Richard Ellis Talks

Richard Ellis: You know what temptations are coming, so be prepared. Know the scriptures. And then when it comes, you say, "I don't want to do that anymore." Now here is the problem: it's my body, and I do want to do that. A lot of sin, if not most of it—you know why we don't quit? We're not interested in quitting. This body right here, is it my body or is it his body? Which is it?

Guest (Male): Welcome to Richard Ellis Talks with Richard Ellis. Thanks for allowing us to share this time with you. You may be stuck in traffic or stuck in life. Either way, today's message is going to help you get on the right track as you learn how much God loves you right where you are.

Richard's unique style checks all the boxes with a lot of hope, insight, truth, and of course, humor. Today's talk with Richard will get our conversation started, but we want to keep it going with you. So let's stay in touch through our website, RichardEllis.com. But right now, let's go ahead and get right into today's talk. Here is Richard Ellis.

Richard Ellis: The title of today's message is "It's My Body." One of the basic battle cries of the pro-choice movement is a woman saying, "It's my body." So let's think about that for a minute. It's your body. Some things happen to your body; we'll allow for that. But it's your body and you make choices with your body.

Once you start there—that I made a choice with my body—I may have put certain things in it. I may have taken it to certain places. Some people use the argument, "Well, but you dressed it up a certain way and that's what incited something." I'm not 100% on that one. A man still does not have the right, whether you look like... well, I'll get in trouble for saying the word, so whether you look like that or not, that doesn't give a man a right to do something to you.

But there are enough situations where what has happened in our world is women, in particular, say, "It's my body and I will do what I want to do, even if what I choose to do is a mistake and if my mistake results in another situation that's a mistake what I deem is a problem. Because it is my body, I can fix that."

Your body does not have two heads, four hands, four legs, two beating hearts, and two different DNAs. It is not your body that you're dealing with alone. Now, I also understand this. I have a very high expectation of people in general, but across the board, human beings do crazy things.

In this country at least, we try to literally use the law to stop people from killing each other. But here's the danger: when you let them start killing the babies at one end, the unborn children at the other end, then the old people at the other end, and then it gets kind of blurry and you say, "Well, but it's okay in this country now to kill people, especially if they're inconvenient people."

And we don't look as harshly on that because if you can't draw the lines with the unborn and the old, you keep squeezing it and squeezing it and squeezing it, and who knows what's right or wrong? There are no absolutes. We don't value life. Let me tell you how I know you don't value life: because you have to value your life before you're going to value somebody else's life.

It's amazing if little unborn children had some way to signal, if you could fire a question in and say, "Hey, we're about to kill you, are you okay with that?" They don't get a chance to say, "It's my body, I'd like to live." Not a one of them. Nobody's asking them what they think.

You say, "Well, I got born and I wish sometimes I had never been born." I understand that. I actually have told this many times: I had times in my life when I thought about killing myself because I didn't think my life was working or ever going to work. I am so grateful that God protected me from myself. But nobody is there to protect these unborn children for themselves.

So I may die a fool, but I will not stop sounding this cry. Just because everybody says it's okay doesn't mean it's okay. I encourage you, however you're processing all this, that you stop and think not, "What about me first? It's my body," but start with God, then go down and start with the child and see where you end up. You'd be amazed how many babies live when you do that.

Go to Romans chapter six. Now I want to talk a little bit about what gets us to even the problem of the unborn not being able to say, "It's my body, I'd like to live." Romans chapter six, and let's just jump in at verse one. He's been talking here about grace, what an extraordinary thing that is, that no matter what you do, there's grace to forgive you almost anything.

He'll forgive anything. But you say, "Well, I just keep sinning," and he addresses that. Romans 6:1: "What shall we say then? Shall we continue in sin that grace may abound? Certainly not! How shall we who died to sin live any longer in it? Or do you not know that as many of us as were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?" This word "baptized," by the way, means "put into."

"Therefore we are buried with him through baptism into death, that just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life." The expectation is that if something has died and been raised from the dead, especially if Christ is involved here, there's going to be a new life.

You wouldn't want to die to your old life and then be raised to live your old life. What point is it? Just keep your old life and leave Jesus out of it. So you get Jesus, you reckon yourself dead, you're raised from the dead, you live this new life. "For if we have been united together in the likeness of his death, certainly we also shall be in the likeness of his resurrection, knowing this, that our old man was crucified with him, that the body of sin might be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves of sin. For he who has died has been freed from sin."

Now that's a big statement. If you underline stuff, you might want to underline that. I've used this example before: if I took an alcoholic and I laid him out here on the stage and we shot him and he's dead, how much impact does alcohol have on that dead alcoholic? I could put bottles of Jack Daniel's around him, pour it down his mouth, pour it over his body. I could put Jack Daniel's everywhere. The guy's not going to be affected by alcohol anymore because he's dead.

So once you know that you are dead to sin, you say, "Okay, this part is over. I am not a slave to sin anymore. I don't have to live this life anymore. I'm free." Now this is one of those moments where people stare at me and go, "What the heck are you talking about?" because we don't teach this. People don't understand and the devil certainly doesn't want you thinking you're freed from anything.

When you get set free from a prison and you've served your term, you're out, everything's paid for, everything's done—parole, everything—you're off of everything. And then you start going back into the prisons and sleeping there over the weekends, you're a nutcase. You say, "Well, I just think I belong there. I'm supposed to go." You are free. Be free! Don't go back.

Read it again: "For he who has died has been freed from sin. Now if we died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with him, knowing that Christ, having been raised from the dead, dies no more. Death no longer has dominion over him. For the death that he died, he died to sin once for all, but the life that he lives, he lives to God."

"Likewise you also, reckon yourselves to be dead indeed to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus our Lord. Therefore do not let sin reign in your mortal body, that you should obey it in its lusts." You say, "But I can't help it." You can't; he can. You say, "Well, what's the practical side of this?" You're hit by a temptation. You look at the temptation and say, "Here are the facts. You are real. I may feel something, but ultimately I know and believe, based on what scripture says, I am dead to this, so we're not playing this game anymore."

You say, "Well, then I'm still going to do it." You don't have to do it. There is no quota system for the Christian life in sinning. "Oh, I'm behind today. It's already noon. I better get after it." And you know what temptations are coming, so be prepared. Know the scriptures. And then when it comes you say, "I don't want to do that anymore."

Now here is the problem: it's my body, and I do want to do that. A lot of sin, if not most of it, you know why we don't quit? We're not interested in quitting. We're going to get to this in a minute in the scriptures, but here's the point: this body right here, is it my body or is it his body? Which is it? I've got to answer that every day. So do you if you're a Christian.

Now if you're not a Christian, none of this is going to work. So don't be trying to apply scripture to your life, especially addressed to Christians, if you're not a Christian. You say, "Well, I tried all this stuff." The devil goes, "Whatever, dude. You got nothing." When you get Jesus, you get all of this. And then you start having conversations and walking away from stuff that you couldn't before.

I don't want to show hands on this either, but I promise you we've got a room full of people who walk away today. Maybe not every time, but they know how to walk away and know that they are dead to stuff, alive to God, and say no in Jesus' name and walk away from it.

Keep reading: "Therefore, do not let sin reign in your mortal body, that you should obey it in its lusts. And do not present your members as instruments of unrighteousness to sin, but present yourselves to God as being alive from the dead, and your members as instruments of righteousness to God." The word "present" means yield.

Now this is what happens almost when you sin: you kind of go to Satan and say, "Hey, I'm here and I tell you what I'd like to do. I would like to yield my whole body to you to do whatever you'd have me do with it. What do you want to do with it today? You want me to sleep with somebody? You want me to shoot something up? You want me to drink something? You want me to steal something? You want me to cuss somebody out, flip somebody off? Whatever you want to do, I yield my body to you to do whatever you want me to do."

You think that's a crazy person. That's what we're doing! You yield your members to unrighteousness. Read it again: "Do not present your members as instruments of unrighteousness to sin, but present yourselves to God as being alive from the dead, and your members as instruments of righteousness to God."

So you turn yourself into God then and say something else. "It used to be my body, it's your body now. I want you to do whatever you want to do with it for righteousness." The right thing, the godly thing, the holy thing. Use my—literally use my body today to glorify you. Let me also add this. You say, "Well, I don't do that every day, but God knows my heart." You have a default. Every human being has a default. If you're not turning yourself into God, you are by default yielding yourself to Satan, giving him your life because our tendency is to go back not to his life but to our death and live the same old life.

"For sin shall not have dominion over you, for you are not under law but under grace. What then? Shall we sin because we are not under law but under grace? Certainly not! Do you not know that to whom you present yourselves to obey, you are that one's slaves whom you obey, whether of sin leading to death or of obedience leading to righteousness?"

So you're either sinning or you're obeying God. "But God be thanked that though you were slaves of sin, yet you obeyed from the heart the form of doctrine to which you were delivered. And having been set free from sin, you became slaves of righteousness. I speak in human terms because of the weakness of your flesh. For just as you presented your members as slaves of uncleanness and of lawlessness leading to more lawlessness, so now present your members as slaves of righteousness for holiness."

One of the fundamental things you have to decide along the way is this: if you say, "It's my body, I'll do what I want with it," you're going to end up doing whatever your body wants to do. But if you say, "Lord, it's my body, but I yield my body to you. Now you do what you want to do through me."

You're not going to make this transaction unless you're sick and tired of what your body's getting you into. I still say that a lot of people sin because people want to sin. And the Bible describes sin literally—it says the law of sin and death. And the law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set me free from the law of sin and death. So there is a law of sin. You say, "Well, I can't stop sinning." You have a point, unless the law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus sets you free from that.

I'm still amazed no matter how many planes I see take off that are so heavy, just grounded by gravity. A plane stuck on a runway, you say, "Well, there's no way that's going to fly. Never going to fly. Look what it weighs. Never get off the ground." The only way it gets off the ground is what? A law greater than the law of gravity. I have a greater law working in me than just the law of sin and death. It is the law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus that has set me free from the law of sin and death. I do not have to sin unless I choose to.

So these little things says the devil made me do it, that's out the window at some point. The devil can't make you do anything. At some point as a Christian, you choose it every time. Go to Romans chapter 12. Look at Romans chapter 12, verse one: "I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that you present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God, which is your reasonable service."

Let me tell you something about a sacrifice. When something is sacrificed, it doesn't come out alive. It doesn't make it. So you say, "Well, then how could you have a living sacrifice?" He is not trying to kill your physical body. He is trying to get you to yield it as though you really had lost your body, that you don't even have it anymore, but you give it to him to do what he wants to do. And it is a reasonable thing to ask for. Present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God, which is your reasonable service.

So you've got to turn yourself in or nothing's going to happen. You wake up in the morning, you say, "Okay God, I'm just saying, I've decided to take a day off from you. So I'm not interested. I don't know what plans you had for me today, who I was supposed to talk to, what I was supposed to do, but I'm taking a day off." And then ask yourself, how did that work out for you that day?

Instead of waking up and saying, "Lord, literally I offer my body a living sacrifice. I lay it down as though it was going to die and be over, and if anything good comes out of me this day, it is because I yielded my physical body, all that I have, all that I am, I give it to you." You think your day is not going to be different? Where you go, what you say, what you do, what you think.

You say, "Well, God's going to wreck my life." Give him one day. Give him a chance to wreck your life one time and see if you don't go to bed that night with more joy. I'm not saying it's going to be a perfect great day that you won't have persecution or something, but at least go to bed with some peace and some joy knowing that you obeyed.

And he goes on to say there after you present your bodies a living sacrifice: "And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God." You begin to be proof of what is that good and acceptable will of God. It doesn't turn you into—and this is part of the scary thing: you may have some picture in your brain, "Well, I knew some godly old people in my church growing up who were the meanest people I'd ever met." I'm not trying to turn you into that.

You do it God's way, you end up with joy, peace, love, long-suffering—the fruit of the spirit starts to burst out of the tree of your life. And that's so attractive to people. "For I say, through the grace given to me, to everyone who is among you, not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think, but to think soberly." By the way, the Bible nowhere says don't think highly of yourself. If you're a healthy Christian, you do think well of yourself.

Why wouldn't you feel good about yourself? Jesus came after you, died for you, buried, raised from the dead for you—you must be somebody or he wouldn't have gone to all that trouble. It doesn't say don't think highly of yourself, it just says don't think more highly of yourself than you ought to think. Don't get a big head, just be confident in who he is and what he's done. "But to think soberly, as God has dealt to each one a measure of faith. For as we have many members in one body, but all the members do not have the same function, so we, being many, are one body in Christ, and individually members of one another."

It's not just my body anymore. My body is part of the body. There's one body. So when you become a Christian, you join that body. It's not just you anymore, it's not just me. "What about me?" It isn't "What about me?" anymore, it's "What about us?" Even the Lord's Prayer starts not "My Father which art in heaven" but "Our Father." You can't even pray the Lord's Prayer without knowing you're part of the group.

All right, go straight to Matthew 26. Look at Matthew 26, beginning at verse 26. On the pro-life issue, it primarily addresses women in a lot of ways because it's a woman's decision. You say, "It's my decision." Just remember that you are saying "it's my body" and you are not just making a decision about your body, you are making the decision about whether another human being lives or not. You are making a choice, but you have to be aware of the magnitude of that choice.

So women can say it, we all can say it. Non-Christians say it: "It's my body," and I get it. Unless Christ has made a change in your life, you can try to be a good person, you can be a moral person, you can be an ethical person, you can be a good person, but being good is not bad, it's just not good enough. Ultimately without Christ, you don't have the life he intended here and you don't have eternal life with him in the hereafter. It's just not going to happen.

It is my belief based on scripture. And you say, "Well, I don't agree." I get that too. "You're crazy people." I'm okay with that. It's just that when you drop dead, something is going to be true. When you die, something is going to be true. Either that you live and you die and it's just over, or your concoction worked out for you, or you could have been wrong unless your answer is Jesus.

But please do not listen and leave and say no one explained this to me. I'm telling you, you have no hope apart from Jesus' blood and his righteousness. The fact that he died on a cross, was buried and raised from the dead—without that you will not have life here or eternal life anywhere else. Not going to happen.

So I get it if you don't agree with that. That's your prerogative. But you will not stand before God and say, "Well, no one explained this to me." You just had it explained to you. So you put your trust in him or you don't. And if you don't, I'm not okay with that because it's tragic. But that's your choice. That makes you pro-choice. Now you're dealing with your life, not some unborn child.

Matthew 26, last little passage here, beginning with verse 26. When Jesus sat down with his disciples right a few days—hours, literally—before he was crucified, buried, and raised from the dead, he has Passover with them. And as they were eating, Jesus took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to the disciples and said, "Take, eat; this is my body."

It is amazing to me what Jesus chose to do with his body. There is no way that he would be worthy to die for us if he had not lived a sinless life. And he could not have lived a sinless life unless he had obeyed the Father everywhere without question along the way. And he couldn't have done that unless he had literally yielded, said, "Yes, it's my body, but I give it back and submit it to the Father," just like we have to do.

You say, "But no one's ever pulled that off but Jesus." It doesn't mean you can't let him live in you and through you and try again, though. Now is it possible for me to live a sinless life between here and heaven? You say, "Well, that doesn't sound possible." It doesn't mean you have to try to sin the rest of the way. If you're running a cross-country race and the road all the way to the finish line is filled with potholes, and you step in a pothole and you fall and you get all scraped up, and you get back up and you run and you see another pothole and you step in it again, you would think sooner or later you'd start running around the potholes.

I don't want to run the rest of the race this way. And then you start telling other people, "Hey, watch out for the water puddles. They're not puddles, they're holes. They'll screw your life up." You say, "Well, I kind of miss the potholes. I think I'll jump in one." You're crazy! But we do it every day, almost trying to hit every pothole. Run the race differently. Look at what you're doing. Who's the finish line? What is the point? You just like feeling bad? And that is some people's problem.

So what does he say? "Take, eat; this is my body." Now I'll tell you honestly, for a long time I've had thought like, "Okay, I don't get the whole body thing. I get the blood thing because Jesus' blood—there's no without the shedding of blood, the Bible says there's no remission of sin. It's the blood."

Let me tell you something about the blood. There is no blood without a body. God did not send his blood down here. He sent his blood down here in his son. And his son had to be willing to yield up his body. So when he says, "Take, eat; this is my body," you've got to be aware that he literally didn't yield himself a living sacrifice, he presented himself a sacrifice that was willing to die. And because he said, "it's my body but I will yield it and die," now I get a life.

Without a body, you got no blood. Without blood, you got no remission of sin. But you have to have a carrier to come down here, a lamb that was willing to sacrifice his life, slain before the foundation of the world. So thank God Jesus didn't say, "It's my body and guess what? I'm going to keep it." You say, "But look what it cost him." When you sacrifice yourself, when you yield yourself unto God and you experience death, the promise is you will experience resurrection from the dead. You cannot get in on resurrection without death. And that's not just in the life to come.

So what do I do with all this stuff? I go, "God, I want, I'm telling you honestly, I don't want to say no to this." He says, "I understand that. I've been here but I haven't done that, but I know what it is." Tempted literally to the shedding of blood. So you stand there and say, "Okay Lord, I don't want to die to this, but I choose to die to this and be alive unto you." I promise you, even if it means challenge, it's going to be better than it would have gone the other way.

Guest (Male): Richard will be back in a moment to wrap up today's talk. But first, I want to share a couple thoughts with you. Let's be honest: real life isn't about living some highlight reel for others to see. Most people have deep hurts, questions, and struggles. We get it and want to help you in any way we can. So let's keep this conversation going. Give us a call at 855-6-RICHARD or connect with us at our website, RichardEllis.com. You can even put in your prayer request right there on the prayer wall so others can pray for you as well. Call us at 855-6-RICHARD or online at RichardEllis.com. And now, let's get back to Richard with a final word on today's talk.

Richard Ellis: Now, what are we going to do with all this? I'm going to ask you today within the next few hours to run a test on the system. It may be hating on somebody, it may be alcohol, it may be some form of sexual something that's out of bounds. We're going to run a test. You are going to encounter before the end of this day a situation. Most likely your situation is going to come up again.

And here's the test: you're going either stand there and say, "it's my body, I'll do what I want," or you stop in that moment and say, "Lord, one time. All I'm asking for is one time. I'm asking that this one time, I am going to reckon myself dead to this and see what happens. And I'm going to trust you and I'm going to say no and walk away."

Now if your palms are getting a little sweaty because you already know what's coming, okay, I need a show of hands. How many of you are almost positive you know what encounter you're going to have and have a chance to make a decision on? Raise your hand. You already identified what it probably is.

For the rest of you, something is going to sneak up on you, but you'll know what it is. Give God a chance to let resurrection power kick in and run your life instead of you or me. So you stop saying, "it's my body," and you start saying, "No Lord, it's not my body anymore. It's your body. And I am part of your body. And I want to get this right."

Guest (Male): This has been Richard Ellis Talks with Richard Ellis. The message of the gospel is one we take very seriously in our mission to reach the planet, and you have a vital part of doing that along with us. If you've been encouraged by these talks with Richard, be sure to tell someone about the change they've made in your life. You can even share today's talk with them through the website, RichardEllis.com.

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