When It's Not Jesus

SERMON: 2012-02-19--ac1284--when-it-s-not-jesus-part-3 SOURCE DURATION: 00:46:15.000 PROPOSED CUTS: 1 CONFIDENCE: 1.00 APPROVED: false REASON: The recording begins with the speaker starting a reading for the sermon (segment [0]). The material concludes with sung lyrics/textual content that forms the final part of the message (segment [464]), before any potential post-sermon music fade. Acoustic segmentation found sustained music at the end edge and moved the boundary to the adjacent transcript segment. ACOUSTIC EVIDENCE: available ACOUSTIC MUSIC INTERVALS: 00:42:56.640-00:43:00.240, 00:43:45.520-00:46:15.220 ACOUSTIC SPEECH OVERLAP: yes ACOUSTIC BOUNDARIES APPLIED: end Inline CUT markers identify each proposed audio boundary after the relevant word. --- ORIGINAL TRANSCRIPT WITH PROPOSED CUTS MARKED --- I want to begin this morning by reading to you from an online blog posted by a colleague preacher, a friend of mine, and in which he describes a rather unusual spiritual experience. And as I read that I want you to try to fine-tune your discernment receptors and ask yourself the question, this experience that is being described, is it from God or is it not from God? Here's how it reads, "About three years ago I woke up one night very suddenly. It was as if I had been jerked from deep sleep into alert wakefulness in less than a second. I was surrounded by a darkness that seemed thicker than usual. It felt like something or someone ominous was in the room with me. The blackness around the bookshelves in my office where I had fallen asleep was so substantial that I could see nothing. The space was filled with a conspicuous and crushing sense of dread. My fear increased when I realized that I had been rendered immobile as if a great weight had been placed over my entire body. I was pinned down. I began to pray with every fiber of my being. Wouldn't almost anyone have done the same whether they believed in God or not. Physically the prayer required fierce resolve just to bring my hands together. 'What's wrong, God?' I asked when my hands were finally clenched. 'Are you angry about something?' That is when I heard the voice. It was calm but deliberate and focused. It was not loud but clearly audible. I do not know if it was outside the room, inside the room, or just inside my heart. In any case there was no mistaking what it said. It said the prayer of repentance. I was frozen by apprehension, riveted to the bed. Was God angry about the prayer of repentance? I'm very proud of the fact that my denomination, the Christian Reformed Church of North America, in 1999 had mandated all congregations use an official prayer of repentance for our failure to show sufficient love to homosexual people. As a denomination we had committed ourselves in 1973 to an official policy of love the sinner hate the sin, but we had not demonstrated enough resolve in showing the genuine compassion we had promised. So in 1999 we urged all the churches to use this well-known prayer of repentance. The sinner did not wish to change a biblically based denominational approach, only encourage greater focus on pastoral love. Many of our congregations in North America, alas, defiantly refused to use the resource liturgically, and now to my surprise it seemed that maybe God, if this was God, was not pleased with the official prayer of repentance either. He then goes on to describe the prayer which starts like this. It's fairly typical, "Lord, our gracious God, we have sinned against you. We have not done the things we ought to have done. We have not kept the promises we made. Instead of trying to become a place where persons who love you and they're homosexual could find a gracious dwelling, we confess that we have continued to build walls. We have avoided them. We have been cruel. We have called names and used insulting language. We have wished that they would just go away." And the prayer goes on like that for a little while, and then the blog picks up again. He says, "Then the voice came again, not loud, but terse and deliberate, and it said, 'It's too long.'" It's only now, three years later, that I can see some of the humor in this encounter, but when it happened I truly felt I was going to die. I did not dare relate this event to my council or church. I also did not have the courage to tell my wife or my best friends. I truly felt I was going to die. One thing I vividly recall with genuine gratitude is that after the voice spoke, the overwhelming terror in the room slowly dissipated. The level of darkness returned to the range that is normal for 4 a.m. and the heavy weight on my body receded. I was able to stop folding my hands. I lay there wondering if this could have possibly been God. I felt that I had been spared from some kind of obliteration, but I did not have a joyful sense of contentment or relief. I had always imagined that having an actual encounter with God would be more beautiful, not something so frightening. And he goes on then to talk about the fact that as a pastor in the Christian Reformed denomination, he's always been very distrustful of spiritual experiences that aren't firmly grounded in Scripture. But he ends up concluding that this probably was God who came to him that night. So you got your discernment on? How many of you think that might well have been God? Let me just see a show of hands. How many of you think it most likely was not God? All right. How many of you haven't a clue and you're not ready to put up your hand in either one? That would be the vast majority of you I think this morning. And that's precisely the point in sharing this little story with you, because it's not about putting you on the spot and it's not pointing fingers at my colleague. It's trying to focus on the importance of spiritual discernment not only, but also how difficult it can be to discern what is from God and what is not. And yet in a world where there is revelation that can come at us from many different sides, few things are more important than spiritual discernment. Listen again, if you will, to how John puts it here in 1 John 4 verse 1, "Dear friends, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world." We are to test the spirits. The question of course is how do we do that? And in the time that we have this morning I'm going to try to give you three tests, first of all, that do not prove one way or the other, whether something is from God or not. And then as time allows, probably two biblical tests that will almost for sure help us to sort out whether the encounter that we have, the revelation that we receive, the words that people speak to us, are in fact from the Spirit of God and not from the spirit of evil, because Satan of course the Bible says parades as an angel of light. You can simply sort it out by whether it feels good, seems good, feels right, feels wrong. It takes much greater discernment than that. Alright then, first criteria that means absolutely diddly-squat in trying to discern whether something is from God or not. And that is the fact, is it a spiritual experience? And by spiritual experience I mean revelation coming to you from outside yourself, so to speak, in similar vein to that blog that I've just read from my colleague. Or those moments when you have a brilliant insight and you think, oh this must have been God speaking to me. Or those moments when somebody says something and it touches you deep in the inside and you say, this has got to be of God. It's a very interesting thing. We live of course in a very secular age and in a very secular age there is increasingly the attempt at defining spiritual experience in terms of the biological. And we have tons of scientists all over the world now who will be trying to tell you that your experience of God is nothing more than a chemical exercise in the brain. Very interesting. National Public Radio in the US did a whole program on that a number of years ago and they have all kinds of scientists on who are now repeating the LSD experiences of the 1970s with modern brain-scanning equipment to try to prove that spiritual experiences are primarily biological in nature. Despite that, listen to this, 50% of people in North America claim to have had a transcendent spiritual experience that they credit with changing their lives. Isn't that amazing? 50% of the population. And if you look at the popularity of occult themes in movies and in literature, you know the Twilight series for example, you know the vampire themes and Harry Potter and all of that sort of thing, then you see that even in a secular age, there is a huge interest, perhaps more than ever, in the spiritual. And very often then, people fail to discern whether the spiritual is from God or whether it is not. Because remember, we live in a world as we saw last week where behind the scenes there is a whole spiritual world. And that spiritual world has God on the one hand, it has Satan on the other hand, it has God's holy angels on his side, it has satanic demonic powers on the devil's side. And we know from scripture and from Christian history that both sides have an impact and interact with the human experience. And so just because something seems spiritual, just because it seems like it must therefore be of God, means absolutely nothing. And our job is to exercise spiritual discernment. Dear friends, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world. Do not believe every spirit. Secondly then, second criteria that doesn't necessarily prove something is from God or not, is whether it involves supernatural power. And by supernatural I mean power that is beyond the natural. The world super means above, natural ties into nature, and supernatural then means something that cannot commonly be explained by the ordinary laws of nature. And virtually every religious tradition, even secularists, will often admit there are things that happen in the world that people cannot explain. It can be a healing that according to the laws of nature ought not to be taking place. It ought to be a series of events, it can be a series of events or circumstances that you can possibly predict, and you know the timing of it is such that it looks like it's supernatural in origin. And there is again the temptation and the tendency to think if something is supernatural, if it cannot be explained according to natural laws of nature, that somehow or another it must by definition be from God. This national public radio program had on it the story of a journalist who sat in on a New Mexico peyote encounter. Peyote is an hallucinogenic drug created from cacti, and if you ingest it you go on a spiritual trip. And I happen to believe that LSD and drugs of that nature that are hallucinogenic in origin don't just generate spiritual experiences in your own mind, I think they break down the barrier between the physical world and the spiritual world. And so then the spiritual comes through and you begin to have spiritual experiences. And in this particular episode, this cleansing ceremony, there was a woman present who had a severe case of shingles and had suffered with that severely for a period of time. And as the ceremony was going on, suddenly she had a revelation that she needed to confess somebody that she had injured years ago, and in spirit this person showed up in front of her, forgave her, and instantly her shingles was healed. You look at that and you say Christians could learn a lot from that. Confess your sins to one another, pray for one another, that you may be healed. But you cannot tell me for one moment that a healing that takes place under the influence of a hallucinogenic, what a mouthful, a hallucinogenic drug is actually from God. And so it's very important to understand that just because something is supernatural, doesn't mean that God is behind it because guess what? Who is the great imitator? Satan himself. And the Bible says there is coming a day when the Antichrist appears in full glory and power, and guess what? How is he going to deceive the world with great signs and wonders? Listen to this, Paul says, 2nd Thessalonians 2 verse 9 and 10, the coming of the lawless one, that is the Antichrist. He is the ultimate embodiment of human rebellion against God. With the work of Satan is displayed in what? All kinds of counterfeit miracles, signs and wonders, and in every sort of evil that deceives those who are perishing. And the Antichrist then is the culmination of a long line of magicians and astrologers in scripture who have plugged into the dark side and whose power from the dark side has had a significant influence on the human race. Think back to the magicians in Moses's day or the astrologers in the days of Daniel or even Simon the Great in the Book of Acts that we have seen earlier. Don't ever think that that is just all hocus pocus and imagination. There is a dark side. You can plug into the dark side and as we'll see in a moment, the devil doesn't mind giving you power if it means that you bow down and you worship before him. And the whole point of the gospel of course is that the power of Jesus is greater than the power of evil. So it doesn't, you can't judge on the basis of spirituality, you can't judge on the basis of supernatural power, nor can you base thirdly then on worldly success. And by worldly success I mean blessings that the world considers blessing. Can be anything from happiness to financial prosperity or health or success in any areas of life. And for Christians this is a pretty tricky one because you see doesn't the Bible teach that if you walk in covenant faithfulness before God he will bless you and that if you don't walk in covenant faithfulness with God he will not bless you. And from there it is a hop, skip, and a jump to reach the conclusion as did the friends of Job, that if things go well with you you are on the right page with regard to God and if things do not go well with you it's because God's favor is not upon you. And there is always the possibility of a grain of truth. But that black and white view of success is a distortion of the biblical notion of success. And it omits two very important things. The first is this. The blessings that God promises to his people ultimately are spiritual and they are eternal. It is what God promises to give us in the age that is to come. And at the end of history, you've heard me say this many times, there isn't anybody who is trusted in Christ who is going to be disappointed or ashamed. Everything that God has promised to those who are obedient to him they will receive in that day. But it all depends on a relationship with God and if in order to refine our relationship with God there are things we need to go through in life to let go of the false idols so that Christ is the center of our existence, God as you know is not at all adverse to doing that. In fact, he disciplines those whom he loves and he chastises every son whom he receives. So you got to be very careful and not be like Job's friends who automatically assume when life is tough or difficult it's because you have sinned or God is angry with you. Yes, you always ask that question, you always make sure you go to the cross, but some of the most righteous people of God throughout the course of history have gone through the deepest waters because God is preparing for them a greater degree of glory, you understand that I trust. The other side is this, Satan is not at all adverse to give you worldly success because he knows that if he can hook you in an alliance with him then he's got you not only for time but he has also got you for eternity and I say that because that's exactly what happened to Jesus in the wilderness temptation, did it not? Remember the third temptation in Matthew I believe it's the second one in Luke. Luke puts it this way in Luke chapter 4 the verses 5, 6 and 7 the devil led him that is Jesus up to a high place and showed him in an instant all the kingdoms of the world and he said to him I will give you all their authority and splendor for it has been given to me and I can give it to anyone I want to so if you worship me it will all be yours. Now the devil may be you know bragging a little bit too much in the sense that ultimately all the authority of the kingdoms and their glory belongs to God but he is described in scripture as the God of this age and as the God of this age he is able to bless you beyond what you can imagine on the condition that you worship him because he knows that if he's got you then he's got you and like a drug dealer he is not afraid to give you the first dose free if that means he can hook you so that he can use you to accomplish his purposes. Of course he is a lawyer and in the end it will cost you your soul and so throughout the course of history there have been those who have sold their souls to the devil and you may remember the story of Faust who supposedly is a true historical figure from the fourteen and fifteen hundreds he entered into a covenant with the devil that he would serve him if the devil would serve him for 24 years he would give his soul to Satan after 16 years he began to have second thoughts but the devil wouldn't let him go so he renewed the covenant and then when the 24 years was up then the devil came to him the night before and said it's time for me to claim your soul and the next day they found his body with blood and brain splattered all over the room. The devil is a murderer who seeks to destroy and to kill but the number of people who have bought into his law is legion and much of the power that you will find in the world today and much of the success that people experience in the world today the power of many nations that they experience in the world today is fronted is a front for Satan's power the principalities and the powers stand behind the scenes and they use people to accomplish their purposes you see that for example many years ago when Hitler Hitler was very occultish in his inclinations and there is spiritual power behind it that played on on Germany's shame after World War one and said you're going to dominate and you're going to be somebody and if the devil can find that kind of a place in your life or mine where we feel that we have been wronged where we feel that justice has not been done where we feel that we have had to struggle unfairly against the odds in life he'll come along and he'll promise you whatever it is that you crave for and initially he will bless you until he has power over you but remember how did Jesus respond to the temptation bow down and serve me and I will give you the splendor and the glory of all these nations wasn't very difficult for Jesus he said it is written worship the Lord your God and serve him only at the end of the day the kingdom the authority the power the blessings in this life and in the life to come do not come from the devil who is a lawyer don't ever believe him it comes from Almighty God who says make sure you have the right relationship with me and I will see to it that everything you have ever longed for and everything that I have ever promised to the human race I will give it to you both in time if need be and in eternity so you can tell by spiritual experience you can tell by supernatural power you cannot tell by worldly success so how do you then determine what is from God and what is not from God how do you know when you listen to the blog that I read whether it's from here or from there or the brilliant thought that comes to you in the middle of the night whether that's a prompting from God or a prompting from evil or that person who espouses a philosophy of life and wisdom that sounds so appealing and so applies to your life how do you know if it's from God or don't let me give you in the time that remains at least two criteria that we need to judge by that biblically and experientially are infallible and they will always cut through all the confusion the first is this ask yourself the question does it point to Jesus does it point to Jesus listen to how Paul puts it when Corinthians 12 3 I tell you no one who is speaking by the Spirit of God says Jesus be cursed and no one can say Jesus is Lord except by the Holy Spirit no one who is speaking by the Spirit of God says Jesus be cursed no one can say Jesus is Lord except by the Holy Spirit now what Paul means there is not that a person cannot just mouth the words Jesus is Lord apart from the Holy Spirit people do that all the time they take the name of the Lord in vain along what he means is that you cannot confess that Jesus Christ is Lord with all the biblical implications of that apart from the Holy Spirit neither he says can somebody who is filled with the Holy Spirit say Jesus is cursed why because the job of the Holy Spirit is always to point to Jesus and the spirit of prophecy even in the Old Testament Peter tells us was the spirit of Jesus it is Jesus in the New Testament who unfolds all the prophetic declarations in the Old Testament concerning himself why is Jesus so important well he's not only the agent through whom all of creation came into being but as you well know by his by his birth and and his life and his death and his resurrection and his ascension is the centerpiece of history that makes possible the reconciliation between a holy God and a sinful man he is the one who makes it possible for God to enter into covenant relationship with you and me without compromising his holiness and without anybody saying what are you doing hanging around with these people who are what they are Jesus is the centerpiece of human history and I'll tell you why that is so important to understand and why that is such an infallible test because there are many so-called gods so scripture there are many so-called spiritual beings who reveal themselves you go to any of the religions in the world and people have spiritual encounters they have spiritual experiences but if they do not point to Jesus they are all fallacious and they are all in error because no man can come to the Father says Jesus but by me so anytime you hear a teaching anytime you hear a formula for success anytime you you you get a vision you get a an insight you get a revelation always ask yourself this question where's Jesus in it does it point to Jesus does it point to Jesus is the way the truth in the life does it exalt Jesus does it show the importance of Jesus does it give glory to Jesus does it make Jesus more important in my life and if the answer is no then no matter how good it feels how nice it sounds put it away because the spirit of prophecy is the testimony of Jesus always ask yourself the question does it point to Jesus but don't stop there because the second criteria very closely related to this is does it point to the biblical Jesus does it point to the biblical the Jesus listen to these words from Paul 2nd Corinthians 11 3 & 4 I am afraid that just as Eve was deceived by the serpents cunning your minds may somehow be led astray from your sincere and pure devotion to Christ now listen to this for if someone comes to you and preaches a Jesus other than the Jesus we preached or if you receive a different spirit from the one you received or a different gospel from the one you accepted you put up with it easily enough a different Jesus a different spirit a different gospel Paul says the same thing later on Galatians chapter 1 verse 8 he says but even if we or an angel from heaven should preach a gospel other than the one we preach to you let him be eternally condemned the word there is anathema and it means let him go to hell it's the strongest possible curse in scripture it means you are beyond redemption and throughout the New Testament it is only applied to those who preach a different Jesus in part a different spirit or in part a different gospel how can there be a different Jesus how can there be a different gospel how can there be a different spirit really not that complicated if the devil can keep you from seeing Jesus and coming to Jesus he will parade before you a Jesus who is more agreeable with your human nature and the world is filled with people and with churches and with preachers who picture a Jesus who you would never recognize from the pages of scripture a Jesus who not only forgives sinners but tells them to go out and sin no more a Jesus who not only comes into the world to share our humanity but who so represents the holiness of God that he gives his life to present before God to people who are holy and righteous and without blemish so how do you know when the message you hear the revelation you receive not only points to Jesus but points to the biblical Jesus well that is what John continues to talk about here in John chapter 4 and the verses 2 & 3 when he says this is how you can recognize the Spirit of God he says you don't have to remain in confusion this is how you can recognize the Spirit of God every spirit that acknowledges that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God but every spirit that does not acknowledge Jesus is not from God this is the spirit of the Antichrist which you have heard is coming and even now is already in the world notice again every spirit that acknowledges that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God but every spirit that does not acknowledge Jesus is not from God and I can hear you thinking what in the world is that about well it's about an ancient heresy called Docetism and the word Docetism comes from a Greek word meaning it seems or to see him it was particularly popular among a group of people called the Gnostics and Docetism held to the belief it was a denial of the humanity of Jesus which is really quite fascinating because because today the challenge is not the humanity of Jesus it is the divinity of Jesus and people like to write Jesus off as just another good man or another good prophet certainly not as the son of God well interestingly enough in the early church that wasn't the issue at all because they were so accustomed to a world with spiritual beings that believing that somebody was was spiritual or from God they could get their heads around that but they couldn't get their head around is that Jesus was human and the implications of that are huge because if Jesus wasn't truly flesh he only seemed human he only seemed to die on the cross he only seemed to be raised from the dead you see what the Gnostics liked about this was that it didn't matter what you did with your body as long as you were spiritual if your body didn't matter you could engage in all kinds of seeing and still claim to have a relationship with God because after all Jesus wasn't really human I know an awful lot of Christians in the world today who really are Gnostics at heart and who buy into this thing this separation between the material world and the spiritual world but as I said the implications are huge because of Jesus was not born of the Virgin Mary and didn't become fully human then he could not take our place in the process of redemption he could not live our life he could not face our temptations he could not overcome those temptations if he wasn't really human then it wasn't our body and our sin that was nailed to the cross and our sins could not possibly be forgiven and if he wasn't truly human that he could never be raised from the dead and you and I can never be raised into newness of life both in time and in eternity and if he wasn't human he couldn't really sit down at the right hand of God the Father is the Son of man and the Son of God to one day come in glory to judge the living and the dead as we are in our humanity and so ask yourself the question whenever you have an experience whenever you hear teaching whenever you are trying to figure out is this of God or is this not of God ask yourself the question is Jesus in this and if so is it the biblical Jesus I'll never forget years ago man and one of the congregations that I pastored came to me tears running down the face he was just so upset we were trying to change congregational life a little bit introduce some new music and and place a greater emphasis on God's grace and God's mercy and and he came from a very very traditional family and from a community back in the Netherlands that you know that even today by by any standard of measurement is is on the extreme spectrum of of being old-fashioned if you can call it that and he was just so torn up and he ran into me in one occasion or he came to see me and he had just tears streaming down his face and he said how can you do this to us and I'm human enough to to have compassion in that kind of a setting and and for a moment there you know you ask yourself the question boy if it's causing this much pain can this be good but then the thought hit me where's Jesus in this where is the biblical Jesus in this and all of a sudden it became very clear to me that Jesus wasn't part of this picture at all because he wasn't concerned about the glory of Jesus he wasn't concerned about the passion of Jesus to bring the loss to salvation he wasn't concerned about the power of Jesus getting himself a people who will love God and who will serve him and who will do his will now there was only one thing that he was concerned about and that was his own level of comfort and the pain that he was experiencing in being stretched well I don't know if you have ever looked to Jesus in the Gospels and what his priorities were and I can tell you that he had great compassion for sinners he had great compassion for the lost he had great compassion for the lost and the straying sheep there was one thing he never had compassion for did you ever notice that the comfort of those whose personal comfort was more important than the kingdom of God and you will have found that in your life as I have places where I want to hold on to my sin places where I want to live in rebellion places where I want to go my own way I never meet up with a Jesus who says oh poor Johnny you know let me just give a little bit here so that you don't have to feel so badly about your [PROPOSED CUT 1 START at 00:42:56.640; remove through 00:46:15.000] failures or your messes that you've made in your [CUT] life it's all okay just go ahead and sin some more give me that kind of a Jesus I never met him and if you meet the true Jesus you will never meet him either because God so loved the world that he gave his son and he died a horrible death on Calvary's cross so that we can come to him with all our brokenness and with all our sin and we could receive his forgiveness not only but we could receive his resurrection power so that by God's grace our lives can be transformed from glory to glory until one day we stand before him pure and spotless without wrinkle or blamish and that doesn't mean we're not going to fail and that doesn't mean we constantly need to get down on our knees and claim God's forgiveness but never ever think that sin is not seen and never ever think that the closer you get to Jesus the more tolerant he's going to be of your sin because that's not true if anything the closer you get to Jesus the more stern you discover that he is because sin is deadly it is destructive it kills God's purposes and it has brought the world to where it is today and the new age that God is creating is going to be peopled with the people who have learned to love God by faith in Jesus through the power of the Holy Spirit with their whole being and who will love their neighbor as they love themselves that is the Jesus of scripture and so to wind up let me come back to my colleagues blog because you see at the end of the day whether you judge that was the spirit of Jesus or whether that was an other spirit is going to be determined to a very large degree by your own view of homosexual behavior when it's being practiced I won't give you a lot of details except to say that I know this colleague is part of a church that has been on the forefront of not only being accepting of people who struggle with the issue of homosexuality and we all need to have great compassion because those sins are not any different from the rest of the sins the rest of us may struggle with but has also been very active in trying to get practicing homosexuals in leadership positions in the church so was the revelation of God was it none of God I'm not in a position to judge and I'm glad I don't have to but I know this that whatever you lean towards in your own heart and in your own mind any place where you haven't truly been to the cross of Jesus opens up an avenue for deception that'll blow you out of the water and the only antidote then to not get led down the garden path is [CUT] to love [PROPOSED CUT 1 END at 00:46:15.000; resume after this marked segment] the truth with all your heart no matter how much it hurts you no matter how much it offends you no matter what it says about the most attractive people in your life because if you were to read on that passage that we quoted from 2nd Thessalonians chapter 2 that talks about the coming of the Antichrist who leads the whole world astray how does that passage end they were deceived because they did not love the truth all we have to do is love the truth and if we love the truth the truth of who Jesus is who says I am the way the truth in the life God will grant us his Holy Spirit God will give us discernment and in a day and age where the world is not only confused but also the church we will know with clarity what is of God and what is not of God so that we can be the light of the world and the salt of the earth stand with me as we pray father there isn't the one of us here who at one time or another hasn't been bamboozled by the deceptions of hell and sometimes that has come because we've had an amazing spiritual experience that confirmed many of the things that we believed and longed for in our hearts sometimes that's been because we've seen power and we automatically assume that power is you and sometimes it's because well it's promised as riches and wealth and fame and good reputation and Lord we hear your word that the only security is Jesus and then the Jesus of Scripture the one who became flesh lived among us faced all our temptations overcame them without ever sinning died horribly and miserably on the cross as our representative was gloriously raised from the dead sits today at the right hand of God the father poured out his Holy Spirit so that by faith in him we might share his wisdom and his riches and his glory thank you father for Jesus give us a spirit of wisdom and knowledge in the revelation of him that we may know him better open the eyes of our hearts so that we can see him clearly most of all Lord we pray give us a ruthlessness about sin and a love for you and a commitment of truth that simply puts us in the place where we will not coddle our flesh but allow it to be crucified in Christ so that we can live by the power of his resurrection and then Lord forbid that we should ever be arrogant forbid that we should ever think we're better than anybody else because of anything we see or sin more clearly than we've ever seen it before but may Jesus shine through us so that people around us may be drawn to the delight that he is oh Jesus make yourself central in our lives in our families in our church and may we ever honor and worship you in Jesus name amen (music playing) In Christ alone my hope is found He is my life, my strength, my song This porous dome, this solid crown Firm through the fiercest drought and storm Where hearts of doubt, what depths of peace When fears are still, when striving cease My confidence, my all in all Here in the love of Christ I stand In Christ alone who took on flesh For the so proud in hell who's made This gift of love and righteousness Spined by the ones he gave to save 'Til all that trust that Jesus died The wrath of God was satisfied For every sin on him was laid Here in the depth of Christ I live (music playing) There in the ground his body lay The light of the world by darkness slain Then bursting forth in glorious day Up from the grave he rose again And as he stands in victory Since first has lost his grip on me The lion is and he is mine Up in the precious blood of Christ No guilt or light, no fear in death This is the power of Christ in me From life's first cry to final breath Jesus commands my destiny No power of hell, no scheme of man Can ever plough me from his head 'Til he returns for cause behold Here in the power of Christ I stand (music playing)