South Shore Pentecostal Church

Guest (Female): Welcome to the Apostolic Truth Radio Program with Pastor Craig Ouellette, a radio ministry of South Shore Pentecostal Church located in Whitman, Massachusetts. At a time when many Christians do not know what to believe, South Shore Pentecostal is honored to bring you clear biblical teaching on which you can confidently build your faith. Thank you for joining us.

J. Craig Ouellette: After Brother Stephen comes by, open your Bibles to First Thessalonians chapter 5, verse 23. King James says, "And the very God of peace sanctify you wholly. And I pray God your whole spirit and soul and body be preserved blameless unto the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ."

Notice it is the God of peace. He wants us to have peace. The Bible says he is the King of Peace, the Prince of Peace. The Bible says that we can take our problems to the Lord, and when we do, there is a peace that passes understanding. What that means is I could stand up here all day and talk about it, but you wouldn't understand it until you experience it. That is what it means.

There is a presence of God like Mary had, the experience with God where God let her understand about trusting. She entered into a dimension with God that she comes up and explains it to us. We hear the words and we know something great happened by God, but we can't understand what she actually felt. It has to happen to us.

The very God of peace sanctify you means separate you. It says "wholly," w-h, means completely. So God wants to sanctify us or separate us completely. He says, "Your whole spirit, soul, and body be preserved blameless." Sometimes we get the idea that God is only interested in our soul, that he just wants to save our soul. But here it says our whole body, soul, and spirit.

God is interested in the whole person. God is interested if your body is not working right. God is interested if your spirit is not working right. God is interested if your soul is not working right. Again, our soul, what you see of each person is really a reflection of our soul.

All the miracles you saw Jesus doing, the reason he did so many outward-type miracles, was for a couple of reasons. First of all, he wanted people to realize God is real, the power of God is there. But he wanted us to understand that by seeing the outside, we would get a vision of seeing that he can heal the inside. When he heals the lepers, leprosy is a type of sin.

A person with leprosy was banned from society in Jewish society, maybe a little bit different in other societies, but definitely in Jewish society. Your body starts to fall apart. You lose your feeling. Because you lose your feeling, you damage parts of your body and they get infected and drop off.

The reason that they don't have eyes or they don't have ears and fingers and feet and different things is when leprosy sets in, if you pour boiling water on your foot, you don't feel it. If you damage your foot while you're walking and you cut it and it gets infected, you don't feel it, and eventually, your foot has to go away or fall off. Sin does the same thing in us.

Sin undealt with eventually takes away our feeling. Right. You continue in sin and eventually you become hardened to God. Leprosy is a type of sin. It's a type to show how ugly sin can transform the soul. The unseen soul becomes visible when you see leprosy, you get an idea. At first, people might look normal because it might just be their ear and they've got a hat on or something on their back or on their elbow. But eventually, if it's not healed and dealt with, it will take over the whole body and kill. Sin does the same thing in us.

A lot of the miracles Jesus is doing, he is trying to help us understand that the kingdom of God is present. God is interested in our body, but if I have got to lose an arm to go to heaven, God would rather see me lose an arm. Didn't Jesus say that? He said, "If your eye offend you, pluck it out." Now, he didn't mean literally, but what he was trying to say is it's better to lose something physically and make it to heaven than to go to heaven physically fit, in shape, and looking good, then to go to hell that way. To go to hell looking good and in shape. There is no return from hell.

God is trying to help us understand the devil attacks us in our spirit. Our hormones are affected by our attitude, our mental state. If you get negative, your body after a while starts to get negative. You get positive, your body gets positive. If you're always in fear, then you have adrenaline running on you and in you, and it eventually starts to break your body down and create problems with you.

This is why we need God. We need to make a commitment to the Lord. We are living in a world where people that don't know the devil, don't know God, are being manipulated by the devil to do bad things. Because they're being manipulated, if we come into contact with them, we might have some bad things happen to us. We blame God, we blame others, when it is really the devil working on people through ignorance.

The answer for our sin problem is always the blood of Jesus. The blood of Jesus. You have got to apply the blood. The blood is real. It's today. If you look over in First John chapter 1, verse 7, it talks about that the blood is working when we confess our sins. When we live right, the blood of Jesus is functioning in our lives.

First John 1:7 says, "But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light." It's talking about Jesus. And Jesus is light. Light means truth. Light means truth. "Thy word is a lamp unto my feet, a light unto my path." So light means truth. That is from Psalm 119.

If we walk in the light, if I walk according to God's word, as he is light, we have fellowship one with another and the blood of Jesus Christ his son cleanses us from all sin. I need to get into fellowship with the Lord. That really means to be born again. That is where real fellowship starts. You can believe in God, but you have got to be born again to be a part of the family. That puts us into the fellowship that God wants us to have.

Again, in First Thessalonians, if we walk in the light, if I am trying to live the way God wants me to live and I'm born again, the blood of Jesus is working in my life. It's working in your life. That doesn't mean I don't have to confess sin if I sin. I still have to confess it, but because of the blood, my sin is covered.

The blood has got to be applied, and it has got to be applied the right way. We know this from the Passover. If you're not familiar with the Passover, go look at Passover in Exodus chapter 12. Take the blood of the lamb, which is a type of Christ. Slay the blood, take the blood, put it on the two side posts and on the door, the lintel.

Get in the house. Get inside because there is going to be judgment. The angel of death is passing over. I'm going to judge every family and the firstborn, whether it is animals or people, is going to die if they're not inside a house with the blood on the door. It is three places. He says it twice. It's not just nice; there is blood on the two side posts and blood on the lintel. It says it two times within the book of Exodus.

Why? Because in order to have a real door, I need two sides and I need a top. What is it? It's a type of the door of salvation. I take the blood of the lamb, I apply it to my life, the door of my heart. Put that blood. That is the new birth process. That is why there are three elements to it: repentance, water baptism, Holy Ghost baptism. It makes the door of salvation. It is the blood of God being applied in our lives. Amen.

So if that blood is working, that blood can heal me. That blood gives me access. We can talk about wounds and different things, and the Bible says that there is going to be offenses in the world. The way Jesus said, he said offenses are going to happen, but woe to him that makes the offenses. As Christians, what we want to do is we want to be a non-offender.

Of course, the devil is going to take what you meant as non-offense and try to convince you you're an offender when you're doing the right thing a lot of times. You have got to get close to God. But again, we're talking about our soul here today, our soul. God wants to heal the soul. Again, our mind. The soul is who we are. The soul is what is going to go to heaven or hell.

If you go to the book of Revelation chapter 6, verse 9, "And when he had opened the fifth seal, I saw under the altar the souls of them that were slain for the word of God." This is in heaven. This is what John is seeing in heaven. So John is seeing the souls. It doesn't say their body or their spirit; he sees the souls of them.

Remember Adam. God formed Adam out of the earth. He breathed into him, and the Bible says he became a living soul. If I can be a living soul, I can be a dead soul. So God is interested in our soul. There are testimonies of people in wheelchairs that have been healed in wheelchairs, got up and started to dance, got back in the wheelchair because they realized if they took their healing, they would lose their benefits. So they didn't want to be healed. That's actually happened.

That is right. There is an evangelist that said he'd seen that two or three times in his life. The point I am saying that is our mind can overrule what God has done. Our mind can prevent us from receiving what God has got for us. God tries to raise our faith to believe. That is what the word is. That is why the examples are in there. What the Lord wants us to get the frame of mind is, "Hey, if they did it for them, maybe he can do it for me."

That is the way the Lord wants us to understand when we read the Bible. Not to look at them and say, "Oh well, they were some special person, that unique thing and God's just doing it for them." No, what God wants us to do is look and say, "If they healed that woman, maybe he can heal me. If he healed that leper, maybe he can heal me. If he forgave that person, maybe he can forgive me."

Again, one of the keys is forgiveness. Go to Matthew 18. In Matthew 18, the last verse, verse 35, he says, "So likewise shall my heavenly father do also unto you, if ye forgive not from your hearts if ye from your hearts forgive not everyone his brother their trespasses." The story is there was a servant that had a debt that was beyond his ability to ever pay.

The king was going to send him into prison with his wife and his kids, and he begged the king to forgive him. The king forgave him, and that same man went out and found another fellow servant that owed him about a hundred days' wages, and he wouldn't forgive him and he threw him in prison. So the king, when he found out, took back the forgiveness he'd given to that man, the first man, and he threw him in prison. Jesus says the same thing for us. If I don't forgive, God will not forgive me.

But they meant to do it. Again, who's our example? Jesus. Doesn't Jesus on the cross say, "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do"? Now, do you think he meant they didn't mean to crucify me, they did it by accident? He knows they mean to kill him. He knows that they hate him. He knows if they could do more to him, they would. But he's still saying, "Father, forgive them." He is not waiting for them to come say, "Oh, we're sorry."

"Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do." When somebody hurts another person, they don't realize the depth or what's really happening. When you don't forgive, you are allowing somebody else's wrong to bring you into bondage. It prevents you from loving God, talking to God. It prevents you from getting forgiven. So the devil, in a lot of times we are offended by things and people that never meant to offend us.

A car cuts us off and we can get upset and angry and say, "What's wrong with them?" Maybe they were having an emergency. Maybe they were under such pressure that they weren't actually thinking about how they were driving. We get all angry at them. People say things and because of our insecurities, we think they think of us a certain way. We think somebody thinks of us a certain way, and they say something and we interpret what they say based on how we think they think about us, when they weren't thinking of us the way we are thinking they're thinking.

What they meant was not at all what they meant. People leave churches all the time because they're offended by what somebody else did when the other person didn't intend to offend them at all and doesn't even know they did. When that happens, you have got something in your soul that until you deal with it is going to be a problem every day of your life.

The Bible lets us understand that when you have bitterness in your soul, it leads to dry bones or arthritis. Bitterness will lead to problems in your body. Continual anger will lead to problems in your body. The reason why people are going out and getting high and getting drunk and they have got to have so much excitement in their life a lot of times is they're upset with themselves inside and they don't want to deal with it. Or they don't know how to, and they're trying to escape it.

When you get Jesus, you don't need to get high. You just need to get into his presence. When you get the presence of God, you get the peace that passes understanding. I don't need to get high to have a good time. When I get into his presence and have a good time, I don't wake up with a hangover. I'm not going to do something I regret because God is there. I'm not going to wake up and say, "What did I do last night?" Call my friends up, "Did I do something stupid?" But if you get the Lord, you get stability. You get God in your life.

Proverbs 17:22 is a good one. It says, "A merry heart doeth good like a medicine, but a broken spirit drieth the bones." So again, when your soul's not right, that is going to lead to the broken spirit in you because the soul is you. The soul is who you are. The spirit God gives us gives life to our body, and our body is the house, but the soul is who I am. It is who you are.

Proverbs 18:14: "The spirit of a man will sustain his infirmity, but a wounded spirit who can bear?" Again, that is talking about your soul. Understand that in the Old Testament, sometimes the word soul and spirit are interchangeable in their thinking. So in this case, it is talking about the soul. If your soul's good and you get sick, you're going to have a right attitude. It is going to help your body do the right thing. You're going to recover.

But if I don't have a good attitude and I get sick, then there is nothing to help me. A wounded spirit. You've been around people that they're always negative. You can't take them; they're always hard. It's because they have a wounded spirit. But Jesus is able to fix that.

Jesus is able to fix it. We're going to go to Romans 8:28. There's a lot of scriptures that people quote and claim, but they're not in a position really to claim them. They're true, but you have got to be in the right position to claim them. Romans 8:28: "And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God." Now, you can't just stop there. That statement's true. "We know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose."

So you've got a lot of stuff in your life that's not working out and broken, and you want God to fix it. The first place you need to start with is, am I following God's purpose for my life? You've got to find God's purpose. God's purpose has to do with your calling as an individual in God's plan. Every human being's got some kind of a calling of God's plan. God makes us with a purpose.

Nobody's here by accident. Nobody. Even if your parents said, "We didn't expect you," or even if you were the result of a rape incident or something. It doesn't matter. If you are alive, God has got a plan for you. Your name is written down in a book and what God wants you to be is written down in the book. Psalm 139 says, "All thy members are written in the book before they were formed in the womb, when they were yet being formed." Your members, who you are, is in the book.

A lot of times the devil recognizes that God's got a special purpose for somebody, and so he starts working on their life before they're even aware that God is trying to get into their life. His objective is to convince you that God couldn't be calling you to do something for him because of all the things you've done or who you think you are.

So again, it has to do with our inner person, our soul, what God wants us to be. If we're living, God has got a purpose for us. The Bible says God wants all to be saved. First Timothy 2:4, Paul says, "Who will have all men to be saved." Say, all. All. "And come unto the knowledge of the truth." It doesn't say most men or just Jewish men or good Gentiles. "Who will have all men to be saved, come to a knowledge of the truth."

Second Peter 3:9: "The Lord is not slack concerning his promise, as some men count slackness, but is longsuffering to us-ward, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance." So that means everybody. The big problem is we judge people based on our own standard. We can get an idea, "Well, they're not good enough, they're good enough, they seem okay, they just need to change a couple things." God's not looking at us that way.

Again, he's looking at us; we're all sinners that need to come to God. Every one of us. We might have different degrees, we do have different degrees of sin in our lives, but we still need to admit that. That is the first place you start. You admit, "I'm a sinner, I need to be forgiven of my sins, I need to do things God's way."

For me, that admission means admitting something that I don't feel capable of maintaining or doing. So a lot of people won't come to God because they're afraid, "Well, I can't live that way," and you are absolutely right. You can't live that way without the Holy Ghost. The Holy Ghost will give you power to live God's way. The Holy Ghost will give you a desire to live God's way. The Holy Ghost will cause you to want to be enthusiastic about God.

The Holy Ghost will make you like the Syrophoenician woman. "Lord, calm her down, she's making too much noise. Lord, save my daughter!" She didn't have the Holy Ghost, but the Holy Ghost will make you talk out like that. "God, I've got to have something!" And "Lord, I praise you! And Lord, I thank you!" Amen.

Holy Ghost will make you want to shout when nobody shouts. Holy Ghost will make you want to pray when nobody prays. Holy Ghost will make you want to go to church when others don't want to go to church. Holy Ghost will make you want to sit in a chair and read your Bible or go in your bedroom and pray so you can touch God. Hallelujah.

You can't live for God without the Holy Ghost. So what God needs us to do is admit we're sinners, repent of that, ask God to forgive us, and ask God to fill us with his spirit so that we will have the power to live the way God wants us to live. We need to get baptized; you need to get baptized in Jesus' name. Because you need to get, if you're really dead to sin, you get buried with Jesus in the grave and you get his name. Water baptism remits sins. It's different than forgiveness. Remission releases you from them, gives you freedom from them. It's a spiritual circumcision, Colossians chapter 2 says.

You need to do that. Being born again helps a person get their soul healed and it helps them have access to God. Being born again will open the Bible up to you. There's a lot of things you can read in the Bible and you're going, "What is that? What's that mean? What's that for? I don't think I can do that." But you get the Holy Ghost, and all of a sudden the Bible reads differently.

All of a sudden you start to understand things in the Bible that did not make sense. When you start to understand the Bible, you start to understand God and you start to understand life. You start to understand proper thinking. There's a lot of anti-God thinking going on in the world today.

Isaiah 53:5: "But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities, the chastisement of our peace was upon him, and with his stripes we are healed." When it starts talking about peace, it's also talking about our spirit and soul and mind. So the cross of Calvary is not just to take care of your sins, but it's also to bring other things to our life that we need from God. He's wounded for our transgressions, he's bruised for our iniquities. Iniquities are sins that we knew they were sins and we did them anyway. Sometimes we sin and we don't know we're sinning or out of weakness we sin, but iniquities is talking about sins that we full well knew what we were doing and we wanted to do it anyways.

He was bruised for that. First Peter chapter 2, verse 23, talking about Jesus. Peter is writing about Jesus. He says, "Who when he was reviled, reviled not again. When he suffered, he threatened not." In other words, he's not reacting out of his pain and he's not reacting out of their wrong. He's forgiving.

But committed himself to him that judgeth righteously, who's own self bare our sins in his own body on the tree that we being dead in sins should live unto righteousness, by whose stripes ye were healed. Peter is now bringing that Old Testament scripture into the New Testament, saying it applies to us today. 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. Healed from what? Healed from our sin, healed from our wounds, spirit, soul, and body. Healed from our past, healed from anything that needs to be healed in our lives.

Let's just give him a little praise here for a moment. Lord God, we thank you. We praise you, Lord God. We give you glory and honor. We thank you for your word. Oh, let these words sink into our hearts and in our minds, Lord God. Lord, we praise you, Lord God. Give us understanding. Lord, give us faith, Lord God, to act upon your word, to believe, Lord God. Hallelujah. In your name, in Jesus' name. Amen.

Again, we're going to thank Mary for being prompted by God, the Lord, to speak about that. Again, if I am bitter in my spirit and my condition of my body is the result of bitterness, if God heals me, as soon as he is done being healed, I'm going to go right back to it until I deal with the bitterness. It is the same thing when people got devils, and I don't know how you feel about that, but the Bible says people can have evil spirits in them. Jesus said that.

When somebody's got the Holy Ghost, they got the name of Jesus, the blood of Jesus, they have authority to cast evil spirits out. But if the person that's got the evil spirit doesn't want it out, it is cast out but as soon as they leave the door of the church it's coming right back in them. So it is the same thing with healing. If I have got a condition because of my spirit, my soul, wounds in my spirit and soul, if I don't get God to heal that within me, I don't bring it to God, even if God heals the physical result, I end up back in that condition because all that physical result is an outward indication of the inward condition. What's the answer? You must be born again. Let's stand this morning.

If nothing else, what God wants us to understand is he loves everybody in here. When you praise him, it's beautiful to him. None of us in here that God doesn't have healing for some of us and not the other. God doesn't run out. I healed 99 persons and you're the 100th and I ran out of power; that is not God. He has got enough for all of us. He wants us to be whole. Why does he want you to be whole? Because a whole person is going to glorify God, and when he is glorified, that's a testimony and a witness to the goodness of God.

Lord God, we thank you today, Lord, that we can be healed, that we can be delivered, that we can be whole. Help us, Lord God, as we leave this place not to forget the things you've implanted in each one of our hearts and minds. Help us to believe what your word says over how we feel, what others say to us, what our past may dictate to us. Lord God, help us to understand that you're our God. You're in the past, you're in the present, you're in the future. You're Lord of time. You're not bound by our past. Help us to be loosed by the understanding that you have got authority over our past, our present, and our future. Help us to realize we've got to commit ourselves to you, and we give you praise in Jesus' name. And everyone said, "Amen."

Tina Ouellette: Thank you for joining us today as we have studied the word on Apostolic Truth Radio. My name is Tina Ouellette, wife of Pastor Craig Ouellette of South Shore Pentecostal Church located at 58 West Street in Whitman, Massachusetts. If you love praise and worship, you will love services at South Shore Pentecostal Church and we invite you to come and worship with us.

Sunday school for all ages begins at 10:00 AM and our Sunday evening service begins at 6:00 PM. Adult Bible study and children's church is held on Wednesdays at 7:00 PM. You can learn more about our church on our website at southshorepentecostal.com or you may call us at 781-447-1668. If you have been blessed by this radio ministry, you can help support Apostolic Truth Radio via online giving through Venmo at SSPCWhitman. Write us today and request a free copy of today's message and join us for another broadcast of Apostolic Truth.