Without Excuse

7/17/1986

Do you see how nature has taken its course? People actually refuse to look to God, and because of that, all men are without excuse. People grabbed after the creation rather than the Creator, so God says, “Alright, have it your way. You don't want to retain the knowledge of the glory of God? I'll give you over to your own deceit, lies, and pettiness, jealousy, malice, and slander about other people. The evil in your heart will be fanned into flame and the animal passions will well up inside of you and you’ll be angry with your wife or your husband or your friend. You won't be able to stop it; it will just overflow out of you. There will be no way to contain it because the animal nature in you has taken control.” God says He is going to give you over to that for one reason because you didn't think it was worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God.” You let it go. You shrugged your shoulders and said, “It can wait.” And God says to you, “It can't wait. I'm going to give you over to your own depravity, to your own depraved minds.”

At that point in our lives, we become enslaved by satan. Each of us has either been there or is currently there. But nobody really ever thinks they are enslaved by satan. However, that doesn't change the reality of it. Jesus said that even the people who believed in Him, if you can believe that, in John 8, Jesus told some “Jews who believed him” that “Your father is the devil. You are children of satan.” He said, “You are so enslaved to your passions that you want to do what your father the devil tells you to do.” It's in your nature. You want to do that. Whatever satan says, you want to jump right on it. If satan says watch this television program or go to this movie, you want to do it. It wells up from within you. You want to do what the father, the devil, is telling you to do. That person is a child of satan.

Ephesians 2:1 “As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and your sins, in which you used to live when you followed the ways of this world, and the ruler of the kingdom of the air, which is a spirit that is now at work in those who are disobedient.” If you are not walking heart, soul, mind and strength with God, then guess what? The word of God says, “a spirit of disobedience is at work within you.” The prince of the power of the air, the kingdom of darkness, has taken you captive to do his will.

Now, if you were to take a vote at any coliseum of 60,000 people during a basketball game and say, “How many of you feel like you are enslaved to satan?” I really don't think you would see too many hands go up. Probably none. Yet, the word of God says that if you are not living your whole life—heart, soul, mind and strength—for God, then the spirit of disobedience, the spirit of satan, is at work within you at this very moment. You are enslaved to your own lusts. There is no way you can break out of it. You want to break out of that bad habit, but you can't do it. Maybe for a while, and then it captures you again. Can you relate to what I am saying? That is really the nature of the kingdom of darkness. It is very subtle, very quiet. It never announces itself. You don't get any nametags that say, “Hi there, I'm a child of satan.” But Jesus said it very clearly, even to those who “believed Him” in John 8 that your father is the devil because what you want to do is what your father the devil wants to do.

As John the apostle said in 1 John 3, if you have been born of God, then your sinful nature is something you have pushed out of your life, and now God has blessed you with a new nature. Don't be deceived. Those who do what is righteous are righteous. It's not some kind of pie-in-the-sky acknowledgment of what God did or just believing the story about it. It has to do with your life being invested in Him, and nothing short of that will release us from the oppression of satan.

Willful Blindness

Ephesians 4:17 “I tell you this and insist on it in the Lord, that you must no longer live as the Gentiles do in the futility of their thinking. They are darkened in their understanding and separated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them due to the hardening of their hearts. Having lost all sensitivity, they have given themselves over to sensuality so as to indulge in every kind of impurity with a continual lust for more.”

They have given themselves over to willful blindness. They have decided that they can live with this situation. “It’ll be okay. It's not the best, but I can live with it.” You will die with it, and then you will suffer eternally with it, too. If you give yourself over to that, if you make that choice to live in willful disobedience, then you have sacrificed your soul into eternal Hell. You have alienated yourself from God. Most of you, if not all of you, have made a lot of decisions in your lifetime, and I don't think any of you willfully made a destructive choice that you knew would annihilate your life. Surely not, right? The preservation of self is one of the key things in our lives. But, what we are talking about is seeing things that are unseen, and realizing that whatever this life has offered to you so far is meaningless. It's a mirage.

There is something much bigger going on here, and I’m asking you to see clearly that life does not consist of eating and drinking and going here and going there and coming home and fighting with your roommate or your wife or your husband and then going back to work and being miserable there, too. That's not why God put us down here. And, if we, in the futility of our thinking and in the darkness of our understanding, decide to stay with that and say, ”Well, that's good enough. I don't really enjoy it much, but I'm going to go that way,” then you will lose your soul no matter how religious you are, and no matter how moral you are. Those things are immaterial. Those things have nothing to do with what we are talking about. We are not talking about being religious. Jesus didn't come down to bring a message of religion. We think He did, but religion is mentioned five times in the New Testament. Three of those have to do with the Jewish faith, and only two of them have to do with Christianity. Religion is not a theme in the New Testament, much to the surprise of the world at large that rejects it on that basis.