Bethel Deliverance International Church

Guest (Male): Today on Climbing Higher. And so now it’s the same way in the things of God. You’ve been born of the spirit. Do you know what that means? According to First John, you have the seed of God in you. That’s what caused you to be born as a child of God. You are qualitatively, distinctly different from your culture.

But you must perfect it. You must learn how to adapt to this new life. It should not be greeted with anxiety and stress, remorse and regret. You should not look at the scripture’s call to separation as some punishment. It is God’s way of saying, in order to perfect you in the life that I’ve called you into, you have to be separate from those things that pull you into the opposite direction.

Announcer: Welcome to Climbing Higher with Bishop Eric A. Lambert, Jr.

Bishop Eric A. Lambert, Jr.: Well, praise the Lord, everyone. Welcome to the Climbing Higher broadcast. It is truly a joy to sit with you and share the word of God so that you may grow up in your salvation and enjoy your Christian life. So many people come to God, they give their lives to Him, but they have not yet learned how to have joy.

Well, this message that you’re going to hear today will discuss the benefits of being born again. Now, I know many people want to know, what am I getting out of this? Aside from forgiveness of sins and eternal life, what do I have right now to enjoy my life on this planet?

The Psalmist declares in Psalm 103, "Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all His benefits." He said He heals all of my diseases, forgives all of my iniquities, redeems my life from destruction, satisfies my mouth with good things, and that He makes sure that my youth is renewed like the eagles. So, as you listen to the message today, keep your mind centered on the benefits that come to you as a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ. I’ll be back at the close of the broadcast.

Guest (Male): We’ve been programmed by a world of sin. And it is, with God, all things are possible, but it is almost impossible to find God throughout all the foolishness around us. If you notice the word of God, if you notice the, I’m going to give you a paradoxical phrase, an oxymoronic phrase.

If you read the word of God, you will notice the complex simplicity of the word of God. What does that mean, Pastor? It means that it’s simple in scope because God’s commands are simple. But they’re complex by participation.

He wants us to Himself. We’re sure of that. But He doesn’t just grab us and pull us to Him. He instructs the Apostle Paul to write in Second Corinthians, "Come out from among them and separate yourself." There’s the complex part.

In most cases, we don’t know what we should separate from. Now, in the Pentecostal arena, we’ve enumerated a group of behaviors that we say you should not be partakers of: drinking, smoking, things like that. And we keep you from certain patterns of behavior because someone decided they were sin.

A woman shall not wear pants, that which pertaineth unto a man. Don’t sit in the seat of the scornful. Don’t go to the movies. Don’t do this, don’t do that. Is that what God wants for us? No.

He wants the positive to overshadow the negative. He doesn’t want you serving Him with a list of don'ts. He wants you to understand the dos. And when you understand the dos, the simple, the complexities fade away.

So when Jesus is confronted in Mark Chapter 12 by the young lawyer who says, "Just tell me what’s the greatest commandment? What should I be striving for?" Jesus said, "Focus on the oneness of God. Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one."

What’s He trying to do? Remove the possibility of polytheism. We don’t serve three gods. We serve one God who manifests Himself in different distinct personalities, but it’s one God.

He said the second part is that you love Him with your entire being, which is what we don’t know how to do. Simple, complex. Simple, love Him with all your heart. Complex, how do you do it? You don’t love anybody with all of your heart because you don’t know how. No one ever taught us how. No one ever taught us how to love.

We pick it up, we grab it, we contemplate an emotion. Whereas Jesus says it’s mental because He adds the mind in Mark’s gospel. In the Deuteronomy passage that He’s quoting, it says, "Love Him with all your heart, your strength, and your soul."

Jesus says "and the mind," which means think about how you are responding to God. Then He throws in the most incredible directive. Right after He says you love God with all your being, He says, "Now, here’s the thing you are going to be hard-pressed to do: love yourself."

I intentionally skipped one. Because we’ll jump right to that "loving neighbor." But He said, "as you love yourself." He presupposes that you’re going to love yourself. Now, I can’t say Jesus did not take into consideration because He’s omniscient. I cannot say that.

But I will say He was supposing that we would grow to love ourselves. Maybe, forgive me but I need to do this for allegory sense, maybe He didn’t know the scope of mental illness that we would have in our culture that causes us not to love ourselves.

Maybe He didn’t know how far we would sink without being able to even love us. That’s why you have a problem loving others. It’s not the devil; you don’t love yourself. That’s why He put the caveat. He said, "Love others as you love yourself."

And so many of us don’t love ourselves. So how can I love someone else? If I cannot give myself love, then how do I love someone else? So we have simplicity and difficulty intertwined.

But now, here you are born again. Remember, we are not promoting the Christian concept. I understand in theory it means follower of Christ. I’ll give you that. But in our cultural understanding of the phrase, it just means anyone that’s not a Jew.

So we’re not focusing on the Christian part. We’re focusing on born again. In Psalm 103, we are going to really deal with this because now that you’re born again, there are some fundamental things you must perfect.

I want to draw a correlation between being born again and being born to your parents and born into your culture. I feel impish and I’m not going to do it because it’s you know, yeah, yeah. How many of you can remember when you were born?

Is there anybody in here whose parents did not have any children? I was at a church once and I asked that question, three or four hands went up. I said, "Then how are you here?"

But how far back can you remember from the day you were born? Chances are you will not remember when you were born. But how far back can you remember? And that’s pretty telling. If you had a decent childhood without abuse, mental, verbal, or physical, you remember far back.

But if you had some things happen to you that offended your youth, there’s a mental block there where you can’t go beyond that. So let’s just say you can remember first grade. I’ll give you first grade.

As you began to grow and become accustomed to both your home life and your culture, there were many times when your home life clashed with your culture. By that, I mean your parents gave you rules that your friends did not support.

There were things that your culture pushed you to do that your parents insisted you don’t do. Now, baby boomers, you had a lot more phrases to insist on the rulership of your parents, such as, "Why did you go do that?" "Well, everybody else did it." "Well, if everybody jumped off a bridge, would you jump?"

"They don’t feed you. They’re not your parents." There were a lot of little euphemisms, a lot of colloquialisms, just general types of speech that caused us to learn the difference between the upbringing in our home and the upbringing in the culture.

Now, the wise parent knew that there had to be some cultural exposure in order for you not to be consumed by the culture. So you learned what you needed to learn to get along in the culture, or else you would just be like somebody from Kansas walking around the streets of Philadelphia. You would be a victim forever.

So you learned. You learned certain behaviors, certain mannerisms, certain ways that people would look at you. You learned how to get along and go along. And so your entire life now as an adult is salted by the things you learned in both cultures: the culture of your environment and the culture at home.

It depends on a lot of ingredients to determine who won. A lot of ingredients had to come into play. Some people were overwhelmed by the culture, and they wound up disrespecting and dishonoring their parents because the culture had them in a firm grip.

Now you get born again. You respond to the pull of the Holy Spirit because the Bible is clear: you can’t come to God unless the Spirit draws you. And I think people look at those verses and we refuse to understand that God is the instigator of salvation.

I don’t know why we don’t realize that. Because in our Pentecostal expression, we’ve been taught and trained that we choose Jesus. So when we give the altar call, as it were, we tell people to choose Jesus. You need to choose Jesus.

I said that too in my younger days because I did not fully understand Romans Chapter 8. But now I say to people, you need to respond to the pull of the Holy Spirit. And you know when He’s pulling you. Oh, you know it.

But God in His majesty still gives out freedom of choice. I don’t understand it. But He gives out freedom of choice. I don’t understand why give something so great to people who don’t know how to use it.

My dog doesn’t have freedom of choice. There are times when he has certain treatments and the doctor doesn’t want him to lick that treated area for fear of the dog aggravating it. So his mother puts a collar around him. He don’t want that collar. He don’t want that on him.

He comes to me because he knows there is no reason to go back to her. He doesn’t have freedom of choice. The collar isn’t put in front of him and said, "Now, do you want to do this so that that can heal up nice?" He doesn’t get a choice.

And God gives us choices. Why? Why, knowing we’re going to make the wrong one? Why? We’re not capable of making choices for God. The prophet, he said, "There is none that seek after God." Can you see the enormity of that statement? There are no humans who seek after God, not even born-again ones.

We’re just not wired that way. And so here we are now, born again without the knowledge of what that means. Just like in your natural life. Your parents were responsible to train you, to teach you, and to help you develop the gifts that God gave you so that you could make proper choices in your life.

It was the parent's responsibility to help you identify whether or not you're an extrovert or introvert, whether or not you’re scientific or mathematical or trade-oriented. It’s your parent's responsibility to help you discover if you are a visual learner, an audio learner, a kinesthetic learner. It’s their responsibility to help you learn you so that when you enter the world, you enter with an advantage.

But most of us, our parents were never taught that. So they basically had you and turned you over to the world and the school. The school had to discipline you, read the Bible to you, they had to give you structure, they had to give you order. They had to do everything you needed to do with your life had to come from the motif of your school.

Again, it’s not that they were bad parents; it’s that they had no model. And so now it’s the same way in the things of God. You’ve been born of the spirit. Do you know what that means? According to First John, you have the seed of God in you. That’s what caused you to be born as a child of God.

You are qualitatively, distinctly different from your culture. But you must perfect it. You must learn how to adapt to this new life. It should not be greeted with anxiety and stress, remorse and regret.

You should not look at the scripture’s call to separation as some punishment. It is God’s way of saying, in order to perfect you in the life that I’ve called you into, you have to be separate from those things that pull you into the opposite direction.

But the things that God has ordained are not pleasurable to the flesh. So the flesh says, "I don’t want it. I don’t want it. It doesn’t make me feel good." No one in their right mind eats the little cabbages and smiles and says, "Mmm, mmm." If you do, you lie. You just want to say it to be contrary.

But when you eat sweet potato pie—look at you, look at you. Look at you. Sweet potato pie. Chocolate nut sundaes. Buttercream cakes. They sell it now at the Broad Street Diner. So between services, lights and sirens.

But broccoli. Asparagus. You lie like a Persian rug. Why is it that the things that are not good for us are void of taste? You have to doctor it up. You have to doctor it up. Deacon Kyle sent me a meme. It was so good.