In this sermon, the preacher emphasizes the importance of having a personal relationship with God. He explains that without God, we are powerless and unable to accomplish anything. The preacher also discusses the concept of revival, which involves restoring life and vitality to areas that have become stagnant or dying. He encourages the audience to seek a deeper connection with God and to prioritize their spiritual growth. The sermon concludes with a reminder that people are hungry for the truth and are looking to the church to provide it.

Don Godfrey at the Sessions on Revival Ministries in Elyria, Ohio, August 1984. For additional copies of this message, or for other messages available, please contact Saterra Twins Crusade Team, 1801 Stony Ridge Court, Mansfield, Ohio, 44904. Or in Canada, contact Canadian Revival Fellowship, Box 584, Regina, Saskatchewan, S4P 3A3. You know, I'm interested in noticing that most people believe that the woods is more important than the trees. And that's what Brother Ralph just told you. You know, really the woods is made up out of trees. And so I have a lot of big trees in the woods. And you'll say, well, I don't see the woods. But I want to tell you that the woods has a specific focus from the general basis of what I'm going to have to say. As Brother Ralph relayed the matter of tragedy in my life, in a sense God reinforced in my life and began to show me, once that I responded to the things that I had to necessarily respond to, that revival was His imperative. And that's the message this morning, revival, God's imperative. You know, after God beat me black and blue, I saw that I would have to relate properly to the cross, that there was no longer any alternative to me. Although, beloved, let me say this, whether you're a pastor or whether you're not a pastor, your current life will continue to seek out alternatives to the cross. How many of you would believe that? You see, and so I say that because God brings me to a place of His power simply through the death of that man that finally discovers, sooner or later, he can no longer survive. He's ready to lay his own life down because He knows that pretty soon life will end. I find that out more realistically all the time because, you know, last year I turned into a senior citizen. I officially became old, 65 years old. Now it gets worse every year, you see. And not only that, it's leaking out. And people say, what do we want with that old goat coming over to talk to us? You know, but the truth of the matter is that as we consider the forest, and the forest sort of occupies the entire background, and it talks about the essential nature, that revival is an imperative. Now we have to talk just a second or two to remember what an imperative is. An imperative isn't something that's nice. It isn't something that's good. It isn't something that's better. An imperative is something that you cannot get along without. We need to understand that. And what do we do? Do we equivocate and do we take a back seat and say, let's don't talk about this stuff, whereas very soon, you know, beloved, we're going to be looking in the face of God, and we are vessels of His ownership. And so we'll have to face the imperative of a new life flowing through us continually in a continuous matter, and we'll have to find out whether in our church or in our experience that the imperative and the necessity that God sets forth is a sort of a squashed matter, that we are not practicing the truth. The new vitalization is not primarily important to us. We have other little ideas. And so I say that as I mention the fact that the trees are so large that maybe you fellows have the wrong idea. I'm going to have to talk that over with Ralph, that he learned it at the seminary, that you've got to have a great big topic at the top, and everything has to bore in on the topic. And those little essays that I hear, they bore me stiff. I want to tell you, I don't want to hear a title with three S's on it or four D's or whatever the case is. Beloved, my spirit is hungry for the truth, and so is the spirit of your people. And they don't know where to go for it. Some of them are wondering if they're going to be able to find it at your church. You see, you're a layman, Mia, but I'm 66 years old. Maybe I won't get another chance to say this. I often notice this out in the road, where we say, Well, now, we're here for a while, and you're going to have to listen to us. We're going. We're going to leave. But stop and think of the burden of the itinerant preacher. You know, you may make a mistake as an entrenched pastor in thinking you will have the opportunity over and over and over, or maybe someday, to bring the truth that you've been skirting and that you've missed by a little bit. We need to focus in on this essential matter because you know that in the area of human experience, the cult of human approval, the cult of mutual approval, is the accepted cult, mutual acceptance. And in the area of revival, in the area of a new relationship to God, we have the same problem. When we come off to a conference, year after year after year, we tend to shape ourselves into a cult of mutual approval. Will anybody say amen to that? Or am I wrong again? We want to seek a way so that we come together, and in some sense, we're liable to lose our mystic relationship to God. We talked about it at breakfast just a little bit. It became interesting for us to just mention a word, and I noted at the time that our relationship to God in a mystic sense is a personal and private and a secret relationship based essentially on 1 Corinthians 2.15 where it says, He that is spiritual discerneth all things, yet he himself is discerned of no man. Brethren, there's some area in which you are not understood. There's some area in which you should not be understood. There's some area in which you should not require everybody to understand you. There should be a separate and a secret relationship between you and God, and if you've leaked it to someone else, I said just this morning, then you'll have to set up a new private relationship because you'll never survive long without it. You need a secret and a private relationship with God, and the whole cult of mutual approval is one we need to be wary of. We keep drifting into it. Really, it's the new sight we have of the self-man that finds us where we're moving, tells us where we're moving. You know, I don't know what it is, but it seems to me that if I had the stomach to ask myself, was this activity of mine, was this product of mine, this ministry of mine, was it a product of the old self? Man, was it Christ working in me? You know why I hate to ask that question? Because the answer is so obvious. It's so discouraging sometimes to see how much I do just because I've thought it up myself, because I've come to believe it's the best way, and I didn't really ask God before I came to say it, whether it was right or not. I just threw it out and let it fly. Now, God says, they that are Christ's have crucified themselves together with the affections and the lusts thereof. Now, that is a universal statement. That statement encompasses every believer that ever came into the family of God, that there was a day in his life, whether consciously or subconsciously or even unconsciously, he came to the end of himself in that he saw he could not have his way and God's way. It would have to be one or the other. And God graciously reached at that miracle moment into his heart and conferred upon him the death of Jesus Christ. Out of his agreement, it was his agreement that brought him into this relationship. His agreement through belief that brought him into this relationship. And we quickly desire and plan to move out of this agreement. Now, God talks to us, and He makes it very plain how we will come to have power in our lives and how we will come to live a live life because Revival talks about the putting in of life back into a place where life apparently has fled or apparently where there was life, but the life is dwindling down. And look at that life. I've been looking at that life. It needs that plant. It needs water. It needs sunshine. It needs something. If it keeps this way, it's going to die. It's going to fizzle all the way out. But you know the Lord says in John 15, verse 5, He said, I am the vine, you are the branches. He that abides in Me and I in him, the same bringeth forth much fruit. I haven't read anything you haven't heard, and I haven't read anything you haven't preached. But it says, for without Me you can do nothing. Now in our minds, as we grab this and begin to accept it because we accept it academically, there's a bad word academically. Now that's a word in which you've already heard testimony. I stand a little bit free of it because the fellow doesn't know how to outline three points, a poem and a prayer out the door. They're out the door. But God says without Me we can do nothing. So the academist, he says, that means I can do almost nothing without Him. That's what he says. The fellow who's an intellectual, the fellow who's academic, says I can do almost nothing without Him. His trouble is I don't do anything, and the little almost that I do do doesn't amount to a hill of beans. Now God places me in here, and it says in the next verse, if a man abide not in Me, he is cast forth as a branch and is withered, and men gather them, that is, dry withered branches. And they burn them. And so we need to see what men do to dry withered branches. The branch has an abode in the vine, and there's no life in it. It has some kind of academic, intellectual approval. It stands in the strength of mutual approval. I'm saying these things, beloved, because really, basically, I understand how to say them because I'm speaking to myself. Having made efforts that were failures in order to properly align, I have no reason to deny the thing as relevant. Of course, obviously, and you know as well as I do, that if you're going to speak at all well, you have to talk to yourself. You sort of get behind the desk and you kind of talk to yourself when you talk out loud. You know, and there's a lot of folks, they say the hit dog howls, you know. But you know, it's the fellow behind the desk that has to be hit. He has to see what the real truth is. And so, this Scripture says that there's a difference in sticks. Some sticks are alive and some are dead. It reminds me of the staff of Aaron, right? And it budded and it blossomed and it bore almonds. There's a tremendous difference between a live stick and a dead stick. And a lot of us are just dead sticks, that's all. Just dead sticks. But I want you to notice, because we're talking about a universal proposition, that revival is a must or the vitality of God coming continually, coming back into a man's life or repeatedly into his life or continuously into his life is an absolute necessity for a successful life. There's no other way. Because you know, when that Scripture in Galatians 5, 24 says they that are Christ's, are they that are of or from Christ? It's a genitive. You know, the Greek is to Christou. Of Christ. Generated in Christ. Those that are generated in Christ have crucified the flesh together with the affection and the lust. There's a historic reference there that talks about the time I was a little naive, born again child. Naive. So gullible. I run around asking everybody for answers and finally I got so many answers, I'm gorged. Makes us wonder sometimes if the things we learn from God, whether they fuel us and motivate us on or if they just stuff us. Sometimes we're stuffed and not fueled and we don't know how to move. We long to know. You know, we're talking about the how of the whole matter this morning. Really. My attempt is not to say that we are good or bad, that we have an ethical or moral reference of one kind or another. This is not the ministry of the church. We go around issue-oriented and we pretend that if only House Bill 99 would go through, we'd all be set. We could counteract all of the evils of our society. God did not send us to minister against the evils of our society. God sent us to preach Christ. And we're going to have to do that. Now I want us to just notice that in coming to this place where at last we are really identified with God because He saved us. We're little children. We're naive. We seek growth. We seek the power of that growth. And the power of that growth is going to have to be Christ in me. It's going to have to be Christ. It's going to have to be that. That's all. I discover this rascal. You know, when I walk away from my death or the cross, because we're talking about the cross now and we're talking about how I relate to the cross, and I must relate to the cross in a continuing fashion because I said we come to God by agreement and we agree with God over the necessity of our death. Many of us agree to have a cross in our lives but don't see any necessity of the cross and so therefore we are actually in disagreement. When I come to God agreeing with the cross, I must agree not only as to the fact and the history of that cross, but as to its necessity. It is necessary for a man like me. The cross is necessary. And even though this is so, and historically there's the frame of reference that says that I belong to Christ or I'm of or from Christ, and therefore God says I've crucified the flesh together with the affections and lusts thereof. Now I don't know how to say that with any greater emphasis except to say and to repeat what I have said before and often we know we must do this because I know that it's nothing new to any of us but to notice that the day came in our lives when we saw we could play golf on Sunday or we could go to church but we couldn't do both. And when that critical time came, we took Jesus instead of the golf course. Now that's the truth because when you were persuaded and when God brought the message of redemption to you, you saw that there was a certain sort of an absolute requirement and that there weren't all kinds of alternatives, all kinds of equivocations. You would have to take Jesus. Now this is the nature of our strength. And even though when we recover ourselves, and that's the old man, we go right straight back to the drawing board and see if there is in some way we can modify this arrangement. If we can't squirm out of it some way and modify it. It might be well if we could squirm out of it alone but it's worse for a pastor because they drag the whole crowd with them when they squirm out of it. They not only squirm out but they show others how they can squirm out. Whereas God calls upon us to be committed to Him, our message becomes a message of more and more consecration not more and more commitment. How many pastors go into the pulpit with an idea they will have to exact more consecration, more devotion, more dedication? I thank God that when revival came, I reviewed it, you know, some years later as I had my pastor out to lunch and came home from lunch with a pastor and I told the pastor, you know, when revival came to my heart, God showed me I'd never again scrape the bottom of this dirty barrel in order to find some way to please Him. I'm going to have to find something God will do in my life. I'm going to have to let Him show me how inept I am. The very things that seem to be the best things if I pursue them far enough and this is the problem. I don't know if you saw Falwell and an outstanding astronomer the other night. You know, and they tried to test the limits of their brains until of course they both ran out of gas a very little bit beyond the horizon. But beloved, we need to know. We need to know, beloved, who we are. We don't just agree over the cross. We need to know that we are death-deserving sinners. I was tremendously interested in hearing what one man said yesterday. And he knows. Maybe I should point out Brother Stein. But he says, you know, his people have learned that he's come into his new church to take his place with sinners. Hallelujah. Hallelujah. So many problems in the church, you know, with an elite core of preachers. We have an elite core. Don't tell me there we don't. I go out and I see what the problems are. You know, we laymen, we have a hard enough time. Every pastor that ever meets us knows we're going to run out of gas before the first sermon's over. We don't get invited out. We have a very shallow scheduling. Not only that, but we get in on some embarrassing propositions. But you know, as I come from this place, and as I come to the place where I'm committed now to deal with this universal truth, I find out that within me, in and of me, there's a tremendous problem. There's a tremendous problem on account of what I am. See, I know all about the blood of Jesus and I know that the blood of Jesus deals with what I did, but I'm not too acquainted with the cross because it is the purpose of the cross not to deal with what I did, but with what I am. God wants to take what I am. Well, what have I just found myself to be in my agreement with God? I've discovered myself to be a death-deserving sinner. I've forgotten that. I'm no longer a death-deserving sinner. I'm one of the better guys. You know, come to our church and be good guys. I notice that the world and even the church itself has a derisive attitude towards revival, partly because they're educated the wrong way and they think it is the evidence of revival. Because you see, the revival in itself is not a name of something that happened, but it's verbal and it talks about what continues and what goes on. There may be a reinstatement of that failure where a church has neglected that essential work and when the team comes in, lo and behold, there's an awakening or a renewal in the spirit of the believers who finally come away and they abandon their former position of being unbelieving believers. You see, the revival message reaches in and it touches unbelieving believers. Been able to do everything but believe. Oh, how nicely we can do it. Oh, how hard to believe. How difficult. How that we need to see who that man is who wants to do so well. We need to rebuke that man. I thought to myself, if there's any positive thing that a believer can do, if there's any time he can take his turn and allow God to minister to him, as distinct from his own ministry and his own behalf, it's a time when he rebukes himself. Lord, I just need to rebuke myself. I need to stand out of Your way. I need to stand aside so You can move in and have Your way in my life. And so I go back to the drawing board and I face the skepticism. I join the skepticism of the world and I become like some... I noticed and I even put my marker in a place which is a very strange place in the Bible because as I wondered about what we were talking about and whether it was valid or not, you know, we were talking about God's imperative revival or continuous and new life. Well, there's a time when the world gets in on it and I noticed that in Nehemiah 4 where Sanballat looks at what's going on and he says, What do these feeble Jews? Will they fortify themselves? Will they sacrifice? Will they make an end in a day? Will they revive the stones? Now that's a derisive statement because he knows you can't revive stones. Now you can't revive stones because stones never live. That's the only reason you can't revive. Because revival is more life, it's life again. It's not an expansion on the old life, it is the continuing surge and the flowing. The old life is that carnal man. And he willingly resuscitates himself and keeps reviving himself and at last God is done with it and we really wind up in a grave and there's no more of it. Oh, for the wisdom to do it now. To get on God's side with it and say, Yes God, I'm a death deserving sinner. I'm worthy of nothing but to die and I'm not doing this just for death's sake but so that resurrection may take over my life. I need a new power that comes from heaven. I don't need a refurbishing of that old power. I don't need to be shown that all these years I was right. What I probably need to be shown is that I've hardly ever been exactly right. Well, when we look at this and we find out, this is the statement of Sam. It's quite different from Ezekiel. And in the Valley of Bones, the Lord says, Can these bones live? The answer, Yes. But even the prophet does not venture to say that he really knows. He suspects those bones can live. He doesn't say how they can live. But he says to God, You know. You know they can live. Revival of old bones. That's how revival works. I mean, your bones may be too good for revival. You may have found them too dependable. Your life isn't beat down, flattened, pressed out yet. And maybe you'll have to be content going into the presence of God with a sort of a self-inflated kind of life that hasn't been able to die. You see that I'm talking about this because I speculate on it and I think there's a wonderful chance of me arriving before God in exactly that shape. My problem is me. My problem is not the doctor. My problem is not the people. Although I may have come to think that the problem is the people. The problem is not the people. I am the problem. I will have to live in a ministry. And if the ministry calls on me to have a rather low level, a base kind of relationship to the public while I faithfully minister in the presence of His saints and in their behalf, well, then it will have to be that way. There's going to be only glory by and by. We walk a valley. We need to walk it willingly. David says, Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, there's no thought in his mind that perhaps he won't have to walk it, but he says, I do walk it. I walk in the valley of the shadow of death. Yea, though I walk in the valley of the shadow of death. Well, yes. Of course, we know what that means. We have such bright hopes for the carnal man who's under condemnation. Yea, who has been the recipient of the death that he needs and of the resurrection he must have. Now I want us to notice, because it seems to me that there's a problem, and in general, the entire church and even the adherents of the church, including me, are duped by a lie. We prefer to accept a lie or to find some truth in that lie. Now when the devil speaks, he speaks of his own. You know, he's a liar and he's the father of it. Now you'll sense, you've heard me speak before, that I kind of have to track around some of these things because I can't find it easy. Even though we got into the ministry, we talk about bitterness. We talk about love. But when we talk about the death of the self man, which we always do, and which we have frequent reference to because we're talking about God raising that man up as He accepts the death of the criminal, namely His own death. Because when Jesus dies on the cross, He doesn't merely die. He dies the death of the criminal. No. It's not merely death. It is more than death. It is the death of the criminal. It's my death. But Satan, when he speaks, he says in Genesis 3-4, the serpent said to the woman, you shall not surely die. I mean, really, not really. I mean, are you so naive as to think that you'll really die? I mean, really? That's what Satan says. You must be able to see some way in you can moderate this prophecy that you can make it acceptable and still survive in yourself. There must be some way. I remember how it was. I've shared that you know when I was in college and I went to Bible school and we had courses in advanced Greek and we studied Romans 12, 1 and 2 for an entire semester. We took it apart. I mean, we took it apart. We started out outlining it. You've heard me say this because you know, God had to teach me a deep lesson concerning this and I see no reason why it doesn't need to be reinforced. But you know, as we did all that and we studied the case, the text, the number, the mood, we declined all of the words and studied the syntax and the exegesis and as I shared when Revival came about 15 years later, I believed it. You see, I did everything but believe it. Because you know, I heard what the devil said. Well, what did the devil say? Well, he said, you won't really die. And that's what I thought. Well, yeah, there's death there, but not really. Not really. You know, I must have a wrong slant after I've only studied it one semester. I need to go back to the books and crack them again and see if I can't find in the books some logic, some confirmation, some reason for God's irrational act. Oh, God did an irrational act, didn't He? Amen. I conceived that He did. It was not reasonable that He should die for me. It was not a rational process. It was a process of grace. He moved all the way outside of reason and He did this thing. Now you know, I'm not going to get to do it this morning. We won't have time. But I have a little session where I prove two and two aren't four. And I find that once I understand that God is not bound by reason and that actually I have no right to be ultimately bound by reason, we'll talk about it as we go on. But I want us to notice that one of our big mistakes is that we deny the need of death. We accept the first part of the devil's argument. And he says you won't really die. Do we accept it or don't we? I'm afraid we do. Our actions show whether we've accepted it or not. Whether we have militated against it and whether we are completely against it. But you'll find that when the self-man gets back into power, you will systematically accept the devil's argument. And that's why we know that we need a continual walk in the infilling of God in our lives. We need to be back at the cross in agreement. Now that's the nature of my continuous death. The continuous death that I get and that I am involved in and that I appreciate is the continual agreement of my heart and of my life with what God has said. That I'm crucified with Christ. Or don't you know that as many of us as were dipped into Jesus Christ were dipped into His death? Did you know that? See? Romans 6.3 and Romans 6.4 So that like as Christ was raised from the dead, so might you be raised to newness of life. The cross is there to bring change into my life. So once I come into that place, I can be raised to newness. I can be raised to difference. Not the same old man. And so this is one of the aspects of my failure because I've agreed with Satan who always lies. You see? I can scrub him off as a liar. I never need to think that there are elements of truth in what he says. You know, I need to look for the lie. But there's another part to it because in the very next verse he says, For God doth know that on the day you eat thereof then your eyes shall be opened and you shall be as gods knowing good and evil or right and wrong. Now we put ourselves, we install ourselves into that office. And in whatever capacity we minister whether as an ordained minister and a formal minister or as a lay minister, we find out that we are called upon to make these distinctions. That people demand that we should tell them what's right and wrong. And so we're for it. That's good enough. We'll attempt it. We don't see anyone around that's nearly as well qualified as we are to discern what's right and wrong. But God did not put us into this role as to discern these matters. We learn and we live them. And you know, the message out of the life is far more powerful than the message of the words which finds its denial in the life. How come, Dad, you're saying this and doing something else? Who knows us better than our children? And so the problem is the more people see us, they stay away from us because they discern that at our church there's a struggle going on between believers that we really don't love one another. He says, I give you a new commandment that you love one another. And this is the way everyone will know that you're my disciples. Not because you're good arguers or you have a good message. And that's why we are slipping away these days. There's more trouble in more churches. There are more difficulties in handling those troubles as you pastors know where we see an ascendancy of the belief in the ordinary person and even in the true Christian that the world is succeeding more than the churches. We're a whole of microelectrics. We're looking at the little bitty things. You know, we can put a little box out and it'll remember a million or a billion things. We're beginning to think, what are we doing? We're struggling at the whole matter of faith when look what the world's doing. Do you ever wonder why it is that today there's so little fear of God? We think that if the atom bomb goes off, it won't go off because we've not feared God. Whereas I remember when the atom bomb first went off years back, we had a dread that the same thing might happen to us and we dreaded that because we sensed that when it happened, God would be the arbiter of whether it should or shouldn't. We don't think that anymore. We think that Moscow will be the arbiter or the person in the White House or whomever. We don't fear God anymore. I don't remember a time in the history of man. In my experience, when we go out and see so little fear of God in our community or in our own hearts, we want a sort of a computer hold on everything. Let's get it on the computer. God says, let's get it off the computer. Let's get it into our hearts that God has the ownership over us. He has the right. And you know, when God shows us this, He needs to show us that our primary devotion is not to reason but to God Himself. You know, we have a dedication to reason. Reason is our God. We have to have a rational three-point relationship to all truth. Whereas God desires to work in me to keep turning my mind over and turning it over no sooner than I have it made up and God wants to turn it over again. God says, I can't accept it the way you're doing it. So God finds us as willing doubters. You see, we are willing doubters of the deep truth because after all, God said, the devil said, the problem is God doesn't want you to partake of this fruit because you know, when you eat the fruit, you'll be just like Him and you'll know right from wrong. You'll know good from evil. And so you see, the church has been flying under His banner. And so the reason we can prove this is that when we attempt to serve Him, we only know one area in which to prepare ourselves and that's in the area of the academic. We go up into the area of the academic, we get approval and endorsement and we get a commitment and you know, everything seems to be alright. And it is if we really belong to God. If we really have a relationship to the cross. Otherwise, it isn't worth burning up. I remember Dr. Harrison Gregg. I don't know if anybody remembers him. He was 81 years old when I heard him preach. Probably about in 1944. You know, he trembled when he told us the story how he went to the school and he went down home and when he got home, he took his diploma down in the basement, got on his knees in front of the furnace and threw the diploma in. We have a wrong affinity. We have our God and our authority as reason and we need a blind attachment to God. We need a relationship, a holy, personal, private relationship with Him that's able to survive because, you know, not everyone is going to like the way you are when you abandon reason as your primary authority. Now God says, if any man thinketh that he knoweth anything, he knoweth nothing as he ought to know. What is God saying? God is saying that you do not know all about anything and that you better not put the lock on it. And you better not go around pretending you do because God is trying to break in on you at that very place where you put the lock on it. And there is no further forward motion possible because now you are committed to that condition and you are involved in presumption. Now I just want to say, beloved, and perhaps if we had an hour or two of a bull session, we could get together and talk about it, but no reasonable process deals with truth. It deals with premise. It deals with a hypothesis. Now hypothesis is the presumption that is made. It's a polite way of calling it a presumption. The scientist wouldn't be so foolish as to presume, but he will hypothesize all over the place. You see? And so as we go forward, we can become dangerous presumers, presuming to know so much. But the truth is that I know nothing with finality. Now I'm a little bit glad about that because all that I think I know I'm not too satisfied with. It isn't really comforting me all that much. You see, even though I might think, you know, that in dealing with hard things like in a machine shop where you deal with steel, you deal with references to gauge standards that are certified in Washington, well, it isn't really all that comforting. It really doesn't present you one truth that will take you past a grave. Not a one. And yet, you know, we find ourselves locked in to that place and separated from a holy God where he desires to maximize and intensify my secret personal relationship with him so that basically I'm serving him. And so we see this point. Now I just want to, we've already used up our time and we find that we've come in to a place when we revive the old man where we doubt our death. We really doubt it. And then we find that when the Spirit of God flows back in to us we not only remember it but we welcome it. After all, we've struggled to survival and it hasn't been that good. It's not that good. Let the old man die. Let him go. I sometimes think that all of life generates around this process so that at last I'll know enough that just before I step on that last slide on that last banana peel, you know, that I'll have this thing settled. Or I'll have a good measure of it settled. And God wants to settle me around his imperative. I cannot get along without the power of the Spirit of God in my life. Not only that, the power of an anointed word as I go in to it. You know, the apostle himself, he dared not but endorsed this truth. Because what he said was, and I, brethren, when I came to you came not with excellency of speech or wisdom declaring to you the testimony of God for I determined not to know anything among you save Jesus Christ and Him crucified. Oh, we know everything, don't we? You know why we're called upon to know everything? People think we should know everything. One of the sweetest things we can say is I don't know. I don't know. He said, I was with you in weakness and in fear and in much trembling. My speech and my preaching was not with enticing words of men's wisdom but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power. Why is it that power flags away from my relationship to God in my ministry? It's because I disagree with Him. I'm no longer on the same wavelength. I'm no longer on the same beat. I no longer agree over sin. I don't agree that sin is sin. I don't agree that sin is wrong. I don't agree that sin has to go. My agreement in sin must be full-orbed. My agreement as to the cross must be wide as God's look at the cross. When God looks at the cross, He sees it as a necessary cross. You see, there is a necessary cross standing behind an indispensable resurrection. And I'm going to have to invite it into my heart and life. You know, David has a solution. We're going to close with this. Just a little look. Because you know the famous and beautiful Psalm, the 19th Psalm, where David says, Keep thy servant also back from presumptuous sins. Let them not have dominion over me. That's the problem with them. That's the problem with presumption. The first thing you know, it has dominion over us. It's the thing we bow to. A bunch of little ideas. You know, we spend our life compacting our ideas. That is the name of the process. And we gather them together and we seek some kind of comprehensive look. And I'm the same way. I'm probably worse than anybody else because I try to add it up and sift it down and come out with a comprehensive look at everything. You know what we mean by being comprehensive? We mean we're looking for an answer that will solve all the problems when God wants most of those answers under His own control. We need to know the single truth that our salvation is available in Jesus Christ through faith. And that Jesus was crucified and He has within this whole process the power to bring my worthless life to death and to bring it resurrection. Because David calls out and he says, Keep thy servant back from presumptuous sins. Let them not have dominion over thee. Then shall I be upright and I shall be innocent of the great transgression. What is the great transgression? It is to behave as if I were God Himself. You know, we who minister, whether we minister under the authority of an ordination or not, have every opportunity to preempt God. And by preempting God, I simply mean that we become the proprietors of the work. And we've set God off aside and we think that when God called us and put us into this work that now we are the proprietors. Beloved, we are not the proprietors. God is the proprietor. We can't strip the ownership and the authority from God. Why do we do this? I'll tell you why. Because our own lives are not under the authority of God. It's the only reason. There's no other reason. This is it. If we place our own lives under God's authority, then the authority that we will need to minister will flow out of us. And we will no longer administrate and minister under the tyranny of the self-man where it's felt all around. It's felt in the environs, in every area that we attempt to project Christ. So he says here, let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in Thy sight, O Lord, my strength and my Redeemer. He's going to be the arbiter. Lord, You see to it. You guard me. You watch me. You correct me. I want to bring myself back to agreement in every instance so that You can hear my agreement and I'll have this ongoing relationship that will invite resurrection into my life. Let's pray. Father God, You know our need. Lord, You know how weak we are, how broken, how ignorant, and yet sometimes filled with pride, presumptuous. Lord, disdainful of Thee. Bless us, we pray Thee, as we bow before You. Lord, minister to the deep things. Cause us not to see the superficial symptoms of our failing lives. And we know that our lives have many symptoms. Showing the faithlessness of our relationship to Your Holy Word. Sometimes to our faithlessness in the prayer situation. But Lord, God, help us this morning to see and to minister with respect to what we are. Lord, strike all deceit from our hearts and minds. Minister to us, our Father, by Thy very self. And Lord, as David called to Thee. And call upon You to minister to the deep things that presumptuous might not rule in us. We call upon Thee to this end. We thank You this morning for the freshening of our view of agreement with Thee. That we are not holding back. Lord, the requirement and the privilege even to say, Lord God, let it be so. Let this man perish utterly from before Thee. That the life that abides and continues in each of us might be the life of Christ. We look for Your work. We look for the success of Your Word and of our relationship with You by Your Spirit. In the name of our loving Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.