The Elevator To The Seventh Floor

The Elevator To The Seventh Floor

by Bill Godfrey

Transcribed from the original recording; may contain errors.

Thank you, Lord Jesus Christ, for this day. Thank You for opening our hearts and our minds to what it is that You’re trying to do in us today. Give me words, give us all hearts and ears to hear and understand. And give us the will and the strength to do what it is that You want us to do this day. For we ask it in Jesus’ name. Amen. And Tom was mentioning about knowing, seeing His glory and knowing Him. Because, as he so beautifully put last night, when we accept a gift from God, we accept God. And it’s really anything that we acknowledge or say that we approve of, we become a part of. That’s the truth, too. But what I want to talk about, that we really are, we’re powerless. All of us. You may not know that. Scripture says we are. And Paul, who said that wonderful thing. Paul, who, in the seventh chapter of Romans, said the very thing that I don’t want to do, that’s the thing that I do. And the thing that I want to do, that’s not what I do. And I don’t understand myself. What’s going on within me? See, that Paul had this problem. And after all the revelations and all the experiences that he had and the miracles and all the things that went on towards the end of his life, he said that.

And he wrote one of his last letters; he wrote, “Oh, to know Him and the power of His resurrection.” That was his goal. That was Paul’s goal, to know Jesus better. And that’s what we want to do. And what I wanted to say this morning was that the first way that I ever came to know Jesus Christ was I heard an Episcopal priest stand up and say these words. He said, “Either Jesus Christ is the Son of God, as He claimed, or He’s the worst fiend that ever walked on the face of the earth.” Now, either God is all or He’s nothing. That’s all there is to it. And we have to accept this. This is the truth. Either God is or He is not. And we have to think about that. And that’s the choice we make. If we accept that God is, then we can say with the writer of Hebrews that we must first believe that God is and that He is a rewarder of those who seek Him. There’s no way to please Him otherwise. That’s the only way we can do that. But we have to believe that God is. And then as I gave in the meditation this morning, God is love. God loves us. We know nothing of love. We’re powerless.

To make sure that we understood this, how are we born into this world? Strong and powerful? No, weak and helpless. Absolutely, totally dependent upon nurture from other human beings, God working through them, in order for us to survive physically. We cannot survive. Apart from all the help. We gotta have everything. We can’t do anything for ourselves. As we get older and older, we get stronger and we get a little more independent. When we’re about two, we think that we know everything. And I remember when I was a little boy, a little older than that, about four, that I didn’t like reality. And, well, you see, I’ve been able to modify it whenever I wanted to. If I was hungry, I cried. My mama fed me. And if I was wet, she changed my diaper. I cried too. But I could, you know, affect what was the God in my life at that time, and I made God my servant. My mother and my dad were God. That’s the first gods I have. That’s why we have to give up our old gods too, if we’re ever gonna grow with the Lord. We have to separate ourselves from our mother and father and go on. But anyway, I… Finally, I… in my consciousness, I realized that I’m here, and everybody’s out there.

I mean, there’s, you know, there’s the I-Thou separation. And I realized that I wasn’t a part of everything. And I didn’t like some of that I saw out there. And so I tried to change it. And I found that I couldn’t change it. And I was powerless to change what was out there. So I did a thing that all of us do. I played like it was different. Uh-huh. Remember that? The example, I went over to a little boy’s house about my age and… and asked his mama if he could come out to play. And she said, “Sure.” And she called to him, and he didn’t want to come out to play. My, I was mad. And so I went there, well, I didn’t want to play with him anyway. You see? Well, I’d come over there to be able to play, you know. And now I’m saying I didn’t want to play with him anyway. I was just changing reality. It wasn’t changing reality. I was changing my perception of it, wasn’t I? That’s all I was doing. And that’s called self-deception. That’s a lie. That’s how we first start to sin, as we deceive ourselves. We get into this self-deception, and we practice it all of our lives. I got into, I found a wonderful chemical way to do this when I was 14.

I was a skinny, knobby-kneed, weighed about 120 pounds when I was 14, and tongue-tied and terrified of girls. And just felt I was just ugly as sin. And so, somehow I got a hold of some alcohol, and suddenly I grew six inches in height, 40 pounds in weight, and I was very handsome and loquacious. And I had the gift of blarney, you know, like that. And that stuff was powerful. And it changed, it didn’t change anything. It just changed my perception of reality, and it changed my personality. And I thought that was wonderful stuff. I was predestined, through my genes to become an alcoholic if I drank. And I did drink, I was in a drinking family. And I became an alcoholic. And it was just, that’s the way it was. God used this, as He does use everything, in order to bring me to Himself. God uses everything. You know, Romans 8, 28 really is true. Paul didn’t say, “And we hope” or “we believe.” He says, “We know.” And we learned that ourselves, Judy and I, in all of our lives we’ve learned that we know that all things work together for good to them that love the Lord. But, until I came to the end of myself, I still wanted to do it my way.

I wanted to change reality. I wanted to have my cake and eat it. I wanted to be what I wanted to be. My parents and my culture told me, “If you want a helping hand, look on the end of your arm. That’s where you’ll find it.” And, the little train that could. How many of you all heard that when you were a boy, you know? Oh, chug. A little train. Just keep trying. Never give up. You know, that’s the world. Jesus said, “Surrender, you’re helpless. I came to save you. You can’t save yourself.” And if we could save ourselves, listen, if I could save myself, I would have never needed Jesus. Not the truth. Because I would have done it. I loved me. I wanted to help me. I wanted to save me. Everybody does. I was the most important thing in the whole universe. I remember one time I had a fellow in an AA group and he didn’t know what to make of God yet. And that’s the thing he has to face if he’s going to get sober in AA. We got to talk about this God business. And one of the wise hands, you know, he was discussing it. He wasn’t really sure that there was such a thing. He said, “I don’t know anything about God and I don’t think anybody does.”

And this guy spoke up and he said, “Well, the first thing I learned about God, I learned two things. I learned number one, that He is. And number two, that I’m not Him.” That’s what we have to learn. That’s the first thing, God, that He is and we’re not Him. So we have to give up playing God. And that’s the first thing we have to do if we’re going to ever get help from the Lord is to stop playing God. Stop being the king or queen of the universe. Stop running. We have to recognize our hopeless powerlessness. You’ll say, I can see something in your mind now and you’re thinking, “But I can do all things through Christ.” That’s true. That’s the other side of the coin. I am powerless, but I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me with God’s help. Nothing is impossible. That’s the truth. That’s the paradox that we deal with. In the 12th chapter of John, if you want to turn there right at the last two verses, Jesus is speaking. And so Jesus, of course, is representative man, the new man. The old Adam is where we were born and the new man is where we come into when we come into Jesus, the new humanity.

I tried to describe this one time to someone who had a lot of fear about something that had happened in their family. That there had been some insanity in the family. And this person was a Christian now. And I said, “You used to be homo sapiens.” And that’s what you were. That’s what we were born. That’s our technical name, homo sapiens. That’s thinking man. That’s what it means. That’s a significant, we called it. Thinking man too, because we’re not supposed to think, we’re supposed to obey. But anyway, and I said, “You’re no longer homo sapiens. You’re a homo sapiens spiritualis. You’re a totally different new species, a new creation, new creature. And what was of the old is gone. And you don’t have to worry about that insanity in your family.” And it was the fear of insanity that was bringing that on. And I really believe. And of course this person didn’t have that problem after that, because the person was homo sapiens spiritualis. The 49th verse of the 12th chapter of John says, “For I have not spoken on My own. No, the Father who sent Me has commanded Me what to say, how to speak. Since I know that His commandment means eternal life. Whatever I say is spoken just as He instructed Me.”

Jesus is saying, “I’m not doing anything on My own. I’m doing just what the Father is doing.” He’s in total obedience to the Father. In other words, He is powerless on His own as a human being to do anything. He was totally powerless. And then over here, just across the page in my Bible, He’s reinforcing that whoever has seen Me, that’s on the 14th chapter now about the ninth verse or so. And He said, “Whoever has seen Me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’? Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in Me? The words that I speak are not spoken of Myself. It is the Father who lives in Me accomplishing His works.” So Jesus Himself lived a life of a man of faith. He trusted in God and it was His faith in God that provided the power. He recognized He could not do anything. His prayer was constantly, “Not My will, but Your will.” This is what I think we need to all get into, touch with. What I’m leading to on this is trying to get to know Jesus. Several years ago, I did a, I think they were, it was a Faith at Work conference, I believe.

And they were doing a little gestalt experience where you got quiet and you saw yourself on the beach. And then in your imagination, you walked up a beautiful path up into the foothills and into the mountains. And you’re just going along like this. And finally you come into an opening in the trees. And there is a, in a large opening and there’s a wise person, I said on the thing. Well, the wise person, the wisest I knew was Jesus. So I just thought that was Jesus sitting on the rock out there as I was going through this thing. And they said, “Now you go up to this wise person, in your imagination. And then you ask them the deepest question of your heart.” I walked up to Jesus and I said, “I want to know You. I want to know You. I want to know You. How can I know You better?” That was the desire of my heart to know Jesus. This is the desire that’s really in all of our hearts. That’s what Paul said. This is what Tom was speaking about last night. To know Him. I wanted to know Him. How can I know You, Lord? And instantly the answer came back. I was dumbfounded.

I had no idea this answer would come to me like that because I was in deep prayer. And Jesus spoke to me in my thoughts. That’s the way He speaks to me. And He said, “Get to know yourself. Because when you know yourself, you will know Me. Because in the depth of you and I are the same.” And boy, that was profound. I had to get to know. And what He’s trying to tell me is that without Him, I’m nothing. But with Him, I’m everything. If you want to get it that way. And what’s really in the depth of me now, in my spirit, in my innermost being, is God Himself, Jesus Christ. I don’t have to become. I am. I am already a son of God. I already have Jesus living in me and so intermixed in my spirit, in my human spirit, that there’s no real difference. It’s in my soul. Now that’s where I get into trouble. That’s where some of me comes into there and starts doing some of these actions out here through expressing through my body, which is my soul. My spirit is one with the Lord. I am one in spirit with the Lord. Aren’t you? Yes. See? And that was a profound thought I hadn’t thought about.

So I began to… An inner journey using dreams and all sorts of things. I used psychological message. I used prayer. Everything I’m thinking. That’s the journey I’ve been on ever since then. A journey to what I call reality. I want to know truth. I want to know truth in the inward parts. And that’s what Paul spoke of too. It’s what we need to know. And when we know truth, who is truth, that is Jesus, we’ll know Him. And so, the more I learn about me, the more I learn about Jesus. It’s really incredible. Now, I have to wash away a lot of the soul. I know about some of my reactions are not me. My reactions are not me. My actions are not necessarily me. Not a reflection of the new me. They’re a reflection of the old me. And I do that pretty frequently. And that gets me in touch with my powerlessness, because I really am powerless. Let’s go on a little bit with this.

Again, in the 24th chapter of the 14th verse, He said, “Yet the word you hear is not Mine, it comes from the Father who sent Me.” And then up there in the 31st verse, “And I do as the Father has commanded Me.” He’s powerless. Now, the biggie, the 15th chapter. It starts the fourth verse. “Live on in Me as I do in you.” That’s comforting to know that Jesus lives in us, isn’t it? “No more than a branch can bear fruit of itself apart from the vine. Can you bear fruit apart from Me?” So, He is the vine, we are the branches. He just been saying that. And so the strength and the power and the life, everything, come from Him that we express. And apart from Him, we can’t do anything. Then He says, “For apart from Me…” Well, He said, “I am the vine, you are the branches. He who lives in Me and I in him will produce abundantly.” And now this last part of the fifth verse, “For apart from Me, you can do nothing.” Nothing. Absolutely nothing. We are powerless. The first step in recovery for… from addiction, is that you must recognize that you can’t do it. That it’s impossible. That God can do for you. That’s the next step.

What you can’t do for yourself. But you gotta say, I am powerless. I’m beaten. I surrender. I give up. The very thing the world tells us not to do. Don’t give up. Keep trying. Keep going. You can do it. Try a little willpower. Really get on it. You know, like that. But that’s not God’s way.

God says in His word, this, “The soul that sins, it shall die.” And your soul sinned and mine has too. And it’s going to die. We’re going to die. Because we sinned. That’s all there is to it. That’s the separation from God. Now that’s not a pleasant word, but it’s the truth. That’s what it is. And, but He has an answer. Jesus is the answer. And I am the life. And I thank God I died. “I have been crucified with Christ.” Paul says, “Nevertheless, I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me, and the life that I live is by the faith of the Son of God.” And it’s the, in the Greek, there’s a little word E-P-I in there. It’s faith. Faith epi. It’s not faith in. It’s faith resting upon. And that’s what my faith rests upon. Jesus Christ, the Rock. That’s not yours. This is what we have to do. That means I’m powerless again. I can’t do anything. Never have been able to do anything. Always thought I could. Thought I could do a lot of things, but I can’t. Not anything worthwhile anyway. And that’s what I want us to think about during this day is our powerlessness. We really are powerless.

Once an alcoholic or a drug addict comes to the point that they realize that they cannot do it and they give up. If they don’t kill themselves at this point and don’t succeed in, because a lot of them do try to kill themselves. If they don’t succeed, then there’s hope. And we have a saying and we’ll see someone who’s practicing their alcoholism and their drug addiction. And we’ll say, “Well, if he lives, we’ll get him.” That’s what it is in our program. If he lives and that’s all we can do because it’s not up to us and we can’t save anybody. We can be a witness to what God has done in our lives as to offer hope to anybody who wants to try it our way.

The program of the 12 step program is an instinctive program. This morning, Tom, we were having breakfast together and he asked me about the delirium treatments. Now you don’t really want me to talk about all that because it just goes on for hours. It does. And, but what I took from that is an understanding of how I came to be and surrender to the Lord and this sort of thing. And so that’s where I learned this when I was totally powerless and I knew that I couldn’t do anything. And I surrendered and I said, “God, help me if You’re there.” I wasn’t even sure He was there. I was being honest enough to that. Oh, I had claimed I’d been a Christian for nine years. That’s hard for a lot of people to grasp, but I had really been saved. I’d known Jesus as my Savior for nine years and continued my alcoholism because I didn’t think I had a problem. And his denial, you go right on. And just because you see a guy, you think salvation is all he needs. No, it isn’t. There are lots and lots of people that are drunks that are saved. They know Jesus as Savior. They just don’t know Him as Lord yet. That’s the interesting thing. He is the Lord. You know, He’s not the president.

We didn’t elect Him. He chose us. Right? We didn’t choose Him. Did we? Bob Mumford said it so beautifully. He said, “I ran and ran and ran and God ran me into a blind alley and knocked me down, put His foot in my throat. And I said, I found the Lord.” You know? That’s what happens to all of us. So, and that’s the way I found the Lord. I found the Lord in a motel room in Roswell, New Mexico on June the 1st, 1967. And said, “God, help me any way You want. Make me a missionary in Africa and I don’t care.” Because that’s what I had resisted for nine years. I knew He was going to make me a missionary in Africa. And I didn’t want to do it or pass out tracts on the street. You know, it was just awful. And then I was willing. I didn’t care. I just wanted… I didn’t even want to live. I just wanted the pain to go away. And He removed from me the craving for alcohol instantaneously right then. Boom, it was gone. That’s fantastic. This happens every time an alcoholic surrenders. It took me 48 hours to realize this had happened. I just… All I knew that I didn’t drink and I didn’t want to drink.

And it didn’t even occur to me. For two days. I stayed in that room and I began to meditate. And I said, “God, oh, the things I’ve done. I don’t want to be like that. I don’t want to be like that. I want to see…” What I had done, the first step in AA is you surrender. The second step is you come to believe that He can help you. The third step is that you ask Him. And you make a decision to turn your will and the life over to the care of God as you understand Him at that time. That’s what I did. The fourth step is you make a searching and fearless moral inventory of your… What I was doing. I was doing an inventory, wasn’t I? Now, I had never read the book AA on Alcoholics Anonymous. I had never seen the 12 steps. I knew nothing about them. Instinctively, God put me through those 12 steps. In that room, alone, with no communication with anybody, this is how He revealed what I should be doing the rest of my life. Like that is to practice these principles. Because that’s the last thing in the 12 step is when we practice these principles in all our affairs.

I couldn’t do the fifth step, which was confession. Because there was nobody there. But as soon as I got out, I did. And then I became willing to have God remove these defects of character for me. All these sins. And I asked Him to. I made a list of those I’d harmed and became willing to make amends to them. And as soon as I got out, I started making those amends. And then He took me, like I say, through these steps. And then when I got where I picked up the big book for the first time, and it said, “And here are the steps we took.” This was the first hundred people that got sober in Alcoholics Anonymous. And I realized that this was not the theme or the theory or the philosophy that we worked out. This is what God led us through. This is because it says that each man tells in his own way how he established his relationship with God. And you see, it’s up to us to do that. We have to establish our relationship. He has already established His relationship with us. Now we have to establish our relationship with Him. And that’s all that we have the power to do is turn to Him and say, “Help.” That’s really what it is. We have power to do that, but otherwise we’re powerless.

And until we learn that, we’re going to always come a cropper. It’s going to be terrible. And we’re always going to make mistakes. And we do it all the time. All of us do. I told someone, I think it was Jack, right after the meditation this morning, I said, “Now let’s go and see if we can live a little bit of that.” And I’d like to live what I preach, but I’m not able to do that yet. I’m doing a little bit, and I’m getting better. Spiritual progress is what I claim, not spiritual perfection, as we say. I’m getting better, and better know us. And it was the old saying that the guy said, “Thank God, I’m not what I’m supposed to be, but thank God I’m not what I used to be.” And then Paul did say that, too. It was a very freeing thing for me when I read that in the Scripture. See, I’d never read the Bible. I’d read it through one time, but not with the Spirit of God to guide me. And in the Bible, Paul says, “I am what I am by the grace of God.” And I thought, isn’t that wonderful? I am what I am, not what I ought to be, or what I should be, or what I used to be.

But I just am what I am by His grace. I’m not more than I am, and I’m not less than I am, you see. I’m not less. I’m not a piece of nothing, you see. And also, I’m not exalted. I’m just me. I’m just plain Bill. That’s the thing. He made that quite clear to me, that you are just plain Bill. You’re ordinary. See, all my life, I was either superior to or inferior to everybody I met. I compared my insides with their outsides. What I saw out there, I compared with what I knew to be in here. So, either you were superior to me, and I hated your guts, and I’d find a weak spot in you, and I’d find out where I could be superior to you. Otherwise, you were an enemy, and I got rid of you. You know what I mean? I just, I wouldn’t have anything to do with you. I just… And so, all my life, I was either superior to or inferior to everybody I met. And God showed me I’m equal to everybody. I’m not greater than or less than anybody that’s ever lived. Isn’t that nice? It means I’m just as great and not less than Paul and not more. It’s really interesting.

There’s so many beautiful things that we find in scriptures about this powerlessness. Jesus Himself was powerless. He acted on faith. We are powerless. Now, we need to act on faith. We need to realize that the worst thing we can say to ourselves is, that’s the old gods in our head saying, “You ought to do this. You should do that. Why don’t you do that?” And the old gods, believe it or not, are Satan. Part of them. You know, some of the old gods is the worldly system that we have, and that’s Satan’s system. And he’s put that through our parents to us and through us to our children. And he works in those ways to do it. Now, you have to really realize the subtlety of our enemy and the enemy of our souls, is that he wants us to be attracted to any of, or all, the three things that Jesus resisted in His temptation. Did you ever meditate on those three temptations? Do that sometime. Now, what came to me in the three temptations is they, all three were power temptations. The power of fame, the power of money, and the power of politics. Those are the political power of money, and power of fame. Those are the things. He said, “If you’re the Son of God, change this bread into, this stone into bread.”

Now, that’s money, because you can have anything you want, any material thing. You can change it, whatever it is, you see. So you don’t need money, so you’ve got the power of money. Then he said, “Cast yourself down from the temple, because it says in the 91st Psalm that the angels will have charge over you, because you are the Messiah, the Anointed One.” This is not for all Christians, by the way. This is just for the Anointed One, that 91st Psalm. And he said, “If you really are that one, then cast yourself down, and everybody will see. And the angels will save you.” That’s fame. Boy, wouldn’t His fame have spread everywhere if He’d have jumped off that 200-foot thing up there. So He resisted that temptation. And then he said, “All the kingdoms of the world are mine.” Whether that’s a true statement or not makes no difference. I dispute it. I think Satan’s a liar, and I don’t think he owned them. And God owns the cattle on a thousand hills, and the fullness of the earth is His, and the fullness thereof. But anyway, he said, “I’ll give those to you, that political system, if you’ll worship me.” You see, there was always something that He had to do, to obey or to worship Satan.

You see, because He would be obeying him by changing the stone or jumping off the parapet. And the thing there was political power. And those three temptations are what we fall into every time. That’s the bottom line, the hooker, the payoff, always on that, is either we’re going to get recognition, fame, out of it. What a good person I am. Oh, look at that lady. She goes down to the church every time you open up the door. She does everything. And Jesus said something about that, didn’t He? He said, “They have their reward.” That’s true. But what you do, you do in secret. Anonymity. That’s the secret of AA. It works. The anonymity. That no one is any… We all, we remind ourselves all the time, we’re one drink away from death. That’s what it is. You drink once and that’s it. That’s the drink that’s going to get us and it’ll kill us. And so, no matter if you’ve got 40 years in the program, you’re still just a drink away from death. The thing is right there in your body. The trap is there to get you. And we know that. So we know we stay in touch with our powerlessness. We have to.

And all of us are powerless. And we’re all going to die if we don’t surrender. There’s a war going on. It’s been going on ever since we were conceived. And after we were born. That war is going on. It’s been going on before and since the world began. And that war is not won by struggle and fight and that sort of thing. It’s won by surrender. If we surrender, we lose the battle and win the war. That’s what it is. The battle is with the Lord. We don’t know that. We think we’re battling Satan and we think we’re battling circumstance and we think we’re battling all these things. But really we’re battling the Lord. Because He’s creating those circumstances in our lives that will bring us to Him. All things work together for good to them that love the Lord. These scriptures all fall into a pattern. This is what I’ve learned about Jesus. Do you see what I’m sharing with you? Some of the things I know about Him. That He has done in my life. Because I wanted to know Him. And I’ve been trying to find Him. And I found out that I’m a long, long, long way from Him. And I have a lot more to learn. But I’m on my way.

And that’s the important thing. And I’m walking down that road. I’m heading in that direction. That’s all I can do. And it’s His grace that’s got me as far as I am. He was the one who gave me the desire to do. Paul said another thing about powerlessness. “What is it that you have that you were not given? Is there anything that you have that you were not given?”

Did you choose your grandparents? Did you choose your parents? Whether you would be stillborn or whether you’d live. Did you choose whether you’d be male or female? Did you choose whether you’d be a Down syndrome child? Or whether you’d have genius mental capacity. Did you choose any of that? I didn’t. I don’t think you did either.

The desire to succeed. Where did that come from? That came from my culture and my family and everything else. And to make money and all that sort of thing. But I earned it, brother. No, you didn’t earn it. It was all given to you. Everything that we had was given. Everything that I had was given to me by God. There’s nothing that I have that I earned on my own. Oh, it worked. If I didn’t work, I’d starve. I’m motivated to do it. But that was a gift too. The whole thing is a gift. And we exalt ourselves. We think we did something. And, oh, I was kind to that sweet old lady or something. No. Not really. God was motivating us in the first place. Because, you see, I don’t know how to love. The only way I know love is when God loved me. I didn’t choose God. He chose me. He said, in that love is perfected in that God first loved us. You see how powerless we are? And it’s so wonderful to be, to recognize that you’re powerless. Because when we get there, Paul says, “In my weakness, then is His strength perfected.” Brought to fulfillment. Completed. And the weaker that I am, the stronger He is in me. Is that true?

And if I get to total powerlessness, He’ll be total power in my life. See, that’s the goal. Is to recognize our powerlessness and our helplessness. How many of you would like to change what your children have done or doing like that? I would. But I can’t do it. I’m powerless. What’s the answer? The answer is we surrender to the Lord Jesus Christ and say, “This is Your child, not mine.” All right. “And I thank You for bringing this child into my life.” That’s all we can do. And “Lord, whatever You’re going to do,” we can say, “do it quickly.” We like to speed that up a little bit, but that’s up to the Lord. We’re still powerless over time, too. He’s the Lord of time. God’s never been late, either. That’s another thing. And they asked Martin Luther one time, he said, “Is hurry of the devil?” He said, “No, hurry is the devil.” So we want it right now. We want patience right now and things like that. But we want the best for our children. And we know that we give good gifts to our children. And if we had the power, we would do what we thought was good for them. But we don’t know all the things. And we don’t know all the ins and outs of their lives.

We don’t really know what’s good for them. In fact, I don’t know what’s good for me. I really don’t. I have to ask God, “What are You going to do with my life today?” And we have to do this one day at a time. That’s all we can do. I can’t live tomorrow. I can plan tentatively for tomorrow. You know, you say, if the good Lord will and the creek don’t rise, well, I’ll be such and so. And I’m planning on speaking in New York. And next year in Ohio, I’ve got some plans that are part of my life has been taken away from me. And given to someone else. And that sort of thing. That’s the way I look at it. But the Lord was doing that. And so I’m not in control of the time. I’m not in control of my children. I’m not in control of myself. Even my own emotions. I can’t control those without His help and His strength. But with His help and His strength, I can do it. And I can do all things. And this is basically what we need to learn about God. That He is love. That He loved us. And He wants the best for us. And He knows what’s best for us. And the circumstances that we see are exactly what we need in our lives right now at this time.

We learn to give thanks to God in all things years ago in our prayer group. And we began this as a practice as a group to in everything give thanks and for everything give thanks. There are scriptures for both of those. You can argue it if you want to, but that’s in there. I always like to analyze things. And so I analyze it this way in my meditations. God and I have a conversation going on most of the time in my head. I have several people in there. I am my very… But we have a group meeting every once in a while in there. And through these thoughts, everybody’s this way. We have a dialogue going on. And in my thoughts, God speaks to me. He speaks to me through your lips. He speaks to me through a stranger who says something to someone else and I hear what God was saying to me. Haven’t you had that experience like that? You know, so in everything, I can acknowledge God. Now, I’ve got to give Him thanks and everything because if God had come to me and said, “I’ve got a deal for you.” I haven’t been born yet now. We’re in heaven in the eternal sense. And He says, “I want you to go down and live a miserable, horrible existence for a hundred years.”

On this… just live just as a leper, you know, in a leper colony for a hundred years. “And then when you’re finished with that, then you come back and you can live with Me in eternal bliss for eternity.” I said, “I’ll take that deal.” I would have… wouldn’t you take it? I would. I would have taken it if He’d made a deal. He doesn’t make that kind of a deal. He said, “I want you to be happy, joyous, and free. I want you to rise above the circumstances where you are. And I want you to be happy in spite of it. I want you to have the peace that passes understanding.” He said, “My peace I give to you.” He didn’t ask us to do anything terrible. But circumstances in this earth are that way that sometimes that does happen. But it’s just for a short time. And if we do have a little woe for a little time, what difference does it make? I mean, if we look to the glory that lies beyond, what we suffer here has no meaning. It really doesn’t. And in this… I was telling Tom this morning about the DT’s experience. I had the delirium treatments. And in this experience, I had a very near death. I went into convulsions and very nearly died or did die and was revived.

And I don’t know which. But I know that Jesus came into my room and I saw heaven and hell and the entrance to hell and came back. And I didn’t want to come back. But at that time, I remembered that everything was all right. Everything had been redeemed. Everything. Every question I had. I had no more questions. You’ve heard people say, “When I get to heaven, I’m going to ask Paul thus and so.” No, you’re not. Because the moment you get there, you’ll have all the answers right then.

“Before you ask, I will answer,” the Lord says. And it’s a mind-to-mind communication. And I knew that everything had been redeemed. It wasn’t all right at the time. But now looking back at it from there, it is all right. And that’s what I was sharing this morning. That that’s what Julian of Norwich, that’s what she saw. “All things shall be well. All manner of things shall be well.” Everything is all right when we get there. Right now, it doesn’t appear that way. But it’s just appearance. And it is all right. Every bit of it. Because in the end, He’s redeemed it. Now, that’s hard for us to grasp. And so if we have… Life isn’t fair. You know that, don’t you? There is no fairness in this life. The fairness and the justice comes afterwards. Right there. It’s the truth. There is no fairness in this life. And life is not easy. And our Constitution says, “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Oh. And aren’t we ever doing it in America? And isn’t it an absolute nothing? There isn’t… All the money in the world cannot buy you happiness. And the only happiness is joy in the Lord. That’s the only happiness there is in this life. And it’s a gift from God. It’s free.

All you have to do is give Him everything you have. You just sell out totally and then you have it. You know, it’s free but it costs you everything that you have. And we… Every once in a while, someone coming into the program of AA and we’ll say, “You’re going to have to change.” Well, how much am I going to have to change? Everything. You have to change everything. Everything you do, the way you talk, think, walk, who you run around with, the whole thing. Everything has to be changed. It’s all wrong. Every bit of it. And then you start in from there. And that’s the truth. And that’s what God tells us. “You must change.” He said, “You and I are not one.” And I haven’t changed.

So what’s going to happen? If we’re going to walk with God, we’re going to have to change, aren’t we? And if we get to know Jesus and know ourselves in the inner person, then we’re going to have to change. And who can change us? We really can’t even change ourselves. I can’t stop myself from sinning sins or some kind of sins. I can’t do that. Like Paul. The more I try, the more I’ll do the very thing that I don’t want to do. But he says, “Who shall deliver me from this body of death that I walk around in? I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord, for there is no, therefore now, no condemnation.” See, that’s the beginning of the 8th chapter. Last of the 7th chapter, the beginning of the 8th chapter. And the bottom line is that we are powerless, but we’re all powerful. Right. Through Christ who strengthens us. And we must depend upon Him. What is faith? What is belief? It’s a Greek word that means trust in, rely on, and cling to. Everybody read the Amplified Bible? If you don’t, you ought to get one and see some of those words, what they really mean. It means trust. If I trust God, how do I trust God? I have to commit to Him, don’t I? Oh, I believe that an elevator, I can stand in front of it, and the elevator will take me to the 7th floor. That’s where I want to go.

And I’ve got a choice. I can take the stairs, or I can take the elevator. Now, I really believe that an elevator will take me there. But until I commit my body to the elevator and trust it to take me there, I ain’t going to get to the 7th floor. You see? I’m going to have to take the stairs. I’m going to have to do it myself. Well, there’s no option of stairs with God’s way. You’re going to take the elevator. And so, if we’re going to do it God’s way, we must commit ourselves to Him in a trustful relationship. In the Spanish Bible, I had a friend who was a missionary in the Spanish-speaking countries, and that he would always write back, and he said, “So many trusted Jesus for salvation.” Isn’t that a wonderful way of expressing that, that they were saved, that they trusted Jesus for salvation? There was another song, a little long-haired flower child in the late 60s came through Ardmore one time, had no idea who she was, or was she just wandering around the country as a Jesus freak? And she was playing a guitar, and she sang a little song, and all I remember of the song was just one line of the chorus, and the ears away it went, and I don’t remember the music, even just the words.

And the words said, “You trust Me for eternity, why not trust Me for today?” Boy, wasn’t that a profound thing? Yeah, we claim we’re going to heaven when I die, but in the meantime I’ve got to work, and do all that. No, no, no, no, no. God is going to do for me today what I can’t do for myself. He’s going to do for me in the future. Okay, I’ve talked just about enough. I think you’ve got the idea. Does anybody believe that they have any power left? But they don’t. We need to talk later about this. You’re not hearing what I’m saying. But it is, it’s a very comforting position to be in, to know that even my mistakes God can redeem, and my weakness, and He does. Because He is the redeeming God, and He loves me more than I love myself.

One way we put feet on this, I’ll give you just one little word, and I don’t know why I’m doing this. This doesn’t really fit. Maybe it does. The word holy has a connotation in our culture of purity. But holy doesn’t mean that, really. That might be part of it if that’s what God asks you. But holiness is other, different, not like the world. “Be other, be holy, be different, be like Me.” You see, that’s what God is saying. Of course, I am holy. I am other. That’s what the Hebrew word means, is other, different. An example. The holiest thing that I believe that Judy and I ever did in our lives was immediately after we heard and confirmed that our daughter Sarah had been killed in an automobile accident. This was in 1976. We were on our knees, and we praised God because we were obeying His scripture. And we obeyed. That is not what the world does. We were crying. We were in agony over the loss of our daughter. But we said, “God, we thank You for this child. We thank You for the 23 years, 9 months, and 1 day that she lived. And that she was in our household. And that she is with You. And we give You and trust You with this.”

And we thank You. That’s not the way the world does things, is it? That was a holy thing we did. You see what I’m saying? That was different. That was the way God wants us to act. He wants us to do that. He wants us to not be of this world and to think in otherworldly terms. It says, “Be not conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.” In Colossians, all the way through the scriptures, just rich with these statements. That now that you are in Christ, then think of those things which are above. Think not in worldly terms, but in spiritual terms. That’s what we’re doing. Transform our minds. Think differently. Be holy. Different. Other. We’re peculiar. Peculiar people. That’s pretty peculiar. To be thanking God for the death of your daughter. Boy, that’s something. That takes something. That took the grace of God to do it. We had been obeying God in all these things, and it got rougher and rougher and rougher in praising Him in all things. And this one was the roughest I ever saw. But we did it. And God healed us. That He redeemed the whole thing. Now, that can be done, because we did it. And we’re not super strong people. We’re powerless, just like everybody else.

You see? This is what it’s all about. This is what Christianity is about. It’s Jesus Christ. Is that He can take you through the roughest place. He said, “In this world, we’re going to have woe.” That’s one of the translations of that word, woe. And it really is woe sometimes. And we’re going to have woe. So, the world system, that’s what it says in Greek. The world system, “I’ve overcome it.” And He doesn’t pray for the world. He prays for those in the world. You see? “But for the world, I pray not. I pray for them that are in the world.” Not of the world, but in the world. And He wants us to be in the world, but not of it. Now, if we’re in the world, which we are, then we know that we’re not of that. And as Paul says, we’re citizens of another country. We live in heaven. Our citizenship is in heaven. We’re just strangers and sojourners here. And if that’s true, then when our daughter was taken to be with the Lord, we ought to rejoice, shouldn’t we? Our soul is going to cry, but our spirit rejoiced. And that was one more thing I’ll say and then I’ll quit. The next morning, I was shaving and Judy was making up the bed right just outside the bedroom door.

And in my mind was going this little chorus. “Break forth into joy, oh my soul.” And all I could think about was that I was just devastated with the loss of Sarah. I was weeping, trying to shave. And Judy was crying and making up the bed. And we’d been crying all night long and we hadn’t slept. And I went in there and she said, “I’m going crazy.” And I said, “What is it?” She said, “I keep hearing this song, ‘Break forth into joy, oh my soul. Break forth into joy, oh my soul. In the presence of the Lord, there is joy forevermore. Break forth, break forth into joy, oh my soul.’” Now think about that. God was saying, “In the presence of the Lord is joy forevermore.” “My soul doth magnify the Lord and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Savior.” And we experience the difference in soul and spirit right there. They are not the same. They are different. I can, in my spirit, I can rejoice and give thanks to God. And in spite of my soul, and my soul can be weeping for the death of my daughter. And Jesus was weeping for Lazarus, His friend, and His soul. While He rejoiced and said, “I thank You, Father, that You’ve heard My prayer of Lazarus.”

“Come forth.” Isn’t that something? I love it. Thank You, Lord. We just praise You and bless You. Thank You for this day that You have added on to the end of our lives. And we’re going to go forth and rejoice in this. And help us again, Lord, to love those around us and be kindly affectioned one to another. Thank You, Jesus.