The Physical Realm Is Rotting
2001
You mentioned learning from your mistakes -- that customer coming to the door and offering that complaint. Over the years, that issue of a pure heart and not letting my affections get divided has been something I’ve felt like God has really wanted me to pay special attention to. I’ve experienced that feeling more often than not, unfortunately, that when I’ve given my heart to something and then to see the disappointment of the promise that was supposedly there before I gave into that. satan’s always offering these cotton candy things that seem so promising that if we’d just give our heart to it -- then as soon as we bite into it we just…
You get to a point where that really gets wearying. What I’m learning is you begin to see those things on the front end of how disappointing everything else is besides truly knowing God and knowing His heart and showing His love to other people. That they really are just lies that we believe. Any time I do that I feel like satan is there, ready to say, “Gotcha! Got snagged again in that same ol’ lie.” You begin to see the pattern and begin to cut it off on the front end. That’s something I’m hoping I’m learning to do a little bit more instead of the backwards way of learning.
It’s such a hard lesson for earthly creatures to learn how to live in heavenly realms. There are so few people that don’t learn the hard way. It’s just a shame. God’s Word is true, and there’s ample evidence in history as well as God’s own testimony that it’s true. But we’ve got to fail miserably ourselves before we realize and sometimes do irreparable harm to ourselves and others before we learn the lesson. I was listening to a tape recently, a world-famous teacher/preacher guy. He was talking and it shocked me, because I know him! He’s probably 60 now. He was talking about how he had everything going for him. And somebody like him could’ve been a charismatic “preacher” making $60 million a year. “I have everything -- college-educated, articulate, handsome...” and I started laughing when I heard that! I said, “Handsome?! I know this guy! This guy is not handsome.” :) I’ve never seen his high school picture, so I don’t know what he looked like, but his handsomeness faded in a big, big way. I laughed at that because it just pointed out the fallacy of human thinking. Entropy, that second law of thermodynamics was written by God to prove the futility of human pursuits.
The things that you put your heart on, the things that you desire and you think have value and you spend all your money on these things of temporal, vain investment. And set your watch, flip your calendar a few times and you’ve got a handful of garbage. That’s why you’re never going to find God -- you cannot experience the depth of the riches of the things that are eternal that last forever and forever and forever...
Someone said something kind of shocking about seat belts fairly recently. “Well, I’m immortal. What difference does that make?” It was shocking. But it had such a ring of truth to it, because when we’re buried in Jesus, when our life is totally His, living only for Him, “seated with Christ in heavenly realms,” having no affections for the value system of the world, not tolerating any mixture of heart and mind -- if we’re building that way, then we’re experiencing this power that is generated and generated, and it’s stronger and stronger, like a nuclear explosion.
Whereas when you’re investing part of your heart and mind in the physical realm, it’s deteriorating, rotting, decaying, rusting -- it just turns into garbage. And we lose God, we lose the power of God’s life and a love affair with Him because we’re seeking after and trying to extract something for ourselves in the present age when it can’t do anything but rot and deteriorate right in front of us.
Again, history and the Word of God are very clear about this matter. But for some reason we have to do all the stupid things over and over again in every realm of human existence to learn that these things are true. It’s too bad that we all have to be 60 before we finally realize that God was right all along, and the only things that ever mattered were “the goal of this commandment is love.” Some have wandered away from the fullness of the reality of the Godhead living in them, and wasted it on an impure heart, affections misplaced, desires misplaced, and a conscience that’s fouled because we haven’t given ourselves over to God’s will and an insincere faith that doesn’t believe God when things aren’t going well.
We vacillate all the time because things aren’t going well. And I’ve got to plead guilty to all three of those things at different points in my life. But what I’m telling you is there is no limit, no end in sight to how deeply He can take us into His heart and mind if we can just hold onto that scripture that Greg was nice enough to read for us as His roadmap. If we’ll hold onto those things and demand those three things, the depths of what’s real and won’t decay and rot is just beyond imagination.
The scriptures teach it, history proves it. Look at the before and after photograph. It’s very, very real, but we’re so stupid to keep giving into this thing over and over again, whether it’s business or whatever it is. We just think we’re going to grab ahold of it and we won’t let go so it will still be there for us. And it just rots on the end of that rope and we end up worse than where we ever started.
Will God please raise up a generation of people that don’t have to turn 60 to find out all these things so we can teach our children that don’t have to turn 20 to find out all these things.
