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February, 2020
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Preached by Dr. Gene Scott on June 17, 1984 Paul, an apostle of Jesus Christ by the will of God, to the saints which are at Ephesus, and to the faithful in Christ Jesus: Grace be to You, and peace, from God our Father, and from the Lord Jesus Christ. Ephesians 1:1-2 WE ARE TEACHING ON BASIC CHRISTIANITY. Please turn in your Bible to Ephesians 1 and let’s read beginning at verse 1: “Paul, an apostle of Jesus Christ by the will of God, to the saints . . . and to the faithful in Christ Jesus.” The word translated “saints” is a form of the Greek word hagios. It has to do with commitment; it doesn’t have anything to do with how well you perform. It is a liturgical word that describes someone who has offered himself on the altar for the exclusive use of God. You cannot be a saint unless you are willing to turn yourself over to God. That is the essence of the meaning of repentance. The word “repentance” does not mean coming to an altar and crying for an hour. It simply means “to turn from something to something else,” specifically, “to turn from your way to God’s way.” Repentance means recognizing that sin is not what most of the church has been condemning us for; rather, sin is something way down deep in our nature. The prophet Isaiah said, “All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way.” Every one of us, at some point in life, must learn to submit to authority in order to learn how to submit to God. The devil has won a victory in this generation that has deified freedom. The devil wants us to believe there is such a thing as total freedom without any external influences, what I call “freedom in a vacuum.” But there is no such thing as freedom, abstractly speaking; there is only the freedom to choose a master. A drunk is not free; he is enslaved to his passion. A pervert is not free; he is enslaved to his body. We were made in God’s image, which includes the freedom to choose. That is what Jesus revealed. Philippians 2 says He “thought it not robbery to be equal with God: but made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant.” Christianity is warfare and the only way to survive the attacks of the enemy is to stay connected to God. This is one of the challenges of pastoring a church: it seems I always have to deal with people who start working so hard for the work’s sake that they backslide because they stop listening to the preaching of God’s word. Even on Sunday, they are “working for the Lord.” Everyone needs to make the time to sit down and listen, because you need God’s power to resist the devil. Without the power of God in you, you haven’t got a prayer. Every embryo of new spiritual life comes under attack, and the Bible says we must be prepared for spiritual warfare. All of life is warfare between God and Satan, and we are merely the pawns on the battlefield. Romans 8:28 says that God enters in to all things to work His good for them that are called according to His purpose. The King James Version erroneously translates that verse, “all things work together for good,” but that is simply not true: “all things” don’t work together for good! I see a man in my congregation who lost his teenage daughter last week. Don’t you dare try to tell him that “all things work together for good.” But once those “things” create their calamity, God enters in to them, and that is where faith comes in. We know when disaster strikes and the world falls in on us, the devil has the edge for a moment. But God enters in to all those things to work His good, not for everyone, but “to them who are the called according to the purpose.” Satan is the great imitator: he also enters in to every circumstance to work his own evil ends, and the only thing that keeps God on your side in this battle is faith, not works of righteousness. Your performance can be so righteous that any fundamentalist denomination would deify you, but God won’t even bother to come near to help you. Furthermore, when you are self-righteous, you are encroaching on the honor that only Jesus is due. But the moment you act in faith, God goes to you outside the camp, even though some self-righteous people might view you as a leper who ought to be banished. The saints are those who give themselves over to God. Children should learn authority from their father, and he ought to have the guts to make them learn it. Everyone has to learn it somewhere. The pastor exercises authority in matters pertaining to the church. If you think that a pastor is getting away with doing things he shouldn’t be doing, I can tell you that God will deal with that pastor. God is very hard on His ministers. Paradoxically, He is easy in the area of sin that is already covered, and He gives all of us the chance to start over. Paul addresses his epistle to the saints and to the faithful in Christ Jesus. That is what attorneys would call a “conjoined sentence.” It does not say “to the saints or to the faithful.” You must have both ingredients. A saint is someone who says to God, “Here, God. In as much as I can be, I’m Yours!” And a saint has to be faithful. Again, sin in essence is defined by Isaiah’s words: “All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way.” All the other stuff you hear about sin is just the fruit of that condition. The problem is we think we can handle our own way. The church totally misses the mark when it starts condemning you for such trivial things as how you wear your hair or how you dress. God goes right to the root: we just want to run our lives our own way. By that definition, there is more sin inside the church than there is outside the church. Inside the church, the sinners deify their sin. Let me give you a perfect example: there are people who say, “The Lord told me to tell you something!” They want you to believe that the Lord speaks to them directly, when in reality they are only trying to elevate themselves. If you have been in the church for a long time and have ever seen a backslidden troublemaker, then you know how super-spiritual they can get. Everyone wants his own way, but God positions us to learn that our way is not His way unless it conforms to “Thus saith the word of the Lord.” What is the next thing Paul says? “Grace to you.” That tells us something right away. If Paul is talking to the saints and the faithful, why do they need grace? In the minds of most traditional churchgoers, saints and faithful people are perfect; they don’t need grace. But Paul says to the saints and the faithful, “Grace be to you, and peace.” Peace means God is not against us. Paul says we have grace and peace “from God our Father, and from the Lord Jesus Christ.” Paul then goes on to say, “Blessed by the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who hath blessed us with all spiritual blessings in heavenly places in Christ.” In Ephesians 2, Paul will say there was a wall of partition between us and God because of our sins, but Christ broke that barrier in order that God might now come near to us. But leading up to it, Paul is full of praise to God, saying, “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who hath blessed us,” the saints and the faithful in Christ Jesus. Saints don’t have to be perfect; they need to be perfected. And “faithful” simply means they are consistently acting in faith. We who are in that state are blessed “with all spiritual blessings in heavenly places in Christ.” I have heard people say things like, “My church kicked me out because I had long hair,” or “My church kicked me out because I drank one of those coffee drinks that had a little alcohol in it,” or “My church kicked me out because my wife and I went to a rock concert and we couldn’t help but get up and dance.” Who really cares about any of those things? You are seated in heavenly places in Christ Jesus! That is the important place to be. Your denomination cannot place you there. It does not matter whether you are Southern Baptist, Assemblies of god, Nazarene or Catholic. None of them can put you in Christ, because you are already there! The church cannot save you; the pastor cannot save you. To the best of your ability, you simply offer yourself to God, not to the pastor. I want to make something very clear: when I talk about my authority as pastor, I am only referring to the functioning of the church. I don’t have any authority over your personal life: it is none of my business what you do. I cannot tolerate those churches that follow you around outside of the church. I don’t care what you do; I don’t know how many people in the congregation are committing adultery in their minds while they are sitting in church today. I will guarantee you there are a few adulterers, by Jesus’ definition, sitting in every church every Sunday; I am not stupid. That’s your problem. I am only talking about the workings of the church. I don’t care if musicians in this church want to play at a local bar. Maybe they will loosen up a bit and learn some new chords. It’s still none of my business. Some people might be shocked that a pastor would say that. But my authority is only over the things that I have been charged with, just as your authority is over the things you have been charged with. I will not come into your home and tell you how to raise your kids; that is your business. The true saint simply offers himself to the Lord. You don’t need a bunch of falderal and liturgy, and you don’t have to try to change your life in order to get the approval of a bunch of people who call themselves saints. To be a saint, you simply say, “Here I am, God. I may not have much to offer, but I have been going my own way for years, and that hasn’t amounted to much either.” The Bible says, “Turn to God and He will turn to you.” You say, “Here’s my mess, Lord. Now I offer myself to You to the best of my ability. I don’t expect You to speak to me audibly. I will do what I think is sensible, but I have made up my mind that I have been the boss long enough.” If you are a bartender, just say, “Here I am, Lord, I’m a bartender.” Now I can imagine the objections of those bound by their traditions: “But you can’t be a bartender and be a Christian!” Who are you to say? Does that mean you can’t be a Christian and work in a sporting goods store that sells guns, because someone might get killed by a gun? And you can’t work in a clothing shop that makes khaki clothing for the army? Where does it end? There is no basis for the myriad number of legalistic rules of surface behavior by which the traditional church decides who can and who can’t come to God. The tradition-bound will still argue and say, “Well, you sure can’t remain a bartender once you come to God.” Again, according to whom? You are a saint when you give yourself to God as you are. All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to our own way. I don’t need you to tell me about sin; I can tell you. The problem with traditional Christianity is that as soon as you walk through the door of sainthood, you become a punching bag for the rest of the church. They all want to start beating you into conformity to some set of rules. The saints and the faithful are simply those who get some faith and keep on having faith. I have heard people say, “If you are a nightclub performer and you become a Christian, you can’t stay where you are.” Nonsense! Now I am not talking about second-rate nightclub performers who try to salvage their failing careers by deciding to “serve Jesus” and start performing in Christian venues. I believe God’s faithful people ought to be the best in their fields, whatever that field is. Paul says to the saints and the faithful in Christ Jesus, “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who hath blessed us with all spiritual blessings.” The traditionalists say we must first be spiritual in order to receive God’s blessings. What does the Bible say? Who is it that gets the blessings? The saints and the faithful! The ones who offer themselves to God. I am not an “evangelist” in the traditional sense of the word, because I don’t try to “save” anyone. Most evangelism is rather silly, if you would think about it. Imagine being in a dark room and turning on a light, and you have to tell someone, “Do you know there’s a light on? Let me lead you to the light bulb” or “Let me show you the light!” There are churches all over America where the preachers are trying to get someone to see the light. But if the light is on, it’s not hard to see it. Salvation is simple, and repentance is simple. It is not, as I have said, coming to an altar to bawl and squall. I remember one man in the church my parents pastored who would throw himself on the ground before the altar and cry for hours while the whole church waited until they became worn out waiting. We would say, “What’s the matter with you?” And he would say, “Well, I just can’t get the feeling I remember I had the first time I got saved!” He was a miserable man, forever trying to duplicate a past experience that memory had exaggerated. When I was a boy, I would ride my scooter through an olive orchard near the little town of Palermo in Northern California. I thought I was in the Amazon jungle! I remember how scared I was when I rode my scooter through that forest, looking for monsters. Twenty years later, I went back and discovered it was only about four or five trees; I thought someone had cut down the forest. Memory exaggerates! Repentance is not all that falderal; it just means turning from your way to God’s way. Some people say I make salvation too easy. That is not true. I tell people, “Your way is wrong.” That is what sin is. I don’t care how it looks to someone else. You may look pretty righteous, but the beginning point of being born again is turning to God. Being born again is a work of God’s Spirit in you. It does not have to be a big deal in terms of your feelings. Rather, it is a simple act of God’s placing His life in you. He may hit you like a thunderbolt or in a way that is more subtle, but His word says He will do it. Repentance is coming to a point where you say, “I’ve had it with my way.” The church actually makes it hard to do that. They get on your back and tell you how you have to change in order for God to accept you. But repentance is simply a hard-headed decision where you acknowledge, “My way is wrong, and it hasn’t done much for me. God, here I am. I don’t know everything that encompasses Your way, but I’ve made up my mind to turn to You. And I’m not going to listen to anyone who tries to persuade me to follow their own version of ‘Your way,’ unless I find it written here in Your book.” God knows the heart, and He knows when you have made that decision to go His way. God’s way is clearly stated: His way is for you to believe what He says, not what you see. So you find a promise of God in His book and grab hold of it and start acting on it. And the minute you do that, you have offered yourself as a saint. The first act of faith is to take God at His word. He puts His Spirit in you and you are born again; and whether you feel anything or not, there is a new life in you. Now watch out; that new life will change you. God put all your sins on the cross. The traditional church does not want them there; they want to keep your sins around so they can beat you to death with them. But God put your sins on Christ and He puts you in Christ, seated in heavenly places with all spiritual blessings. That is His promise to the saints, meaning those who have committed themselves, and to the faithful. Do you know that this church is a house full of saints and the faithful, and that God has blessed us with all spiritual blessings? Do you know we are seated in heavenly places with Jesus? All the pressure in the world will not prevent us from making it, because God has decided He will treat us like we are already there and help us to finish the trip. Isn’t that simple? Reprinted with permission from Pastor Melissa Scott | December, 2020 Wingspread | November, 2020 Wingspread | October, 2020 Wingspread | September, 2020 Wingspread | August, 2020 Wingspread | July, 2020 Wingspread | June, 2020 Wingspread | May, 2020 Wingspread | April, 2020 Wingspread | March, 2020 Wingspread | February, 2020 Wingspread | January, 2020 Wingspread | | Year 2019 Wingspreads | August, 2016 Wingspread | 2016 Wingspreads | 2014 Wingspreads | 2013 Wingspreads | 2012 Wingspreads | 2011 Wingspreads | 2010 Wingspreads | 2009 Wingspreads | 2008 Wingspreads | 2007 Wingspreads | 2006 Wingspreads | 2005 Wingspreads | 2004 Wingspreads | 2003 Wingspreads | 2002 Wingspreads | 2001 Wingspreads | August, 2001 Wingspread | November, 2001 Wingspread | December, 2001 Wingspread | 2000 Wingspreads | 1999 Wingspreads | 2015 Wingspreads | Year 2017 Wingspreads | 2018 Wingspreads | Year 2020 Wingspreads | Year 2021 Wingspreads | Year 2022 Wingspreads | Year 2023 Wingspreads | | Return Home | Current Wingspread | Wingspread Archives | Contact Us | |
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