Transcript of message from TV Broadcast 645 -- taken from Closed Captioning Text

-- Brother Phil Enlow: Our old self has been so corrupted by sin that it's beyond help, beyond repair. So when God calls people to the gospel, He is not saying I am calling you to live for God and to just do different. It's not reform. It's not reformation. God can...the only thing that God can do for us is to kill this old life and to replace it with one that works.

( congregational amens ).

Because the life you and I were born with, this old self, there's no way that it can inherit the kingdom of God. That's what the Scripture says, "...flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God." I don't care what you do to it. I don't care how you behave--good, bad, indifferent. We are what we are and we are unfit for heaven. We are unfit for the kingdom of God and God knows it better than we do.

That's not the Gospel. The Gospel of Jesus Christ is such that it would bring men to the end of themselves and cause them to face the fact of what we are. Nobody...He talks about a new life, a new self. But nobody can have that new self who has not first been brought to the place where they're willing to give up the old one. As long as you think you can kick, as long as you're so held in the grip of the desires of that old flesh and that old self, my God, there's no help.

All God can do is stand back. All He can do is seek to bring you to the place where you run out of gas. You know we use the expression of God bringing us to the end of ourself. Boy, that is necessary. And folks, if you're here this morning, if you're one that doesn't know God, that doesn't know what I'm talking about, that's the priority in your life.

And the people who know God need to be praying for such. They need to be praying that God will cause you to run out of gas, He'll cause you to come face to face with the fact that you are a sinner. You are helpless. You have been so marred by sin that I don't care what you do or what you try to change in your life, you will never be able to enter into His kingdom with what you are. That's not what God wants for any of us to do.

But I'll tell you when God can bring a soul to the place where they can humble themselves and say, Oh God, be merciful to me a sinner and mean it from their hearts--they see, they know, Oh God, I absolutely have run out of hope. There's not one thing that I can ever do that would somehow make me fit for your kingdom. All I can do is just come to you for mercy. I don't deserve this. I don't deserve you to show me any favor.

But, oh, when you see in the light of what we are, what Christ has done for us--what He was willing to do when He descended here to this world, and all the agony, all that He was willing to undergo on the cross. All that amazing agony that He suffered there for us, taking upon himself our sins and all that's wrong with us and receiving in Himself the punishment that was due to you and to me. Oh my God, that's the gospel. The gospel said I'm turning away from all that I am. Lord, I give it to you. I don't care. As far as I'm concerned, my life is over. I want the new life. I want you to do something new in me.

( congregational amens ).

That's the problem. People are trying to fix up their lives. People have problems. They have bondages. They have all kinds of things that have got a grip on their lives and they don't understand that it's not fixing your old life that is what God wants. God promises to give a new life to those who give up the old one. That's the gospel.

And notice how he talks about this. He says, " And to put on the new self... (NIV)--Now listen to this next word if you have my particular translation here. It says created-- "...created to be like God...." Do you understand that the life God puts within us that is born when we are born again into His family is a brand new creation?

( congregational amens ).

It is a brand new creation. God...that's the only thing God can do for us. He can't, even God Himself can't fix what's wrong with us. Think about that. That's how desperate our condition is. But there's something He can do. He is a God who can create. He has the power to create a brand new you and a brand new me. That's what the gospel is.

( congregational amens ).

That's what the gospel is. Created to be like God. Do you have a problem living for God? Well, the reason is very simple. When I have a problem living for God, it's because I'm trying to do it. I can't. You know when we hear the requirements and the admonitions of God as to what we ought not to be and do and what we ought to be and do, the natural reaction of everyone of us is to try. If we have any desire to do right at all, we try. We struggle. We strive.

But that's not what God wants. There's no way that we can embark upon this passage that follows of all the things that God wants His church to be if we don't understand this. If we don't understand that it doesn't happen that way. I can't do it. When I hear the admonition of God to be holy, for example, my reaction is not, okay, God, I'm gonna try real hard. I'm gonna try harder. Of, if I just pray more, if I'd do this, if I do that, I'm gonna...then I can be holy. That's not it at all.

How did you come to Christ, you who know, you who've come to Christ? Did you come to Christ and enter in because you tried hard? No. It's the exact opposite. Coming to Christ is not a matter of trying to be a Christian. Coming to Christ is a matter of surrender and saying, I can't, Lord. It's recognizing our inability to do anything to save ourselves. Lord, I can't save me, you're gonna have to do it. I surrender. I cast myself upon you. It's the exact opposite. We cease from what we are. We cease from our works. We depend upon Him. We enter into His rest.

( congregational amens ).

Do you see how all this dovetails together? God wants to create a new you. And when we surrender to Him, He does. There's a new life that's born in us. But that having happened, how do we live? This is where our problem comes. You know God taught Paul in a very real school. It was a school of experience. He didn't go and sit at the feet of Gamaliel and learn all this stuff. He got alone with God.

God took him first out in the backside of the desert for three years and began to teach him what the gospel was. Paul had a lot to unlearn. He had been a self-righteous Pharisee. That's all he'd ever known until God showed him what a wretch he was and all he could do was just surrender and realize, oh, my God, I can be forgiven in spite of all that I've done.

( congregational praise ).

He has shown me my sin but He didn't show it to me to condemn me and to grind me into the ground. He did it so I can be forgiven. He did it so I would abandon all of my self-righteousness and trust in Him alone. Praise God!

But you know I'll just refer to the passage in Romans 7 that we all know. I believe God took Paul through a very difficult school in which some of that Phariseeism that he had grown up with rose up and that zeal for wanting to obey God, wanting to do right. It was still there in him and God had to continually show him in a school of life that no matter what he did, no matter how hard he tried, if he was going about it that way, he was gonna do nothing but fail a hundred percent of the time.

When I would to do good evil is present with me, and so on. You know the things that I would, I do not and so forth, that I would not, that I do. Whatever it was it was the opposite of what he oughta do is what he found himself doing. And so it was on the heels of that he came to the end and said, O wretched man that I am! There was a sense which he realized that no matter what I do I can't live for God. I can't. There's no hope for me to live for God if I'm gonna have to do it this way.

And that's when God showed him another way. He said, it's the life, the law of the life that's in Jesus Christ that dwells in me. When I begin to yield my vessel to that, I'm gonna find out that I can serve God.

( congregational amens ).

It's not me trying to do it. It's that new creation that begins to come into play. Praise God! That new creation is part of God's own life within us. And this verse here tells us that it's created to be like God. Do you realize if you know Jesus Christ today, that there is something--there is a life in you that is a part of God Himself? We don't have to muddle along. We can learn. We can grow. We have a resource.

Now I'm thankful for this--that God does not...I mean, you know, a lot of people find out something like this and they want a shortcut. But boy, they want a experience that's gonna suddenly transform them from here to way up here. It doesn't happen like that. That's why the Scriptures are so careful to talk about us 'growing' up into Him. Growing up into Him.

God knows where we're at. He knows that we start out as little infants. He doesn't expect more out of us than we're capable of. But I tell you there is a life there that if we will nurture that, if we will understand that, if we will co-operate with that, we're gonna find that we can serve God without all this striving and struggling that we try so hard to do. Because serving God is not striving in ourselves.

Serving God is, first of all, just like we came to God in the first place. It begins with surrender. When God tells me in His Word to do something that I know in myself I have no power to do, what is my reaction? How should I approach that? Should I just excuse myself? Should I just push it aside and say, Uh Uh, that's not for me? I'm gonna "cherry pick" my Christianity. I like the good parts. I'm gonna take the forgiveness part and I'm gonna leave the "be holy part" out of it.

Is that how we should react? Or should we react like Paul with great zeal, Yes, God, I'm so glad you finally told me how I'm supposed to be and I'm gonna be that way? Praise God! I'm gonna gear myself up, I'm gonna be holy. That doesn't work, does it? How many of you know it doesn't work?

( laughing ).

You know what I'm talking about. I certainly do. But I tell you God's plan is a whole different one. Just like we came to God in the first place by surrender and faith, that is how God wants us to face the issues that are right in front of us at any given time. That's the only way that I know that we can actually get from here to there. There's no jumping over all those experiences. God wants us to go through them, just like a child has to go through being an infant, and a child and a young person and go all the way up.

They can't skip school. They can't skip all the things that they need to do to become an adult. We can't skip those things in Christ. God wants you and He wants me to face the things that we face, but I'll tell you, He has given us the means to face them. He's given us the very life of God on the inside and if we understand that, we can obey what He says in verse 23, "To be made new in the attitude of your minds." I believe that's several things. One thing is agreeing with God that we ought to not be like the world. We want to be like Him.

( congregational amens ).

There's an agreement. Yes, God, I long to be like you. I want to be righteous. I want to be holy. Lord, I can't do it without you but I want to be that. But it's also an understanding that God is not requiring our old self to somehow be that way. He has given us a brand new self that is capable.

In fact, the truth of the matter is the new self that He's given us can't do anything else. Think about that. Do you believe that that life of God that He's given to us on the inside is capable of sin? No. Think about that. God has given us what we need. And the fact that we don't get there in one great leap doesn't mean that we cannot, day by day, face the things that we face and instead of trying hard, instead of ducking and running, we can say, Oh, God, just as I couldn't save myself to begin with, Lord, I cannot help myself in this situation. I come to you. I want to do right.

I'm depending on you to strengthen me and to help me to co-operate with that nature that you've given to me. That life, that new life that you've given to me, that's the only way that I can handle this. I have no other way. Lord, you know in this situation I lose my temper every time. I have no patience. I can't do this, Lord. I can't stop this habit. I can't do a thousand and one things that afflict everyone of us because we're all made of the same stuff.

The only way that I know we're gonna have to bring these things to God and surrender and recognize that we cannot do it. That's the starting point. The starting point is not trying hard. The starting point is "Lord, I can't. That's why I need you to be my Saviour." God has never put us in a place where we've got it all and now we just sort of do it. We are in a continual relationship of dependence upon a faithful God who longs to help us.

( congregational amens ).

Now let's go back to the illustration that the Lord used in John, chapter 15 of the vine and the branches. Now the first picture of God's somehow requiring something of us that we should somehow live for God in our own energy would be like a branch laying there on the ground, not connected to anything and saying, bear fruit, come on, bear fruit. That'd be kinda stupid, wouldn't it? It doesn't work that way. We understand that.

What we don't understand sometimes is in our real lives, we don't understand that we can't. God wants you to know you can't, and that He understands that you can't. He's got a better way. But you know when we become a part of the vine, there's a life that comes. How does fruit get borne? Does it get borne because the branch just tries real hard? No. It just opens up and it drinks in the life that flows from the source of life. And as that life begins to go to work, you suddenly find that you have power to do something that you could never do. No branch by itself can bear fruit. But if it abides in the vine, it can. Why? Because there's a life that flows. We have...God has connected us, every believer in Jesus Christ, to the source of life itself.

( congregational amens ).

And that's why He wants us to drink of Him and to look to Him and to worship Him and to read the Word and to do all the things that strengthen and cause this new life that He spoke within us to grow. We've got a new self. We've got an old self. Which one are we gonna co-operate with? That's the question. That's the issue we face every day. If we're gonna continue to grasp after the things of the flesh, we gonna have a miserable life. But, oh, if we say, God, by your strength...I cannot do what you have called me to do, but in your strength I can.

Just a simple example of what Paul expressed in Philippians, chapter 4, I believe it is. He talked about how in the course of his ministry he had been called upon to occupy places of great need. There were times I'm sure that Paul didn't know where his next meal was coming from. He was struggling. Sometimes he was in prison. He was beaten. There was a lot of things in which he just didn't have the natural resources of life. He didn't know what he was gonna do.

But God...and there were other times that he had plenty. I mean he was living with--perhaps boarding with some rich person and he was dining on caviar every day. Well, they didn't have caviar, I guess they hadn't learned how to make it, bring it from Russia at the time. But anyway whatever the equivalent was in their society, he was living high on the hog.

And you know, both of those are situations that Satan knows how to use against us. He can cause the person in need to feel self-pity to feel hopeless, to feel struggling. Just unbelief, sometimes complaining to God or complaining. You know all the complaining that we do is against God if we understood it. But those are all the things that we are prone to and you get so focused on the need and the lack you forget to live. And here's Paul called to minister. Supposed he'd gotten so occupied with all the stuff he didn't have, he wouldn't have been any good for the ministry.

But the danger is just as great on the other side. If he'd gotten so comfortable and so 'well I've got everything is going so great right now. I've got money in the bank and I'm living with the best people in society. Everything is just wonderful.' First thing you know he'd go to sleep and be ineffective. But you know what he said. He said, I've learned. He had learned. That means he had to go through things. I'm sure he didn't do it all right every time. But in the process of facing those situations, he learned. He learned how to be abased, how to have a little and how to have a lot and how for it not to get him off track in his spiritual life. God is gonna do the same thing and He is doing the same things in our lives.

( congregational praise ).

He's not putting you and me in situations that are over our heads to drown us. God is like someone who would teach someone to swim by the brutal method, in a way, of throwing them in the water over their heads. But you know something, He's a loving heavenly Father, who knows that we have it in us because He's put it there. He knows what you're capable of. He knows what you're not capable of.

But He has created and is creating every single day in you and in me the capacity to live for God and to overcome. Now the fact that we don't do it perfectly today doesn't mean that we don't have it. That's part of growing in grace and in knowledge. There is that growth to be sure, but God has given to you and to me exactly what we need. And we need to approach every situation where the starting point is Lord, I can't but in you I can. I'm looking to you. I'm trusting in you.

( congregational amens ).

There's a rest in that. Instead of striving about things we yield and we believe about things. Isn't that how your sins got forgiven in the first place? Did you do anything different to try to get God to forgive your sins? No. You surrendered and you believed. Well, living for God is the same way. It's the same principle that carries us all the way home. The grace that got us started is the grace that'll carry us on and carry us all the way home. It's divine strength that we have that's opening our selves to the flow of the life of God that's in the vine.

I can't talk to you about this, this morning as someone who is way up here beyond you. I'm in the same battle that you're in. But I tell you I know where my help comes from. And God has taught me in a great measure through a great deal of falling in the mud that I don't have what it takes. And I've watched some of you. And I know that you don't have what it takes either.

( laughter ).

I've watched you fail over and over and over again. God doesn't want us to stay in a place of failure. The reason we do it is because it's us. God wants us to learn to drink in of the very life of God and say, Oh, God, strengthen me to do what I cannot otherwise do. And it's real, folks. We're gonna understand. We're gonna experience the power of His resurrection life flowing in us. God is creating a brand new you and I'll tell you that brand new you is gonna be perfectly fitted for the kingdom of God.

( congregational amens ).

Believe in it. Co-operate. Let that life grow up. Co-operate with that life. Walk in the Spirit. Walk in a harmony with that life and not with the other one. God is gonna take us all the way through, folks. Oh what a horrible burden it would be if we had to somehow do it, but He has given us what we need to do it. And I praise Him this morning. I praise Him for His goodness.

( congregational praise ).

Don't ever be stuck in the rut of "I can't." If God has shown you that you can't, He has done you a wonderful favor, because that's not where He wants you to stay. It's not where He wants me to stay. He wants me to bring all that inability before Him and say, Oh, God, you knew I couldn't do it all along. You never expected me to be able to. All you've wanted to show me was that I couldn't so that I would come to you in surrender, in humbleness, in faith and draw the strength that I need so that I can begin to do what I couldn't do in myself. God is so wonderful. Praise God!

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