Expose Your Sacred Rivers

7/17/1986

If you can leave without having any kind of response at all then you need to be pretty concerned, actually. What we are talking about are things in the supernatural world.

The worst of all fates, according to the Word of God, is to have your conscience seared as with a hot iron. You become so callous to God that when you feel the prick of the needle of God, it doesn't faze you anymore. Your heart becomes hardened ground and when the seed of God’s Word is thrown on a hardened path, it can't possibly take root. If God’s Word doesn't have any impact at all on your feelings and perception about things, if it doesn't make you look inside at all, then you have a seared conscience and you need to be real careful about that. I just want to throw some things out to you.

Let’s Look Under a Microscope

There is a river in northern India called the River Ganges. It's bright yellow in color. Because of that, the people who lived in northern India thought it was a special and unique river. People, being as they are, began to worship that river and called it a goddess. That river began to be worshipped. They made up a story about it. They said the River Ganges was yellow because it flowed from the feet of a god and then through the hair of a goddess before it ever made it to planet earth.

Back in the 1950's a chemist decided to go over to India to find out why this river was yellow. Once he got there, he collected some of the water from this beautiful yellow river and placed it onto a slide to be viewed under his microscope. Do you know what he found? When he focused the microscope on this sample of water, the reason for the river’s unusual color became very evident. The water from this “sacred” River Ganges was just crawling with bacteria! That’s why it was yellow.

He called one of the Hindu “holy men” to come look at that slide. The chemist wanted the holy man to see the “sacred river” that they worshipped. When the holy man looked down into the microscope, he saw germs swimming all around, crawling like crazy in that water. The holy man stayed there and looked and looked at it. After a few minutes, the chemist turned his back and all of a sudden there was this big crash. When he turned around he saw that the holy man had taken the microscope and thrown it down on the ground, destroying the slide and the microscope.

I think you can reason in your mind why that might have happened. Of course, we are capable of doing the same thing, too. If we have our “sacred” little things that we want to grab onto, we are going to be infuriated when anybody tries to touch those things. We are going to have our own sacred rivers, our sacred yellow Ganges Rivers that are crawling with germs. But, regardless of how much our little sacred rivers are crawling with filth, we still want to protect it with our life. There is no way we want any light to be shown on it. We don't want to see it under a microscope.

Come Into the Light

Jesus talked about that same thing. He said in John 3, “The court has been adjourned and all the witnesses are in. Now here's the verdict. Light has come into the world, but men loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. Everyone who does evil hates the light and will not come into the light for fear that his deeds will be exposed. Whoever lives by the truth comes into the light so that it may be seen plainly that what he has done has been done through God.”

People who live in darkness, people who are attaching themselves to things that have no life in them, don't want to come into the light. They don't want the light to shine on them. Jesus said, “This is the verdict. All of human history points towards this one fact. Court is in session; the verdict has come in that mankind does not want to have their deeds exposed. If we had light in us, we wouldn't mind coming into the light.” He ends that by saying, “Whoever lives by the truth does come into the light so that it may be seen plainly that what he has done has been done through God, not through his own goodness. He comes into the light not to prove himself innocent. But, he comes into the light to prove that anything he does has been done by God.” That he is guilty. Not afraid of the light. They are not going to take the microscope and throw it down just because they don't like what's underneath the slide; they are willing to be exposed to the light. That's the mark of a good man or woman. We have a lot of ideas in our minds about what “good” might be. “Well, that's a sincere person, that’s a moral person, that’s a good person.” The question is: In whose eyes are they good? In whose eyes are you good? Who cares whether we think it is good or not. The only thing that will ever matter is whether God calls it Good. So it is foolish to bite, and snap and chew and try to protect our sacred Yellow Rivers. It doesn’t make sense. It’s not logical. You are better off to let go of those things and come into the light and let it be exposed for what it is. That’s only good sense.

Well, what I want to talk about for a little while is some “bad news,” some things that are true, some things that Jesus spoke about, that all the apostles spoke about and the very things that allowed people to come into the Light. It was a matter of being honest with the darkness that was within them. And that is a characteristic of human nature. You remember that God destroyed the world in Noah’s time because man was wicked—wicked all the way to the core. God said, “I’ve had enough of this. I’m tired of it. I’m sorry I even created these people. They are sick inside. They are terrible.” And so God wiped out all that existed except for eight people on Noah’s ark, and we know how that story goes. So now we have eight wonderful people right? Noah, a person we quickly find drinking, in his tent passed out. Noah gets down on dry land and he builds a little altar and offers some sacrifices and God smelled the aroma of those sacrifices, and there had been a rainbow, and now God’s promised He won’t destroy man again but that promise was not based on man being worth anything. Not at all. He says “I’m going to spare mankind from now on, not because they are good because I know this,” and God said it, “that man’s inclinations in his heart are evil from the time he is a child.” It had nothing to do with man being good now that God decided not to destroy the earth again. We had it coming, within one generation after Noah’s time. And every generation ever since then because there is nothing good inside a man’s heart. Since man abandoned his life to the destroyer, satan, in the Garden of Eden, there has been nothing good inside of a man that he can boast about in himself.

We come into the light not to show our own goodness, but to show that if anything good ever does come, it comes because God did it within us. That's the verdict. That’s the nature of it. Man really messed up bad. Isaiah 59: 1-2 says we have all sinned and because of our sin, our ugliness, our iniquities, God literally turned His face away from us. He hated that. It made Him sick. He didn't want that. So, we broke fellowship with God because of our sinfulness and because of all the wretched things within us.

Revelation 21:27 says that all things in heaven are so perfect that not one unclean thing could ever enter heaven. That puts us in quite a position, doesn't it? In light of that requirement, have you ever even had a day where you were so perfect that just based on that one day you could enter Heaven? Not one unclean thing? Not one thought of malice or hatred, bitterness or jealousy, lust or pride? Not even one of those things can enter the gates of Heaven. Now, we have a problem on our hands, don't we? I don't think any of us want to go to Hell, do we? I know you wouldn't be reading this if you wanted to spend eternity in Hell. But we have this dilemma…we have sin in our lives, and there is nothing we can do about it.