Let's begin with a word of prayer. Father in heaven, we're glad that we can be drawn into fellowship like this, where we can sing with one accord, because we have faith in one accord. We can sing from our hearts together in unity. Worshiping in the door in our Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, whom we desire to honor, help us this morning to honor Him, honor Him in our hearts, in our thoughts, in our focus, and in the speaker's words.
May these things be guided and directed by your Holy Spirit. We pray in Jesus' name, amen. A month ago, we thought about crossing the Jordan, but it didn't happen. So this morning, we are going to consider crossing the Jordan for real.
But I do need to review with you what I went over last time, but I will do so relatively quickly. The sense of the promised land is that it is a place of blessing. It is a place of blessing for the believer. The context, of course, is the context of the earthly children of God, which you are not.
You are people. You are the children of God, whose citizenship is in heaven, not on earth. You live in the age of grace. These people lived in the age of the law.
And so they were dealt with by God in a very strict manner. Sometimes it seems as though God deals with them in a harsh manner. But remember, they are under the law. The context of grace is meaningful because we have an understanding of the law.
If we had no understanding of God's holiness, of God's law, how could we have an understanding of forgiveness when we fall short of that law? That would be a tough thing for the human mind to get its head around, to get my head around, forgiveness in the context of no rules at all. But we can look back in our Bibles in the Old Testament and see how God dealt with his earthly children, the Jews, the children of Abraham following the leadership of Moses, under the law. Nonetheless, there are many pictures for us in the Old Testament that are applicable to the believer.
And the Apostle Paul makes no apology. He has no hesitation in pointing out Old Testament realities and applying them to the believer who walks by the Spirit in grace. So then what is the promised land? Well, it is a picture of rest entering into God's victorious rest.
And when we say victorious, it does not mean that we sit on our hands in a lazy boy chair. The nature of victory is to have victory over the enemy. So it is not that the promised land gives us nothing to do. However, we do want to avoid living a defeated Christian life.
I'm sure you have had periods in your life. I have had periods in my life. And you know people who have had periods in their lives, sometimes long periods of defeat, getting nowhere in the Christian life, understanding salvation, but living a life of defeat and having no peace within. Well, that person has not experienced the victory that is possible through God's working and through his spirit and through his operation in your life, if that is the case.
And so we need to be able to enter into that place of victorious rest. It is not a question of having not been saved. The picture in the Old Testament is clear enough. These people passed through the Red Sea.
These people left Egypt because of the Passover. The blood on the lintel prevented the angel of death from bringing death to the home of the earthly children of God, those families of the earthly children of God. The blood on the lintel across the doorposts protected them. We'll see this morning.
Another picture of redness, of scarlet. There are multiple pictures of redness and scarlet that speak of redemption. And the one of the ones I want to get to this morning is one of the most famous ones and interesting ones. And so they have been saved.
But does it mean that the one who is saved is living a victorious life and enjoying the peace and rest in the heart as a victorious Christian that has experienced God's rest and victory, not necessarily. It seems that that is not a given. And so it's worth reading these things. And it's interesting.
You know, you would say that the Bible, these 66 books of the Bible, the first five, what would you do without the first five books of the Bible? I'd be lost. I wouldn't understand my origins. I wouldn't understand God's purity and holiness.
I wouldn't understand the origins of the earthly children of God. We have a state of Israel today. Well, what is their history? It is a very long history.
I would have no understanding of the origins of that. If it were not for the Torah, the first five books of the Bible, the Jews will call the Bible the Tanakh and the first five books of the Tanakh are the law, the Torah, the contained and mosaic law. So it is worth considering the Torah. And it is, of course, because it is part of the word of God.
And as we will see again this morning, there is a significant, a significant portion of that set of five books of the law that are dedicated to what I'm talking about this morning, which is the wanderings and failures of the children of God, leading up to the beginning of their victories in the book of Joshua. So if you, as a Christian, want to learn something about avoiding failures in your Christian life, read it. Consider these things. Now you know that God will not kill you when you fail.
Paul wrote about, in 1 Corinthians 10 about that, but about the death. But we have a different take on it as the new children of God, the new citizens. So 1 Corinthians 10, I just alluded to. And Paul is interesting.
The Peloponnesian Peninsula there at the bottom of Greece, it's interesting that that was one of the earliest manmade connections between two bodies of water, between the Aegean Sea, and going up toward the Adriatic. It saves you a lot of time. If you're in sailboat, you're just in a sailboat. You don't have steam, you don't have coal, you don't have anything like that.
Then getting across the narrow neck of the Peloponnesus, that's very useful. And so you have Corinth, a city where there would have been a lot of people moving past and a lot of trade. And that means that there was a lot of Grecian influence, a lot of worldliness. And when you read the book of 1 Corinthians, you get the sense that this church definitely has problems with worldliness, harboring worldliness, harboring worldliness in the congregation, harboring worldliness in the heart.
These are very, very damaging to the individual, and to the congregation, harboring worldliness, and harboring fleshliness, and harboring sin. And he says, in verse 1 of 1 Corinthians 10, for I do not want you to be unaware of brothers and sisters that our fathers were all under the cloud. They all passed through the sea. They're all saved.
They were all baptized into Moses in that sense, in the cloud and in the sea. And they all ate the same spiritual food, right? Water from a rock and manna and quail, which was a picture of Christ. Nevertheless, with most of them, God was not pleased.
And they're dead or spread out in the wilderness. Now he comes to the very sort of pointy end of this. These things happen for an example to us, for our instruction. We are in a different age, as it says there at the end upon whom the end of the age is a we are in the age of grace.
The age of grace has come upon us. Does that mean that this is less pointy? Well, in a sense it does, but in a sense it doesn't. Death.
The death principle. The death principle is in society. The death principle is always trying to disrupt and destroy. It is always trying to disrupt relationships in this assembly.
It is trying to disrupt relationships between people. It is trying to disrupt your relationship with God. Not long ago in the ESL, we again looked at the parable of the prodigal son. What does the father say to the elder son, your brother, who was dead?
Now, as far as I read that parable, at no point, was that boy dead? So in what sense was he dead? He was in zero relationship with his father. Zero.
That is a picture of spiritual death when you have no relationship whatever with God. And as far as that boy was concerned, he was quite correct. He did not deserve one, and nor do we. We have a relationship with God through grace.
We should never forget the grace and mercy that we enjoy. And thus we have a relationship with God, which Satan and the world and everything about the world wants to destroy. Make no mistake. And so we can ask very legitimate questions about pleasing God.
I hope that we want to please God. I mentioned to you that a good chunk of the Torah is devoted to a week's walk. How long do you think it takes to walk from the eastern limit of the Nile Delta across the top of the Sinai Peninsula, up into Rafa? And why do you know Rafa right now?
Why do you even know it? It's where the land changes from Egypt to Gaza, what they are calling Gaza, what they are calling the occupied territories. This is where the hostages get out and where Palestinians, so-called Palestinians, are trying to escape through that little place, that place that nobody's ever heard of. Suddenly it becomes in the news every day.
How long does it take to take that little walk? Not very long. It's a short car ride. Maybe on the outside, if you took a not so direct route, it might take a week.
I don't even think so. So how can you have 68 chapters of the Bible for a walk of days? From the Passover when they fled to the Jordan River in Numbers 14, that's a very good question. So we come to this very good question, and Paul makes no apology for bringing it to the attention of the Corinthian church, a very worldly bunch of people who are trying to find their feet in their Christian faith.
And so it is important to be pointed, but it is also important to be loving. And when we interact with people who are struggling, who are going through what you might call Christian wanderings, it is important to be pointed with the truth, but also to be loving. That is a great balance, a very difficult balance to achieve. When they got here, and 10 of the 12 spies reported back, the people here are really tall.
The people here are really scary. We can't do it. They're going to kill us. And two of them, Joshua and Caleb said, no, no, no, no.
We can do it. We can win. And who did they listen to? They listened to the majority.
There's a lesson right there. When the majority of people seem to be saying something, does that make it right? Absolutely not. You have to think about the content of what they're saying.
And so they failed. And they failed because of fear. When the American Air Force and other military air forces in the world look for pilots. You know, a lot of young men, I love to fly an airplane.
Oh boy, I've been in many airplanes. I've been in helicopters. I've been in many, many different things, I guess, but flying out to an oil rig one time. And I love to fly, especially the smaller, the better.
The most exciting thing I ever was flying in was a two-person helicopter. And I was a third person. And there wasn't really much room for me. But they said, if you can scrunch up between the two of us in the back there, you can come.
I'm coming. I'm coming. And we were placing dynamite. I digress.
But there was a flood on the go. I'm starting to think of Newfoundland because it happened to Harry's River and you're Stephenville, Blackbackside. So now my Newfoundland accent comes out and my Newfoundland expressions come out. There was a flood on the go.
And an entire house had been pushed sideways on its foundations. It was fascinating. In viewing that, I was working for the Water Resources Division and wanting to review the flood damage because I had to read a report. I would climb over blocks of ice and then climb over another block of ice and come down.
And I would be on the inside of a meander band filled with these giant blocks of ice. And in the middle of that was an entire house that had been destroyed but was still standing. And it sort of touched my heart. I managed to get inside the house and I managed to get inside and look inside the children's bedroom and the door frame was like this.
And everything was in upheaval. And of course, when a house is in that state, there's no saving it. There's no saving it. It's a bit like it reminds me here where God says, you're too afraid.
You don't trust me after I have taken you through the Red Sea. There's no redeeming you guys. You are going to be turned back and you're going to go in to the Sinai. And you're going to go in to the land of Moab and other areas which are very arid and have very little entertainment.
You are going to wander for 40 years. You are unfit. And that house that I saw all tilted on its foundations. If you know the exploits of a Shackleford in Antarctica, one of his crewmates actually built that house with logs.
And that situation, to get back to the helicopter, you wonder where did the helicopter go? Back to the helicopter. The attempt to use anapho explosives, which is ammonium nitrate and fuel oil, you just get a bag of fertilizer and you soak it with diesel fuel. And all you need is a shotgun cap detonator and that will make a very big explosion.
Especially if you have many bags of the stuff. This was all placed out on the Harry's River. And you could feel the little thump in your feet when it went off. It wasn't having much effect.
And they said let's try some dynamite with the small helicopter. So we would go down and the guy would jump out and light the fuse and jump back in. And let's hope it takes off. And he would pull up on what's called the collective.
Did you feel the G-Force when he was turning the angling the blades and giving it more gas and not going forward with the stick much using the collective which is lift and turn at the same time. So you feel that and then back away. Very sharp crack. Not like the big bags of anapho.
It was a very high velocity explosive trying to put punch holes in the river. And that's one of the most fun things I've ever done in my life. But has very little to do with the wanderings of the wilderness. The fear that air forces deal with if you're going to be a fighter pilot.
One of the things that young men don't know is they don't always cope with fear very well. Now there are many university students here and many people here who have gone to university. And I taught university for 31 years and I dealt with all kinds of young people. You might say I'm a bit of an expert on 22 year olds.
They're psychology and their attitudes and their feelings and how those things have evolved since the early 90s. But a young man might feel yeah I'm in for this F16 fighting falcon. This is where I want to go. Canada doesn't fly that.
Canada flies the F18. They're hornet and super hornet. So the young man says I'd like to do this and he finds that in combat situations he basically loses his mind. You know you have a very complex display.
Sometimes a HUD heads up display and there's just so much information coming at you and somebody is trying to kill you, chase you and you just don't even remember what half of these things do. And you stop thinking and you are not able to engage in the dogfight and you are unfit. You are unfit to be a military pilot in a fighter because fear overwhelms the heart and the mind. It's well known.
Chemicals are released. Tormones are released. And you have to be a special kind of a person. There's not many people like it.
A special kind of a person not to allow the fear to fog up your head. If you allow fear to fog up your head you may have seconds to live in a dogfight with modern F22 Raptors for example. So here we have the people of Israel listening to the 10 who brought the bad news and they started to cry and they cried all night. Oh dear.
What have you learned? Have you learned anything about God's deliverance? Have God ever delivered you? Think for a moment.
Analyze the situation. Calm down. Hasn't God delivered you in the past? The answer is of course and was of course.
Yes. We walk between walls of water. And as soon as we got through God let those walls of water come in and destroy an Egyptian army. And when we were approaching the Red Sea we had no concept whatsoever of what was going to happen.
All we knew was that there was a lot of guys and chariots chasing us and we would not be able to outrun them and we got to a dead end. Psalm 66. David brings this back. This miraculous thing.
He wasn't even there. David wrote about this in the year 1000. This happened hundreds of years before. The David and his culture and his people and Jews knew it very well.
It was part of their redemptive history. And for these people here that part of their redemptive history with the Passover and escaping Egypt and crossing the Red Sea. That was very recent. And it is as if it was as if they could not hold it in their hearts and minds as a reality.
This is actually a fairly common thing I think with Christians. Sometimes we just need to pause and think and remember that God has delivered us in the past. Therefore he can deliver us again. Paul writes in 2nd Corinthians 10, 3 and 4.
However, which I shared last time that you know it's not about swords nowadays is it? It's not about not usually. Especially in Canada. It's not about actual physical combat.
But it's about casting down things like imaginations. What a choice of a word. Is this society filled with evil imaginations? Does this society have opportunities for evil imaginations that tempts you the believer to enter into those evil things?
Those evil imaginations and thoughts? Well, every hour of the day I guess. And so we are in a war. May not involve stainless steel or whatever they had in those days.
They certainly didn't have stainless steel. But whatever weapons they had could be used. And under the age of the law, not the age of grace, victory was accomplished by physical means, not spiritual means as in 2nd Corinthians 10. And we see too that in this drive to enter into the place where God would like us to be and would like them to be a place of victorious rest.
We see that they not only lose it, as we would say in modern language, but they get angry. Moses, Moses, what? Why have you done? Wouldn't it have been better if we'd stayed in Egypt?
We seem to remember they had good vegetables. Goodness me. They became angry at Moses and they begin to be rebellious. So that's another flavor, isn't it?
When we actually cross over spiritually in our hearts and in our minds, we look at the progression here. It's not a very nice looking progression. And this belief that God can do anything, in spite of what he's just done, fear, emotional ism, wailing and crying and hours and hours of wailing, then trying to anger and rebellion. Rebellion against God's representative, Moses, who in many places is a picture of Christ.
And then God. So this is a bad progression. How do we look at it? Well, what did it start with?
It started with a lack of faith. Now, that's most interesting. I have a book on psychology at home and I've actually read a number of interesting books about psychology. It's very popular these days.
Psychology is a very popular area. And everybody sort of seems to think that they can dabble in psychology. I'm fascinated by the fact that the psychology book that is on my coffee table, the one that I read on abnormal psychology amongst others, look at the index. Can you find the word guilt?
Not there. I challenge you to ask any psychologist. I'm going to ask Farley. He's a top squash player.
He's a clinical psychologist with an entire clientele. Does anybody ever come to your office with guilt feelings? I think Farley's going to say does anybody ever come to my office without guilt feelings? So many people have guilt feelings.
Faithlessness. That's where it started. Lack of faith. I don't believe God.
I won't believe God. Oh, wait a minute. You can't or you won't. I think it's won't.
It's not that you can't. You won't. You won't. You won't move forward in faith.
And what does it lead to? Whole cascade of things. The psychologist goes, well, you know it's completely understandable. We know that when people are afraid, such as the pilots, when they're afraid they make mistakes.
So it's okay. It's understandable. Is that how the scriptures presents it? It's okay.
It's okay. Your domination allowing yourself to be faithless and dominated by fear and turn into wailing and turn into rebellion. It's okay. Is that how the scriptures says?
Paul says in 1 Corinthians 10, dead bodies scattered in the wilderness. That's the outcome of that. These dead people aren't going in. That contamination in the people of God had to be dealt with by death.
Sometimes in the New Testament, people did die. Paul used the analogy of sleep. That's why some of you are sleeping. From my position would say that in the same way that miracles in this day and age are not God's primary way of working, that would include miraculous death.
People who lie and because they lie, they die. That happened in the book of Acts. And you know it well. God does not deal with us in that way anymore, primarily, primarily.
So what is the message? What is the element here that we need to avoid? Well, we need to avoid faithlessness and we need to avoid the broken relationships. But we need to avoid, we need to deal with things in the same way.
I'll share some verses from Romans. I hope that we can get there. And so we have the School of the Wilderness and often I believe that God will deal with the backsliding Christian in that way, that there will be deprivation, that there will be a series of events that will cause that person to make a choice between listening to the Lord or actually going further away because that person will become, in a sense, deprived. It is actually good for you to be deprived.
One of the things that we enjoy in this day and age and in this country is abundance. One of the reasons people don't seek God or even want to talk about God is that they're having too much fun and they're having a great deal of comfort and they don't feel that they need to because they're keeping themselves happy. I once put on my office door, I used to enjoy the freedom, academic freedom of putting anything and everything, Bible verses on my office door. And I put one thing that said, no amount of happiness will compensate for an absence of joy.
Do you want joy? That comes from the Lord. Do you want happiness? We can get that anywhere.
It's pretty cheap actually. Easy to obtain. And Canadians and many others in wealthy places, no problem. I'm feeling a bit down.
I have 57 ways to deal with the fact that I'm feeling a bit down and not one of them involves praying. Ha, that's sad. But that's very human. One of God's priorities is your character.
40 years, 40 years of wandering, 40 years of deprivation, 40 years of having very little to do except focus on the Lord. It would do you good to focus on the Lord. I may have told you that when I was teaching in West Africa, there was no TV. The radio, I gave up on the radio.
I kind of craved information about what was going on back in Halifax. And there wasn't any. And I had a very little understanding of African politics and I still don't have much understanding of African politics. We think Canadian politics is complicated.
So I didn't listen to the radio and I didn't have a TV. And my mom was with me and I came close to the Lord over those two months. Two months? I'm 67 years old.
What's two months? Two months is nothing. But I prayed more. And after two months, I felt like my soul had been cleaned out because I hadn't looked on a TV screen in two months.
And I felt the closeness of the presence of the Lord. So I always think of this school of the wilderness as being a bit... It's a good place to go. If God takes you there, go willingly.
I thought that He's going to kill you as happened with these people from their repeated sins. But that things within you will die. Things that need to die. Things that you need to stick the knife to.
Put an end to in your life. Not toy with. Martin Luther, you would know the name. He had quite an interesting pilgrimage and one of his professors actually put a lot of evangelical Christian ideas in his head.
And he wrote later that it's interesting from an experiential point of view. You know, there's truth, there's doctrine, there's orthodoxy and so on. And it was something that Martin Luther wrote about later that he couldn't square up. He just couldn't square it up.
Romans 814 for as many as are led by the Spirit of God. They are the sons of God. He said, I've never been led by God in my life. I don't know what this is talking about.
What is this talking about? Well, it was because he wasn't born again. Because he didn't have saving faith. If you don't have saving faith, God doesn't lead you.
He might lead you and point you to Christ through circumstances and friends if you are unsaved. But to have in the positive sense the Christian experience of being led by God, by the hour and by the day to be in fellowship with God, to be led by God. When Martin Luther read that verse for as many as are led by the Spirit of God. They are the sons of God.
It's part of the Christian experience of the children of God. He said, what? And of course he did come to saving faith. And when he stood up in verms before that Catholic tribunal, he said, I can't say anything but what's here.
I can't believe anything from what's here. I can't abide by anything except for what's here. And of course the Catholic Church would have none of it. But he had come to know what it meant to be led.
And as I said a month ago, you know, you're a dad and a mom and with children and you're in the wilderness and we're moving. We're going. Where? Don't know.
Let's go. Pack it up. Why? God said so.
Is that enough? It's got to be enough. It's enough. It was enough for Abraham.
Where are you going? Don't know. Leave. Leave where are the calledies?
The father of all the Jewish people. A very wealthy man. Flocks and servants and I suppose very fancy tents. I don't know what all he lived in.
Buildings left it all because God said I will show you a land. This land. This promised land. He never took possession of it as such.
But that's why he pulled up stakes in faith. Are we prepared to do that? The last ESL was, I wasn't planning to speak about this, but the last ESL, I'm thinking Luke 19, 18. Rich man.
Rich man comes to Jesus and says, good rabbi. What must a man do for eternal life? Jesus says, why do you call me good? Let's get down to brass tacks.
Only God is good. Are you serious about what you're saying? You need to admit who I am or don't talk about it. Come to terms with who Jesus is.
And Jesus knew where this man was up to. He said, you know the law. Do not steal. Do not bear false witness.
Honor your parents. He said, all these things I have done from my youth. Jesus says, one thing you lack. Sell everything you have and follow me.
Did he say that's not logical, Jesus? Rabbi, what is that about? That's not law. I don't understand that.
That's not what he said. That's not what happened. God witnessed that told Luke about it, said the man went away sad, sad, because Jesus had put his finger on his heart and he knew it. He knew that he loved all of these possessions.
He knew it all too well. He loved the wrong things. The Torah says, and Jesus said, love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your mind, with all your soul. If you don't know the Lord, how are you going to do that?
And this poor man was faced with his great love of his lavish lifestyle and the question of whether he loved God and he knew the answer right away and he went away, sad, end of discussion. And so there is a beauty to this wandering around, this possessionless life. And last time you remember, I think I asked someone there in the front row, I can see the person's face on it. Can you read what's in the heart there?
Can you see the text in there? You know what you're praising? Of course I can't. No.
What's in there? What's in there that we're dealing with? What has to die? What has to be destroyed?
What arrogance against God has to be dealt with? What is not captivity to Christ? Oh, it's not that hard to find out. And when you look at those chapters between Exodus 14, when they leave, Exodus 12 is the Passover 14 is through the Red Sea and then all the way over to Numbers 14 when they come up to the edge of the river and they go, no, and start crying.
And then even after that, for 40 years of wandering, everything that's in you and I comes out, everything. And it has to die. It has to be dealt with. Licentiousness, worldliness, forgetfulness, rashness, pride, discontentedness, all of this stuff.
It's all lurking there, isn't it? If we say that it's not lurking there, I don't think we've looked very hard. And one more thing is going with the crowd. The 10 guys and then the 10 guys' opinion about the impossibility of inheriting what was their inheritance spread in those people amongst the earthly children of God and then they all felt that way.
When we were teenagers, I don't know what your parents were like, but phrases like, don't go with the crowd. Don't submit to peer pressure. These are the kinds of things that were spoken about when I was in grade 9, grade 10 in St. John's, Newfoundland.
But that's what happened. You look around and you see what other people are doing and you go, yeah, I'm going with that. I just don't have the, what's the word, intestinal fortitude to go against what other people are doing, so I'm going with the crowd. And so when all of these evil things come out, then they take on a life of their own and they carry the crowd.
They carry the people. And so we looked at the, some of the details you can go to the references. This is for your Bible study, Bible study, Bible study. Do your Bible study.
And so is it we can't or is it we won't? I think it's a case that we won't. In which case God says, now you can't, you won't, now you can't. It was actually you won't, but it becomes you can't because God has to deal with you.
He has to deal with what's in our hearts. One of the interesting things in all of those wilderness experiences leading up to numbers 14, the first time they came to the Jordan and leading up to Joshua chapter 3, the second time they came to the Jordan. I looked up something, I did a search. I use Bible gateway.
Very good. By the way, you can also get Spanish, whatever you want. And 15 English versions as well. You can search for any word in any version.
You know, in all of this wailing and anger and sometimes Moses, we're going to start, we're going to die a thirst here. What? Well, it happened before. God came, brought water from the rock before.
Once again, whereby the rocks can God bring our water out of the rocks? Well, we never thought of that. Well, why didn't you think of that? Or it's like a repeat of something else that I've already spoken about this morning.
I searched the word prayer. Did these people ever get down on their knees together? We need water down in this. Let's pray together for the water.
Never do they do that kind of thing. There is one time that they do it in the 66 chapters, only once. And I'm not counting the standing up outside the tabernacle to worship, which is recorded. And I'm not counting the very first time.
It's an interesting reference there that when they were suffering in Egypt, their cry went up. Does it say to God? Well, it doesn't say it exactly. It says that God heard the cries and the suffering that had ascended.
It's not clear that they actually intended that suffering to be expressed to God. But it says that God heard it and God decided to do something about it. And one other time, do they say, do they actually pray out of all of those experiences of faithlessness? And from that I would say that they relied on Moses too much and they relied on him for good and for ill.
If he's helping us out, he's a good guy. If we don't like what's happening, he's a bad guy. So they turn on him completely fickle. They'll turn on him in a moment.
But they expect him to talk to God. Listen, you talk to God. If we don't like what's happening, maybe we should throw you out and find somebody else. They talk like that.
And so they're very shallow and very fickle. I hope we are not like that. So with this experience in the wilderness, what is the reason for the death in the wilderness? One of the popular concepts, I think, in psychology and in modern parlance, it's not a word that I grew up with in the sense that I'm going to use it, but it's popular now.
You'll say to a young woman, don't get interested in a man who has baggage. We all know what it means. The guy who's actually internally, he's a mess. He's a mess of unresolved problems.
He's a mess of bad attitudes. Seems like a nice guy in the first ten minutes. But boy, does he have a lot of baggage. And I shouldn't only pick on the guys.
A guy looking for a suitable Christian young lady can sometimes find that the person has a lot of baggage. Non-Christian or anti-Christian or fleshly or worldly baggage that should not be brought into a marriage. I won't go down that road of talking about marriage. We'd be here for a while.
So you can't bring into the promised land this baggage, all of this fleshliness, all of this licentiousness, all of this rebelliousness and faithlessness. You won't enjoy victorious rest if you're going to try to import that into your Christian life. You will not enjoy a victorious, peaceful Christian life. If you try to say, like the psychologist, like to say, you know, in life you need a balance.
If you go out on the town sometimes, the nightclubs, and you do this and that is once in a while it's okay. You know, your wife will look the other way. You know, you need a balance between substance abuse and nonsense. Nonsense for the Christian.
We are not trying to seek a balance between fleshly things and spiritual things. You need to stick the knife to the fleshly things. You need to die. They need to be killed.
They're not compatible. Not compatible at all. I'm out of time and I want to just jump over and I was going to talk at some length about Rahab, the Scarlet, and a little bit about Joshua as God's man. But I want to go ahead and think about in the last couple of minutes here the proof, if you will, of some of the thoughts of the same writer.
The Corinthians was written by Paul. Romans was written by Paul. So when you are going to analyze your scriptures, we were speaking on the side this morning about hermeneutics, the analysis of scripture and the bringing of meaning out of the scripture. There are principles, you know, there are principles of hermeneutics in bringing the truth of the scriptures together, in synthesizing your theology.
So this same writer is writing in Romans 8 verse 6 for the mind set on the flesh is death. But the mind set on the spirit is life and peace. The Greek word for flesh is, sarks, and sometimes, and looking around at the ages of people present, I will say that sometimes we are tempted to interpret that as things sexual. No, no, no, it doesn't exclude that.
No, no, it doesn't exclude that. Sexual sin is a terrible sin. 1 Corinthians 6, he who sins sexually sins against his own body. It's bad, serious.
But is that the only thing that sarks means? No, it's all that stuff that I showed you in that red heart. All of those things, when you feel like, for example, trampling on somebody at work because it's going to advance your career and make them look bad. That is the flesh talking.
The flesh manifests itself shockingly in many diverse ways. And the mind that's set on that approach to life is a mind that is set on spiritual death and broken relationships. We need to get out of that. We need to get out of that completely.
We need to put to death those things that destroy loving relationships. A little later, if you're living in accord with the flesh, you're going to die. But if by the spirit you are putting to death the deeds of the body, you will live. I would include in that your tongue, as far as I know your tongue is part of your body.
And the words that come out can do great damage as we read in the book of James. There is this antithetical nature between the things that will be, you know, we encounter all the time, all the time, all the time, and the life and the spirit. For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes and the pride of life is not of the Father but is from the world. And your feet are on the ground.
And when you leave this building, you're in the world. Tomorrow when you go to work or whatever it is you do, your feet will still be on the ground. You'll be in the world but we don't want you and you don't want yourself to be of the world. You don't want these things that are death to resonate in your heart and to cause you to go astray and to cause you to be faithless and rebellious.
Instead, as per Romans 814 in between, the two verses in Romans there, to be led by the spirit, in Ephesians to walk by the spirit, to keep in step with the spirit. What a beautiful metaphor. God is going like this. Keep in step, keep in step, keep in step with the spirit with the leading of God.
I alluded to this verse last time, I'll close here because I love this. I love this that when Paul is encouraging this young leader, a young leader, that's an exciting thing. We're going to be adding no less than four deacons to this assembly pretty soon. And I'm very excited about that.
I take comfort in that every day. When Paul is encouraging a young leader, he said, you know, fear and of course Paul's mind would not be very far from stopping at the Jordan and going, nah, nah, fear. That's not what God gave you, Timothy. It's not what God gave you.
It gave you power. If you love, you know the love of his son in your life, you know the love of his redemption, you know the love associated with a clean heart washed by the blood of Christ, power, love and of sound mind or in the NASB discipline. You take apart that Greek word, you know what it is? It's two parts.
The second part of friend was it pertains to the mind. And the first part is pertaining to the word, so tearyology, which means salvation stuff. You need a saved mind, a sound mind, a saved mind. You need to think like a saved person.
That's what needs to govern your life, to live like a saved person. And then having the power and love of God, that just goes with it. And that is a great blessing for ourselves as believers. I'm speaking again at the end of December, Christmas Eve, and I do not believe that I will be doing the material that I missed out on today.
And I will be leaving with my wife for a trip to Southeast Asia, which is kind of a repeat of a trip that we did 41 years ago. We had no children. We were newly married. And we went to China, Hong Kong, Singapore and Indonesia.
And for this little new fee boy, I tell you, that was a real eye-opener of a trip. So it's a bit of a recall, not a reenactment, but a repeat of a trip that we did 41 years ago. So I'll be leaving middle of January. We won't be back until March the 1st.
So I'm not speaking in January as far as I know. So it's going to be quite a while before we can get back to this material, if we ever do, Lord willing, we will. But I want to close by saying, if none of these things actually make any sense to you, if you're saying I have no idea what he's talking about with regard to being washed by the blood of Christ or walking by the Spirit, you really need to talk to somebody. You really need to be saved.
You really need to enter into these things so that you can know your destiny after your life is over. Let's pray. Father, we thank you for your time around your word this morning. Help us to take it seriously.
Help us to be willing to examine our own hearts and allow your Spirit to deal with us. Help us to put to death those things which deserve only death. Help us to be followers of our perfect Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ. In His name we pray, Amen.