This sermon emphasizes the importance of understanding the New Covenant to live a life of victory and closeness with God. It contrasts the Old Testament shadows with the reality found in Christ, highlighting the need to live as spiritual kings who rule over circumstances rather than being slaves to them. The message encourages believers to avoid deception and pride, focusing on encountering Jesus in their hearts to truly live as children of God.

The last few weeks we've been looking at the New Covenant. Reason being, most Christians that I have met anyway, and most of the Christian books I've read, seem to indicate that they have no understanding of what the New Covenant is, and that is why many Christians accept a lower standard of life, a lower standard of home life, a lower standard of church life, and a lower standard of walk with God, closeness, etc., than the New Testament offers. So, all I'm trying to do is trying to show you your birthright, and to tell you don't sell it for anything. So, we were trying to see how the New Covenant is emphasized right from the beginning, the Gospel of Matthew. You know, we saw that the first promise in the New Testament was Jesus will save his people from their sins, in Matthew 1.21. That's a promise never found in the Old Testament. Never found. Three quarters of the Bible is the Old Testament, but you'll never find a promise that God will save you from your sins. It was pictured in God taking the Israelites into the land of Canaan, where all the giants were killed. And those giants are a picture of the sins that rule in our body. Remember that everything in the Old Testament was a shadow. It says that in Colossians 2. Everything was a shadow, not the real thing. It's not a photograph. A photograph may be a very exact picture. I think if Paul was living today, he would have used the word photograph. A photograph is a very exact picture, but it's not the real person. So, you must remember that when you go to the Old Testament. It is very exact, but it's not the real thing. Colossians 2 says that. Those things are only a shadow. So, if we forget that, we can get into a lot of confusion. It's amazing how many Christians today don't understand the simple thing that the Old Testament was a shadow. And if you're not familiar with that verse, I'm going to show it to you. It's in Colossians 2. It's important to know this if we are to be protected from deception. Not deception that leads us to hell. But deception that prevents us from living at the level we can live in this age. You know there's a difference between... I mean, let's take an earthly example. The beggar lives on this earth. The king lives on this earth. Well, they're both living on the earth, but there's a vast difference between the level at which they live. And in between the king and the beggar, there are many different levels of living. And I think that's a good picture of many Christians. Born again Christians. They're all born again. And they can rejoice in the fact, well, I'm born again. I'm a child of God. But some live like beggars, spiritually, even though they may be very rich materially. And some live like kings, spiritually, even though they may not be very rich materially. So, though we may all be born again, there are different levels of living. And the Bible says we can all live like kings if we want to. If you believe that God has made that provision for you, and I want to tell you, it doesn't depend on your age. You don't have to wait till you're 50 or 60 before you live like king. You can be a 12, 13 year old young boy or girl. You may not know everything that older people know, but you can live as a king on conquering the... A king is one who rules. You know, it's a mark of a king. And a beggar is one who is a slave of circumstances. I mean, the circumstances are so bad. He's just defeated by all his circumstances. That's what makes him poor. But a king rules over circumstances. And that's spiritually also, it's like that. The temptations that come to you even as a 12, 13, 17 year old, you can conquer all of them. You can be a king. Or you can allow the circumstances to rule you. You can be under your circumstances or over your circumstances. And that's the difference between being a beggar and a king. A person who is under the circumstances is depressed, gloomy. Sometimes he's on top. Somebody gives a beggar 50 rupees. Boy, he's on top of the world. But then the next day or a couple of days later, he's down in the dumps again. That's the life of a Christian. Up sometimes, God blesses him in some way. He gets a promotion in his job or he gets a new house or something. And he's so excited. And then you see him a year later and he's down in the dumps. This is exactly a beggar life. He gets 50 rupees, he's happy. Another day he gets nothing and he's depressed. But a king is not like that. Kings got everything. So spiritually, God wants us to be like kings. Where we are over our circumstances and everything is under our feet spiritually. That even when materially we don't have so many things that make other people's life comfortable, it doesn't make any difference to us. Because we have learned to conquer. That was impossible under the old covenant. So when a person lives like that, under his circumstances, he's living an old covenant life. And it's always up and down. Like Job, he was very happy when things were going well. And then things got bad and he was the best man on earth. And he still made a lot of complaints against God. So if you go to the Old Testament, you can easily go astray. So Colossians chapter 2, it says here about the Old Testament, there were verse 16. There were rules concerning food. There were certain meats you could not eat. Certain things you couldn't drink. Certain festivals you had to keep. And certain Sabbath days you couldn't work one day of the week. And he's just taking an example. And that's just not everything. There are a hundred other things. These are all a shadow. All of them are a shadow. The entire Old Testament is a shadow. You know a shadow is an exact replica of the man standing there like a photograph. But the real person is Christ. So let no one cheat you of your prize by saying that he saw some visions and things like that. You know many people I find nowadays are thoroughly deceived if somebody says, I saw a vision. Somebody else gets up and says, he saw another vision. Somebody saw one angel, somebody else saw two angels. They don't get fooled by all this. Look at the lives of these people who see these visions and the angels, they just get angry and upset and lust and everything else, they love money. What's the use of seeing all those angels even if they see a hundred angels? It doesn't make a difference. The important thing is to see Jesus in our heart. This is so important. When I see so many Christians today, it grieves me. I say, Lord, these are people who should be kings, but they're slaves. I long to lead them to become kings. See the trouble with all of them, he says, they are, part of the reason is, in the last part of verse 18, they are inflated without any reason by their fleshly mind. That means they've got a swollen head. Now they have no reason to have a swollen head. When they're defeated by sin, there's absolutely no reason to have a swollen head. And when you overcome sin, you won't have a swollen head. But when you're proud, I'll tell you this, pride's many things from you. And we don't see how much pride there is in us. Now pride wasn't spoken much about in the Old Testament. Very little. But it's one of the major sins of the New Testament. If you were to make a list of New Testament sins, it would not be the Ten Commandments first. It would be things like pride and hypocrisy and selfishness. Things were not even mentioned in the Ten Commandments. Those are the sins which are primary in the New Testament.