Please be seated All right, let's take our Bibles tonight, and let's go to the book of Galatians chapter number five if we could Galatians Chapter number five there was an author who once wrote this sentiment about motorhomes He said this the motorhome was or has allowed us to put all the conveniences of home on wheels. A camper no longer needs to contend with sleeping in a sleeping bag, cooking over a fire, or hauling water from a stream. Now he can park a fully equipped home on a cement slab in the midst of a few pine trees, hook up a water line, a sewer line, and electricity, and he's good to go. One motor home I saw recently had a satellite dish attached on top. In fact, you get fish houses like that now. No more bother with dirt, no more smoke from the fire, no more drudgery of walking to the stream. Now it is possible to go camping and never have to go outside. We buy a motor home with the hope of seeing new places, of getting out into the world, yet we deck it out with the same furnishings as our own living room. Thus, nothing really changes. We may drive to a new place, set ourselves in new surroundings, but the newness goes unnoticed, for we've only carried along our old setting. The adventure of a new life in Christ begins when the comfortable patterns of the old life are left behind. Tonight, as we continue our series, Spirit-Filled Living, We want to understand what the Holy Spirit of God is trying to do within our personal lives. And that is transform them from the inside out. Transform them. Make them different. Make them what God wants them to become. Change that you can believe in. Here in Galatians 5, we were here last time. We'll read a little bit more of the passage tonight. But it just says in verse 16, this I say then, walk in the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfill the lust of the flesh. For the flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh, and these are contrary one to the other, so that ye cannot do the things that ye would. But if ye be led of the Spirit, ye are not under the law. Now the works of the flesh are manifest, which are these, adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness, idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies, envying, murders, drunkenness, revelings, and such like of the witch I tell you before, as I have also told you in time past, that they which do such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God, but the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance, against such there is no law. And they that are Christ's have crucified the flesh, with the affections and lusts. If we live in the Spirit, let us also walk in the Spirit. Let's consider this thought in a little bit more detail, what I call simply the spirit of transformation. That's what the Holy Spirit is in each of our lives, a spirit that transforms us, again, from the inside out. Let's pray and we'll get into the message tonight. Father, thank you for the time that we can have around your Word tonight. I ask that it would meet needs within each individual here tonight that you have for them and unlock some understanding, give some encouragement, and if necessary, Lord, even give rebuke. Whatever it takes, Lord God, for us to get aligned with your will is what we desire. We want to be focused completely on you and what you want us to be like and what you want us to do so that you may ultimately get glory and that our lives can fulfill their divine purpose. Thank you, Father, for tonight. May your spirit rest upon everything we say and do here in Jesus' name. Amen. Now last week I discussed the fact that as unsaved people we lived according to our fleshly, aka sinful, ideas and desires. You have your place here in Galatians. Just flip ahead a couple pages or so to the book of Ephesians. Ephesians 2 just expounds it so well. This is probably one of the clearest passages in the scripture that communicate to us life as an unsaved person. It says here, and you, speaking to the Ephesians, hath he quicken, brought back to life spiritually, who were dead in trespasses and sins? Wherein in time past ye walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that now worketh in the children of disobedience, among whom also we all had our conversation in times past, in the lusts of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature the children of wrath, even as others." So Paul here communicates very clearly that we as unsaved people live fleshly. Live sinfully. We got along. We found commonality with this world. We found, I guess, a brotherhood with this world, as you might say. Our spirit bear witness with the spirit of this world, and the spirit of this world is driven none other than by the prince of the power of the air, and that is Satan. And some of us can remember our unsaved days where we just lived according to what we felt like doing. And for some people, they get in worse sin than others. But generally speaking, we're all living that way. Living according to our lusts of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind. And naturally, we were children of wrath. Our sin nature had naturally cut us off from God. In fact, Paul calls us here, in so many words, spiritually dead. or we can put it this way, completely disconnected from God. Completely. Now we might have been religious, we maybe grew up in a denomination of some sort and practiced some different rituals of various types. But the thing is, until you are saved the Bible way, you and I are completely disconnected from God. Completely. There's no connection at all. God is distant and kind of unavailable, if you will. And spiritual things made very little sense to us. 1 Corinthians 2.14 says, but the natural man, that of course is the unsaved man, the lost man who's disconnected from God, receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God. In other words, they don't readily receive them, they don't readily understand them and embrace them. For they are foolishness unto him. In other words, why would you do that? Why would you live that way? Why would you tithe? Why would you witness? Why would you go to church? Why would you read your Bible? Why would you pray? Why would you devote so much time to serving God? That sounds like foolishness. That's what the world would say. And I would have said the same thing too. Because it was just like, my life was mine. And I was going to do as I pleased. The lost man says that the things of God are foolishness. But neither can he know them because they are spiritually discerned. In other words, you have to have a spiritual radar to understand them. I remember reading the Bible as a teenager and at different times. And to be quite honest with you, I couldn't make a whole lot of sense out of it. I could pull some verses out here and there that were kind of inspirational, if you will. But the general gist of the scriptures, I had no clue. Because when the Bible talked about wicked people, I didn't feel that that was me until God's Spirit convicted me and said, yeah, that is you. And I got saved and I began to seek things from God's perspective instead of my own. It's amazing what the Spirit can do to change your mind and change your mindset to help you understand what God is trying to communicate in His Word. But as unsaved people, spiritual things make little sense. And as it mentions in Ephesians, we tend to follow the whims of the world that are influenced by the satanic realm. And that's life as a lost person, even the most religious. Salvation, however, reunites us with God as God, of course, blots out our sin debt before Him. We appear before Him as if we've never sinned. We are clothed with the robes of righteousness. And one of the best things that God does for us, amongst all the other things, is that He comes and lives inside of us through the Holy Spirit of God. The Holy Spirit of God comes in and lives within, and now we are now connected to him. 1 Corinthians 6.19 says, what, know you not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost, which is in you, which you have of God, and you are not your own? Our bodies become the temple, the dwelling place of the third person of the Trinity. God himself comes to indwell within us. That is an amazing thing to think that holy God wants to dwell within sinful me. But he does. He does that. And that spirit reconnects us to God and becomes our divine enabler to no longer live our lives subject to sin, but we become free to live for him. May I just say this? Biblical liberty was never a license to sin and live as you feel like. Biblical liberty is to live free from sin. Because if you go back to our passage in Galatians, look up at verse 13. For brethren, Galatians 5 verse 13, for brethren, ye have been called unto liberty. Only use not liberty for an occasion to the flesh. But I love, serve one another. What it tells me is this, all those around and around saying, liberty in Christ, liberty in Christ. You know what every one of them are doing? They're living like the world. Every last one of them. It's always an excuse for how I can live like the world and you can't judge me. I don't have to judge you. God's Word does. And he says, that's wrong, folks. I saved you away from sin so that you do not sin as much as you did. Because God can't use an unholy life. It's a big deal. We need to get our definitions very clear here tonight. God says here, don't use your liberty to go play in sin. Use your liberty to walk away from it. Before salvation, we were sin's servants. Jesus said that in John 8. He that commit a sin is the servant of sin. He's the servant of sin. In other words, you can't but habitually practice it. But after salvation, the Spirit of God will enable us to counteract the sin tendencies of the flesh, as our text communicates. Verse 16, walk in the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfill the lust of the flesh. And that does something to a person's life. Go over to Romans chapter number 6 just to expound a little bit more on this. Romans 6 really presents to us the power of grace to reject sin and embrace righteousness. Something we can't do on our own naturally. And it's so beautifully laid out. I wish I had time to expound more of it, but I'm going to read this and just say a few things and move on. But it says here, verse 11, likewise reckon ye also yourselves to be dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord. In other words, that's the mentality we can now embrace, that we no longer need to sit there and follow our sinful flesh. We no longer need to go after that direction. We can find real life in Christ Jesus. Verse 12, let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body that you should obey it in the lusts thereof. Notice again, there is that rejection of sin that should be the desire of the Christians. It doesn't mean we will be sinlessly perfect, but it does mean that our attitude towards sin is, I don't like it like I used to. There has been a big time attitude change towards sin. Neither yield your members as instruments of unrighteousness unto sin, but yield yourselves unto God as those that are alive from the dead, and your members as instruments of righteousness unto God. For sin shall not have dominion over you, for ye are not under the law, but under grace. What then shall we sin, because we are not under the law, but under grace? God forbid. God forbid. No, you're not supposed to be playing in sin. Or should we go sin some more so grace abounds? The answer is no. But if you find yourself in there and want to get out, where sin did abound, grace will much more abound. What's great is it will pull us out, but the whole point is getting out of it and trying to stay out of it as much as we possibly can. Because what does sin do? It destroys everything that it touches. It will destroy your life, it will destroy mine, it will destroy anybody that we influence as life as well. You better be careful with your influence, by the way. You start saying things that are anti-God, anti-scriptural, you will be accountable for those people you influence. And I have seen people pull other people down and away from spiritual truth because they thought they knew better than God. Be careful with your influence. Side note, I guess. Whole point here. What then shall we sin because we are not under the law but under grace, God forbid? Know ye not that to whom ye yield yourselves servants to obey, his servants ye are to whom ye obey, whether of sin unto death or of obedience unto righteousness. But God be thanked that ye were the servants of sin, but have obeyed from the heart that form of doctrine that was delivered unto you. In other words, you'd lived for sin before, but then you got saved. being then made free from sin, you became the servants of righteousness. Skip to verse 20. It says, for when you were servants of sin, you were free from righteousness. In other words, you couldn't live righteously, at least not joyously. And that's the thing about the Christian life. When it's lived in the power of the Spirit, living righteously isn't grievous. It's actually joyous. But that only comes when you're filled with the Spirit. And that's a big thing because, you know, before I was saved, trying to live right, trying to do this, trying to go to church one time a week. Man, I did it. Oh, it was hard. Especially some of those mornings I wanted to sleep in. reading one chapter in the Bible, taking my communion, you know, I was doing all that stuff, but I tell you something, that was about as grievous as it got. I couldn't wait to get out of there. I had my plans, I had things. When I got saved and the Spirit of God came in, boy, that sure did change my wanter. And a lot of you can testify of that, too. It really changed what you were. That's what it's talking about here. What fruit had you then in those things whereof you were now ashamed? What was the good fruit that came out of a sinful lifestyle? Nothing. For the end of those things is death. However you want to interpret death, all I know is it's not positive. It's a bad deal. God doesn't want us serving sin. Instead, living our lives in the way that is pleasing to him. And that revolves around holy living. And that will naturally cause some real changes in the lives of people, some very gross changes, depending on what kind of sin they were in before. You know, we've had a Bruce Fry here, and what a great guy he is. Wonderful musician, sweet, tender, passionate man for God. I really have a lot of good to say about him. But you know his testimony and the life he lived before that. I mean, he was really into some rough stuff. He had pretty wild life. But then Christ saved him. It's very evident that he changed him. Even if we weren't into sin as bad as some, we are still a far cry from the image of Jesus Christ. Even if you grew up in a church, you know what? You're still not Jesus, okay? Sometimes the worst ones are the ones that grew up in church, by the way. That's the sad thing, is when you see people marching off that grew up in church and they're out living like the devil. And it's just like, it's so sad that it happens, but it does, and in more cases than we like to see. But we'd really like to see people come to see that real change that takes place. God is going to use the Holy Spirit to work to bring us closer to that image. Remember, that's his ultimate goal. Romans 8, 29, very key verse for the Christian to understand. predestinated us to be conformed to the image of His Son, that He might be the firstborn among many brethren. When God transforms you and I more into the image of Christ, we will be the firstborn among many people." In other words, God will use us to see others saved. That's a good thing. But God wants transformation in our lives. You know the Bible is not just an information book, it's a book of transformation. It's a book of transformation. And we come to Christ as we are, but he's going to change us into what he wants us to be. And hopefully since the day you got saved, you are not the same person that you were that day. And hopefully you've changed, at least a little bit, over the course of time. It's evidence that you truly got it. The Spirit is directly responsible for those changes that take place. And it's a natural and normal thing for that to happen. If a person claims to have gotten saved and don't have, well, simply just no semblance of change, honestly, it's questionable they ever got it. It really is. No matter what they claim. John the Baptist, or excuse me, yeah, John the Baptist, You know, before he baptized people, he required what? Bring forth therefore fruits meet for repentance. What does that mean? Well, what happened, if you look at the text, there was some Pharisees and scribes and whatnot showing up wanting to be baptized. And he says, who hath warned you to flee from the wrath to come, called them vipers? I mean, he was rough. But he said, you know, bring forth fruits to eat for repentance. In other words, let's see some evidence of a changed life. And they didn't have it. They didn't have it. And he didn't baptize them. See, Paul preached this in Acts 26.20, or mentioned this in a testimony, which showed first unto them at Damascus, and at Jerusalem, and throughout all the coast of Judea, and then to the Gentiles, that they should repent, and turn to God, and do works to eat for repentance. Why does that happen where you get people who make professions and they just have no change? There was no repentance in their salvation. That's what it is. See, you have to understand that if you're going to accept the terms of salvation, that you're going to go in a new direction. You can't keep doing the same things that you were doing that offended God. You can't. And people are walking around, oh yeah, I'm saved, and they're just living like the devil, and they can't figure out, you know, why they have no interest in being faithful in church, they have no interest in giving up their sin. Rather, they gravitate more to the world than they do to the spiritual stuff. Well, could it possibly be that when they made that profession, they weren't willing to repent, or they didn't understand that? Because when people genuinely got saved in the Bible, they were one way, and then they became another. There was a difference there. Now, can people get backslidden? Absolutely. They can get backslidden if they're saved. But I'm just talking about somebody who makes a profession, two weeks later you follow up and they're like, huh, what happened to me? I don't know. You know? We're not into doing that kind of stuff. I don't want to just flip professions to flip professions. I want genuine conversions. And if that means less people make a profession, that's fine. At least it'd be genuine. It'd be genuine. But the Spirit will work transformation into the life of people, and that's a guarantee. And our text suggests that transformation thoroughly. The text tells us that there will be transformation that will take place in the life of an individual. Because just simply seeing, you walk in the Spirit, you're not going to fulfill the lust of the flesh, and that will just change everything about you and me. Let's look at this a little closely, and I'll have to hurry here. As we see, first off, the conflict Now last time I mentioned that as a born-again Christian, we have a dual nature. We still have the flesh to contend with, but now we have a partner, the Holy Spirit, who becomes our great helper to put down the flesh. But it's not going to be without conflict, because verse 17 tells us in Galatians 5, "...for the flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh, and these are contrary one to another, so that you cannot do the things that you would." So you have two natures battling it out here. Nature is battling for control of your soul, is what it amounts to. The soul is the decision maker. The spirit is saying, do this. The flesh is saying, do this. The soul is saying, what do I do? Well, the obvious answer is to do this, but what we often feel is to do this. So we know that conflict exists within. And it can be a real battle, especially in areas that were maybe in times past, We are prone to fall towards as lost people. You know, before you got saved, you had a problem with lust? You're probably going to have some problems with lust after you get saved. Because that spirit had craved it and then built up a craving, or you might call it a stronghold, in that area. It could be in anger, it could be in pride, it could be in any number of sins we may be more prone to. But the Spirit is here to help us subdue the flesh so that we can walk in victory over it. Now just for clarity's sake, what is victory in the Christian life? It's very simple. It's our ability to say no to the sinful fleshly nature that we possess and we say yes to God's holy desire. That's the basic gist of what victory is in the Christian life. Yes to God, no to Satan, sin, flesh, whatever. But that's just not going to happen without our participation. I'm expecting God to help so I don't sin anymore. No, you're going to have to make choices just like I have to make choices. We have been given the responsibility to choose what we submit to. That's where the Bible says in Romans 6.13 again, neither yield you your members as instruments of unrighteousness unto sin, but yield yourselves unto God as those that are alive from the dead and your members as instruments of righteousness unto God. It talks about yielding. That's a personal choice. That's a personal choice you and I have to make. Okay, here's a temptation. What am I going to do? Am I going to go after it? Or am I going to submit to the Spirit? Which side am I going to submit to? In fact, our text tells us to walk in the Spirit. Again, that's in a command form. And when it speaks of walking in the Spirit, it's those moment-by-moment choices in which we choose to obey the Spirit of God, be obedient to Him, or surrender to fleshly impulses that we get. Yet why do Christian people not walk in victory, though they have a clear testimony of salvation at times? Why? Why do some Christians struggle to overcome through the power of the Spirit? Now there might be some other reasons than this one I'm going to give, but I think this is a major one. It's what they're feeding on. It's what you're feeding yourself, your mind. It's what you're putting into your soul, as it were. Now, to give a perspective, the Bible tells us in Ephesians 5, 18, if you want to flip there quick, just ahead a few pages from Galatians 5 there, it's kind of the essence of our series here, spirit-filled living. It says here, verse 18, "...and be not drunk with wine wherein is excess, but be filled with the Spirit." Okay? We understand that. We've been speaking a lot about that. But it goes on in verse 19, it says, "...speaking to yourselves in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody in your heart to the Lord, giving thanks always for all things unto God and the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ." Just notice the wording here, about the speaking to your songs and psalms and so forth, and that's a mark of a Spirit-filled Christian. There's joy, thanksgiving and praise in the heart, in essence. That's the definition of Spirit-filled. But look at Colossians 3.16 up on the screen, ìLet the word of Christ dwell in you richly in all wisdom, teaching and admonishing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with grace in your hearts to the Lord.î Very similar diction but it says here in essence being word filled. And the conclusion is simple here, a word filled Christian will be a spirit filled Christian. You get it? In other words, if you and I have been getting this into our heart through our exposure to it, then we will be filled with the Spirit. Let's just put it this way, feeding on it. And that starts with our personal devotions. that comes from the preaching of the Word of God, that comes from meditating, that comes from reading and studying, whatever it is that we're doing to take it within our being. You know, the Bible uses in a couple of occasions was a couple of prophets about them eating a roll, and that roll was symbolic, or a scroll of some sort, that roll was symbolic of them taking in the Word of God so that they can give it out. Okay? That's the idea. We're feeding on it. That's what I mean by that. And you say, why is that important? Well, if we're not feeding on God's Word on a regular basis, we will never be Spirit-filled people. It's just not going to happen. And again, what I mean by feeding is simply taking within our being the eternal Word of God. You know, Jesus, when he was under fire from the devil, there in Matthew 4, When the devil tempted him to turn stones into bread, what did Jesus reply with? Men should not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God. Yet in our day, Christian people have a tendency to be Bible anemic and world gluttonous, and hence have zero power to live out the commands of Scripture. Can't do it. No power at all. Because in order to be spirit-filled, you have to be word-filled. But if you're media-filled, entertainment-filled, worldly stuff-filled, what are you going to reflect? What you've put into yourself. There's a saying with people, with food, you are what you eat. Think about that a little bit, what that means. You are what you eat. You eat a donut, it might be like a donut. I don't know. I know, it hits home for some of you. But in all seriousness, you are what you eat. That's really true spiritually. If all you do is shove your heart full of the entertainment world and the sports world and the music world and the political world and the financial world and everything that the world just craves and champions and celebrates, you're not going to have a spiritual bone about you. It's just not going to happen. You can't do that. Because what you've done is filled your heart with stuff and there's no room for the spirit to fill it. That's the way it works. We can be so Bible-anemic and world-gluttonous. The world's forms of media have so pumped into the minds of the average Christian, all its ideologies, that they are far more influential over them than God's Word, our spirit. What we feed on will control our minds and our hearts. That's the basic gist of it. What we feed on will control our minds and our hearts. You know, I was reading an article I have about George Whitefield. I don't think I've shared this before, but one of the things that so impressed me about him was the power that he possessed. Now, he said he was very eloquent in his oratory, but really it was more of the person that he was that made such an impact with his preaching. But this is something that he did, is that he would read the whole Bible on his knees and just thoroughly just saturate himself with the Word of God. George Muller, of course, the famous prayer guy from England years ago also, he read the Bible over 200 times in his life. They said at least 100 times on his knees. You say, how did those guys have such power with God? Well, that's how. They saturated themselves so much with the Word, but more God's people are so saturated with movies that swear at them and are laced with sex and violence and all the other stuff, they can't... Well, I don't have any power with God. I don't know. What you been eating? What you been eating? It's going to make you void. There's just no power there. We are weak and anemic spiritually because of what we've been feeding on. People in poor health change their diet because what they are eating is harming or not helping them get better or simply even live. And maybe for some people they need to really consider changing what their diet is in regards to what they allow in their eye and their ear gate. And I'm not trying to speak self-righteously here. I'm just telling you, We desire power from God, we want to please the Lord, we want to see God do great things, but we can't do it being so filled with the world and so empty of the Word. Because without the Word you can't have the power of the Spirit. But I'll admit, it may not be easy at first to do that if you've kind of been addicted to that. One thing I've learned about my flesh is that it will put up a real stink. You know what I mean? It kind of likes to put up a stink when you're trying to take something away that it just craves and pleasures. And the devil likes to bring temptation across our path too. But if we can learn to starve the sin and feed the spirit, the victory will be found. The conflict is real. But it's also very winnable. But we have to be feeding ourselves with God's word over and above the influences of this world, far and beyond. Defeat is certain when we insist on continuing to feed our flesh and starve the spirit. It will not happen. You will not walk in those commands. It can't happen. I can't do it. You can't do it. Nobody can do it. Because the only way you can do it is being filled with the Spirit of God and empowered by Him. Without that power, you and I are nothing. We have no ability whatsoever. And this isn't a means to go into everyone's life with an FBI spirit trying to find what's wrong with them. Let me tell you something. Each one of us probably have more sin than we care to have to deal with. And thank God for his grace to just help us get through one day walking in that field. But that's the bottom line. We have to do more to getting this thing in than all the other influences of the world. Otherwise, it's just, you just have no power. And the Christian life will become a real drudgery. Powerless and fruitless. But that's not what we're shooting for, right? We're shooting to be used. We're shooting to have something that's real within the soul. And being filled with the Spirit really does make a difference. Well, secondly, and this is just my, I only have two points, and I'll have to go real quick here tonight, but the change. You know, as we walk in the Spirit, we're Spirit-filled, Word-filled. When He's completely in control of our lives, it's only natural we'll change. We will change as a person. What happens is that the Spirit of God will begin to illuminate God's truth and guide us to choose to obey those truths. John 16.13, "'Howbeit when he, the Spirit of truth, is come, he will guide you into all truth. For he shall not speak of himself, but whatsoever he shall hear, that shall he speak, and he will show you things to come.'" The Spirit of God will reveal truth to you and I. and he will guide us into that truth. In other words, he'll lead us to choose that. Now, we can still make a choice of rejecting that, but if we're seeking to be people who are filled, we'll more likely gravitate in that direction. As we set aside our sinful choices and make spiritual choices, the fruit will correspond over time. Galatians 6, 7 through 9 talks about the sowing and reaping process. You sow the flesh, you'll reap corruption. You sow the spirit, you'll reap life everlasting. The consequences just naturally become that way, and naturally we change as people. God's goal, of course, is to make us replicas of Jesus Christ. We saw Romans 8.29 a moment ago. He also has predestinated us to be conformed to the image of his Son. Now, of course, we'll never be complete replicas, but God will be working through the Spirit to get us closer to the image throughout our time here on earth. He will be looking to do that. The process is referred to as sanctification. And we're familiar with that term, I think. And this is good change. This is good change. You know what? I don't think anybody is sad when they're more like Jesus. I think we're happiest when we're more like Jesus. But you just can't work that up in your own power. It's impossible. You just can't do it. But through the power of the Spirit, oh, he can start removing things that you never thought could be removed because of that power. See, sinful tendencies will hinder our ability to be used of God. In fact, if we insist on staying in there, we will, again, be absolutely powerless. But a holy vessel in the hands of God is a powerful tool that impacts the world. And that's really what we're shooting for tonight. It's not to come down on anybody as much as it's like, hey, there's a better thing to live for than all these fleshly tendencies that the world champions. Go to 2 Timothy chapter number 2. 2 Timothy chapter number 2. The scriptures communicate this to us. It says, nevertheless, the foundation of God stand assures having this seal, the Lord knoweth them that are his. and let everyone that nameth the name of Christ depart from iniquity." Okay? You know, the idea is not to be choosing sin as much as it is to be departing from it. But in a great house there are not only vessels of gold and of silver, but also of wood and of earth, and some to honor and some to dishonor. So in other words, in everybody's life there's some good points and then some not so good points. Some more than others maybe, but that's the reality of things. But verse 21 speaks of that sanctification process, "...if a man therefore purge himself from these, he shall be a vessel unto honor, sanctified, set apart, holy, and meet for the Master's use, and prepared unto every good work." Hey, that sounds like a pretty good deal doesn't it? That we can be used of God in a greater way, in a way beyond what we ever thought. But the thing is we can be our own worst enemy by simply not seeking to be filled with the Spirit. And you know, we'll sit back at times and just say, it's not supposed to be this way. Why is it that way in my life? And the goal tonight is to help us understand that this is the reason why it's that way in our lives at times. It's that the Spirit needs to be more in control than the flesh. And it hinges completely on what we choose to feed ourselves and the decisions that we make. God will not make a decision for you. He will encourage you, He will guide you, He will tell you, but He has given you and I a free will. So, the choice is ours as it were. Again, people dream of being used of God to do great and mighty things, but don't want Him to change much of anything in their lives, but you can't have the best of both worlds if you want to put it that way. Before God does a work through a person's life, He's going to do a work within them. You will do a work within them to purge out things that would have otherwise hindered or sabotaged what God's desire is to do. You know, you think of Moses. Moses is a great example of this. Moses spent 40 years on the backside of the desert, and God used that time to strip Moses of all of his self-confidence. Because you remember, at 40 years of age, you read, that it came to his heart to visit the children of Israel. He went down and defended one, killed that Egyptian, thinking, they're going to see me as their Messiah, and that was anything but what happened. And then 40 years later, when all that self-confidence was stripped away, he became a vessel that God could use. And God did more with him than he ever thought, especially at his age, at his age. I have a book in my office called Mountain Rain. I enjoy that book. It's an encouragement to me. It was about a missionary by the name of James Frazier. He was a British missionary who sought to reach the Lisu people of the Yunnan province of China back in the early part of the 1900s. And he spent years trying to reach these people. They were steeped in ancestral worship and paganism of various types. And he seemed to be making some headway only to be set back multiple times. And it wasn't an easy area to live and to traverse. There's lots of mountains, very high mountains in the region. But he really had a burden for them. And he wrote in his journal one time this thought that God laid upon his heart. He said, it seemed as if God was saying, you're crying to do a big work among the Lisu. I'm wanting to do a big work in you yourself. And eventually God did move upon the pagan Lisu people and several hundred families of that people group came to Christ. But it started because he first was changed. He was first changed from the inside out. Hey, the transformation the Spirit engineers in life is remarkable, but we have to make the decision to give ourselves over to that. And we help ourselves by feeding on the spiritual things and not ignoring them, or thinking that we can have it in both worlds. You really can't. You can try as hard as you want, but the more I'm learning is simply this. You either got to be sold out for God or you won't be sold out at all. And that's your decision as much as it is mine. What choice are we going to make? The Spirit's there to help. He's ready to transform. But can we surrender to him in that working? May God help us to do so tonight. Let's stand to our feet for a few moments as the pianist comes.