Regaining Lost Ground

Pastor Shane Idleman: His name is Jesus, awesome in power, reigning forever, the healer's in the room. No soul is beyond the boundaries of his grace. There is resurrection power in his name. Name another king like this. He has no boundaries. His power is limitless, his riches unsearchable, his reign never ends, his authority is final. He cannot be overruled. His majesty can never be matched. He is the savior for the sinner and the shepherd for the shattered. He is the repairer of the breach for the broken. He is the rock of our salvation. Name another king like this.

Narrator: Thank you for joining us here at Westside Christian Fellowship, located in Leona Valley, California, one hour north of Los Angeles. Today on Regaining Lost Ground, we hear the second and final part of a soul-restoring message by Pastor Shane titled, "There is Life in Death."

Psalm 62:1 tells us, "For God alone my soul waits in silence. From him comes my salvation." Please join us for today's uplifting message of eternal hope in Jesus as Pastor Shane lays out the gospel message, relaying the hope that can only be found in a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.

You can hear the whole message at Pastor Shane's YouTube and Rumble channels. Make sure to subscribe today. For more information, visit us online at WestsideChristianFellowship.org. We also encourage you to hear more truth from Pastor Shane with the Idleman Unplugged weekly podcast. And now, from Westside Christian Fellowship in Leona Valley, California, here's Pastor Shane Idleman.

Pastor Shane Idleman: Paul said to be absent in this body is to be present with Christ. I don't teach, and I've never believed, a soul sleep to where you just are laying there. That sounds kind of nice, though, but I don't think it's biblical. In 1 Peter chapter 2, when he was reviled, he did not revile in return. When he suffered, he did not threaten, but he committed himself to him who judges righteously. Basically, he committed himself to God.

What a great example. It is hard and challenging in these times. When do we push back? I believe there is a time to push back and to say, "Not on my watch." We are going to pray and fast, and you push into the kingdom of darkness. He didn't return when they were hitting him or mocking him. He didn't return that because God was going to judge him. I saw a social media post this week. I think some of you saw it because I posted it. A guy had a shirt on that said, "I'm going to let God fix this because if I do, I'm going to jail."

Isn't that true? It's okay for believers to feel like that because we are called to be watchmen. We're called to guard those things entrusted to us. We're called to be a voice to those who have no voice. We're called to make sure that the little ones are not sexually assaulted and groomed. That's what we're called to do. Of course, that can be in a spirit of humility and gentleness, but it has to be done.

I really don't understand this passive Christianity. People say Jesus was passive, but he wasn't. He was not a pacifist. He was not passive. He was very pointed and bold when it needed to be said. He called them white-washed tombs. When you tell the religious leaders they are white-washed tombs, nice on the outside but full of dead men's bones on the inside, you win one proselyte and you make them twice the son of hell as you are.

You can't get more bold than to push over the money changers out in the foyer. There are some things I would have loved to have seen. We have this idea of him being just mild and meek. Some of the language in the Greek language shows the emphasis on certain things. He emphasized. There was a boldness. There was a cry. There was an urgency to his voice.

He would call out those false teachers and the religious leaders. I think it was the scribes or the lawyers that told him to settle down. In rebuking them, he rebuked us, too. He said, "While you're at it, let me go on and rebuke you some more." It's not just a passive doormat letting society walk all over you. The Bible is talking about personal assaults or personal offenses. If somebody says something to me or they slap me, I return the other cheek.

You let those things go when it comes to personal things. When it comes to protecting little ones and giving a voice to those who have no voice and exposing the unfruitful works of darkness, if we don't do those things, that's more in the category of a coward, not a bold believer. He did not respond with scornful or abusive language. That's a good lesson for many of us. He did not threaten in return. He committed himself to God's sovereign plan.

I have said this many times before and I will continue to say it: God's sovereignty is my sanity. Learn that and absorb it in your life as well. God's sovereignty is my sanity because as things get crazier, you've got to have an anchor, that being God's sovereignty. This whole push now with grooming kids and transgenderism is deviant. It's sexual sin. It's in your face, and it needs to be called out. It is evil to its core, and they're not very tolerant of opposing views.

First Peter says he himself bore our sins in his own body on the tree. This is the reason behind the cross. He himself is why we're here celebrating. He bore our sin in his own body on the tree so that we, having died to sin, might live for righteousness by whose stripes you were healed. Having died to sins? Wait a minute. If I've died to sin, why is it sometimes still alive in me?

The context is that you've been saved from the transgressions of your sin. The penalty of death is no longer hanging over your head. You're free of that. But the Adamic nature, that sin nature, is still alive and well until the day we are buried. It still says you might live for righteousness' sake by whose stripes you were healed. This could take a whole other sermon, but I do believe we could show you where by his stripes you were healed spiritually speaking.

Also, there's something in the healing aspect of Christ's death, burial, and resurrection. That's where we pray that people can be healed. We believe in God's healing power. We don't believe in "name it and claim it" or that everyone's going to be healed. I've taught on that before. There are reasons why sometimes we're not. But because of those stripes, we were healed spiritually. He bore our sins. He was pierced. The Bible says without the shedding of blood, there is no forgiveness of sin.

If you're a young adult and you're having a hard time understanding the cross, you're not alone. Sometimes I wonder why a perfect God, a king on the cross, would do that for me and for you. It's hard to really conceive what Jesus did. But we understand that without the shedding of blood, there's no remission, there's no forgiveness of sin. This is why the blood of bulls and goats could not cover sin. It covered temporarily. They were all pointing him to Jesus. They were pointing the Passover Lamb back to Genesis or Exodus, and it was pointing to the final work of redemption on the cross.

The final act of the shedding of innocent blood for our sins completely was just a temporary covering. So, die to sin; it no longer controls, dominates, or sentences us to death. First Peter continues, "For you were like sheep going astray, but have now returned to the shepherd and overseer of your soul." You have now returned. I often think if I could preach one message to our nation, it would be something along these lines of returning to God.

The power of returning, knowing how far you've drifted and then calling you to come back to God, or maybe for the first time, and realizing how far we've drifted. That's what the prophetic voices would do throughout the Old Testament: "Turn back to God, O backsliding Israel. Look how far you have drifted and come back." You would never see this again. I'll show you a picture from New York, 1956, on Good Friday. Let that sink in.

We haven't drifted; we have completely made a U-turn. Now, they'll drape them in rainbow colors or put some other godless Lil Nas X having sex with Satan in Times Square. We have lost our minds. Where is the desperation? Where is the desperation of the church to get back to God and return to God? Return to the shepherd, the overseer of your soul.

Isaiah 53 says he is despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows acquainted with grief. It's one thing we try to instill in the youth here at this church: you will be despised and rejected by men. We want to prepare them for the battle. We don't want to say, "Hey, just follow Jesus, everybody's going to love you, you can be a famous YouTuber." He understands your sorrow.

Then it goes on to say, "And we hid, we hid as it were our faces from him. He was despised and we did not esteem him." That's what they did. It's almost embarrassing. Jesus is embarrassing. Have you ever been there? Especially as you get older, your faith will be challenged and you'll have to eventually stand your ground and say, "I believe in Jesus Christ." Don't expect the truth to be popular. If it's popular, it's probably not God. The message of redemption, the message of sin, the message of hope, peace, and forgiveness has never been popular.

Two weeks ago, it just kind of broke my heart. Do you guys know who the most famous YouTuber out there is? He's got the biggest YouTube channel. MrBeast. That's his name, MrBeast. I was watching an interview with him. Do you know how he started? With crosses and John 3:16 in his old YouTube videos. He was witnessing. Now, I just heard him on a large podcast when they asked, "Well, you don't believe in Jesus anymore, do you?" He said, "No, I don't know. I'm not an atheist, I'm agnostic." He was just caught off guard in that spot, and he denied the very thing he believed in and promoted earlier on.

Can you imagine if you come out and say Jesus is Lord and Savior? In many of these cases, people have religion and rules rather than relationship and intimacy. If you have a relationship with God and intimacy with him, the chips are going to fall where they may. But if you have religion and were raised in a Christian home and raised to believe this, that's why this big term now, deconstructionism, is happening. They're deconstructing their faith.

You have all these Christians writing books about how they walked away from faith and how silly they were. The reason is they had religion. If you listen to them, you'll understand they didn't have an intimate relationship with Jesus Christ. They had rules and they wanted to rebel against those rules. It wasn't about relationship; it was religion. How can you walk away from a genuine love for God, a genuine fullness of his spirit? You can drift, like the prodigal son, but you're miserable. That's the difference: you're miserable in that state.

Ben Greenfield is one of the top trainers in the United States, very popular on YouTube. He asked me, and I think I shared with him, that the reason I knew, at 12 years old up by Wrightwood, I believed in the Lord. I had the wrong influences. Even my dad at that time was not a believer. So, it was kind of, "What'd you do last night? Did the parents get you a keg?" It was that party scene.

I was led astray by that and the wrong friendships and wrong people. I began to drift completely from God. I would say I was a Christian and I'd pray when it got in tough spots. I rolled my vehicle and I sure prayed. Every time I woke up, I was depressed and wanted to come home saying, "Lord, I'm sorry." But many of you have been in that bondage. It's deep and hard to get out of. It took some time.

That's why we don't want to beat people up who are caught in sin. The difference between someone practicing sin who's unconverted and a sinner who is struggling is this: both the pig and a lamb find their way to the mud, but the pig enjoys the mud and even leads other people in. The lamb cries out and hates its miserable condition. They're both caught in the sin, but the heart of the prodigal wants to go running back to the father. The heart of the sinner is, "I love this. I don't care. I'm a drunkard, I'm an adulterer, I'm a fornicator, I'm a thief. This is who I am, I practice such things."

That's why this church also gives a lot of hope to every type of sinner out there, even same-sex attraction. It's not way up there. Sin is sin in God's eyes. But when we practice it and we shake our fists in God's face and say, "I don't care, this is who I am," that's a bad spot to be versus, "Father, I'm struggling, help me. God, pull me out of the mud and the mire, God, please." See the difference in the heart? It's a difference between night and day, light and darkness, right and wrong. He was wounded for our transgressions. He was bruised for our iniquities. The chastisement of our peace was upon him and by his stripes, we are healed.

Exodus 12 says God told them to take some of the blood and put it on the two doorposts and on the lintel of the house, and when I see the blood, I will pass over you. This is where we would see Jesus even in the Old Testament, a foreshadowing of the Passover Lamb. He's called the Passover Lamb. 1,500 years before Jesus, the blood was shed and God was getting ready to deliver Israel out of Egypt. He was going to go through and kill all the firstborn males that night.

But he said whoever puts the blood of the lamb on their door, the death angel will pass over. That's where they still use that word Passover. When we apply the blood of Jesus Christ on our lives, the death sentence of God passes over us because of that blood. They would put the blood on the doorposts, like in our homes. It would resemble one of the houses there in Israel. They would put blood on one side of the doorpost and then they would cover it on the lintel, which is the top part.

Then they would bring the blood down the other side of the doorpost. So, what would happen is you would have almost this reflection of the cross on the doorposts of these homes in Israel right before they were led out of Egypt. The blood would fall on each side of the doorpost and on the lintel and then they would drip from the top down to the bottom of the floor. You can almost see a picture of the cross there and what Jesus did, even foreshadowing back in the Old Testament time.

That's exactly what they did. Whoever put the blood on it was saved. This is a serious discussion. There's nothing more important than believing in Jesus Christ and what he did. There's a song we sing sometimes called "The King is in the Room." Come see the scars of love upon his hands. Watch the darkness flee at his command. Who is this king? His name is Jesus, awesome in power, reigning forever, the healer's in the room.

Let miracles break out across this place. Let no soul be beyond the boundaries of his grace. There is resurrection power in his name. Name another king like this. He has no boundaries. His power is limitless, his riches unsearchable, his reign never ends, his authority is final. He cannot be overruled. His majesty can never be matched. He is the savior for the sinned and the shepherd for the shattered. He is the repairer of the breach for the broken. He is the rock of our salvation. Name another king like this.

Another song I love says, "I come broken to be mended. I come wounded to be healed. I come desperate to be rescued. I come empty to be filled. I come guilty to be pardoned by the blood of Christ the Lamb." There is life in death, but you have to come broken. The greatest threat to all of us is pride. Pride must be crushed. God, I come broken. I want to be mended. If you want to be fixed, you've got to come broken.

We saw Jesus when he was on the cross, and there were two choices on either side of him. So many people when they hear about Jesus will say, "Yeah, he was crucified. I know that story." But here's the difference: he was crucified for me. You've got to make sure you get that right. You can't just say he was crucified. He was crucified for me, and you repent and you believe in that.

Hello, this is Pastor Shane Idleman. I want to tell you about a new booklet I just released titled "The Dark Night of the Soul." This book came from a very challenging season in my own personal life. Dark seasons reveal what we actually believe, not just what we say we believe. The phrase "The Dark Night of the Soul" captures a moment we all dread. It's the moment when the floor drops out from underneath us and we realize that we are not in control, and we come face to face with something we cannot fix.

Time and time again, God demonstrates that what appears to be the end of something is actually only the beginning. So, again, I want to encourage you to take time today and download my new booklet, "The Dark Night of the Soul," for free right now at WestsideChristianFellowship.org. Again, download it for free at WestsideChristianFellowship.org. It is on Amazon, but we're encouraging people to go to our church website where they can actually download the booklet for free, the PDF, and share it with friends and family at WestsideChristianFellowship.org.

Narrator: Westside Christian Fellowship is located 60 miles north of Los Angeles in Leona Valley, California. Thank you again for listening to today's message of Regaining Lost Ground, where we are reminded daily: times change, truth does not.