By: General James Green (p. 8 in Issue Twelve of The Tribal Call — Radio Tape #1169)
We are going to go on and finish up with this message entitled Jesus Our King. We went into certain aspects of His Kingship in the last message and now I want to cover some more. One thing we all know is that within every born-again Christian, there are two kingdoms. One kingdom is the kingdom of flesh and the other is the kingdom of Spirit. It would be nice if it were all Spirit, but it’s not. We know we have carnality and inbred sin in us. We know we have our own will as a Christian. We’re not robots, nor are we predestined without a choice in the matter. We have a choice to serve God or not to serve God. You might know about Jesus being King or you may know about the Kingdom of Heaven by reading your Bible, but do you really know Him, and are you really living there under His rulership and guidance? We might as well get down to where the rubber hits the road and face issues. Are we in the Kingdom of God or are we just in the kingdom of flesh? This is what I try to do when I teach: I try to rip away the mask of devilish deception and let us see what’s really lurking beneath. There’s no use in playing religious churchianity games anymore. That stuff has to stop. We might as well face what’s happening. People are perishing and going to hell, and many so-called “Christians” are going there too. Everyone of us has a beast inside. I have one, you have one, and the beast is called flesh. Let me clarify: you don’t have flesh—you are flesh. Right? Have you noticed how so many Christians try to say that God condones their sin life? The Lord allows marijuana smoking, shooting up dope, fornication, adultery, homosexuality, and lesbianism. The Lord allows wicked and corrupted pastors and people sitting in the pews. The Lord allows everything, according to modern “Christians.” Who or which Lord are we talking about? Is this the Lord of the Bible, or the Lord of your imagination, or Lord Satan?
Now, let me quickly review these four points I mentioned previously regarding what a kingdom is. A kingdom is power, sovereignty, dominion, and the reign of a king. Let’s start out now talking about the King of Heaven. We’re talking about Jesus, our King. How do we know that Jesus is King of Heaven? Well, let’s study this out. In John chapter 3, I want to read the first couple of verses. You know the old story about Nicodemus slipping in at night like a slippery, slimy snake. He was too proud to be seen at daytime with Jesus, so he slips in at night and begins to ask Jesus about this Kingdom of Heaven business. He was a Levite, he was important, and he was “somebody” in Israel. It says, “Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews: The same came to Jesus by night, and said unto him, Rabbi, we know that thou art a teacher come from God: for no man can do these miracles that thou doest, except God be with him. Jesus answered and said unto him, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the Kingdom of God.” We have talked about the Kingdom and about the King. Now, we know the Kingdom of God, today, has nothing to do with the Jews living in Israel. Yes, Jews can be part of it if they’re born again; we’re not going to leave them out, but that’s not it. The Kingdom of God or the Kingdom of Heaven is God’s sphere of activity where He is in control. It’s His sovereignty, His domain, His reign, His rulership, and His Kingship among His born-again people. You can’t just be religious and belong to a church. You’ve got to be born again. You’ve got to be born of His Spirit. You can’t just drag yourself into some church and sign a piece of paper that says, “I belong to this church. I’m in the Kingdom of God now.” Nonsense! You’re in the kingdom of men, religious men. What could be worse?
Jesus said if you’re not born again, you cannot see this Kingdom, but He didn’t just leave us with that. He goes on here and talks more in verse 5. He says, “I say unto thee, Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the Kingdom of God.” He says you have to be born again of the Spirit to actually enter into the Kingdom. You’re not going to meet Jesus and He’s not going to be your King unless you enter into His Kingdom.
In John chapter 18, verse 36, we read, “Jesus answered, my Kingdom is not of this world.” This stops the patriotic movement in its tracks. All the patriots love to wave their little banners and say, “Oh I’m serving the Lord. God’s my King. Jesus is my King. And I’m doing all this for Jesus.” They bought their guns and stacked away their ammunition, getting ready to kill somebody for their king. And Jesus comes along and says, “Hey man, this is the kingdom of the world; this is not my Kingdom. This is your kingdom. This is the kingdom of unregenerate religious men. It’s not my Kingdom.” Jesus says, “If my Kingdom were of this world, then would my servants fight, that I should not be delivered to the Jews: but now is my Kingdom not from hence.” The point is that His Kingdom is a Kingdom of Heaven not a kingdom of earth, although His Kingdom has come to earth through born-again men and women, boys and girls. What is Jesus without a Kingdom? His Kingdom is His people. It’s not land; He doesn’t need land. He needs people: His people that are born again become His subjects and in turn He becomes their King.
Second Timothy, chapter 4, verse 18 says, “And the Lord shall deliver me from every evil work, and will preserve me unto his heavenly Kingdom: to whom be glory for ever and ever.” Here we read that He’s got a heavenly Kingdom. It’s not a kingdom like the kingdoms of this earth. His Kingdom is invisible, but yet it’s visible to and through His people. And listen, if you don’t live the life, if you don’t become a living epistle, and if I don’t let the light of Christ shine in me, then who’s gonna be an example of the Kingdom of God? Who’s really going to perceive it? This is why men are stumbling in darkness, even though there are churches and religious establishments everywhere. This is why Christianity is mocked and made fun of, so pushed aside like it doesn’t matter anymore. It’s because it’s all hypocritical. Christians have quit letting the light of Christ shine in them, they’ve quit living the life, and they just talk the talk. They cheat and cut corners, and they want to quickly run to get on the throne and get deified themselves. Instead of living a life of humble obedience, they want to be deified and put on the crown of glory. They think everybody is going to know they are a good Christian because they can talk good, they can preach good, and they can be a real “witness.” But the problem is that the way you live is of the devil! As you blow your weed, and smoke your cigarettes, and drink your wine and beer, as you fornicate and have abortions and all this other stuff that goes on in the name of Jesus, you then have the nerve to claim you belong to His Kingdom. Jesus is not a King of that kind of hypocrisy.
There are a lot of professing Christians that are not born again. They never had a born-again experience, yet they claim to be Christians. Either you are or you aren’t. Either you’ve got Christ in you or you don’t have Christ in you. If you don’t have Christ in you, then you’re not in Him and He’s not in you. You’re not part of His Kingdom—even if you talk about Him all day long. Now listen, an atheist who doesn’t believe in God can study the Holy Bible and memorize some of it if he has a good memory, and he can even preach sermons out of it, but that doesn’t mean anything. Just because people can memorize scriptures, quote scriptures, read the Bible, and even carry a Bible doesn’t mean anything to God. YOU could study all about church history and you could study all about doctrine, learning all about God; you can even learn about the Kingdom of Heaven, yet that’s not good enough. You’ve got to be part of it before Jesus becomes your King.
Now I’m making a distinction between religion and righteousness. There’s an element of Christianity which is only religious; it’s not really righteous. Churches are full of people who have joined a denomination and never really met Jesus. The Catholic church is a good example. There are people who are born into Catholicism, generation after generation. They don’t even know the Lord, they’ve never had an experience with Jesus, and they just say, “I’m a Catholic,” and that settles it for them. They’ve just been brought up in the Catholic religion or the Lutheran religion, or the Episcopalian religion, or even serve the Baptist religion. Throw all man-made religion into the pit! Get back to the basics, get on your knees, and find Jesus for yourself! Get to know Him. Don’t just get to know religion—get to know Him! I could know about God, and I could know about the things of God, but is He in me? That’s what is important.
Let’s talk about the King of glory. First Timothy, 1:17, “Now unto the King eternal, immortal, invisible, the only wise God, be honour and glory for ever and ever.” King of eternal glory, praise God, that’s what Jesus is. Go back to Second Timothy, Chapter 2, verse 10, “Therefore I endure all things for the elect’s sakes, that they may also obtain the salvation which is in Christ Jesus with eternal glory.” There you have the two together again: Jesus and eternal glory. Colossians 3:4, “When Christ, who is our life, shall appear, then shall ye also appear, with him in glory.” One more, 1st Thessalonians Chapter 2, verse 12, “That ye would walk Worthy of God, who hath called you unto his Kingdom and glory.” All right, from these verses we can see that Jesus is the King of glory. His Kingdom is glorious; He’s a glorious King. Now we know that the flesh, humanity, carnality has a glory to it. Right? Sure it does. That’s what religion is all about, glorified flesh. Religion has an aspect of glory. Why do you think people follow religious leaders? Why do you think they follow gurus? Yet we are talking about eternal glory, the true glory of God. And how do you get this kind of glory?
There’s an old saying, “No pain, no gain.” I say, “No suffering, no glory.” If you don’t go through any suffering for Christ, you get no glory. How do you think you get glory put in you? By dancing your way into the Kingdom? By shouting and praising your way into the Kingdom? No, you get it by dying. And dying is always a painful process. You know that; I know that—that’s why no one wants to do it. Who wants to lie upon a cold slab and die, or hang on a cross in shame and let people mock them as they’re dying? People have lost the concept that Paul put forth when he said, “I die daily.” They’ve lost the vision of the cross. Now what people want is an illuminated cross, the plastic kind with fluorescent lights behind it. You know, the lights that blink on and off like they do on TV. That’s the glory that man has created in this hour. They’ve created this kind of junk to imitate the true glory of God, but man has altered the cross so that their version is without the pain of dying to oneself. You can put on a good religious show, but I’m telling you one thing, the only way you’re going to get to the real glory of God is by dying, and this is the very thing we fight. We fight dying until we are dead. We hang on to our life, to our carnal flesh life, until it kills us. The Bible speaks of those who oppose themselves. Could it be us? I know I’ve been guilty in times past of hanging on to the very thing that was causing me hell. It was my own personal life that was causing my problems. God doesn’t cause your problems—God is in your life, Jesus is in your life to rule over you. Don’t you think He knows how to rule better than we do?
You say, “I want to go to Heaven.” Where’s Heaven? Have you been there? “Well, I don’t know, but I’m going.” How do you know you are going? Have you been there? Have you seen it? Do you know how to get there? No, but Jesus knows. He said, “I’ll send the Holy Ghost.” The Holy Ghost, which is another part of the Godhead, is going to lead you and guide you. Where? Into the bars? Into the whorehouses? Into some dead church? Into fellowship with the world? Nooo…He’s going to lead you into the Kingdom of God, which is a Kingdom of holiness and righteousness. He’s going to lead you into the glory of God. That’s what He had against the Laodicean church. Jesus was upset because they said, “Hey, I don’t need this. I’m rich. I’m increased with goods. I’ve got all these things. I’ve got oil wells and money in the bank. I’m somebody. You know. I’m somebody.” Then Jesus pointed His finger in their face, and said, “You’re miserable, you’re wretched, you’re blind, and you’re naked!” What a contrast! Naked? What did He mean when He told them they were naked? He wasn’t talking about their physical clothes; He was pointing out that they were spiritually naked. They didn’t have one ounce of glory upon them. You’re covering is your glory. So it goes back to this: You don’t cheat on God. We can’t cheat our way into the Kingdom, I’ll tell you that right now.
You are going to be sadly mistaken if you think you are going to crawl right in and snuggle up next to Jesus on that day, and put your arm around Him, and pat Him on the back and say, “Here I am Jesus; don’t you love me?” Yet He sees you slithering in, like the fat reptile that you are, so putrid and full of sin, so sick and full of the things of the world. He’s going to point again at your face and say, “Depart from me you slime; I never knew you.” Well, He knows you for sure, but He didn’t know you in an intimate way. He didn’t know you like a man knows his wife. You were too busy dancing with the devils to get to know Him. You have no glory. What did He do to the guy that tried to slip into the marriage without a garment on? What do you think the garment was? The garment was glory! He didn’t have it. He said,”Get out! You don’t belong here.” He kicked him out into outer darkness with lots of weeping and gnashing of teeth.
Revelation 17:14, “These shall make war with the Lamb, and the Lamb shall overcome them: for he is Lord of the lords, and King of the kings.” All right, Jesus is King of kings and Lord of lords, “…and they that are with him are called, and chosen, and faithful.” Now, going into chapter 19 you’ll see the same thing in verse 16. It says, “And he hath on his vesture and on his thigh a name written, King of kings, and Lord of lords.” Notice that the word King with the capital ‘K’ refers to Jesus, and the king with the small ‘k’ refers to all the other world rulers. Now back to First Timothy chapter 6, verse 15. I want to read it out of the Amplified. This is how it reads, “…which will be shown forth in his own proper time the blessed, only sovereign.” I wanted that word sovereign because it goes back and relates to the subject of the Kingdom. Jesus is the only sovereign, which means He’s the only King. He is the big King. What is it in us that wants to rule? It’s the little king, right? And if we’re not careful, what we are going to do is take the title that belongs to Jesus, and we’re going to put it in front of our name. We’re gonna take the capital ‘K’ and put it on our name, and take the small ‘k’ and put it on His name. You say, “General I wouldn’t do that because I love the Lord!” If you love the Lord then prove it. Put up or shut up. Prove that He’s the King in your life by obeying His commands.
There are multitudes of professing Christians that live as ruler of their own lives. They tell Jesus what they want, why they want it, what they’re gonna do, when they get it, and how they’re going to use it—and He doesn’t have any say in the matter. A lot of these ideas have been generated by greedy, lustful leaders as we know. They teach their people that they need to command God and dictate to God what they want. I can name names right now but, I don’t feel like getting sick before I’m done with this message. You know what I’m referring to: pride, arrogance, the whole nine yards that make up the kingdoms of carnality. And all the time they’re putting on a show like, “Oh I’m so humble; I’ll do anything that God asks of me.” You can fake your little humility. You can claim that you’ll scrub toilets or do something very lowly to be seen and heard of men, but really you won’t do that. You’ll just say you’ll do that. I tell you one thing, people can lie. They should get a crown for the best liars that they are. Now, let’s continue talking about the King of kings and Lord of lords. These are points six and seven, but we’ll include them together. Now, go back to the book of Acts 2:36: “Therefore let all the house of Israel know assuredly that God hath made the same Jesus, whom ye crucified, both Lord and Christ.” From the Jews’ point of view, Jesus was never the Messiah, and Jesus was never the King. From the writer of Acts point of view, on this side of the cross, Jesus was his King, and he wanted all those born again to know assuredly as well as those unbelievers to know assuredly that Jesus was the King. He was hitting both camps here. Jesus was both Lord and Christ. Not only was He Lord, but He was Christ. Not only was He supreme and sovereign, but He was Christ. He was anointed—Christ the anointed. What was He anointed with? He was anointed with Holy Ghost oil, Holy Ghost glory.
So what I’m getting at here is He’s Lord of all. In other words, He is the Lord with a capital ‘L.’ He’s not just a lord; He’s THE Lord. Now one more scripture. Acts 17: 24: “God that made the world and all things therein, seeing that he is Lord of Heaven and earth….” Here we have a scripture that tells us God is the Lord. You can see that the Trinity is all one in the same: Jesus, God the Father, the Holy Ghost. They’re interchangeable; they’re all the same, but all three are distinctly God. Continuing on it says, “….dwelleth not in temples made with hands.” There you have it. When you say, “I’m going to a church,” where are you really going? Are you just going to some building to be with other religious people, or are you going to go meet the Lord? What about when God’s people come together? They are the church because He’s in them, and they are His temple. What about that? “Well I don’t know about that, General, but I know I’m going to church, because it’s a church that will allow me to do the things I want to do. And we have twenty thousand in the congregation, and we have singles meetings too, General.” Good for you.
Let’s look closer at the meaning of the word Lord. The word Lord means: master, owner, and sir. “Yes sir, I will disobey! Yes sir, I will disobey!” This is the war cry of the modern Christian, for they are at war with God. Yes sir, you’re your own Lord, you’re your own Jesus, and you’re your own King. Yes sir we have seen it in this generation. Churches are full of kings and queens, people who are doing their own thing and calling it Christian. Yes sir, during the last several weeks here, we’ve had several people come here and ask for advice because they are crying over the messed up condition of their lives, and they need advice. They say, “Please give me help. Give me a direction.” So, you give them sound advice, sound direction, even scriptural, and they turn around and spit in your face because they didn’t like what you told them. Who’s ruling your life? The lord of the flies, could it be? “Oh no, I serve Jesus. I go to church.” That’s your problem. You go to church—you don’t go to Jesus!
I want to see a revolution where every church in America would be forced to get on their knees and seek God! Yes, SEEK GOD. And that includes pastors and leaders, that they would be saved. Churches are no better than whorehouses anymore. Everything ungodly goes on in them. They’re nothing but business and social clubs. They’re entertainment centers decked out with all the best that the world has to offer. They have to have their music so they can “praise the Lord.” Sure, they “praise the Lord” with unholy hands and filthy lips, with bloated eyes from watching too much TV, with burning ears from hearing the filth of the world, and with hearts enlarged from eating too much.
So, you’ve got the Lord Jesus in His deity, and you’ve got all the other lords of the earthly or carnal realm; you’ve got the heavenly and the earthly. That’s what you’ve got—and that’s where our warfare is. That’s where you start getting rid of your problems. The truth is you’ve got to fight, learn spiritual warfare, and put it in practice if you want to remain a citizen of the Kingdom of God. Jesus said if my Kingdom was of this world, my soldiers or my people would fight for me. What this scripture means is that His Kingdom is a Spirit Kingdom, and our warfare is not with flesh and blood using carnal weapons. It is a command that we have to fight. We are to join the ranks of the army of God, and He tells us, He even commands us, in Timothy to endure hardness as a good soldier. Don’t get entangled with the affairs of this life and that’s the very thing that Christians are strangling themselves with! Getting money, getting this, getting that, and they’re so involved in the business world out there and in the world in general that they are strangling themselves and killing themselves. They might as well put a noose around themselves, jump off a tree, and kill themselves. He says if you’re going to be in my army and be one of my soldiers, don’t even get entangled with the world. You ask, “Well how do you not get entangled with it, General?” I’ve got to make a living. Making a living is one thing, and worshiping material possessions to the point that you work like a slave is quite another thing.
What do you think communities are all about? Why do you think we live together as a community, army, nation tribe? Communities cut out a lot of that junk right away. When you live together, share your resources together, worship God together, pray and fight the enemy together, you just quit feeding the world so much. And that doesnt mean that you’re secluded in some compound where you peek out the windows because you are so afraid to go out into the world. Far from it! We’re out in this world everyday being a witness for Christ, but we don’t get entangled with it. We’ve traveled this world, we’ve been in many countries and different cultures, and we are still here alive and well, serving the Lord. The essence is that you dont give your heart to the world. Don’t give your soul to it. Don’t worship it, that is what Paul was telling Timothy. Get out there and be a bold witness to people: win them to Christ, do your business in the world, but don’t fall in love with it. That’s what’s wrong with Christians; they’re so in love with the world. They work five days a week, some six, some even seven days a week, for hours on end in the world. Then they go to a church, a building, and give God one hour or two hours a week. Then they sit back and think to themselves, “Oh, I’m a good Christian. I worship God. Come to my church.”
Let’s talk about what Christians do in a week. Let’s just say that the average Christian works forty hours a week in the world. Then Saturday is a day off because you have to unwind from the world, so you don’t serve God on that day. That’s your day to watch football or sports, or go skiing, or whatever you like—whatever you, the lord, likes to do. Then when Sunday comes around all of a sudden, it’s religious day. If you’re really good, you might spend three hours in church on a Sunday morning. Of course, on Sunday night, they have to have something special to get you there, some kind of entertainment, concert, drama, or other diversion. Anything to entice Christians to come on Sunday night. All right, if you’re good you’ll go Sunday night. So all totaled, you’ve got about five hours worth of time at church as opposed to forty hours a week of work, plus twenty-four hours on Saturday, which is all yours because you’re the lord. So do you get my point? Five hours a week for God, compared to sixty-four for yourself. No wonder the average Christian is so spiritually weak and unable to stand against the devil. Another good comparison is between what you eat for your natural body and what you eat for your spiritual body. Of course, we know what you ate at church, don’t we? You ate church food. The snacky goodies, you know the sweet things with lots of sugar coating on them. Nothing that you have to chew very much. Maybe you had a little bubbly glass of champagne if you went to a charismatic, prosperity church. This kind of food gets you feeling real good so that you don’t notice that your wallet was missing $$$ because Pastor Disaster got it. Yet, what about physical food. Oh my God, we live in the land of total consumption. There is no limit put on what you can eat for your fleshly, carnal body. People will go to great pains to make sure they have the highest quality food, in very large quantities. Yet when it comes to their spiritual food, all they eat is a few snacks covered with sugar—nothing to build strength. Nothing that might make you have to work at digesting deeper spiritual truths. What I’m getting at is that if you only ate that little amount of food in the physical, you would be screaming. You would be upset and you would be mad. Not only that, but you would be losing weight real quick, and your natural body over a period of a full year would probably be a skeleton. ,
All right, look at it in a spiritual light. If all you feed your new man is spiritual junk food, naturally he is going to be skinny and weak. No wonder Christians hide behind the curtain and peek out the window when the devil comes around. They have no guts, no grit, no muscle or strength. They have no power. God knows you don’t want to tackle anything out there that might cause you spiritual exertion because you don’t have any strength for it. So you keep on working for the world and do nothing for Jesus. That’s the way it is. Christians starve the new man to death, while their carnal man is a fat, bloating beast that rules all day long and demands more and more of their life and time. What’s wrong? Why are the forces of darkness growing so big that Christians are afraid? Because Christians aren’t doing anything, and they have no guts anymore. They don’t do anything for Christ: they don’t witness or change anything, and the world is just getting worse, and worse, and worse! Now all the “educated” humanists at the universities talk about “post-Christian America,” meaning that Christianity has reached its zenith and is now passed in America. Unfortunately they are not far from the truth. The devil is ruling the streets and the churches. He’s ruling everything! Satan’s soldiers are on the offensive 24 hours a day, every day of the year, while Christians go off and play churchy-church one day a week.
Now in Matthew 28:18 when Jesus came out of the grave and appeared to His people, He said, “…all power is given unto me in Heaven and in earth.” All power! In Heaven, heavenly power and in earth, earthly power. He has it all. He’s the Lord of lords and King of kings. He has all power! And He’s going to give it to you. Jesus is going to invest it in you, and you are going to go out and be His witnesses unto the ends of the earth: “You’re going to preach, teach, and do mighty works in my name. You’re going to do all these things because I have all power, and I’m giving it to you.” Where’s the power? Huh? Where’s the power today? You hear a lot of preaching, you hear a lot of moaning and groaning about finances, but really, honestly, we don’t see the power of God, do we? There’s no power because Christians are powerless. They’re powerless because they have no glory. They have no glory because they refuse to die to themselves; instead, they spend very little time with God, and eat spiritual junk food. So what do you have? You have a worthless, weak, spineless abomination called the “church.”
We are discussing that Jesus is the Ruler, the invisible Ruler over His visible Body on this earth. Jesus is our King, and we are the subjects of His Kingdom. You cannot barricade His Spirit in, and you cannot barricade His Spirit out. Men have tried to blot God out. They’ve tried to stop the moves of God, or they’ve tried to promote them. You can’t do either one, for He is King of kings and Lord of lords. He’s going to do what He wants to do. You can’t reduce His strength because He’s all-powerful. You can’t say Jesus is weak because His Body on earth is weak in this hour. Yea, the Body is weak, but Jesus is not weak. You can’t control His reign or His domain. I can’t tell God what He can and cannot do, or why He should and why He shouldn’t do something. He’s immortal, powerful, merciful, righteous, and steadfast. These are points we’ve talked about. His truth is marching on, and there’s a deadline for men. One of these days, the clock is going to strike twelve, and it’s going to be all over. Nothing is going to stop it. No one is going to turn back the hands of time another day or two, or another month or two so they can have one more fling in sin. No, there’s a deadline, people. We don’t know when it is. I don’t know. I don’t know when He’s coming back or when the time will be over, and I don’t know when things are going to be sealed and shut. But I do know that it is going to happen, and that Jesus the King is going to judge every person. And whatever amount of glory you have or don’t have, that’s going to be it. It’s finalized, finished, done. Once you die, you are sealed for eternity, and you will either be in God’s Kingdom or in the lake of fire. The choice is up to you.
Jesus gives life to the dead, strength to the weak, forgiveness to the sinners, and freedom to the captives. He rewards the good and punishes the wicked. That I know! So what you’ve got is Jesus is our King. As far as I’m concerned, I don’t need any other King, and most of all, I don’t need to be a king. I don’t want to serve any man. I want Jesus Christ to be my King. That’s where the power is, that’s where the glory is, and that’s where the strength is— the strength to serve God in holiness and truth. And it’s a shame to Him when His people drag along, mess around, goof off, waste time, and resources, and never really get down to business for God to let Him be Ruler of their lives. Now Jesus is smart enough to know exactly what He wants to do with every individual. He knows exactly what He wants to do with me and with you. He doesn’t guess; He knows. He already has a blueprint. He already knows what He wants to use you for. But are we willing? This is the vital question. Inside we are all full of good intentions, and we will tell God we are willing to be made willing. Yet you’ll see what’s going to happen when the spiritual battle begins for control. You’ll see the little lord and the little king stand up and say, “No way, not right now.” How do I know this? I’ve done it! And I’ll tell you where He always takes you: He’ll always take you to the cross, to the way of death, to where you become lesser and He becomes greater. He’ll always do that, because if He didn’t do that, people would be no good. We would all go to hell. He needs to empty us out so He can fill us up. And if we don’t get emptied out, then He won’t fill us up. That’s the process of true Christianity, and there’s no other way around it. There’s no other way that you can live your Christian walk and fulfill the will of God unless you die, and that’s the very thing we don’t want to do. The key to everything is dying.
You know in my early days, I was like everybody. I used to dread the thought of dying, of crucifying the flesh. I used to just wake up in cold sweats and think, “I don’t want to do that, God. I don’t want to do that because….” You know how distasteful it is, going to the cross and doing something you don’t want to do. Oh, I would just go through fits over dying because I didn’t want to die to myself, to my ambitions, to my will, to all the stuff that made up who I thought I was. It drives even the most spiritual people crazy. But if you keep practicing, if you keep yielding your will to God, and making yourself die, as the years go by, you will actually find yourself desiring to die so that the life of Christ can come forth. I actually pray that God would show me new ways to die. I pray that way, and I mean it. I want to die to my will and to the things that have tormented me. I look back and wonder why I ever wanted to hang on to that stupid thing. The things of the world were killing me in the wrong way. And if some of you have such problems that are driving you nuts, start praying that God give you the strength to die. Make up your mind that you really want to die to that thing. Yet, you can get to that place with God where you find yourself actually begging God to take anything out of you that’s evil—that’s the place where Jesus is really your King.
“Behold, I come quickly: hold that fast which thou hast, that no man take thy crown. Him that overcometh will I make a pillar in the temple of my God, and he shall go no more out: and I will write upon him the name of my God and the name of the city of my God, which is New Jerusalem, which cometh down out of heaven from my God: and I will write upon him my new name. He that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit saith unto the churches.” THE REVELATION OF JESUS CHRIST – 3:11-13