you

view, what you touch, what you indulge in, what you speak, what

you're thinking, where your feet take you, every element of your

life, your work life, your private life, your personal

desires, your ambitions, the motives of your heart.

Everything has to come under the lordship of Christ.

It can't just be lip service. We offer because that ended when

Jesus came to us. So when we come down to the rest

of the thing. It talks about these phrases.

If you notice, for you have died to sin, you are alive in Christ.

And as I was looking through it in the, you know, there was this

the strong's concordance. I like to look at these words

and understand them. I was curious about the tense of

these words, you know, like past tense, present tense.

We know that. So when I was reading it had

this weird grammatical sentence. They had said the phrases died

to sin and alive in Christ are aorist active verbs.

So I went to Google and I said, what is an aerist verb?

It's basically a Greek word which is in its past tense, and

this is what it says. It's a completed action in the

past. It's a single completed action

in the past, which means when you and I were saved, we were

made dead to sin, alive to Christ.

One single moment, a single action.

And yet Paul also writes about how work out your own salvation

with fear and trembling. He talks about being sanctified

by the Spirit. He says let's keep in step with

the Spirit, be transformed, that we are moving from one place of

one stage of glory to another because the more we are in

contact with Jesus. So what does this actually mean?

So if at the moment of salvation we got our freedom from sin and

death, we were launched into living this new life, this

vitalized life, it should have ideally been done there and we

should be able to live completely free of sin,

completely free from temptation. But that's not an ideal

situation. We live in a fallen world.

We have people who have been touched by that fallenness.

We deal with everyday situations where our integrity is tested,

our morality is tested, and therefore it demands that we

take an active involvement along with the Holy Spirit to actually

walk out the new life. We can't do it in our own

strength. We cannot strive, we cannot will

ourselves to do it. But with the Holy Spirit's help,

being completely pliable by Him, we can actually walk into the

newness of life, right? Because in living this new life,

things change, you know, many times.

When we live the Christian life, sometimes you'll notice a season

where you feel stagnant. You don't have joy.

You don't have a pep in your step.

You're wondering, God. It just feels like, you know,

like before. Because as soon as I got saved,

it felt like, you know, my senses were cleared up.

I could smell the roses. I could hear, you know, the

birds. And now I feel clogged up again.

And maybe it's time to check the drains.

Maybe it's time to go back and say, hey, am I really living the

new life in Christ? And like I said about what

Eugene Peterson compared it to, he said it's like having a house

in the old country of sin. When you are saved, you move

house and you come into the new country of grace.

But you know, I want to just kind of drag that out a bit

more, drag that analogy out a bit more.

Many times we do vacate, but when we come into the new

country of grace, we bring all the building materials from the

old house. And unfortunately in the old

life, those building materials were probably mouldy with, with

shame, with doubt, with self hate.

Probably it was moth eaten because of, of, you know,

spiritual decay and and religiosity.

Maybe it was rusted because of just being so oppressed by

situations, being traumatized and living under that trauma.

And so I bring those defiled building materials into the land

of grace and start attempting to rebuild my life here.

And no wonder the new life in Christ doesn't look new, but

just looks like a repeat of the old in a different landscape.

And so today I want us to look at how although the struggle

with sin is ongoing, like someone said, salvation has

these three parts where you know, in justification, the

penalty for sin is is dealt with.

Jesus paid the full penalty on the cross so you and I don't

have to pay it. And then through sanctification,

this life on earth, when God is sanctifying us through the work

of the Holy Spirit, the power of sin is being lost that it no

longer has a hold on us. It's gone and we're walking that

out towards eternity. And then in the future there's

glorification where the presence of sin is gone completely.

We live in communion with Jesus in heaven where there is no sin.

But while we are here, we're in the now and not yet.

We're in the middle. And in the middle, it is messy

because we're still having this ongoing struggle with our flesh.

There's a lot of oppression that we feel from the enemy.

And so navigating that will require us to be heavily

dependent on God, right? Because when on earth, we're

dealing with the temptations and trappings of the earth.

And so today I'm hoping that I would help you and help myself

arrive at what is keeping us from living this new life.

This week I was just going through a lot of the scriptures

that God had given me over the last year and saying, you know

what, Lord, I'm not feeling the joy of this new season.

And, you know, God really moved me to see areas where the old

stuff was still dogging me, you know, those old materials that

had brought into this new season.

And God was saying it's time you get rid of it.

It's time to rebuild from the ground up, which means certain

foundations had to be thrown out.

Certain belief systems that I had carried in from my childhood

had to be completely broken up and thrown out.

And so we're going to be looking at Colossians chapter 2 to

Colossians 2 · chapter mention

understand why it is so hard for us to actually break free of the

old patterns and actually live in the newness of life that

Christ got for us. Colossians chapter 2, verses 13

Colossians 2:13

onwards. It says when you were dead in

your sins, and in this uncircumcision of your flesh,

God made you alive with Christ. He forgave us all our sins.

Having cancelled the charge of our legal indebtedness which

stood against us and condemned us, He has taken it away,

nailing it to the cross. And having disarmed the powers

and authorities, He made a public spectacle of them

triumphing over them by the cross.

I'm reading verses 20 to 23. It says since you died with

Christ to the elemental spiritual forces of this world.

Why, as though you still belong to the world, do you submit to

its rules? Do not handle, do not taste, do

not touch. These rules which have to do

with things that are all destined to perish with yous are

based on merely human commands and teachings.

Such regulations indeed have an appearance of wisdom with their

self-imposed worship, false humility, and their harsh

treatment of the body, but they lack any value in restraining

sensual indulgence. Now you're probably thinking

those were just a whole bunch of high sounding words because

that's how I felt when I was reading this.

I was like, it took me 5 days to just really understand even this

and I don't think I've still understood it fully.

There's just so much of meat to chew on, but I want to leave it

in three easy, you know, points for you to remember as to what

could be the barriers for us living this new life so that

when we know the barrier, we find the opportunity behind it

or we find a solution to it. So the first barrier is the

presence of open doors. If you looked at verses 13 to

15, it talks about how in Christ he forgave us all our sins,

having cancelled the charge of our legal indebtedness.

What is this legal indebtedness? So when you and I commit a sin,

we incur a debt. The enemy actually, because we

have actually, you know, committed this grave sin.

So let's say I have got caught up in, in a, in a moment of

greed and I cheated someone else.

There is a repercussion for it, right?

This repercussion, because of this repercussion, there is a

legal indebtedness. The enemy has a hold over me,

right? And it's, there's a distance

that gets formed between me and God.

Now during salvation, every sin has been covered, yes, but we

keep accessing that forgiveness when we repent anew and a flesh

and we, we don't lose the joy of our salvation because of the

separation. We don't lose salvation.

We lose the joy that came with it.

And so this legal indebtedness is something that we have to

understand, at least in a broader sense.

We, I, we don't know the full details of how this works, but

when I engage in any sin, I get yoked to the enemy.

I give him access to my life. What does that look like?

Open doors. Sometimes the open doors are

very blatant because of witchcraft or dabbling in the

occult, but sometimes there's milder things which open the

door nevertheless. One of those is bitterness.

One of those is jealousy, envy, anger, lust, greed, anything of

the flesh which gratifies ourselves, which hurts someone

else, which is not the way God intended, which is against God's

commands, opens a doorway for the enemy.

I remember a couple of months back we had a person come and

clean our house. I think Geshram shared about

him. And you know, he's like the Holy

Spirit who, you know, infiltrates every room, cleans

up everything. And so we have this back net

door. And I think the picture will

come up. We have this net door.

So a couple of months back a rat or something had bitten, had

gnawed on the net and created quite a big hole.

And the the gaping hole was there for a good part of a year,

right? We did think of changing it, but

never got around to doing it. We were a bit lazy.

We were putting it off. We thought, you know what, when

we paint the house, we'll probably replace that.

And this man was one day cleaning the kitchen when he saw

it. And he told me, you know what,

I'll just get a new net and I'll repair it for you.

And I didn't expect him to do such a good job, but he replaced

the entire net. And I love that net door because

it lets wind in from outside. It's still airy.

We get fresh air with a dog in the house.

Nothing like fresh air. So I love having the back door

open. And I realized that I had gotten

used to having a hole in the net, knowing that our house is

surrounded by all kinds of creepy crawlies in the field

behind and anything could have entered.

I knew it, but I allowed it because I thought, you know,

it's not the biggest deal. I mean, if a creature had to

come through that, they probably have to really hurt themselves

and come in. I had excused it, assuming that

the door was closed. Nothing could come in.

But a lot of times the enemy utilizes any opening in our the

doorways of our life to sneak in.

Sometimes when we need to enter the new life that God has for

us, we have to slam the door in the face of addictions.

There are some relationships which absolutely have to end in

order to actually step into the new life.

These are toxic relationships. These are relationships that do

not honour God. They probably lead you down a

path of sin and, and complete depravity.

And in those cases, what we do many times is instead of

slamming the door and locking it, we actually put a net door

so that we have like a whiff of the old life now and then.

You know, when I miss it, I just kind of, you know, have this

person in my life to remind me of what I'm missing.

Open doors cause legal indebtedness.

The enemy has control over the parts that you let him into.

What are the doors that are open to you?

Are you entertaining holes in your doors?

Because remember this, you can fortify your life completely.

You can do all that is right. But if you have that one open

door, that one conversation with someone which has let the enemy

in through the back door, not physically cheap, but

emotionally be distant from your spouse.

Maybe it is that one substance that you put into your body

which you know is not good for you, which you know the Lord has

been convicting you about, But you're saying it doesn't matter,

it's not harming someone else, it's still an open door.

Maybe it is the simple thing of envy that you feel for others

and you're thinking, well, it's so private, who knows?

Well, I want to tell you that the Holy Spirit knows

everything. He lives in you, He's with you

and these open doors are spaces that the enemy sneaks in.

He's given the the description of a lion, a roaring lion

waiting to devour, waiting outside.

He's just crouching at the door. The minute the door is open, he

steps in. He's also likened to a snake.

So those holes in those net doors of your life, the ones

that you are keeping open to have best of both worlds, he

will sneak in. So it's important for us to

identify the presence of open doors.

That's one reason why we actually struggle with living

the new life the second. Thing is submission to.

The wrong master. If you look at this, it talks

about how you died with Christ to the elemental spiritual

forces of this world. So why do you still belong to

the world? Why do you submit to its rules?

Why do you do what it says when it says Do not handle, do not

touch, do not do this. These are all merely human

commands and teachings. We're living in a time when the

New Age agenda has infiltrated the entire world.

I was recently sitting on a couple of sessions.

It was like a teaching session on trauma.

And as someone who works with people through movement and

other things, I wanted to understand more about trauma.

I thought I knew about it a little bit from my own journey

in it, but it was very informative.

We were sitting on, you know, these YouTube live sessions with

three big shots in the space of psychiatry.

And one of those guys was an author of a book that was

suggested to me many years back when I was journeying through my

own season of healing. And he wrote this book.

And so I wanted to sit in on his session.

And as I was sitting in on the session and listening to him

speak, I was so disappointed because all of these

psychiatrists who people trust their lives to go and sit with

are very clearly engaging in practices that followers of

Jesus shouldn't dabble in. And that's when I realized, so

this book was suggested to be my my psychologist.

She was my counselor. She said, you know what, this

book will be amazing for you. You need to read it.

The book changed my life in really enabling me to understand

there was scientific backing to dance and art and other things

as forms of therapy for people to heal.

So that part is solid science. But you know, all these add-ons

were disappointing. And that's when I realized,

that's when I realized that people have think they have

answers. If you, you just have to go to

YouTube and say, how do I lose weight on this part of my body?

And you have a video for it. You just have to go to Google.

You ask what are the best foods to eat for such and such medical

condition. And you get article after

article. What did people do 20 years back

before the Internet? I don't know, but we're living

in such a time when people when man has answers for seemingly

everything. But my question is, who are you

submitted to? And this is what the Lord taught

me this week. He said while this book helped

you, while this person has a lot of knowledge, you cannot be

subject and submit yourself to His leadership in your life.

I need you to put me as the ultimate leader in your life.

Jesus, the Word, the living Word, the Word who became flesh

has to be superimposed. He is the one I submit to.

I will not submit to. The the teachings.

Of the world, I can learn it, I can read it for the sake of

education, for the sake of understanding more, for better

understand the scope of, you know, the workout there.

But I cannot submit myself to what they advocate.

And I wonder how many of us have submitted to the wrong thing,

submitted to the wrong master. Maybe you're thinking if I go to

this guru, if I go to this, you know, this particular art form,

which is, you know, of another culture near Oriental culture.

Maybe if I try this thing that others are doing, it might work

well. I want to just encourage you to

refocus and ask yourself, am I submitted to the right master

the. Third thing.

The third. Thing that could be keeping you

from actually living the new life is the display of false

fruit. If you look at that verse, he

says such regulations have an appearance of wisdom with their

self-imposed worship, their false humility, their harsh

treatment of the body, but they lack any value in restraining

sensual indulgence. Now this is how you have to view

it. If it's a plant, I'm going to

show you this picture of this plant in my garden.

So I have a cactus which I was growing in this pot and out of

the blue, this little plant started growing up beside it,

right? It looks perfectly beautiful.

The leaves are so symmetric, so adorable to look at.

So I just let it grow because you know what I'm I'm a sucker

for beauty. So I said, well, it looks really

nice. The cactus pot is rather empty,

so let it grow on the side. But here's the thing.

This plant may look perfectly healthy, perfectly beautiful,

but its roots don't go deep, but it's nevertheless rooted in the

soil. And it is a weed.

It isn't a genuine plant. It's not a garden plant.

It's not a flowering variety. It is actually an insidious

weed, right? And many times, many of us

display false fruit. We display this thing that is so

godly or that I'm doing so much for God.

I serve, I teach in Sunday school, I'm bringing my kids up

amazingly, I am doing the social work, blah, blah, blah.

But I wonder what our roots actually show.

Because the roots are where the real story lies.

The roots determine the fruit. You can be displaying all kinds

of fruit, but if your roots are bitter, if your roots are not

rooted in Jesus, if your roots are not being held by the Word

of God, watered by His Spirit, there is a problem.

The fruit is false. And I.

Wonder how many of us can? Say to ourselves, be honest with

ourselves. This fruit is just for display

purposes. It's not genuine.

I remember we once took our oldest son when he was a little

baby. We took him to some store and

they had a bowl of plastic fruit and he got so excited thinking

it was the real deal and justice before he popped an apple slice

in his mouth. We had to show him the Velcro

behind it and say, son, this is not real.

And I wonder if our lives are like that, if we've just, you

know, spray painted the fruit in our lives and said, hey, guess

what? I'm this person of incredible

spirituality. I am so religious.

I do all things so perfectly. That is the demonstration of

false root because the roots will say who you really are.

So how do we practically outwork living dead to sin and being

alive to Christ just from these three symptoms?

Like I said, open doors, right submission to the wrong master

and display a falsehood. How do we actually live opposed

to that? How do we actually live out this

new life? The first thing is if there are

open doors that you have identified, you need to close

them decisively. You absolutely have to close

those doors. You cannot keep the net door on

and say, you know what? I can.

I've got the confidence in myself that I can, you know,

withstand temptation. I can guarantee you in a weaker

moment you'll give in where you need to put an iron door,

metaphorically speaking, and lock it and throw the key away.

You should do it if it's that old relationship, if it is

tampering with substances that have harmed your body in the

past, if it has been something that has completely dragged you

down, left you feeling like you were completely useless.

Those are indications of the things you need to close the

door on. Colossians chapter 3 verses. 5

Colossians 3 · chapter mention

to 11 says Put to death. Therefore, whatever belongs to

your earthly nature, sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil

desires, greed, which is idolatry.

Because of these the wrath of God is coming.

You used to walk in these ways, the life you once lived, but now

you must also rid yourself of all these other things, anger,

rage, malice, slander, filthy language from your lips.

Do not lie to each other, since you've taken off your old self

with its practices and have put on the new self which is being

renewed in knowledge in the image of its Creator.

Here there is no Gentile or Jews, circumcised or

uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian slave are free, but

Christ is all as and is in all I'm.

Going to read also Galatians 5. Verse 19, which is the acts of

the flesh are obvious sexual immorality, impurity,

debauchery, idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, discord,

jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions,

envy, drunkenness, orgies and the like.

I warn you, as I did before, that those who live like this

will not inherit the Kingdom of God.

Those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with

his passions and desires. Let us not become conceited,

provoking and envying each other.

You might wonder why I read so much because as as humans, we

have this tendency to minimize what we do and say, well, I

didn't murder anyone. Well, if you have been

struggling with conceit, you think you're better than others.

If you've been envying someone else, if you have a classist

mindset, this is for us because we don't get an out.

Whatever is of the flesh, whatever is the past, life has

to die in Christ. The door has to be shut.

What is the door you have left open?

What is the door that you have left open?

That the enemy has come in and he has occupied that territory.

What is the space you need to make for more of the Holy

Spirit? When you look at these two

passages and, there are many more passages in the New

Testament where it's very clear the.

Things that we need to put to. Death the things we need to get

rid of. You might say, well, I don't

dabble in witchcraft. Well, if you rebel against God

and and leadership that he's installed the sin of rebellion

is as witchcraft. The Bible says if you are

someone who wishes bad for other people, that's witchcraft.

If you slander someone thinking well, you know what they harmed

me, let me speak back. That comes under one of these

big sins. Anything that comes here that is

described as put to death, it means the door needs to be shut

on. It cannot be something we

entertain. It cannot be something we

cohabit with. It has to be done harshly, dealt

harshly with. It's important that we begin to

decisively close the door on these things.

How do you do that? Well, we're going to come to

that in a bit, but the first thing is to actually say, you

know what, Lord, I'm done with this.

I don't want to engage in this particular act.

I don't want to engage with this emotion.

I want to really beat greed at its game.

I want to stop. And God will give you the

ability to make those decisions. God will teach you where to

actually draw the line so that the door is closed.

The. Second thing is submission to.

The wrong master we talked about.

God will enable you to submit yourself to Jesus Holy again.

It's it's the work of the Holy Spirit in US.

It is not possible on her own. But when the Holy Spirit comes

in, he makes us aware of these open doors.

He makes us aware of the things we have been flirting with,

engaging with, and he brings us to this place where we go on our

knees and fall before God and say, you know what Lord, I can't

do this without you. I'm not able to stop getting

angry on my own with my spouse, but I know with your help you'll

help me because you care about our marriage.

You care about my spouse. You don't want her or him hurt.

So help me. Submission.

Submission to the wrong master changes with submission to the

one true Master. Colossians chapter 2 verses 16

Colossians 2:16–19

to 19. And the message says this.

So don't put up with anyone pressuring you in details of

diet, worship services, or holy days.

All those things are mere shadows cast before what was to

come. The substance is Christ.

Don't tolerate people who try to run your life, ordering you to

bow and scrape, insisting that you join their obsession with

the angels and that you seek out visions.

There are a lot of hot air. That's all they are.

They're completely out of touch with the source of life, Christ,

who puts us together in one piece, whose very breath and

body flow through us. He's the head and we are the

body. We can grow up healthy in God

only as he nourishes us, even in James the apostle James, right?

Submit yourself to God, resist the enemy and he will flee from

you, right. And he says, you know, grieve

moan. We'll change your laughter to

mourning in your joy to gloom. Humble yourself before God S

that He will lift you up. Submission is an act of will in

the sense that you have to come to God and say Lord I humble

myself before you. I am unable to do this on my

own. I need you.

This is the life you got for me Lord, on that cross through the

tomb and I want to live it. But will you help me?

It comes down to submitting and laying it all down before the

right Master. I want to ask you.

Have you been pressurized? By people who say they're

masters in certain things. We have people who are experts,

who are motivational speakers and while their content could be

great. Have you been submitting to?

Them rather than submitting to God.

Have you been following people who are obsessed on certain

things theologically but miss the whole story of Jesus,

keeping their eyes on Jesus? Too many times we're idolizing

men and women. We're calling them spiritual

parents. We are elevating them.

And when they fall, the fall is hard for us because we have

placed them in such a placement. That place should have been only

occupied by Jesus. No one else.

Have mentors, have leaders, have people you are encouraged by,

your mentored by, your discipled by, but they cannot take the

place of your master. They cannot take the place of

your God. Will you submit yourself to the

right master? The third thing, the display of

false fruit, and I believe the remedy for that is discovering

where your root system is. So I wanted to show you this

picture. So what I did this week, what I

usually do is when this weed comes up, it's really pretty.

I let it grow for a bit and then I just pull it out and throw it

out and promptly the next week the new plant comes up.

So this week I decided to take a tiny little shovel that I have.

I dug it up and pulled it out by the roots and the roots actually

went deep and I there's a picture of it on the ground.

This is the whole plant with its roots.

And after doing it, I kind of just watered the rest of the my

garden and all and went back and I realized I missed out one

weed. It was just very sweetly tucked

into the side of the pot. Had to dig that one up as well.

Now here's the deal. The fruit is the evidence of

your the the fruit is the visible evidence of the hidden

roots. Many times we're dealing only

with the symptoms. We don't go to the root because

you know what to touch the root is painful.

So I have seen this repeatedly. We the God that we.

Worship is so gentle A healer. He's not like some of these

doctors who are so rude to, you know, when you go and they prod

at you, they ask you these mean questions, they judge you a bit

and you feel just very inferior when you're seated there with

them. So obviously, we sometimes look

at our great physician and assume he's going to poke fun at

us like that. But I've found that in these

last 15 years of healing with him, He's tremendously gentle

with us tremendously, because when I expose my symptoms to

him, he sees the symptoms, my family sees the symptoms.

And then when I take it to God in the quiet place and say,

Lord, I've been getting angry for this again and again, this

one child touches this trigger. What's going on?

Where is this root coming from? And he's so kind as to expose

the root to me. And you know, the beautiful

thing is this Hebrews chapter 12, verse 15, the Bible talks

Hebrews 12:15

about this. It's a seed to it that no one

falls short of the grace of God and see that no bitter root

grows up to Causeway trouble and defile many.

And I thought this bitter root is basically bitterness in our

life. It really isn't it.

It could mean that also, but I think it primarily means some of

us we assume. That the grace of.

God covers everything in our lives and we live unrepentant.

We live unaware. We don't realize or care about

the damage we're causing to the body of Christ, to others.

We just keep doing what we're doing and saying, you know what?

I'm doing me. But here's the thing, In the

book of Deuteronomy, it says that a bitter root like this is

poisonous to everything around because they live in such a way

where they think they're safe with God when they're not.

Galatians, chapter 5. Verse 22 talks about the fruit

Galatians 5 · chapter mention

of the Spirit and it says, but the fruit of the Spirit is

Lovejoy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness,

faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.

Against such things there is no law.

When we looked at the acts of the flesh, there was a law

against it because if you operated out of debauchery, if

you were immoral sexually, there is a penalty to be paid.

There was bodily sicknesses you could get.

There was the losing of real relationships.

There was number commitment. These are the real things that

were the legal indebtedness that you would face.

But Lovejoy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness,

faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.

There is no law against it because they are the true fruit,

the fruit of the the Holy Spirit working in your life.

And it's time that when we go to the root and pluck the thing out

by the root and throw it out, that true roots begin to form

and the Holy Spirit starts to bring out genuine fruit from

within you. I recently, I think what a year

back I was, I was just exhausted.

I'd just written my first book on the wilderness.

It had gone out and I was just in the season of going God, is

my wilderness really over? You know, I don't feel joy.

I don't feel the satisfaction I thought I would feel.

And so media, I was feeling that.

And towards the end of the year, one of my friends from the UK

visited me and she just wanted, she gave me a card and she said

I felt like writing this to you, God wants to give you joy.

It was a very specific thing that I had asked God for.

So I felt it was such a sweet kiss of my heavenly Father to me

saying, you know what, I want to grant you this.

But over the last four months, what I've discovered is that

there were real joy blockers in my life.

So the evidence was maybe fake joy or, or putting up this thing

of I'm doing great. But deep within God was dealing

with the roots and he has pulled out some of these roots that the

reason for my joylessness. It was not necessarily the

situations, it was the way I was wired.

It was the things that I'd gone through over 40 years which had

contributed to this way of living.

And I can honestly say today that I actually have the fruit

of joy in my life. What people see on my face when

they meet me is genuine because the root had to be dealt with,

the roots had to be pulled up issues.

That I had overlooked for. Years God revealed it the way I

viewed myself. God.

Unveiled it and said this. Is what you've been doing to

yourself. I want to heal that.

And lo and behold, when he cleared the garden out, the

fruit which came out was genuine joy.

I know that I can face the future with this fruit growing

in excess because the roots have been dealt with.

And I just want to encourage you.

Are you ready to uproot the things?

Pull it out by the root. Expose the root.

Tell God you know what? Take your shovel on me, God.

Take the roots out and. It's it's not.

An easy process, but it's very rewarding.

Very rewarding because the new life is what others are going to

receive. The new life is the satisfaction

and contentment you walk with. You are never the same.

You walk in this place so literally.

You walk on the street, you walk into rooms in this beautiful

bubble of I'm loved, I'm cherished, I'm called, God is

with me, God is for me. Nothing deters you.

Your focus is clear. Even if things are falling all

around you, people are acting up, it really doesn't matter

because hey, you know what the joy of the Lord is my strength,

I'm good and it's an amazing way to live.

So even as I close, I was reading this, this chapter from

Hebrews chapter 6 and it says this is a very scary verse, but

Hebrews 6 · chapter mention

I don't want to harp on the judgement part of it.

I just want to leave this one line with you.

OK? Hebrews chapter 6, verses 4 to

Hebrews 6:4–6

6. It says it is impossible for

those who have once been enlightened, who have tasted the

heavenly gift, who have shared in the Holy Spirit, who have

tasted the goodness of the Word of God in the past, of the

coming age, and who have fallen away to be brought back to

repentance, to their loss. They are crucifying the Son of

God all over again and subjecting him to public

disgrace. I'm just going to focus on the

last line of verse 6. It says to their laws, the ones

who repeatedly sin, you know, misusing the grace of God on

their lives. They are crucifying the Son of

God all over again and subjecting him to public.

Disgrace I come. Back to the point I began with

what? If because of my.

Lack of change because I am unwilling to leave behind the

old life and take up the new life in Christ.

People are actually crucifying Jesus all over again.

They look at him and say I don't want Jesus if this is what his

followers are like, I don't want him.

If if you have cheated someone and that's all they know of a

Christian, Jesus is crucified again.

If I've hurt someone else in some capacity who doesn't know

Jesus yet, their view of Jesus is marred because of my

behavior, the word. There is actually.

In for me, subjecting him to public disgrace, making Jesus

infamous. God forbid that we ever make

Jesus infamous. God forbid that we become such a

stench in the nostrils of people that they don't want Jesus, they

don't want this life. I pray that you know we will be

those who walk in that newness of life so that when people look

at us, they say, wow, what do they have?

I want that. So would you be avid about

watching out for open doors in your life?

And I think that, you know, this is not a one and done thing.

There have been open doors in all our lives.

In my life, I've seen open doors in different seasons based on

the situations we are walking in.

And I have to be very avid about shutting those doors.

Sometimes I've let it open for a very long time till my whole

mind corroded with a particular emotion, a negative emotion or a

feeling and then God had to take me through a long winded process

of healing and detoxing. So my suggestion is, will you be

avid about watching out for open doors and slamming them shut?

Don't keep net doors where you have to put an iron door.

Will you make sure that you are? Subject only to your master.

There are many. People out there who call

themselves masters, but small M Masters, they say they're

experts on things. But will you turn to Jesus, the

expert on everything? Will you make him your Lord?

Third thing, will you be careful to check your roots periodically

and make sure that your fruit is not false?

Make sure your fruit is not put on.

But it's the genuine article. It comes from the depths of

roots that have been plucked out by the Holy Spirit and good seed

being sown in. Can I just pray for you?

Father, I just thank you for this time.

I thank You that You are doing a work in our lives and I pray

right now that Father You would give direction to Your people as

to how to close those open doors, how to pull out things by

the root. I pray for those who have

submitted to worldly patterns, philosophies, pressures and

moved away from You. I pray that You would draw them

back gently to you. God.

I pray in this process of unravelling and healing that

they would have freedom, they would have restoration, they

would have healing that they are longing for we.

Invite you, Holy Spirit. We invite you into the deepest

recesses of our lives, the crevices of our lives that even

we don't know exist. Come in and heal us, God set.

US free. Help us to live death, dead to

sin and alive to Christ. In Jesus name we pray.

Amen. Amen.

Even as you go into this week, I just want to remind you to get

into God's Word. When we sit with the Word, we

meet with the author of the Word and He is the one.

He's the author and perfector of our faith.

He is the Creator and the author of your life and no better

person to really consult with on matters of open doors and roots

than with the one who created you.

So get into His word, read up, learn from Him, spend time with

Him. There is no substitutes to that.

Even as you get into this week, I just want to leave a few

announcements with you. We have our ladies prayer

happening on Tuesday morning on Zoom.

It's an amazing time. A bunch of us women just pray

for our needs and the needs of brothers and sisters around us

and around the globe. It's a very powerful time.

We also have a men's Bible study happening on Wednesday nights.

It's a lovely time when the men of the Church of different age

groups sit together on this call and just lean into each other,

learn from each other. We also have Open Heavens which

happens on Fridays at 10:00 PM. We also have VBS coming up April

27th to May 1st. We would love for your little

ones to join us. It's for kids between the ages

of four and 14. So if you'd like to register

your child, get in touch with us.

We'll send you the link. We can't wait to be with the

kids this summer. So if you have a child or you'll

have a neighbor or someone tell them about Vacation Bible

School. We are going to be learning

about the nature of God. So you're invited for that.

Remember this, that whoever finds Jesus finds life.

God bless you, have an amazing week.

We hope you enjoyed today's. Message and we're blessed.

If you liked what you heard and want to hear more messages from

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Most importantly, remember that whoever finds Jesus finds life.