The Healing Word

Guest (Male): Welcome to the healing word, a radio ministry of the Largo Community Church. Here's Pastor Jack Morris with today's message that will grow your faith in God and lead you to a closer walk with Jesus.

Pastor Jack Morris: Abiding in Christ, only there, only then can we truly live the Christian life and be all that God wants us to be and have the Bible living within us that we will be living epistles or living letters that are read by all people. That when they look at us, they will see the Bible on two legs with two arms and two hands, two eyes, that they will see the word of God coming forth out of your life. Now, this is what God wants for us and this is what we want for ourselves and it can be so by abiding in Christ.

Only as we abide in the Lord can we have this wonderful abundant Christian life manifested. So we're going to talk about how do we abide in the Lord? I want to know, I'm sure you want to know so that we can do it and it's not difficult at all. It's very easy. God doesn't ask us to do anything that is really, really hard. He makes it so easy. It may appear to be hard and it is when we try to do it in ourselves, but when we have the strength of the Holy Spirit, we can do what God will ask us to do. We can do it and we're going to.

Now, every Christian, let me preface the message, every Christian has two natures. Do you know that there are two people living in your body? Two people. No wonder you have some problems sometimes. Which one am I going to see today? Which one is going to come forth? You have the human nature, you received that when you were born. You were born with a human nature and then you were born with a Jesus nature when you were born again.

And these two natures live in your body and these two natures are in conflict with each other to see which one is going to be the dominant one. So there's a little angel on this shoulder whispering in, there's a little demon on this one whispering in. You listening? And then you decide which one you're going to listen to and obey and do. You see, you really have the power, not the demon and not the angel, but you.

God has given you something so tremendous, so wonderful that he hasn't given to any other part of creation and that is a will. You do what you want to do. You have a will, you have the power of choice, you are given this by God. So here are these two natures. We'll call the nature of Jesus the heavenly nature, the high nature. We'll call the human nature the lower nature.

So here are these two natures, the high nature, you've got that in you, you've got the lower nature in you, the human nature. Now, the one you address, the one you take care of, the one you nourish is the one that's going to grow. It'll grow depending upon you. Not the church, not the Bible, not even God. You make the choice.

Now, the nature you feed and nourish is the nature that is going to grow strong and when the temptation comes or the difficulty comes, then that nature will come forth. Here's the higher nature, here's the lower nature. You start giving all your time and attention to the lower nature. Finances, home life, job, career, recreation, pleasure, money, pleasure, recreation, career. Once in a while, drop in church. Once in a while, do the Christian thing.

And all of a sudden, your human nature is way up here dominating your life. All you can think about is me, my pleasure, my family, my career, my money, my home, my vacation. And there it is, way up there. And it's very strong and anything that comes is always looked at and assessed in the light of that nature that is strong.

But on the other hand, if you read, know the word, pray, have Christian fellowship, work with God's people, that nature will grow stronger and stronger and stronger. And when temptations and difficulties come, you'll be able to push them aside, do the right thing, know that God is glorified, feel good in your soul. You won't feel guilty, you won't feel down on yourself. You'll say look, nobody else better say this, but you can say it to yourself.

If I were a Christian, why did I act that way? Why did I say that? Why did I behave that way? It's because you have fed and nourished the human nature and all you can do now is respond in a human fashion. And so now you become upset with yourself, down on yourself, guilt feelings and you wonder, I don't even know whether I'm a Christian or not. Am I talking today where you and I live? Is this practical?

You're going out there in the world tomorrow, you've just come out of the world, you've got a lot of worldly things, business ventures in your mind and you're trying to reconcile and work through and develop it and know the right direction to take. And all of a sudden, you dart into church and you get a little injection of spirituality, but that's not enough to pull up the spirituality.

And then you go back out there into the world again and begin looking at the entertainment, the magazines, the pictures, the lyrics in the music. You're feeding that human nature and it's growing stronger and stronger and no wonder carnality takes over. And now we have a fight to try to live the Christian life, resist the temptations that are there. You become exactly, there's a saying, you are what you eat spiritually and also physically and also emotionally.

So these two natures are strong within us, both of them trying to find an expression, both of them trying to outdo the other and become dominant. So here we go now. You have an outline, I want you to look at the screen, I want you to look at the outline in your Bible. I can mention a lot of things, I'm only going to have a three-point outline to help us understand and I think you'll get the picture and be able to understand how we can live this wonderful Christian life with enthusiasm, with power, with joy and be victorious for Jesus and truly be the Christian that we claim that we are.

First, let's look at some of the problems of prejudice. Has anybody ever experienced prejudice? All right. How do you react when it happens? Do you get angry? Do you get upset? Do you retaliate? Do you think that person is a stupid person? That person is an ignorant person? Prejudice is something that we have all experienced and we will continue to experience. It's a problem of life and one nature in you will respond to those kinds of feelings and those kinds of temptations that come your way.

Now, when I say all of us, I mean all of us have experienced these feelings of prejudice. We've all been prejudiced against. What about racial slurs? Have you ever had a racial slur, a racial comment? I mean it burned, it hurt, it wasn't easy to accept that and still keep your composure spiritually and go on without saying something back.

How about the prejudice between men and women? There are a lot of women, just because they are a woman, the man sometimes will get the position and the woman won't get it just because of her sex. She's been prejudiced against. I've been in countries where people get their jobs and employment depending in some instance on how tall they are. Short people are prejudiced against. If you're a fraction of an inch shorter than what they want you to be, you don't get the job. So short people are prejudiced against.

Prejudice is something that is part of the human nature. You're going to get it over and over until the day I suppose you leave this world and I will too. We all will. But when that happens, how do you react? What do you do? What do you say? How about the elderly? We continue to hear how elderly people are ripped off or prejudiced against. People are mean to people in this world.

So when people are mean to you regardless of your skin color, regardless of your sex, regardless of your height, regardless of how heavy or how skinny you are, when you receive prejudice and you're going to receive it. Friend, I'm talking today right where you live. You know what I'm talking about. How do you react? There will be a reaction. There will be almost what we call maybe a knee-jerk reaction. You think wow, I didn't know that was in me that I could feel that way, that I could say that way.

How are you going to retaliate? All right, here's some ways you're going to retaliate. You can become angry, you can give back exactly what you got. Sometimes you get a hand gesture from somebody and I mean are you going to give a hand gesture back? I've got to say some of this. When they slur you in some way, do you give back what you get? You can do that, we often do that and then we're down on ourselves because we've done it and we wish we hadn't done it.

But it's done, it's out there. You can also, the second thing you can do is try to ignore it. Have you ever tried to ignore it? To no avail. It just sticks in your craw, doesn't it? And there it hurts and you go on it just ruins the next few hours and the next day or so. Or the third way you can, you can lean on Jesus. Can you say amen? You can lean on Jesus.

You can begin to look to him at that moment knowing that you're a child of God. He will whisper beautiful things into your heart, he will affirm you and let you know that you're born in the likeness and the image of God. You look like God, act like God, behave like God. Jesus will talk to you, he'll reveal himself to you. Now the first two are the way we would act or react in the human nature. We would retaliate, we would give as we have received.

Or we would try to ignore, that's the human way of doing it. But neither of those ways work. The only way that is going to work for you as a Christian is to look to the Lord Jesus and lean on him. Come on say amen somebody. Look to the Lord and receive the blessing of God. He will bless you and help you. Now some you're going to get it this afternoon, you may even get it before you leave church this morning. And then you'll say those kind of people go to that church, I don't want to go to that church.

Have you ever been the one that did the offending? All right, we have some honest people here. Let's look to the Lord, let's lean on the Lord. He will bless, he will help, he will bring us through. Now how did Jesus react? We're talking about the nature of Jesus in you. The scripture says and I'm going to turn over to First Peter 2:23 and I'm just going to read it to you.

First Peter 2:23: "When they hurled their insults at him, he did not retaliate. When he suffered, he made no threats. Instead, listen, instead, there it is. Are you getting it? Instead of retaliating with their insults and the things that they tried to do, instead he made no threats, instead he entrusted himself to him who judges justly." Put yourself in God's hands.

Walk away saying I'm a child of God, I've been redeemed by the blood of Jesus, I'm in the image of God. This is God in me. Friend, the hurt feeling won't be there. I'm telling you this because I love you and I don't want you to be hurt. Don't want anybody to be hurt. But there's a lot of people being hurt and then we go away with this guilt feeling because of the way we retaliated and we continue to hurt.

Jesus did not hurt. The scripture said he was oppressed, he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth. He was led as a lamb to the slaughter, yet he opened not his mouth. You and I want to open our mouth, don't we? We want to get back, we want to give as we have received. Friend, don't open your mouth. That's human nature. Jesus was silent, Jesus just looked to the Father.

Now, you have the nature of Jesus in you. The way Jesus behaved when he was here, he didn't retaliate. You have Jesus in you, you have that nature. Now let that nature come forth. Let the other nature be down, the lower nature. Let the higher nature, the born-again nature, the nature of Jesus, let that be projected in those times of hurt feelings. God will bless you, God will help you if you're leaning on Jesus, if you're abiding in Jesus.

You can't do it in yourselves. You don't have the strength, you don't have the power. You may get by once or twice by behaving yourself, but after that you run out of energy, you don't have it anymore. Now how do you do that? Only through the one who forgives, who knows how to forgive, the one who forgave you when you were mean to him. How about patience? Oh boy. Patience, how am I going to be patient?

I have so many things to do. But really, how am I going to be patient with people? Do you ever get annoyed by people? Aren't you glad you never annoy anybody? Nobody here has ever annoyed anybody, but you've been annoyed by people, right? Like somebody said if it weren't for people, this wouldn't be a bad place to live. It's people that cause all the problems. But not here, I'm not talking about anybody here. It's they're out there.

I was talking to my daughter last week and she was telling me how Billy, her son, was annoying her, frustrating her, trying to help him. He didn't get the message, he just does the wrong thing, he messes up. She said and I said "Well Rebecca, what I do when that happens, when I'm being annoyed by people, I pray." She says "I scream."

Okay, what about health problems when health problems come? And health problems do come to us. We never know when we're going to have a health problem. What do we do when a health problem comes? Stroke, heart attack, cancer diagnosis, surgery on your hip. Health problems, they just come. What do you do when that happens? Do you say oh poor me?

Sometimes we do have to have a little bit of a self-pity party and go through it for just a little while, but don't stay there too long. Begin to look to the Lord, abide in him. Friends, there are things that you and I cannot handle that are going to come into our lives and really afflict us and hurt us, but we can handle it by leaning on Jesus, abiding in him. Say it, abiding in him. Say it again, abiding in him.

It's abiding in Jesus that gives us the victory and the power to love the unlovable, to forgive the unforgivable. Now I'm not a forgiving type person. You didn't know that, did you? No. I'm a get-evener type person. That's a new word, I just made it up. But it really describes me to a T. Yeah, in my human nature and so are you, and so are all of us. It is not easy to forgive.

We can only forgive in the power of him who forgave us as long as we're abiding in him and he is abiding in us. Jesus is going to come forth out of us exactly the same way he came forth out of the body the Virgin Mary made for him. It's your body now, but it's Jesus or there's that human nature. But you decide, I must keep telling you, you decide by the one you feed, either the lower nature or the higher nature.

You decide which nature is going to be predominant and is going to rule in your body and rule over you. "My grace is sufficient," God said to the apostle Paul. Paul had a thorn in the flesh. Now because it says flesh, we're inclined to think it was something physical. It was in the flesh. Some think it may have been malaria, some think it maybe is poor eyesight. It was a messenger of Satan that buffeted him.

There was something wrong and he said "I prayed three times," listen, oh this is the good part, he prayed three times for God to heal him, but God had a better solution. You know, sometimes God has something better than healing. Do you know what it is? His grace. He said "My grace is sufficient for you." You never know when an organ is going to go bad in your body.

You never know, none of us do. We live in temporal bodies, but regardless of what happens, regardless of what happens in our life, God's grace, his loving kindness is sufficient to carry us through any and all circumstances, circumstances that we cannot carry ourselves through. He'll take us through. He will be the victor. Let Jesus come forth in your life. Let him be the predominant one. He cares for you, he'll help you.

Apart from me, you can do nothing. I want you to read that on the screen. "Apart from me, you can do nothing." You can't handle the insults, the racial slurs, the difficulties, the prejudice against male and female, against elderly people, against heavy people versus thin people. But in Christ, you can do all things. But apart from him, you're going to be defeated, defeated today, defeated tomorrow, defeated the next day.

You're going to live in defeat. You may be a Christian, but it's your human nature that has taken over because you have given in and fed that human nature for weeks, for months, for years. Your human nature is strong. Now you have enough of Jesus to get you to heaven, but you're going to live a defeated life. But my grace is sufficient, the Lord says, in all circumstances. God's grace is sufficient to carry you through and to help you.

What about relationship problems? I'm going to close in just a moment. What about relationship problems? Like I said, if it weren't for people, it's people. Aren't you glad you're not people? Now God made us social beings. There's no way to get along in this world but to react in a social way because we are social beings. There's your spouse. Do you ever have any conflict with your spouse?

I know everybody has an absolutely saintly perfect marriage. Saintly, saintly all the way. Your coworker. Those relationships become fractured. We have to put them back together again. Not at our own strength, but in the strength of the nature that we have fed and allowed and made strong in the nature of the Lord Jesus Christ. In Christ, I can do all things. Say it with me. In Christ, I can do all things. In Christ who strengtheneth me.

God will give you the strength, he will give you the ability, he will take you through, he will help you. God is with you to bless you and to make you the Christian you want to be and he wants to put you forth as a shining example. Here's a child of God, here's how a child of God looks, here's how a child of God behaves. Listen friends, God will allow you to get in certain circumstances.

You'll say how did I ever meet a person like that? God made the introduction. God put you with that person. Now you know and God knows what's coming out of you. If the human nature is coming out, turn to the Lord and say God, I need some spiritual strength. God will tell you how to do it. God will tell you start singing those choruses that you sing in church when you're driving to work.

Pray that God will give blessing to me. Pray that God will help me to get to church next Sunday. Memorize a scripture, get involved in Christian fellowship, get involved in Christian service, begin to feed that spiritual nature and that spiritual nature will rise up. That spiritual nature will dominate your life. You will live in victory. When there's defeat all around you, you'll rise above it. You'll be on top. You'll be victorious in Jesus. Amen. Praise the Lord. Hallelujah.

Guest (Male): If today's message strengthened your faith, we invite you to stand with The Healing Word through your prayers and your generous support. Every gift helps us take the gospel to more people who desperately need to hear that Jesus still saves. Join us tomorrow for another Healing Word message. Until then, blessings on you.