In this sermon, the speaker focuses on the concept of reconciliation and the importance of living under God. He begins by referencing 2 Corinthians 5:14, which speaks about the love of Christ constraining believers to live for Him. The speaker then emphasizes the need to align one's life with the teachings of Jesus, specifically highlighting the Sermon on the Mount as a prophetic ministry. He further explains that the ministry of reconciliation is about God reconciling the world to Himself through Jesus Christ and entrusting believers with the word of reconciliation. The sermon concludes with the reminder that living under God should be the foundation of one's life and the true ambassadorial message of the gospel.

Just simply to follow on what I have been saying, yet moving into another direction. As when in the margins of your good Bibles, you will find certain marks which say the introduction of another chain. It's related but moves off along another line in the scripture. All right then. Two Corinthians, chapter 5. So familiar, and you may wonder why in the world we're coming on to this subject, but I don't think, after a moment's reflection, you will find it strange. We, verse, sorry, verse 14, chapter 5, the love of Christ constrains us, because we thus judge that if one died for all, then all died. And he died for all that they which live should not henceforth live unto themselves, but unto him which died for them and rose again. All was the highest and the best, you see. Always. You're not to live for yourself, but you're to live unto him. Wherefore henceforth know we no man after the flesh. Yea, though we have known Christ after the flesh, yet now henceforth know we him no more. Not the Christ after the flesh. Didn't know him anymore. This is the ground, you see, upon which the whole of the gospel is posed, poised, and presented on that. Therefore, if any man be in Christ, he's a new creature. Old things are passed away. Behold, all things are become new, and all things are of God, who hath reconciled us to himself by Jesus Christ, and hath given to us the ministry of reconciliation. Now you'll see where the thing is related. The whole ministry is the ministry of reconciliation. And if, in regard to the things we've been thinking of, reconciliation is quite now impossible, as between man and woman, then I want to say, will you allow yourself to be reconciled to this basic principle of the gospel? You'll be reconciled to God in it, won't you? You see, when Paul had to write to these Corinthians, he had to say some harsh things. Take the man in 1 Corinthians 5, seeing that this is 2 Corinthians 5, the man in 1 Corinthians 5 that had lived in terrible sexual sin. He was living in incest, or things of this nature. And these sorts of things used to go on. I don't know whether they go on in Liverpool 8 or anything like that. I should be very surprised if they didn't. I'm not suggesting there's anything like it in this company this morning. But we all know that it exists. And this man was a member of the church at Corinth. He'd gone into this kind of incestuous, amoral, immoral relationship. He'd gone into it. And Paul said that this man was to be handed over to the devil, to say that the flesh should be destroyed, that his spirit may still be saved because of this glorious reconciliation of Jesus Christ, the bond that couldn't be broken. His spirit should still be saved in the day of Jesus Christ. That's the thing that I told you about, the difference between choosing to marry or to burn. It's the same outworking of the same principle. I can't stop to explain it all. I hope your hearts see it. But you see, beloved, he had to write to these Corinthians and tell them and pray them to be reconciled to God. Will you still be reconciled to God even though you can't be reconciled to him or to her? You can still be reconciled to God. Hmm. I want to say that the new birth, the mighty baptism in the Spirit, the glorious taking of a person through the cross, the death and the destruction of it all into the resurrection and the glorious newness of all the life in Christ, so that you become a complete new creature. When you are married to Jesus Christ, please do not think that this will give you satisfaction in every realm of your being. It will not. Marriage to Jesus Christ does not satisfy the normal, proper, God-given, sexual nature of us any more than it will satisfy the normal, God-given nature of us to eat. Although you are fasting today, you'll still come up with an appetite. And you say you fast to get more deeply into God and to know him more spiritually. And so you will if you really do. But it still won't satisfy the hunger pains. Do you understand that? You do, don't you? It's normal. And God has never intended it. But what it does do is this. And this is why some of us preachers have got to be very careful. I'm going back in a parenthesis now. When we preach, you come to Christ and you're completely satisfied, the whole of your being. And it's strictly speaking not true. We sometimes make the wildest claims with the best possible intentions and with the deepest beliefs. But we don't fully consider it all. As when I said this morning, we talk about being free, free, free. But there are lots of bonds that have still got to remain. All right. But what God does do when he takes you this way into his fullness is destroys the sin that gets into people to disturb them and highly emote them and cause them to pass into lustful exercises in the inward man. That's what it does. The inward marriage to Christ takes away the cravings of the depraved spirit, substituting them with the sweet desirings of the spirit that's been born from heaven all new. That isn't to say that it destroys the normal bodily functions. Amen. But it sets you down right in your own body and enables you to live there as you should be able to. Amen. You got that clear? Old things have passed away. But you must see there's a difference between old things that pass away and the phrase in the book of the Revelation in the right right at the end of the book of the Revelation. I saw, verse 21, a new heaven. Chapter 21, I'm sorry. Verse 1. I saw a new heaven and a new earth for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away. Now the first heaven and the first earth were not old heaven and old earth. When God uses the word old, he always uses it in connection with the old serpent who brought about by his cunning and subtlety old Adam. It has to do with morality and spiritual nature. When he talks about old, he talks about first or former things are passed away. That's right. Now the first thing is that you have a sexual nature. God made you like it. Amen. But that's not an old thing. The old thing is the wicked twisted serpent like sinful thing that's been produced under old Adam's progeny in old Adam's progeny under the devil's ages. All right? Under his power and ruling and kingship. That's it. Now the cross destroys that but only death or the end of things will destroy the bodily thing or when the body gets too old anyway as it says with Abraham and Sarah when God brought forth their precious Isaac. Amen. Go back to Corinthians. To Corinthians. Let us read on. I won't say stop me if I'm going too fast. Only brother dares do things like that. And I hope I'm going slowly, plainly, steadily enough for us all to see it. And if not, there's always the tape you can get. Somebody says to me, I like listening to tapes because I can stop it and take it back and I'll listen to it again three times sometimes. Somebody said to me the other day, I'm reading your book, The Generation of Jesus Christ for the fourth time. I'm just beginning to understand what it says. I believe it was intended as a compliment. All things are of God. To Corinthians 17. To Corinthians 5.18. All things are of God who hath reconciled us to himself by Jesus Christ and has given to us the ministry of reconciliation. Now the ministry of reconciliation is here defined to wit that God was in Christ reconciling the world unto himself, not imputing their trespasses unto them, and hath committed unto us the word of reconciliation. Now beloved, it is a fatal trick played by preachers, deadly and sufficient in the end to destroy them if they continue therein, to take a verse out of its context and preach from it. It is allowable under certain conditions that it contains a reference to a theme that you are following. That is in the whole context of scripture. But to take a verse out of its context in its immediate scripture is fatal. How many of you have heard the subject preached on? Now then, we are ambassadors for Christ. I can think right back into my boyhood when it used to be done. You see. But a man is only an ambassador for Jesus Christ, as the next verse says, if he has this ministry of reconciliation. Nobody else's. That's right, isn't it? Now we are ambassadors. The word now is not rhetoric. It isn't just introduced for effect or bringing in something that must be said. He's reached a conclusive position. Because of all this, I am an ambassador, he says. I've got the ministry of reconciliation. The fundament of the reconciliation is that we judge that Jesus Christ died for all. Therefore everybody's dead. Amen. That's what we judge. Therefore if you're given a chance of life, even a breath of life, even a sight of life, it's to know that it's to live under God. Not to your bodily appetites. Not to anything else but to God. There will be satisfaction along bodily lines. God gives me new cardigans. I had one on this morning. God gives me all sorts of things. It has relationship to things in life. I have a body to be clothed and to be fed. I have a body that has other desires than simply to be given over to bear about an ageless, tireless spirit. Amen. To preach all over the world. It has other desires than that. Sometimes wants to sit down and read. And all sorts of things. It's quite natural. Quite natural. But nevertheless, beloved, you are to live under God. That's the basis of Paul's gospel. That's the true ambassadorial message. That's the royal pronouncement from heaven. That's the edict. Amen. If you don't understand that, what? That's what it's all about. So Paul says, we pray to be reconciled to God. Now then, we're ambassadors. The plea of the ambassador is not, I'm a king, I'm a son of God, or all this sort of thing. It's the be reconciled to God. We pray you. This is the basic of it. The message of reconciliation. Hallelujah. God was in Christ. Hallelujah. Look what that body took. Look the denials it gave itself. Look at it. The denials that he imposed upon his own body, Jesus Christ, in order to be your saviour at the cross. Amen. Not saying that every one of us, oh Paul got this. He says, well I suppose everybody's got his own calling. And he says, abide in the calling wherein you've been called. I only tell you what is this, that, what this is, and what that is, and how it works out, and so on, and so on, and so on. All I pray is that you'll be reconciled to God. At whatever stage this morning this message has found you, in whatever condition, I pray you to be reconciled to God. You may feel you don't want to be reconciled to me, that you might have a kind of a hatred to me. I was talking to a person not so long ago, I spend my life doing this, and she came for certain advices along certain lines. She was psychotic, registered so, as a psychotic, and she came to me and she wanted this, that, and the other, and I told her, I said, my dear, the only way you can possibly get what you want is so God's people should see in you that you're no longer psychotic. God wants you to have this. I won't tell you what it was, obviously if I told you, God wanted a certain thing to be for this woman, but the authorities have stepped in because of her past behavior, and she thought she could drop on her knees and pray it all out, or get some man with some magic voice, if you've got one, and knows how to put the right words, or approach it right, and you can get it for her. If you ask God, if you use men like that, I want to warn you, we are not for use on that basis. That's abuse. And what she said, and I said, you have no more hope of that, my dear, than that God should so change you and then the authorities will give you so-and-so, so-and-so, so-and-so. We parted. She came to me two days after, she said it was exactly what you said, and she said, I hated you when you said that to me. That's right. Well, that's part of the price you pay. I want just to say this to you, that in this great truth of reconciliation, you need only turn to the first great reconciling words that fell from the lips of the blessed Jesus himself, unto whom you've been called, and unto him your whole life must be disciplined, so that it takes on the glorious likeness of his faithless beauty. For this is the only beauty that counts in heaven. Listen to it. I'm reading from Matthew 5, where it is generally agreed it was his first sermon. It's recorded in the Bible. It's called the Sermon on the Mount. I don't think it's a sermon at all. People don't understand the Bible at all. It's prophetical ministry. It's prophecy from the mount. All right. In Matthew chapter 5, you read these words. Oh, where shall we come? Oh, 21. Let's start there, shall we? You've heard that it was said by them of old time, thou shalt not kill, and whosoever shall kill or do murder shall be in danger of the judgment. But I say unto you that whosoever is angry with his brother, leave alone hating him, is angry with his brother without a cause. That is, as causes are reckoned in heaven, not the flippant things that pass through people's minds of unstable temperament, so that they get angry on nothing. I say unto you, whosoever is angry, please listen to Jesus. These aren't my words. I simply repeat them. Whosoever is angry with his brother without a cause shall be in danger of the judgment. And whosoever shall say to his brother, Raker, shall be in danger of the council. But whosoever shall say thou fool shall be in danger of hell fire. Therefore, if thou bring thy gift to the altar, and there rememberest that thy brother hath ought against thee, leave there thy gift before the altar. Leave your gift, gift, if you like, dissociated with the thought of giving at the moment. Leave your gift, the altar. Go thy way. First be reconciled to thy brother. That's the first time the word reconciliation fell from his lips. Not first be reconciled to God, you notice. First be reconciled to thy brother. Then come and offer thy gift. You're not in a fit state to make an offering to God till you're reconciled to your brother. I beg you then that that's the thing you do now. You be reconciled to your brother. If it's your husband, be reconciled to him. If it's your wife, she may be in the very room this morning, be reconciled to her. If it's your friend, be reconciled to him. If it's your adversary, it says agree with your adversary whilst thou in the way. Even your adversary you must go and agree with. Even your enemy, this is God. Amen. Don't sit there if you're hypersensitive, trying to think up something about, you know, digging away inside till all you become is an introvert. The Holy Ghost will be telling you now while I'm speaking, the things that I'm saying, the things that I'm doing. No. Reconciliation is the great thing. And I'll tell you why. Listen, they're dead. You're dead. We thus judge that because one died for all, then all died. Amen. Therefore, they can't hurt you. The only thing that's going to be hurt is your pride in this. Your self-righteousness. Two lovely things for God to nail on the cross. Well, you know what I mean. They're wretched things really. All right. Go and be reconciled to them. Get right deep down there. Let it all be done. They're dead. Amen. And remember this. The last verse in 2 Corinthians 5 says this. For God hath made Jesus to be sin. There you are. That's why, that's how easy it is to be reconciled. Jesus has been made sin. So when you approach the sin, you're approaching Jesus. And God's got it that way. That's why you come on your knees. When reconciliation is concerned, if you can't go on your knees literally, you must in your heart. And that's the way God's got it all worked out for us. It's so lovely. It's so humbling. It's so heavenly. It's so holy that most people won't have it because they prefer sin. But God wants to go right on into all the wonderfulness of this. Entering into it with joy. I'm finished. At least I'm going to stop. I don't know what will come together on tonight, but let's move in. Jesus. I don't know what particular issues are, but one thing I do know God's going to do for you is destroy all hardness out of your attitudes and true and relationships with others. All hardness. It's going to make you so tender. So sweet. It's going to take all the screechiness out of your voice and the scratchiness out of your fingers. It's going to take all the muscles out of you, you man. That's what he's going to do. He's going to bring you right up into the wonder of his son. Hallelujah. I want to say something else. Some of you people may be the victims of broken homes. The children of divorcees. And you may have a great big chip on your shoulder about it and blaming your present state to an unstable background in your home. Psychologists will tell you that. But I want to tell you that God moves it one step further than that. He pities your mother and your father. He loves them. Not for what they did, but despite what they did. And that's what you've got to do. Hallelujah. He moves it further back into sin. Not an unstable broken home. Not the things you've been robbed of, though they have affected, scarred you, smeared you. They have. But God will not have you blaming a mother and a father. He loves them. Just the same. He reconciled the world. And because he's done it for you, you can enter into that reconciliation in your mental attitudes and approaches to your mother and your father. You are a sinner in the sight of God now if you cling to those things. You're sinning against God. It's most likely the cause of your present state and malaffections. It's most likely affecting your present relationship with your husband or your wife or your brothers and sisters or in the church. See them. Go back to the beginnings. The only thing that God has divorced from him is old Adam. The nature. He's destroyed that. You're destroyed in you. You feed that old nature by those memories. Yes. You're sinning. Pass from it now. God will forgive you. And he'll fill your heart with such love to these poor sinful people that were your parents. I'm not calling them names. If they came to see me, I would love them. Say, well, you haven't suffered because of it. That may be true. But who has the greater reward? I who loves them when I haven't suffered because of them or you who loves them because you have suffered because of them? Isn't this the main spring of grace? A God who suffered because of you forgives you. Now then, beloved, will you do that now? Go on. Jesus was made sin. But only so that you should be made the righteousness of God. Hallelujah. Father, thank you, Lord. Thank you for taking away all ground for excuses. Thank you. There's no need to be angry with anybody anymore like that. There's no need to be bitter. And because the need doesn't exist, then thou wilt not have bitterness. Neither wilt thou have any hardness. Neither wilt thou accept any excuse. Hallelujah. Total reconciliation. So we bless thee together, Lord. Commit one another to thee in the tenderest love. Live for one another as for thee till all shall be perfect. Amen.