The Healing Word

Pastor Jack Morris: I'm not without God anymore. Oh, I could just jump up and down today. I'm not without hope anymore. Praise be to God for the blood of Jesus Christ. Yes, I'm a new me, all because of Jesus.

Announcer: Welcome to The Healing Word. 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: God has something good and new for you today. Let's go into the sanctuary at the Largo Community Church and hear the message entitled A New Me. God is doing great and wonderful things for those who look to Him. So look to Him today, and if you're not satisfied with your life now and with what is happening in your relationships, you hear this message. Let faith be built up within you, and you can live an overcoming, victorious Christian life. Friend, there's not an obstacle, there's not a problem that will come your way that you, in the name of Jesus, cannot overcome it. Believe me? Don't, well, don't believe me.

Believe God's word. That's his promise. He cares for you. He loves you. Let's go into the sanctuary and hear the message, A New Me. The Bible talks about a new humanity, a new society, a new race, a new creation. Jesus said, behold, I make all things new. If any person be in Christ, that person is a new creation. Now, I want you to think of yourself today as a new creation, not just the one that was born in your family, in your household with your daddy and your mommy. That was a wonderful creation, but you have been born again, if indeed you have been born again, that makes you and me a new creation, a new humanity, a new society, and a new race altogether.

If anyone be in Christ, if, are you in Christ today? You know that your name is in the book of life, that your sins have been forgiven, that you've been made new in the Lord. You just didn't turn over a new leaf, join a church, be baptized, go through a confirmation class. You have been born again, born all over again in your spirit, in your mind, in your heart. Now, there was a time, as I said earlier, that we were not part of this new humanity. There was a divided humanity. The humanity that I'm going to refer to now, the humanity of the Jews, the humanity of the Gentiles. Two separate humanities that didn't like each other, that were literally hostile to each other, called each other derogatory names.

Jews can trace their roots all the way back to Abraham. God made a covenant with Abraham. That was what we will call the first Jew, although I don't know that he called himself a Jew at that time. But that's where it all began with a promise that God made to Abraham and to Abraham's seed or his posterity. They had wonderful promises, wonderful promises. Everybody who was not in that promised covenant is called a Gentile or was called a Gentile. So there were only Jews, and if you were not a Jew, then you're a Gentile. A Gentile was the pagans, the men and women, boys and girls of the nations.

They had many gods, but Abraham and Israel had one God. Hear, O Israel, that the Lord thy God is one. And he was the creator God, the Jehovah God, and that's who the Jews under Abraham worshiped. Now, many Gentiles became converts to Judaism and began to follow the one true God that Abraham followed, and they were part of this great covenant that God made. But with the passing of time, Israel, the Jews, were to evangelize the earth. They were to reach out and bring everybody into the kingdom of God, into the family of God. They were to do then what Christians are to do now. But after a period of time, with the passing of many years, it became more of a race than a religion.

It started out as a religion, it's still a religion, but it now is a race. Now the Jewish community began to grow not by conversions, bringing Gentiles in, but by giving birth to little babies. And that's how they added to their statistics. Became a religion of a lot of rules and ceremonies and laws. Actually, it became so distant that when Jesus spoke to the Samaritan woman, the Samaritan woman said, Jews and Samaritans have nothing to do with each other, nothing to do with each other. So these walls went up over a period of time, these walls grew until there became two humanities, the Jews and the Gentiles.

God saw that it wasn't taking place, the conversions of the Gentiles, the pagans, like he had originally intended. So God so loved the world, he loved Jews and Gentiles equally, that he sent his only son, and he's now going to establish a new humanity, a new society, a new race. And today there are, we'll call this three humanities or three races. There's the Jewish race, there's the Gentile race, and then there's the Christian race. God loves all three equally, and all three are equal in coming into the kingdom of God, having their sins forgiven, for we have all sinned, all humanity has sinned, but God provided us Jesus to take away that sin and to make us a new humanity.

Now, friend, I want you to think of what I'm saying today. I'm talking about you. You are a new humanity if you're in Christ. So stop acting like the old humanity. Act like the new humanity, but you can only act like the new humanity when you have the spirit of Jesus in your heart, the one who gave himself for you. The scripture says that it was on the cross that Jesus abolished these walls that separated. There was a time in Jerusalem when the temple was built, walls went up. The Jews were in charge. This was the court of the women. Women, you stay out. You stay over there in your place. You cannot come over into this place.

There was a wall. There was another wall for the Gentiles. Gentiles, you cannot come over here and worship in the Jewish center. You must stay there. Then there was the Jewish wall. All of these walls went up, literally walls. Archaeology has discovered signs dating back to that first temple and the temples that were built thereafter with these words on it. Come into this court, come into this Jewish court at the risk of your life. They literally put that out. You cannot come over. We'll have absolutely nothing to do with you. You will have absolutely nothing to do. God said, this is sin at its highest level.

God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son. When Jesus died on the cross, there was a veil between the holy place and the most holy place. When Jesus said, it is finished at that moment in the temple, that veil came down, ripped from top to bottom, saying, no one is excluded. Everybody is included, and everyone now can go to the throne of grace in prayer because God cares for us all. Now, friend, you are a very special, special person in the sight of God. God has included you. That's why when I was singing He Included Me, there was a time you and I were not included, but today there is no difference between Jew and Gentile, between bond and free.

Well, let me read it to you from Galatians chapter 3, verse 28 and 29. There is no longer Jew or Gentile, slave or free, male or female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. If you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham's seed and heirs according to the promises. Today we have right to every promise that God made to Abraham. We can claim those promises. Oh, dear God, help us to know what those promises are, because until we know what they are, we can't claim them. And so we live in poverty, spiritually speaking. Some of us, some of us are studying the word of God in small groups, in Sunday school classes, in Bible studies.

We're learning the word of God. We're learning the promises. We're laying hold of the promises. We're going behind the veil, claiming the promises, and our lives are being enriched, enriched by the blessing of God. Friend, there is so much out there for every one of us in Christ Jesus. God cares, and he loves us. We need to know more about that love. Now, all human differences has been done away with. All human difference. Now, now women will remain women, men will remain men. A person that is born into a Jewish family will always be a person born into a Jewish family. A person born into a Greek family will always be a Greek.

But in addition to that, far overcoming that, is that we can now not only be born into these families and into these various, these two sexes, but we can be born again into the kingdom of God and come under the privileges of knowing the promises of God and enjoying them and receiving them. Now, it doesn't mean, as I said, women are going to be women, men are going to be men, Jews are going to be Jews, Gentiles are going to be Gentiles. It simply means, when I said all differences have been done away with, it simply means there is now equality. You know, at the foot of the cross, it's level. We stand on level ground.

We're all one in the Lord. I knew a preacher over in Virginia years ago, great preacher, great man of God, and he told his story about his conversion experience. He said his conversion experience was so new, so great, so wonderful. He said he thought he was even physically changed. Now, sometimes we ask, have you accepted Jesus? Yes. And that's it. But there's no enthusiasm. There's no change. There there's no warmth of spirit. You know, it's sort of a mental thing. Yeah, I accepted Jesus as my savior. Friend, that's not being born again. Old things are passed and all things become new. This man over there said, I even felt that I physically changed.

He said, I was just a young man. I knew nothing about spirituality or the Bible. He said, I even went to the mirror and looked at myself, and he said, I still had that big nose. He said, I thought that thing was gone. I mean, friend, this is a real thing. This is a wonderful experience. I wrote a book about the Largo Community Church, and I asked Pastor Blair, you remember the man from Denver, my hero when I was just a real young fella. I loved him so much, and I still love his memory. He's in heaven today. But I asked him, Pastor Blair, would you write the foreword to this book? Now, I hesitated to do this, but I'm going to do it.

It's not my words, it's his words. The introduction, he said, Pastor Jack Morris had a dream. I'm only going to read just sections of it. On the phone, I called him right before I started the Largo Community Church, and on the phone to me some 30 years ago, Jack Morris suggested to define just, struggled to define just what kind of church he wanted to establish. Jack kept saying, a church without walls. The phrase kept being repeated, a church without walls. Webster Dictionary defines a wall as a structure for defense or for enclosure. If something is walled, it is separated, surrounded, closed, exactly the opposite of what the church was in the book of Acts.

Jack wanted a church without walls, no divisions, no partitions, no locked doors, no closets in which to shove the undesirable, no parlors in which to gossip, no kitchens in which to brew something or stew somebody, no bedrooms in which to oversleep. A church without walls. Here's the next to the last paragraph. As I can personally attest, Largo Community Church is something far greater than that. She is a church who has broken through walls, torn down, climbed over, tunneled under barriers of all kind, financial, social, logical, emotional, relational, even spiritual. The Largo Community Church is a model.

So I cherish that. My heart becomes soft when I read that. That was a long time ago, but I do know this, if we're not circumspect, honest before God, seeking the Lord, those times will come when walls will start coming up again, and the enemy will have a heyday, and he will use you to gratify hell. Let's be the church of Jesus Christ that God has made. Divisions in the church today. John Wesley said it, I think, as clearly as anybody could possibly say it. He wasn't interested in everybody joining the same church, everybody becoming Protestant, everybody becoming Catholic, everybody becoming Methodist.

No, not at all. This is what he said. This is what he said. He said, if your heart is as my heart, you're my brother, give me your hand. That's Christianity. That's the message of Jesus. That's Jesus. Notice he said, remember that formerly you who were Gentiles by birth. Now, he said remember in verse 11. Again, we go to verse 12. He says, remember again. Two times with emphasis, he's telling us, remember who you were. Remember you're not who you were. Remember you're saved, you're in Christ, you're a new person, a new creation in the Lord. Please remember that. Remember that. Speak love to all men, all people, all mankind.

Now, what are we to remember? Okay, we go to verse 12. Remember that at that time, before you were a Christian, you were separated from Christ. You were excluded from the citizenship of Israel. You were a foreigner. You were foreigners to the covenants of the promise. You were without hope. You were without God. Separated, excluded, a foreigner, without hope, without God. That's how you were. Remember how you were, but also remember how you are, and give praise to the Lord and give glory to our God. You're included. Oh, I feel like singing it again, but I won't. Yes, he included me. He included me.

I think it was during World War II, a group of soldiers under a sergeant, one of their buddies was killed, and they were in France, and they wanted to bury their friend, their comrade. And they saw this church, and it had a cemetery with a fence around that cemetery. And they took their comrade there, and the priest came out and asked them what they were there to do, what they wanted to do, and they said, our comrade is dead. We'd like to bury him in the cemetery. We're going, we're leaving tomorrow. We need to bury our brother. The priest said, was he a baptized, bona fide Roman Catholic member?

The guys looked at each other. They said, we don't know. Then the priest said, well, then he cannot be buried in this cemetery. This is a Roman Catholic cemetery. So the fellows knew that they had to leave in the morning, so they went 6 feet out from the fence, dug a grave, and buried him. The next morning, before they left, they came back. They wanted to check out the grave, make sure everything was, the grave was dug up, the mound of dirt, and they came back and they looked, they couldn't find the grave. And they walked all around that fence. They said, we buried him. The ground, the earth isn't disturbed.

There's nice grass that had been mowed. There's no unearthed earth. And just then the priest comes out. He sees them, and he's, the priest came out and he said, gentlemen, last night I couldn't sleep. I had a terrible night, and I got up early, early this morning, and I personally took that fence and moved it 6 feet out, and I included your comrade. Your salvation was based upon doing this and not doing that and obeying all of these laws, and it kept getting narrower and narrower, only a few fenced-in people. But then Jesus came and he not only moved the fence, he kicked it down. You're included.

You're included. Hey, turn to your neighbor and say, Jesus included you. Come on, say it to somebody. Jesus included you. This is what God has done in Jesus, a new creation. How did it happen? Verse 13 says, through the blood of Christ. Verse 14, that new song that I didn't hear it until I heard it today. I didn't know Minister Hill was going to sing it. Verse 14, he himself is our peace, so we have peace with God. Remember, we were excluded, we were separated, we were on the outside, we had no approach to the promises of God. We were without hope. We were without God. Friend, you and I were in a terrible, terrible, terrible place before the blood of Jesus Christ cleansed us from our sins.

No longer excluded, no longer a foreigner, no longer without hope, no longer without God. Now, when I am alone, I'm really not alone. Jesus is there. When I have anxieties and fears, Jesus is there to guide me and to comfort me. When I need wisdom, I look to God who has all knowledge. Whatever my need is, he is there. I'm not without God anymore. Oh, I could just jump up and down today. I'm not without hope anymore. Praise be to God for the blood of Jesus Christ. Yes, I'm a new me, all because of Jesus. Friend, love one another. Love one another. This is the will of God. This is the message of God.

This is the truth of God. And I have come to Ephesians chapter 2, verses 11 through 22, because this is exactly where I am in my study. I didn't choose this message because of anything that is going on or something that has recently happened. I'm here and would have preached this message at this time because this is where I am in the study. But God knew where I needed to be and where you needed to be, and he has given this, and he says, remember, remember you are a new creation in the Lord Jesus Christ. Now, if you're not a Christian today, or if things are going on that, hey, you know, this is the way I used to feel.

I used to get ticked off when these things happen, and I'm a Christian, but I'm still getting ticked off when these things happen. Friend, we need to be honest to God, honest with ourselves, because it will never change until that honesty comes forth. God sees it, God knows it, but if you want God to move the fence and to include you in that place of peace and tranquility and love and fellowship and oneness, then come to God in all open, honest confession, and God will make that creation come about, that new creation. You're a new humanity today in Jesus.

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