Turn the Water to Concrete

Turn the Water to Concrete

by Jim Christian

Transcribed from the original recording; may contain errors.

Thank You that that is so. And we would see You this night, to the praise of Your own glory. Amen. We, yeah, I guess your kids need to… take a break, be excused. Hold up however many fingers you need. You’re welcome. You can’t hold them when they’re ready to go.

We have got some new people, some friends of mine. A special friend of mine of longstanding, who I will not embarrass by calling her Sheriff Blackman from Wynne, Arkansas. She and I had an encounter a number of years ago that I’ll not tell you about, but I had a similar one today. They… it’s interesting to me how the, how the wives take the position… this was not Sheriff’s case. How the wives take the position of the hounds of heaven. And… I don’t know what kind of hounds they are. I guess they’re more like sheepdogs. And they have a rather gentle way of herding their husbands into the fold. There was that young couple that came up here from… Little Rock, is it? I have some difficulty with names of all of the places. I can… I know the names, but I don’t see them on the map in Arkansas. And I’d rather read a map than anything I know except the Bible. If I get real lonesome and I don’t have any scripture around it, I just get out a map and look at it. And I can take a trip all around the world, but it’s cheap as anything you ever saw. But in any event, this young couple were introduced to me, I guess yesterday, I somehow lose track of time, at lunchtime.

And their children had godparents who were having some difficulties in their marriage. And their godparents lived in my hometown. And so I now have the name and address of the godparents. And in the process met a very delightful young man and young woman. The young woman was a modern-day hound of heaven. And she was, somebody had said, “Sic ’em,” and she’d come out full tilt to get her husband. Not into knowing Jesus as Savior, but knowing and acknowledging Jesus as Lord. And she wanted somebody to slip up on his blind side and throw something over him and get him baptized in the Holy Spirit as if it were a gimmick, you know? And so, as, what does Al Hill say, raw material? That was raw material. And she had such a pathetic, pained expression on her face that I figured that maybe I was the man. And I suggested to somebody else that they take my prayer group. And I invited him to join me after he finished swimming down at my room. And he came down, and one of the great things I ever heard was it’s vastly better to spend about an hour or two teaching than two seconds praying than it is to spend a couple of seconds in teaching. And then travail or pray or do what, tarry or whatever it is that you do until whenever.

So we taught for a while, and I could see him getting thirsty. His tongue was getting larger, and when it about reached the size of his shoe, I suggested to him, ask him really was there anything that he didn’t want the Lord to have. And he thought pretty seriously about that for a while. And he told me that he didn’t know what it would be. And so we, after some more to-do, went into prayer. And Jesus did what He always does if you’re thirsty and if you ask, you know. He just pours out His Spirit on you because you’re flesh and you’ve met qualifications. And there was a beautiful word of establishment for him, some prophecy and so forth. And we embraced and I helped him get his stuff in the car and he departed. I came on up the road. I was about 45 minutes ahead of the prayer group. Just in time to meet that lovely lady that takes the tickets going into where they serve the food. And she is the grand mogul of the television set. And she and I both knew because she’s been feeding me little memoranda off and on for the last 24 hours. She and I both knew that the finals of the U.S. Open were being, final round of the U.S. Open was being played.

And she slipped over and turned that set over and I pulled on and I pulled up the chair. And I saw the whole of the U.S. Open and ministered and just carried on. Now, who but God could put all those circumstances together? Didn’t miss a trick. Not a trick. Now, I could have worked up all sorts of things because I’m devious and kind of sly. And thought of 198 reasons that I could get up here and see that thing.

But, you know, it says in Philippians that God puts those desires in our hearts. And He even put a desire in old Bill Godfrey’s heart to bring his… The only thing that went wrong is we had sort of figured as we sat there and took on this whole show on television set that if Rita and Judy wouldn’t bring the tray to us, that surely Marge and Mary would. And nobody did. We had to get our own dinner tray. Oh, excuse me. But, you see, I simply say all that to say that God operates so naturally.

The supernatural is such an ordinary part of living if you’re in the kingdom. If in all your ways you acknowledge Him, then life becomes prayer. It becomes a constant attitude of communion with God. You and He are one. There’s not some time you get yourself all pumped up and fall down on your knees or whatever you do. I don’t care what you do. But if you can just learn that even Bill Godfrey is wrong. Now, I watched you kids just panting this morning, and I can hardly wait for tomorrow. I really wanted to relinquish this thing to him so that I could hear what it was that he never did get into this morning that he said he was going to do. But he told you an untruth this morning, and I think I ought to set it straight. Are there any Pentecostal pastors here? You remember he said some Pentecostal minister went all the way back in the Old Testament to get three words that just suited him? And he didn’t like somebody taking words out of context and preaching a sermon on three lousy words? Man, he beat that dog to death, didn’t he?

How many of you happen to have a King James? Because I happen to have an Amplified. Anybody got a King James and a little hot hand? Man, all right, open it to the fourth chapter of Luke. And the text for tonight could be the first three verses of the fourth chapter of Luke.

Where it says, “And Jesus being.” If you can’t preach on that, you might as well throw the book away. Isn’t that a sight? “And Jesus being.” So the prologue to all that rigmarole being. That’s pure Elizabethan English. Martha, you understood that. B-E-I-N-G. It’s the heart of the horse and around in the boat that’s troubling you.

Fourth chapter. Fourth chapter of Luke. “And Jesus being.” And you just put a period there. And have fun. But really, you see, it’s back again to what I was saying yesterday morning. That in the Spirit, we are perfectly natural. They’re going to catch a bus. Goodbye, Bob. Bless you, brother. You are a blessing to us.

Whatever. And when we are in the Spirit, it is the Spirit’s responsibility to show us when we are out and we don’t have to run around taking our own heavenly temperature or pulse beat or checking some kind of list to be sure that our halo hasn’t gotten tarnished in his own crooked. Life is designed to be expressed in living. And I would love to see you able to do that if you are not already. Because I am and I’m very comfortable with it. I enjoy it. And to tell you the truth, I’ve become much more spiritual when I cease to be so introspective, I guess, is what it is. So tonight I want to talk to you about what I detect to be the largest problem in the body of Christ, the thing that probably keeps us from the fullness more than anything, any other single thing that I know. It’s a familiar subject. It probably really… It really does not need to be brought to your attention. And the only reason that I bring it to your attention is I want to show you the problem. And then I want to show you the way out of the problem. You see, it’s one thing to say, hey, you’ve got two. And it’s another thing to show somebody how to.

So I’ll show you what’s wrong as I see it. And you don’t have to agree with me. And then I’ll show you the way out of it. I think that’s one of the kind ways to minister. And so we’ll do that. Now, I don’t know exactly what’s going to happen tomorrow. To tell you the truth, I really know so many things that I don’t know which one of them God will use. I don’t ever get up and just blow it out. I guess it can be done. I’m always pleased to see Bill have some notes so that I know he knows where he’s supposed to start and where he hopes to get. Now, he’s not locked into them. He can make a talk without reading them. But these people that tell you, you know, I don’t know what I’m going to say. That’s a bald-faced lie. Because they don’t know but so much. And there hasn’t been but so much that’s gone into their computer. And the minute they try to say something that hasn’t been put into their computer and that they have not built their own theology on this particular expression from God and they know how God operates in this area in our time are dangerous to say the least. And you better go somewhere else.

You see, what I’m saying is we know a vast number of things, don’t we? And God can take these things and fit them together. It may be a talk on this. It might be a talk on that. It might be a talk on something else over here. And He takes the essence out of all of them and puts them together and uses them. So you really, while you don’t know the specifics, you’ve got a pretty fair idea of how God is dealing with you in a season, in a time. And you’ve got to come from wherever you’re living at that particular time. I’ve got some of the best stuff you ever saw in your life that I used seven or eight years ago and I can’t give it today to save my soul. And I’m on my way somewhere else in about a week and I know what God wants to talk about there. He wants to talk about judgment there. And I’m working in the area of judgment. The judgment of God and the judgment of Jesus. And I’ve been doing it. But it’s not for here. So you know these things. I don’t know. All I’m just trying to do is I think we are folks here. We are a family now. We are a group that’s fun to deal with.

We are beginning to be somebody. We have gotten over three months old so we don’t have to worry whether a baby’s going to break its neck when we pick it up or not. I never could stand to pick up those little rat-like looking things my own five children I own until they got to be about three months old and got some neck on them, you know. Showed some promise of at least one day being able to crawl even if they couldn’t sit up.

Okay, family. Thank you. What I want to talk about is the fact that there isn’t a person living who doesn’t need forgiveness from someone or from God, who does not need to forgive someone, or who does not need to forgive God. And I think one of the most startling things that can come to our consciousness is the fact that frequently we have an attitude of unforgiveness toward God. “God, why did this happen to me? God, why was this taken away from me? Where were You, God, when I needed You?” We hardly need to talk about the attitude of unforgiveness toward other people. And we don’t need to talk too much about the people who have an attitude of unforgiveness toward us. But how much do you know about how to deal with an attitude of unforgiveness or a situation where unforgiveness exists between either you and God or you and another person? Whichever way you want to see it go. Because the logical thing when it begins to take place, and I’m going to use the hypothetical situation which is totally non-existent, that Bill and I, that I’ve got ought against Bill because Bill has done something to me. What he did was blessing. But we’ll just pretend that he did something else or I think he did something else.

And then I justify myself. You see, I justify the situation that causes me to feel the way that I do. Now this is partly psychological, but it’s greatly spiritual. Because the minute that I justify myself in this alienation that we’ve got, then I have the responsibility to forgive Bill.

If in alienation you prove that you are right, immediately falls on you the responsibility to forgive the other person. Do you realize that? I’m sure you realize that God does not overlook sin. He doesn’t overlook things that separate you from Him. He doesn’t overlook things that separate He separates you from other people. This is why He’s so hard in the area of unforgiveness. Because God is in the reconciling business, and that’s what He’s given to us. And He’s not very patient with separation from Himself, nor is He very condoning of separation one person from another. God does not overlook it. He passes over it in Jesus. You know, we talk about what Jesus did and what He does and so forth. I’m reminded of the story of the judge who was sitting behind his great big elevated mahogany desk, and he had on all his robes and everything but one of those funny hats with a tassel. I never had one of them. When I graduated from prep school and we wore military uniforms, and all I knew how to do was hear the praise and salute. And I got kicked out of college. I really didn’t get kicked out of college. I was asked not to come back at the end of the sophomore year.

And I didn’t. And I went to another school and it didn’t take them long to find out the same thing. But wait a minute about the judge. When we talk about God passing over sin, do you remember that? Remember in the Old Testament economy? How the priest put his hand on the head of the goat and transferred the sins on the goat? Only he didn’t kill that goat. Do you remember how he sent him out into the wilderness? It was a scapegoat. Are you familiar with that? I once did a teaching on that in California. It wasn’t worth two cents. I haven’t done it again.

But there were two. One was killed. The other was one that carried it totally away. It is nonexistent any further. Now here’s the judge. He’s sitting behind. You’re just gonna have to exercise your spiritual imagination. Just suppose that I’m the judge. And Bill Godfrey has been accused of a heinous crime. And John is his lawyer. And you are the jury. And all of the testimony comes in and there’s nothing in Godfrey’s favor. Everything imaginable to the mind of man that is horrible he has committed from murder to you name it. Guilty. And the question is… Bill’s carried out after all the testimony is done. He’s carried away somewhere. And you are closeted someplace as a jury. This is an extra large jury, not a 12 person jury. And it doesn’t take you that long to come to a conclusion. And you come back into the courtroom. And Godfrey’s called into the courtroom. And Godfrey’s called up to my… whatever you call it. And he has to stand here and face you. And I say, “Foreman of the jury, have you reached a verdict?” In this case, the foreman of the jury will be Sharon. The foreperson, excuse me. And the foreperson stands to her feet and she gives to the bailiff a piece of paper.

And the bailiff brings it up and he puts it in my hands. And I read it to you and I read it to Bill, but principally to Bill Godfrey. I say, “Bill Godfrey, a jury of your peers has found you guilty of murder, as charged, and the sentence is death.”

And then I get up. And I take off my robe. And I come across the platform and I walk down the stairs. And I walk over beside Bill Godfrey. And I stand there and I say, “I will accept the sentence. You may go free.” See, that’s Jesus.

That’s the Lord. That’s in a way right where you live today. So you really can’t afford to put your foot on the hose through which God flows in blessing to you by unforgiveness to anybody else. It’s nothing in the world but enlightened self-interest. The Lord’s Prayer, if nothing else. Forgive us our debts, our trespasses in direct proportion to the way in which we forgive other people. Mark 11, isn’t it? What things, whoever you desire, believe that you receive and so forth. But when you stand praying, if you have ought against any, forgive. And nowhere in Scripture does it say, “Get down on your knees and say, ‘Oh God, make me forgiven.’” That’s not the name of the game. It says you forgive. In exactly that fashion. Because He’s in that business. And when we stop being that way, we break down the channel through which God can move to bless other people. We cut ourselves off. Now you’re familiar with the parable in the 18th chapter of Matthew about the man who owed such an extraordinary sum of money. I don’t remember. Two million just depends on whose translation you’re reading and how modern it is. And He forgives that man. And that man goes back and his underling owes him something like six bits, eight bits, next to nothing.

A dollar, a couple of dollars, you know. And he won’t forgive him. And the word gets back to the big master. And the big master turns him over to the tormentors. And I got kind of concerned about this thing, tormentors. We don’t have too many tormentors around anymore. And I really didn’t know what a tormentor was. So I got out one of those great big concordances that you have to lie on its side because if you don’t, all the pages will fall out of it. Or Strong or Young or somebody of that kind. And I began to look it up. And you’ll find in 1 John, the fourth chapter, the 18th verse, that tormentors, torment is fear. And fear.

An unforgiving person, apparently, will spend a life of fear and misery. Can you imagine, can you possibly conceive of anything much more horrible than being continually in a state of fear? As old Satchel Paige used to say, afraid to look over your shoulder because you didn’t know who was gaining on you. You didn’t know what was happening. And that’s what he’s saying. You see? So you can’t afford to have a bitter spirit, can you? It just simply doesn’t make any sense.

Now, God forgives us. And He forgives us because He loves us. I hear this. It might not be anything monumentally new to you, but it’s a great truth. God forgives us, and He forgives us because He loves us. And He cares more about us than He cares about what we do. And therefore, He was willing to provide the way out. When we talk about the love of God, we’re talking about someone that cared more about us than He cared about what we did. And the yearning, loving heart of God was to draw us into Himself.

And when we want to practice justice, we have kicked Jesus Christ in the face. We just added two or three more thorns to the crown around His head. And we’ve spit a little more into the hair. And when you look at the passage in the 18th chapter of Matthew, you see that God forgives in this way. God takes into Himself His own wrath and His own indignation at what was done to Him. You see? That’s the way it’s done. The innocent one carries his own indignation at the sin of the guilty one. God takes it into Himself. If I forgive Bill, rather than justify myself, at which point I have to forgive him, if I have ought against Bill, excuse me, and I justify myself, I’ve got to go in forgiveness to him, if I carry my own wrath at what Bill did to me. And if that wasn’t possible, I promise you one thing, there would be no church, and there would be no marriage. I don’t know how many of you wives are trying to play hounds of heaven, but I’ll tell you one thing. Stop praying for that husband to be saved until you’ve totally forgiven him, and pray that God will show you any resentments in your heart. Any grudge, any disappointment, any unforgiveness.

You see? Then give every one of them up unconditionally. And then you can give up your right to any resentment. You see? That ain’t so easy either. Give it up. And finally, submit to your husband in love, and then you can go and pray, and God will hear. I know how to talk to women. And husbands, don’t you pray for your wife to come into submission until you’ve forgiven her unconditionally for every act of rebellion she ever did. You see? Give up your right to be head of the house. I’m not bad when I talk about husband-wife relationships, but I don’t do it much. Ask God to show you how to look on your wife as Jesus Christ looks on the church, and nourish and cherish her, and live with her in understanding and in compassion and honor her as a joint as one with Christ. And then you can pray. And the most powerful prayer union on earth will begin to take place, because Peter says that husbands and wives need to be together, that the prayers be not hindered. And coming forth from this union that God is caused to be one bone and flesh of one flesh should be absolutely where possible, if the man or the woman are both living and they’re living together, the most powerful prayer that can be uttered on the face of this earth.

Because it’s two made one. It’s a supernatural thing that’s taken place. Now, if you say that you forgive somebody, I’m good at this. If you say that you’ve forgiven somebody after you’ve given them a piece of your mind, you haven’t forgiven them. That’s just sort of a catharsis for you. You didn’t accept your wrath at what they’ve done. You didn’t take this into yourself. See, you don’t make a person crawl. You just don’t do it. You don’t punish a person. You don’t make them suffer. This is hard stuff. You don’t make them suffer emotionally, you see. You don’t reject, you don’t get a sick headache. You don’t emotionally do this or do that or the other. Because forgiveness means that you accept into yourself your own indignation at what that person did to you. You try this on your psychiatrist if you’ve got a shrink.

And this is true in a parent-child relationship, you see. In our own insecurities, we resent what they do to us and we want to mold them in our image. So our peer group says, “Oh, ain’t they beautiful? They are a real testimony to you.” They are an adulteration of a life expression. And they have every right to resent us for it. Hostility enters in. And an unforgiving attitude. You know, I don’t have to spell these out for you. You’re wise enough to read between the lines, I forgive that person, I forgive that child. Because that child or that person is more important to me than what they do. Now this does not mean simply submerge it into your subconscious and holler for Ruth Carter Stapleton. She’d help you get it out. She’d do a first-class good job of it. She’s got this as her ministry and she can do it as beautifully as anybody that ever set two feet on the ground. But you can do it too. Because once it’s internalized like this, rather than press it into your subconscious, you resolve it by externalizing it, moving in love toward that person. You knew that was coming, didn’t you?

Now, it’s kind of like standing around waiting for somebody to drop the other shoe. That’s like having two gotchas on the first tee. That’s a dirty trick to tell somebody that you externalize a thing in love without telling them out of love. But let’s move on. Let’s get the whole thing in the package. Let’s get the whole bottle of wax put together before we begin to try to get rid of it. You see, we’ve got one more problem. We’ve got a real first-class booger problem that Bill was talking about. It’s forgiving ourselves. I have great unforgiveness to ourselves.

We blow it. We kick ourselves mentally. We just abuse ourselves and the attitude toward ourselves. And I was so pleased last night when he was talking about that we are priesthood of believers. And every single one of us that is moving in the power of God’s Spirit has a ministry. The question of whether we know specifically what it is, don’t know what it is, doesn’t really do anything but make us a little more happy about the way we’re moving. But nonetheless, we’ve got one. It was prepared by God for us before the foundation of the earth. And if we’re not moving in it, we certainly ought to be moving into it.

And unforgiveness for yourself, I believe, is almost as bad as unforgiveness for somebody else. You never have a good or decent or wholesome feeling about yourself. And this isn’t Norman Vincent Peale or Maxwell Maltz. You forgive yourself by saying, “Hey, look, that’s the way I am. That’s the way I am.” And you bring that to God and you ask Him to do one of two things. The way always answers prayer. You ask Him to remove it, heal it. Or to change the circumstances. One of two ways. God, He’ll change the circumstances or remove this thing. “God, this is the way I am.” That’s hard, but that’s true.

You do it again in unforgiveness. You see, sin isn’t just separation from God. It’s separation man from man or person from person. The reconciliation part is a union of the household of God in the body of Christ. Christ, in a oneness. And the Lord absorbs it into Him until it kills Him. All of His… All of my hostility. So now I can just reach my hand out to God because He’s reached down to me. He loves me. He says, “Jimmy, I care more about you than I care about what you do.” And that reduces me to something. That calls for a response from me which either says, “Yes, Lord.”

Or you remember what I told you happened in that laser beam? “To hell with God.” And choice is that big. God’s grace. Involving Himself in all of this mess. Who paid the $2 million? Who paid it? The man that owed it couldn’t pay it. Who paid it? If you rip me off, who pays it? I do. If you can’t pay it back. We had communion this morning. I read your passage. I want to read this thing to you again. Open your Bibles. I don’t care what kind you got. As long as it’s got a… As long as it’s got 1 Corinthians 11 in it. It hasn’t got that leaving on the floor.

This can be almost frightening. I appreciate the love and patience of those of you that may have heard me do this before. But God told me to talk about this every place I went. And I said, “Yes, sir. You’re the head man of the universe. And I’m going to do it.” One time I preached this at Ardmore for communion service. And I tell you one thing. It like to wipe me out. The best thing I ever heard in my life. If you all weren’t there, you missed something.

At least I thought it was good. And God said, “You bless me, son.” He says, “Just press on. Come here, Jimmy. Don’t get along.” 23rd verse. For I received from the Lord Himself that which I passed on to you. But the Lord Jesus, on the night in which He was betrayed, took bread. And when He had given thanks, He broke it and said, “Take, eat. This is My body, which is for you. Do this in remembrance of Me.” And similarly, when supper was ended, He took the cup also saying, “This cup is the new covenant in My blood. Do this as often as you drink it, to call Me to remembrance.” For every time you eat this bread and drink this cup, you are representing and proclaiming the fact of the Lord’s death until He comes. So then whoever eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in a way that is unworthy of Him will be guilty of profaning and sinning against the body and the blood of the Lord. Let a man thoroughly examine himself, and only when he has done so should he eat the bread and drink of the cup. For anyone who eats and drinks without discriminating and recognizing that it is Christ’s body eats and drinks a sentence, a verdict upon himself.

That careless and unworthy act is the reason many of you are weak and sickly, and quite enough of you are fallen into the sleep of death. Now what he’s saying is, and this is an Amplified, and it says it a little bit differently from the way that I want you to hear it from the King James or some of your other translations. If we fail to discern the body of Christ in love and reconciliation and harmony and wholeness, we cause to the body of Christ sickness and death. That is just as clear to me as if it was spelled out the way that I said it. Is it possible that unforgiveness in the very body of Christ is the thing that causes the sickness and a startlingly, what we might call premature death? I don’t know that this is true. I don’t want you to run around and say that that’s proof text for every case of sickness or anything else you see. But it certainly would infer, would it not, that there’s a breakdown, not only in the relationship of God to man and man to man, but there’s a breakdown within the whole system of man whereby he becomes sick to the point of death. Hmm? That’s a possibility, is it not? So we don’t seem, I really don’t believe that we can afford to enter into any such thing as a condoning of an attitude of unforgiveness in any way.

And one of the great joys of forgiveness is it brings all this gunk and hostility to an end. It really isn’t any fun hating somebody or having anything against somebody. Do you remember when the hostility between you and God ended? Hmm?

It is called conversion. “Come in, Lord. Come in, Lord. I’m tired of being away from home so long. Come in, Lord, and take me home.” Back to our Father. We lose sight of the fact, don’t we, that what Jesus really wants to do is to introduce us to His Daddy.

And to bring you back to the place you came from. And somehow when that hostility ends, there’s nothing again. You know, we go through all our charismatic, a lot of dog whoop to do. And I believe in it. Don’t misunderstand me. I’ll pray for you, if you want. We go through all that, but we forget that mystique. That beautiful something. That was the way we first knew Jesus.

Like old Karl Barth, and “Jesus loves me, this I know.” But, you know, we forget that. That preciousness of coming back. The Lord has brought us across whatever the thing is. Because for two people to get back together, be it God and us or God and anybody else, someone has to forgive. Someone has to absorb all that hostility into themselves. And it’s simply done by love. You see, this is why Christianity is the dynamic that changes the world.

Nothing else does. It’s a supernatural movement. It’s a supernatural dynamic of love. Turn to Luke, the ninth chapter. I’ll show you something a man showed me. A good, beautiful friend of mine, baptized in the Holy Spirit, of Ardmore, Oklahoma, many years ago. Did a camp with him and he showed me this. And it’s one of the most beautiful things I ever saw. Because I have preached it from the pulpit. And I could scald a hide off of you with it. If I wanted to. I’m like you. I’ve come out of the Bible belt, which means hammer them to death with a word. Show them no mercy. Chop them down. The ninth chapter of Luke right from scratch. Right from the beginning. Then Jesus called together the twelve apostles and He gave them power and authority over all demons. And to cure diseases. And we get all excited. Man, here I go. And He sent them out to announce and preach the kingdom of God and to bring healing. I like that part. And He said to them, “And do not take anything for your journey, neither walking stick, no wallet, no food, no any kind of money. And do not have two undergarments. And whatever house you enter into, stay there until you go away.

And whenever they do not receive and accept you and welcome you, when you leave that town, shake off the dust from your feet. Tell them all where they can go as a testimony against them.” Did you ever do that? They didn’t hear me in Arkansas. And I shook the dust in her eyeballs.

You know what that symbolizes? I didn’t realize this. The dust for the feet, in the Eastern culture, is not symbolic of dirt. It’s symbolic of resentment, and hatred, and animosity, and unforgiveness. And what the Lord Jesus Christ is saying here is that if they cannot and will not hear you, before you leave, get all the resentment, hatred, animosity, unforgiveness off of you. And as you leave the house, the loving attitude in which you leave with no hatred, no recrimination, that in itself will be used by Me to bring them under conviction. You see? You see, what is Jesus talking about when He says to Peter, if I get this from you, if I get this alienating thing from you by washing your feet, the Last Supper, you don’t need to be washed anywhere else.

Because I’m taking into Me the very thing that has taken you away from God. And if you don’t like that for openings, you can go over to the 12th chapter of Romans, the 20th verse, where he talks there about heaping coals of fire on their heads in a similar situation. And coals of fire, the guy that got up cold as a dickens in the desert at night, and the man that got up first thing in the morning, had the great privilege of getting a large container that had been sitting there with one or two coals of charcoal ready to begin the opening fires for all the tents the next day. And he put them together. And while the rest of them were trying to chip the ice off the drinking bucket and get up and get into whatever it is they wore, he’s carrying around on his head the warm coals and delivering them to the people as a blessing to them. And in the process, the warmth from the coals were coming down like an umbrella of the spirit of warmth all around him. See, we make mistakes when we read the Word, don’t we? We really need somebody sometimes to interpret those beautiful things for us. And forgiveness, you see, has the power to invoke love where there wasn’t any love.

It has the power to make the change. To refuse to let somebody’s spirit come embittered by sin and by unforgiveness is the important mark of the Christian love. Now, a couple of other little diddlies, and then we’re going to get through. There’s a violence of spirit as well as a violence of deed. And you don’t have to go back very far about 1954 when four black boys… I remember this because it’s only 120 miles from where I live. Four black boys came down to a chicken place, a white man’s chicken place in Greensboro. And they sat down at the counter. And the man behind the counter said, “We don’t serve niggers.” And the black boy said, “We don’t eat niggers, we eat chicken.”

But where were you then? And where was I? And what sort of similar thing is going on in 1978? You see, there’s a violence of our spirit. Is it Indians? Wetbacks? Still blacks? Whatever. There’s another situation where our pride would rather answer the problem so we’d be free and we wouldn’t have to be forgiving or forgiven and we’d make restitution. I love that thing. Restitution.

What do you do about the things you can’t make restitution for? Adultery. God said, it kills. You know, you can kill a person and never touch them. I can put you in a straitjacket and your tongue can cut me to ribbons. You can start something that absolutely emasculates me in every sense of life.

And there are times when we just flat don’t want to forgive. Our human nature makes us want to rest and our pride in Jesus comes and says, turn the other cheek. And the forgiveness will resolve the hostility and resolve the sin and work to change the person and all that and so forth. And we know it. And we remember the story. The tall story taught about the king that came down and he worked in the ditch with his people for about a year. He put on work clothes and he came down and he worked with them. He thought he had them badly fooled. They knew who he was. After he decided that he’d let them in on the secret. And he came to them and he said, “Man, I guess you never realized it, did you? But I am your king. And because I love you so much I’m down working in this ditch with you.” And one of the more courageous souls stood to his full height and he said, “Yes, sir. But anytime you wish to do so you could go back to the palace.”

And Jesus Christ anytime He wished could have gone back to the palace. But it’s almost as if He says, “You can pierce My flesh. You can bruise My body. You can drain My blood. But you can’t stop Me from being the God who loves you and will never let you go.” And it didn’t come down. Do you remember?

How does God absolve sin then? By changing the sinner. And here we’ve come to the punchline. Forgiveness is only known in relationships. You can’t get off at a distance and forgive. It’s known in relationships. I had to come to Jesus to get what God had done for me. I’ve got to go to Bill to receive what Bill did for me. I’ve got to start to Bill at least. And in some circumstance, I’ve got to step out of the boat and trust God to turn the water to concrete. One of my favorite expressions.

You know, Bill was talking about the boat tied up at the dock over here. Can’t you just say, “I don’t want to go out down to the Sea of Galilee. I get seasick. It’s a mess out there today.” Well, some guy with a great big imagination, he’s sitting down there fishing. And you know what? It’s up and down by the quay. They’re not big enough. You can cover them with your hand. Never see the head and tail.

Then you’ve got to get out on the water and get your foot out of the boat. And if God doesn’t turn the water to concrete, you’ll sink. But the boat’s got a hole in it anyhow, and you’ve got all the rest of these guys that get seasick and they’d almost soon get out and stay in there with them.

And the minute you begin to move in forgiveness, God causes you to become forgiveness. But it’s in relationship. It’s not a long distance, long haul proposition. Now, Devern Fromke says in the little book that Jesus is the patterned Son.

And the name of the game is that we will be created. God will reproduce His Son in us and that satisfies me. That’s about the best that I can think of. I’d a whole lot rather have it be Jesus than any man or woman I ever saw and I’m sure you feel the same way. How did Jesus do it? How did He take into Himself all this wrath and indignation at what I’d done? All this sin, all this separation, all this alienation. How exactly did He do it? He did it until it killed Him. How did He externalize it in love? He did it by dying. And what was the net result of that? What did Jesus Christ really do in every practical sense of the word? He did every single thing that was required to bring my spiritual fulfillment.

So you see when you begin to move in love toward that person against whom you had ought, you can’t do it in the natural. This is where the Spirit of God moves in. Or you could buy him a mink coat if mink coats were still in style, or you could buy him a Rolls Royce or Mercedes Benz or ambulance or whatever in the world you want to buy them. But that’s not it. That’s not what does it. That’s not, that has absolutely nothing to do with it. Ask the Spirit of God. I’m speaking to Jimmy now. Jimmy asks the Spirit of God. Holy Spirit, it is my heart’s desire everything about me understands and wishes with every fiber of my being to move in forgiveness to build.

Lord, when You moved in forgiveness to me, You did that highest thing to bring my spiritual fulfillment. What can I, young Christian, do in love and forgiveness to bring Bill Godfrey a little closer to the spiritual fulfillment that You have for him? The Spirit of God has to show you how to move. You can’t go in your animal heat. You’ll mess it up. But the desire of the heart has to be there. The getting out of the boat is the act on your part. And the turning of the water to concrete is the Spirit of God saying, “Go and put your arm around his shoulder and say, ‘Bill, I love you.’” If that’s it.

Or Bill, can I whatever to get the picture now? You will to move in love. The Spirit of God shows you the act of love that He’s prepared to touch with you and cause to be His blessing toward that person. God is… It’s very simple, isn’t it? It’s so simple you wonder, why would I have any other nature?

And the first night I asked you to do something, and I didn’t ask you if you did it the next day, because it wasn’t important whether you did it or not. If you did it, you know you did it, and you know the Lord answered you. But I’ll tell you one thing, I don’t believe, I really don’t believe if I were anyone in here, I wouldn’t let my eyes close in sleep tonight without asking the Spirit to reveal to me anyone against whom I had ought.

I use ought because I don’t know what ought means. Derek Prince said it once, if it’s good enough for me, he’s one of the most brilliant men I’ve ever seen in the Word of God. If you have ought, it must cover everything. It’s kind of like the mark of infinity, you know, you just don’t know where that thing ends, but out there someplace. Ought is all the things you might have against someone.

“Show me who they are, Lord.” And then by an act of will, you determine whether you want to forgive. And having made your determination, then you move as the pattern of the Son moved under the guidance of the Spirit in whatever way the Spirit gives you to bring that person into the relationship that God can give them through your ministry and through your love. And maybe they’ve simply been yearning to hug you as much as you haven’t realized you needed to hug them. And if I made the point, hallelujah, and if I didn’t, God, You fix it up, will You? Because I think that’s going to turn us loose, you know, in a lot of areas. It’s done it for me. It’s done it for me. Lord, thank You. Help us to hear what You have to say and act on it in Jesus’ name. Amen. Okay.