In this sermon, the speaker begins by telling a story about a man who becomes consumed with a treasure chest. The man becomes so fixated on the box that he forgets about the actual treasure inside. The speaker then transitions to the idea of Christ being unveiled in our lives. He references 2nd Corinthians 4:7-11, which talks about how we are like jars of clay that carry the treasure of God's power. The speaker emphasizes that even though we may face hardships and persecution, we should always remember that it is through our weaknesses that the life of Jesus is revealed in us.

For more messages by Glenn Meldrum and His Presence Ministries, go to www.ihpministry.com. You are welcome to make additional copies of this CD for free distribution. This evening I want to look at the idea of Christ being unveiled in our life. We'll be looking in 2 Corinthians, the fourth chapter, and we'll begin in the seventh verse. But we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us. We are hard-pressed on every side but not crushed, perplexed but not in despair, persecuted but not abandoned, struck down but not destroyed. We always carry around in our body the death of Jesus so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body. For we who are alive are always being given over to death for Jesus' sake so that His life may be revealed in our mortal body. So then death is at work in us, but life is at work in you. Paul speaks in Colossians in a couple of places about a mystery. And the mystery that he presents in Colossians is the mystery that Christ would dwell within us. It's a mystery that we do not comprehend. None of us in this room really comprehend it. Theologians may write on it, but they really don't comprehend it. It is something so phenomenal that I think the majority of all Christians miss its reality and of what it really means. Just think of that for a minute. What does it mean for God to dwell in us? What does it mean for this mystery that was kept hidden for the ages until Christ came and died on the cross and rose again from the dead and sent the Spirit to dwell within us? This mystery, what does it mean that God would dwell within us? I think we downplay that reality so much that we don't become the Christians we should be because we don't understand who dwells withinside of us. It's not a little portion of Jesus, not a little fraction of it as if Jesus was divided up in millions of portions and given to each Christian in proportion to the amount of Jesus that is out there. This God's infinite. And this God that comes to dwell in us is the fullness of who He is, not a part, not a portion of Him. So it's Almighty God that comes to dwell inside of us. It is a God of miracles and signs and wonders that comes to live inside of us. It's a God of holiness. It's a God of righteousness. It's a God of mercy. It's a God of compassion. Everything that He is, He comes to dwell inside of me, not a portion of that. What would happen if we really believed the reality of who this God was who lived inside of us? What could our lives be if we really believed that, if we really understood that a miracle-working God made His home inside? It would be absolutely astounding, I think. I think it would be revolutionary to our Christianity if we grabbed hold of it. Because the God who dwells inside of us, there is no defeat in Him. He has never been defeated, will never be defeated. It's an impossibility for that to happen. And so the reality is if I have a victorious God that dwells inside of me, I should never be an individual walking in defeat. Not because of my ability, my wisdom or anything else, but because of who lives inside of me. Now, this section of Scripture we just read, it refers to a treasure. I want you to think of this for a moment. Here Paul speaks of this treasure that dwells in jars of clay. And what do we most often concentrate on? We concentrate on the jars of clay. Let's look at this from just a realistic standpoint of where we're at. What happens when we go through our trials, when we go through our problems in life? What do we concentrate on? The jar. We concentrate on our problems most often. We concentrate on the difficulties. We concentrate on the issues that are at hand. And so often we're individuals that are looking at the jars of clay. But that's kind of a crazy thing because the prize isn't the jar. If you have a jar of clay that's filled with gold and rubies and diamonds and everything else, the treasure's not that jar. It could go on eBay and sell for millions of dollars, but it's not the jar they're buying, they're buying what's on the inside. It's the treasure on the inside. But yet we can focus upon the jar, the clay, the problems. How many people just constantly dwell upon their problems? And, you know, it's easy for us to do that because we can become very self-absorbed very quickly, and it's so easy for it to happen. Just imagine this silly little scenario that back in years gone by, there were these pirates, and they come across this treasure map of where there's this buried treasure on some South Seas island. So they take their sailing vessel, and they sail out there, and then they come to the island, and they start investigating, and they find this cave, and they go in the cave. Then in the exact spot where the treasure map says there's a treasure, they begin to dig. Then as they dig, their shovels eventually hit something hard, and so then the captain says, Be careful there, boys. And so they are a little more careful, and they get down and find this chest, and they pull this chest out, and the captain says, Arr, we found some real treasure here. And so what happens, he goes and has them open it up, and they open it up, and there's filled with gold and gems and all this stuff. And he says, This is what we've been looking for. This is what it's all been about. And so he goes and he says, Grab it, boys. And they grab the box, and they pick up the treasure chest, pour it out, dump it out, and walk away with the chest. And they say, Boy, long John Silver, sure going to be jealous of this treasure chest. Left the treasure that it was all about. Concentrated upon the box. Thought the box was it. How crazy it would be. We'd think that they'd be some nutso pirates. But yet we can do the same thing. Here there's this treasure that dwells inside. And how often that we have the problem that we begin to whine. I have in my motor home this little tapestry type of thing that says, Thou shalt not whine. And you know, I need to look at it a little more often. Because we don't understand how much we whine. We don't understand how much we concentrate upon the problems, upon the pot, rather than upon the treasure. What is that treasure? It's a treasure, this mystery that Christ would come to dwell inside of us. Paul tells us in 1 Corinthians 3, verses 16 and 17, he says, Don't you know that you yourselves are God's temple and that God's spirit lives in you? If anyone destroys God's temple, God will destroy him. For God's temple is sacred and you are that temple. Paul is looking back to the time where Solomon's temple was destroyed under the Babylonian destruction and the captivity that followed. Paul was not around when Jerusalem was destroyed, which would have happened about four years after his death. If it would have happened, he would have been pointing to that as well. And so why is he looking back to the temple and the destruction of the temple? He's referring that, Don't you know that you are God's temple and that God's spirit lives in you? If anyone destroys God's temple, God will destroy him. God's temple is sacred. Why was Solomon's temple destroyed? What brought about the destruction of God's temple? You know, you go back into the prophets, you go back into the statements of these men of God and you find them warning the children of Israel, warning them of the destruction that would come upon them. Jeremiah goes and brings out in one of the prophecies a statement that they said, The temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord. And it was a statement that we don't necessarily understand, but what they were referring to is the people were boasting that God would never judge Israel because the temple of the Lord was with them. And so they were safe from any enemy invasion, from being conquered because the temple in Jerusalem was there. They thought no harm could come to them. But yet when you walked in the temple, you would find idols there of the Baals of Asherah and of Molech and so on. Sometimes ungodly kings would close the temple doors because they didn't want anything to do with it and would just have their idolatry and build their temples or use some of the temples, the pagan temples that Solomon built. Eventually God went and says, If you don't deal with your idolatry, I will destroy Jerusalem and your temple. They didn't believe it. And guess what? It was destroyed. It happened just the way God warned. They went into Babylon into captivity and it was in that Babylonian captivity that they were finally delivered from their idolatry. It was in the Babylonian captivity that the synagogue came into existence. It was a time where they refused then to become like the rest of the people and finally they freed themselves from the worship of idols. God destroyed Herod's temple in 70 AD through the Roman general Titus, who eventually became the emperor of Rome. And why did God destroy that temple? The same identical thing. Idolatry. It was just a different idolatry had come in. They didn't bow anymore to Molech and Azareth, Poles and to the Baals or anything else like that. They had a new God they bowed to and what that was, that was religion. They bowed to a form, to a ritual, to do's and don'ts, to these things that was lifeless religion, that they thought they were right with God because they were children of Abraham and because they held to what they thought was the law. And so John the Baptist goes to the children of Israel and confronts them with a similar thing as what Jeremiah did. Jeremiah went and said the temple of the Lord, but John the Baptist says don't think that you are right with God because you're children of Abraham, because God could take of these stones and make children of Abraham. They again were saying we are safe because we are of the lineage of Abraham. Not understanding that they had walked out of relationship, not understanding that the Messiah was coming into their midst and they would reject the Messiah and reject him for a dead form of religion. And so God would judge them as a result of that. And when Jesus stood before Pilate and the crowd cried out, let his blood be upon us and upon our children. It was literally so because 40 years later, upon their children that blood was spilt as Titus went and destroyed the city. And so God is referring to idolatry here. But you know we're Americans, we don't bow down to the Baals and when we go to Chinese restaurants, we don't take a little time and bow to the little fat Buddha there. But you know we have other kinds of idolatry. And you know what that is, the idolatry of our possessions, the idolatry of a Christianity that is powerless but that's comfortable. All kinds of idols can come up in our hearts in the American culture. We have just as many gods as the Romans did, probably near as many as Hindus have. You know Hindus, they have 330 million different gods. But yet we can have a whole host of our own gods. And the Lord is warning us through Paul, says that if you defile that temple, not understanding the treasure that lies within, if you defile that temple, God will destroy us as a result. Now we have such a twisted concept of the love of God so often that we think, oh, God's all lovey-dovey and he would never do that and he never gets angry and never has a problem like that. He's just good and kind and sweet. And we don't understand that he's holy because it says, for God's temple is sacred. And you know what he says, if I will dwell in you, there will be no gods. Let's go to the very first commandment out of the Ten Commandments. What is that? It says, thou shalt have no other gods before me. Let's pretend this is the throne room of God. Do you know what that means in the Hebrew? It means here's God sitting upon his throne and we enter in and it doesn't mean that everything's fine between me and God so long as there's no idols between me and him. And I just have a few trailing behind me. That's not the idea. The idea of no gods before means that there'll be no gods anywhere in his presence. That if I'm going to be in his presence, there cannot be one God. Not hiding in my pocket, not in my wallet, not in my home. There can be no God anywhere in his presence. He alone will be the Lord God, the only one that will rule our life or he will not be our ruler. It's the idea in America that we can flirt with sin, play with sin, coddle with sin and not have it a big deal because we have to redefine sin. So we can have the idolatry of compromises and so on. And I could go further and further with this but I think you're getting the point of what I'm trying to say here. And so this treasure dwells in the jars of clay. We so often concentrate on the jar instead of the treasure. And we think that this treasure doesn't have a problem with all kinds of defiled stuff that would come into it. But let's take a moment now and look at these jars of clay. Jars of clay. He's referring to not something that would be a tremendously beautiful vessel or an extravagant vessel or anything like that. It would be a simple vessel. You know at the Last Supper, sometimes they give ideas that at the Last Supper they had gold chalices. It's not true. They wouldn't have had gold chalices. They had common pottery, common earthen vessels that they drank from. What the common people would have drank from. Jesus wasn't drinking from gold or silver or anything expensive and costly like that. He drank from the common vessels of what individuals were. And Paul is taking this common vessel and equating it to ourselves. Paul tells Timothy in 2 Timothy, the 20th verse, he says, but in a great house there are not only vessels of gold and of silver but also of wood and of earth, some to honor and some to dishonor. What would Paul think of a vessel of honor? A vessel of honor would be a chalice that would be in the hand of a king, a gold chalice. A vessel of honor for a peasant would be his earthen vessel that he would be drinking from. What would be a vessel of dishonor? Well, to explain this, let me give you a story. My wife, her family originally comes from Pennsylvania. Hard times started coming on Pennsylvania in the coal industry, and so her father moved to Detroit and started working for Chrysler and eventually became an executive at Chrysler. The family would go back down to Pennsylvania for the summer, so leave him back in Detroit to go down in the mountains and play in the mountains and the streams and the trees, and the kids just had a grand old time. And Jesse's mom loved to go down there and go to the Amish auctions, and so she went to them often. And one day she goes to this Amish auction, and while she's there, there's this beautiful porcelain pot that has just this beautiful artwork upon it. I mean, this was really a pretty thing, and so she decided to bid on it. And when she began to bid on it, she was the only one who bid on it, so she got it just for a few bucks. And so she thought she had some great find, and she came home and says, this is going to be a wonderful cookie jar for the kids. When you've got five kids, they can go through some serious cookies. And they used to go to the grandmother's house and stay there, so she goes back to grandma's house and is washing up this pot, and there's the big old bag of cookies ready to go into it, and finally the grandma walks in and says, what are you doing with that old thing? And she says, what do you mean? I just bought this at the auction. Isn't this beautiful? I just got it for a couple bucks. And she says, well, what are you going to do with it? She says, well, it's going to be a cookie jar for the kids. She says, you're not going to use that for a cookie jar. Well, why aren't I? She says, it would be a great cookie jar. She says, you're not going to use that for a cookie jar. And she says, why? She says, well, because it's a chamber pot. Well, what's a chamber pot? For those who don't know what a chamber pot is, okay, let me explain this. You see, when it gets cold in the winter and before they had indoor plumbing and all the other necessities of today in America, and you didn't want to go outside in the middle of the night, you had this little pot in your bed chamber. They used to call them bed chambers. And so you have this little pot that you would use in the middle of the night so you wouldn't get totally woke up going out to the outhouse. And so they called them chamber pots. That is a good example of a vessel of dishonor. So you got the king that he's out there drinking from his golden chalice, and when he goes back into his bed chamber in the middle of the night, guess what he's going to use? He's going to use this vessel of dishonor, this ignoble vessel, the chamber pot. But let me try and bring out a thought here. I think that's very interesting of what I'm trying to portray here. Do you know what every single one of us were before we were Christians? Every single one of us, we were chamber pots. I want you to think about that. We were filling up with the filth of our sin, of our wickedness. It was brewing, it was fermenting, it was stinking, it was spewing. It was just the horror of what went on there, a vessel of dishonor, and all that was about it, and that's all we were. That's all. Every unsaved person is in this entire world, in a spiritual sense, a chamber pot filled with the filth of their sin, fermenting. And year after year, it gets bigger and deeper and worse and more filthy if it could be such a thing. And it continues to grow. And then one day this God breaks into our world when we never wanted Him to and we didn't ask Him to, but He pursued us in His mercy, in His goodness, in His tenderness, and He pursued us. And because we desired Him finally and says, Would you please forgive me? And what does He do? He goes into this chamber pot, cleans it out so thoroughly that He turns it into a temple. That's what Christianity is. And we have to understand that I think that's a very good image of it. That's why Paul says that it's so that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us. There was nothing noble about me, nothing noble I did, nothing noble that caused that I had a right to be saved. It was the mercy of God that broke into my world, that revealed Himself to me, had nothing to do with my ability or wisdom or anything at all of myself. It was the mercy of God that He would break into a life so filthy as mine that He might save me. Isn't that phenomenal? So that the all-surpassing power is from God and not from us. I love testimonies. What I don't like, I don't like where we sit down and we boast of our sin. I was a worse sinner than you. Let me tell you how much worse of a sinner I was. And then we boast about how ugly and filthy our chamber pots were. You know what I'm talking about? Have you heard those type of things? I've heard them more than I would like to acknowledge. We boast of how filthy our chamber pots were rather than how phenomenal is God that would cleanse them out. And I don't care if you were raised in a Christian home or not, you were just as filthy as the worst prostitute, a drug dealer, a drug addict, or whatever out there. Because all sin is equally as filthy, equally as contaminating. So you know what's so interesting about this? Is that a pot can't change itself. Imagine this chamber pot just sitting there saying, I want to be a king's chalice. Dwelling on it, thinking, I want to be one. And thinking that eventually if it thought hard enough, if it had positive thoughts, that's what it needs. Positive thoughts. Needs to think positively. As if a positive thinking chamber pot could change itself. What lies. What absolute lies. You see, the only hope for the chamber pot was there must be power outside of it to come in to change it. Because it cannot change itself. It's an impossibility. It's an impossibility. It's only the work of God. It comes alone from God and can't come from any other place. You see, Christianity is impossible for us to live. Do you know that? Do you understand that? Christianity is absolutely impossible to live. Do you know what the Pharisees in the Old Testament were trying to do? And in the days of Christ, do you know what they were trying to do? They were trying to live a relationship with God in the human flesh through the natural man. And so they could never do it. That's why they were displeasing to God and displeasing to Christ. Christianity is impossible to live. There's only one person who ever lived a Christian life. Do you know who that was? Jesus. And so the only way that we can live that Christian life is Christ must live through us. There's this woman, her name is Madame Jeannie Guyon. I'm not going to go into her life. But she made this phenomenal statement. She said, Nothing pleases the Father but Jesus Christ and that which bears his mark of character. I cannot be pleasing to God by myself because all I am by myself is a chamber pot. And as long as I try to be pleasing to God in my natural man, all that there is is the filth of a chamber pot. The only way I can please God is I must bear his mark of character. And if I want to bring greater joy to his heart, I must be transformed more and more into the image of Christ that his character would be seen in me because it's not what I have of myself that's pleasing to God because I cannot of myself please him. It is when I bear that mark of Christ, the image of Christ in my life, that I become pleasing to him. If we understand what we really were, there's no place to boast. There's no place to boast of our conversion or of anything. It's what he did. Because none of us sought God. None of us deserved it. None of us still will. For all eternity we will never deserve heaven. For all eternity we will be there solely and completely and absolutely by the gift of God, by the grace of God. Nothing of what we've done or deserved. I'll never deserve it a million years from now. It will still be his gift. But the difference will be at that time I'll understand it at least a little better. Now let's look at verses 10 and 11. I've already read them but I want to read them again. We always carry around in our body the death of Jesus that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body. For we who are alive are always being given over to death for Jesus' sake so that his life may be revealed in our mortal body. I don't believe that word revealed is the right word. And so it's used in both those verses. I believe the right word is when you continue to look at the arguments of Paul and you go up further in that chapter, you find that Paul brings out this idea that the minds of the unsaved are veiled and that the God of this world has blinded them. And so Paul is presenting an argument of those who do not know Christ, they are veiled, they cannot see. And now he's bringing out the word that the proper translation, I believe, of this word revealed should be unveiled. Well, let's look at the idea of unveiled. We all remember the events of the Afghanistan war when it broke out and we saw the pictures of the Taliban and the realities of what Sarah Law is all about. And Sarah Law is what the desire of Islam is to do. Islam is out to conquer the world. I'm not going to preach on Islam or anything else, but it's just the reality. They're out to conquer the world. They are not a religion of peace. It is not true. The only ones who believe in peace are the lukewarm ones. Those who get on fire, Muslims, will be violent and will want to take over the world. Strict Islamic law and you saw women totally covered head to foot and you saw them with even screens over their faces, over their eyes, so you could not even see their eyes. That's being veiled. And I want you to think about something. There is this God that is so absolutely beautiful, so magnificent, so glorious, so perfect, and that treasure dwells within this jar of clay. The beauty, majesty of this God dwells within the jar of clay. And then what do we do? We veil it. We veil it with the flesh. We veil it with these old chamber pot attitudes, these old chamber pot ways, the old chamber pot characters. So what veils Christ in our life? Just putting it in a very simple way is sin. Sin veils Him. I shared, I believe it was Monday night, what I believe is probably one of the most phenomenal definitions of sin and I'm going to share it with you because I think it's so important. I think it brings reality of what sin is because we have so whitewashed it in America. And so this definition comes from a woman named Susanna Wesley. She was the mother of John and Charles Wesley and John Wesley was one that God used to turn England upside down and spare England from the same things that was happening in France with the revolution in France. And this is what her definition is. It says, whatever weakens your reasoning, impairs the tenderness of your conscience, obscures your sense of God, or takes away your relish for spiritual things, if anything increases the authority and power of the flesh over the spirit, that to you becomes sin, however good it is in and of itself. So what she was saying, she was bringing out two points of what sin is. The first point she was saying is anything that robs you of intimacy with Jesus. Anything. There's nothing sinful about golf. I don't play it, so I'm not saying this as an advocate for it, but nothing sinful about golf unless, of course, it takes you from time with Jesus. Now that which is in and of itself seemingly innocent now becomes a horrendous sin because it's robbing you of relationship with God. There's nothing immoral of the television of itself. It's what we watch with it. But let's say there's something moral on that you want to watch and that's going to be very rare, but you have found this particular thing and you want to watch it, but you heard the voice of God speaking, says, hide away with me, and you'd rather sit down and watch this thing. Now that has become to you sin. Anything that robs you of relationship with God, anything, I don't care what name you put upon it, becomes sin to you then. And the second thing she said is anything that feeds your flesh. Anything. And so let's just go back to golf. Let's say you're just an avid golf player and you're good. And now you kind of boast it with all your buddies. And now it's become sin to you because now it's the sin of pride that's grabbing hold of you. Now that which would be seemingly innocent of itself is feeding the flesh and is sin to you now. I mean, I could go on and bring illustration out after illustration of how things feed the flesh. You know, you have problems with lust. Well, what are you doing watching television and watching the commercials? That's going to feed the lust. It becomes sin to you because now you're feeding the very thing that you know is a problem in your life, but yet you're feeding that monster and yet wanting the monster to disappear the whole time you're still desiring him to grow. I want you to think of this for a moment. Do you know what happens is here's this God who comes into the chamber pot and cleans the chamber pot. Does this phenomenal miracle of cleansing it and turning it into a temple. And then somehow or another we somehow start filling the chamber pot instead of with the treasure with the old filth that was there. And then we have these problems where we start spewing it out. I want you to think about this. I want to make a graphic illustration here. Let's take a moment and look at marriage. Do you know what marital conflict is? Let me try and make this graphic for you. I want to leave an impression in your mind. Do you know what marital conflict is? Next time you have an argument I want you to think about what it is. It's two chamber pots that start spewing the filth out. I want you to think of that because that's what it is. It's the filth. The sin. That old chamber pot we start letting it brew inside and all of a sudden it gets to the full point and we just boom! And there it is and it spews upon the wife. And the wife starts spewing it back and it's going back and forth and the stench is all over the place and the children are sitting there watching it. And then we go and we wonder why our kids don't want to walk with Jesus when they get older. Because they saw the spewing of the chamber pots of husband and wife and then they go to church and they say, I surrender all. Do you hear what I'm saying? I'm trying to make a graphic reality because we veiled Christ, the beauty of Christ. We veiled it to the world. Why will the world come if they see us spewing in the workplace? Why would they come if they see us cussing up a storm because we're having a bad day? Why would they come if your neighbors hear you screaming at each other in the home? Why would they come? So you can yell and scream at each other and know you have nightmares and then go to the workplace and talk to the girls about how much your husband's a jerk and then try and ask him to come to church. Do you hear what I'm saying? The spewing of the chamber pot, the pouring of it out upon one another, veiling the beauty of this God because we've allowed sin to reign in our mortal body instead of unveiling the beauty of this God. So how is Christ unveiled in our life? How is He unveiled? What does Paul tell us? Well, in Romans 6-7, he says anyone who has died has been freed from sin. And so how does he tell us to deal with it? Do you know the answer to marital conflict? I'll give you the answer to marital conflict. It's not counseling. It's death. That's the answer to it. I mean, 16 years I pastored. I'll give you this as an absolute. Couples that sat before me and did the blame game and says our marriage wouldn't be like this if she wasn't doing this and if he wasn't a jerk. There's no hope. As a pastor, you might as well get out of here. What's the use? Couples that would sit before me and we'd be willing to take a path of repentance and deal with their own sin. There was healing for it. Do you hear what I'm saying? There's no hope for marriages when people keep blaming each other, spewing the filth upon each other. But there's hope when you repent. And so how is Christ unveiled in our life? We die. Let me give just a crazy illustration here. Let's just pretend that this weekend there's going to be a funeral here and Pastor Nate is going to be officiating it. And it's an open casket funeral. So they bring the casket in and it's up here and the place is filling up with people that are doing what they do at funerals and saying their last goodbyes and trying to deal with the pain of loss. All of a sudden something happens. This big old guy storms in the doors and you hear him slam behind him and he marches down the aisle here and he comes up to the casket and pushes people out of the way. And he looks at the man glaring at him in the casket. And then all of a sudden you hear out of his mouth just come these cuss words like you haven't heard for a long time. I mean it's just coming out of him. He's just swearing up a storm and the worst thing you could imagine just spewing from his mouth and everybody turns around and looks at him just aghast. And then it gets a little worse. Then his anger rises so much he goes to the man and he starts punching on him. He's cussing him out. And then he grabs him and takes him and throws him to the ground and starts jumping on him and kicking him. And finally when he's done and he finishes swearing and all the violence on the body he walks out groaning and complaining. And everybody's just going whoa. That was weird. But you know what? That man was not even bothered that he was cussed out. Didn't even bother him. He wasn't angry that he was punched and kicked and totally degraded in that situation. You want to know why? He's dead. You want to know why we cop all kinds of attitudes? Because we're not dead. You want to know why we get offended easily? Because we're not dead. You want to know why we have bitterness and unforgiveness? Because we're not dead. It's what it all comes down to. If we would die those things wouldn't be there. The very aspect that we get angry shows that we're not dead. The very aspect that we get offended shows we're not dead. The very aspect that we have insecurities shows we're not dead. The very aspect that we have issues like that in our life any dimension of sin shows we've not died to those. But you know what we like to do? We like to do the Adam and Eve thing. Begin to blame everybody else. Instead of dealing with the reality of a fermenting chamber pot that's inside that God wants to do a deeper cleansing in. That he wants to do a transformation in a greater way. And so we need to understand that he calls us to die. In Galatians 2.20 Paul makes this wonderful statement. He says, I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live but Christ lives in me. The life I live in the body I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me. Do you know what happens when we die? Then Christ begins to live in us. When we die it starts unveiling him. When we start getting rid of the bitterness and unforgiveness. When we start getting rid of the anger and the attitudes. All the other junk. I mean the whole list of them that we can have in our lives and think we're wonderful Christians but this whole brewing chamber pot is still there and a spewing chamber pot that happens at particular times in our life. And do you know when we begin to spew? We also often try and say well you know I just occasionally got this problem with anger it just rises up once in a while you know it's just you know it's just not a major thing. But you want to know what comes out of you is what you are. It's been there all along. It's just that particular pain or problem or prosperity revealed something in your life that brought it to the surface and now God will confront and say what are you going to do with this? Are you going to run from it? Are you going to deal with it? Are you going to nail that to the cross? Or are you going to blame your husband? Or blame your spouse? Or blame your parents? Or blame the boss? Or blame that you're tired? What we do is we veil the beauty of who this God is. Let's take a moment and look at Galatians 5. Galatians 5 brings out the fruit of the spirit and the fruit of the flesh. The fruit of the flesh. I want to bring out a thought to you that's very important. And in Galatians 5 I believe it's the 19th verse it says that the works of the flesh are obvious. Now let me ask a very serious question. Are they obvious to you? Are the works of the flesh in your life obvious to you? Now they may be obvious to you of your spouses but are your works of the flesh obvious to you? Because they're in you whether you want to admit them or not. It's just whether you see them and are doing something about them whether you're blind to them and making excuses for them. They're there. Do you see the works of the flesh? Are they obvious to you? Are they obvious to you? You'll never deal with the works of the flesh in your life until they are obvious to you and you're willing to do something about it. Until you're willing to do something about it the works of the flesh will stay there ferment, spew and you'll have a whole list of excuses of why they're there. Only when they become obvious to you and you begin to go to God and cry for mercy and strength and grace and power to change only when you're willing to crucify those things will there be the transformation of your life. Only in that situation. Until that time they will only ferment and get worse. Let me give an interesting story. Last year I was in Maine preaching and while I was in Maine preaching at this one church a family asked us to come over to eat lunch with them. And so we went over to their house to eat and he was a nurse had been a nurse for many years but hadn't been working for about a year because he had an accident and in an accident he went and had fallen down and broke a bone and when they went to investigate to set the bone they found that his bones some of his bones had hollowed out. And as they went deeper into it they found that he had a very rare blood disease that was eating out the inside of his bones. And so the treatment was a very different treatment I hadn't heard of it at that time and what it was is they gave him some particular chemicals and hooked up a tube to the back of his neck somehow and started harvesting his own stem cells. His wife went and said that they were absolutely beautiful they looked like opals. So finally when they harvested his own stem cells they were going to give his stem cells back to him. So they gave him a private room in the hospital and so they started giving it back to him. But something interesting happened in this three day process of giving back those stem cells to him he started to smell. And so the smell became so bad that when the family came to visit that the kids wanted to throw up and they couldn't stay to be with their father because the stench was so bad. And it's what happens to everybody in this particular treatment. And so it was just a horrifying smell the doctors and nurses come in just do their job real quick and back out they're used to it enough that they can handle it to do the quick stuff but to go out and they have to leave the man to himself because the stink is so bad. But you know what he said that was so interesting? He could never ever smell himself. What an example of sin. Everybody else can smell a spewing and fermenting and all the junk but we're blind and oblivious to it. We grow used to it we're so accustomed to it we just think this is part of our personality. We go to people and say you don't like me it's too bad. Not understanding that it's this fermenting chamber pot the stench of it is horrifying but we become used to it so it's not that big a deal. But then you look at the breakdown of marriages and every breakdown of every marriage you know what it's all about? It's all sin. All sin, always sin absolutely every time. There may rarely be an innocent party rarely once in a while there might be but it's always usually takes two to tango. Do you hear what I'm saying? But yet we make excuses. You know what I never hear and I'm not saying this to pick on divorcees or anything else I'm not going to get into that but you know what I very rarely ever hear? Is repentance on the part of divorcees. Because you know what? They still don't want to admit their sin but they sure can blame their ex. Sure can speak of how big a jerk he was or how big a jerk she was and never deal with their own sin. So is there forgiveness then? Is there forgiveness? If they don't deal with their sin is there forgiveness? That's an interesting thought. There's this wonderful statement that Paul brings out in verses 8 and 9. He says, This is the idea of Christ being unveiled in the midst of suffering. In the midst of our pain. Is Christ unveiled when you suffer? Things are going easy. It can be nice and easy to go and worship God and praise Him. What if everything's going wrong? What if life is getting very difficult? What do you do then? Are you rejoicing? Are you praising Him? Are you adoring Him? Are you acknowledging that He's still good though you may not understand what goodness is? We have a real problem with that. We don't understand what goodness is. We define goodness by happiness. God, if you make me happy, you're good. If you're not making me happy, I don't know if you are anymore. Right? Isn't that usually how we do it? But you know, God is so good. He is so absolutely good. And His goodness is so otherworldly that He had the Babylonians come in and wipe out Israel. That's goodness that'll upset us. You want to know why? Because He's out not for our temporal well-being. He's out for our eternal well-being. He has a whole different agenda. His definition of good is totally different. So He can be absolutely wonderful when all the disasters and pain and suffering is going on. Because you know what He wants to do? He wants to manifest Himself as God. Is He Lord in the midst of my pain? Is He Lord in the midst of my suffering? Is He Lord when everything's going wrong? Is He Lord? Or is the old chamber pot spewing? You see, there's a tremendous price to love like Jesus. A tremendous price when pain and suffering and difficulties and challenges, when life doesn't go the way we want. There's a tremendous price to love in the midst of that. And it's a tremendous price to love like Christ, period. Do I want Christ unveiled in me? That means I have to allow the spewing. I have to allow that to be crucified, nailed to the cross. I have to have those very things. I must deal with them. Or Christ will be veiled in my life. His beauty, others will not see. But you know, there's something I think so phenomenal about this. I just want to touch on this for a moment. I think this is just absolutely beautiful. Do you know, when the treasure dwells in the pot, whatever the pot goes through, the treasure goes through too. That means the pot is never alone. No matter how painful and difficult and hard life gets, the treasure's still in the pot. Never, never abandoned. Never left alone. What a phenomenal thought. That he would be there in the midst of my pain, in the midst of my difficulties, in the midst of my sorrow. And the worst things that are happening to me, that he would be there in it all if I would just allow him to be unveiled in my life. If I'd allowed him to be unveiled in the midst of pain, in the midst of loss. What a tremendous thought. Hudson Taylor was a missionary to China, and he started what was called the China Inland Mission. It became a missionary movement that was totally by faith, which meant that they did not go around and raise funds or anything else. I'm not saying it's right or wrong, one way's better or worse. That's not what I'm saying, but that's what Hudson Taylor did. So here was a young man that went in the mission field and started believing for God to supply for his missionary endeavors. As he matured and God took him deeper, and guess what, as he learned to crucify that old nature and find a place to rest in Christ, he started believing for more and more. And the missionary started growing, and more and more came until eventually, in his later years, he was having to believe God for almost, for the money, for almost for a thousand missionaries. All by faith. Not writing out letters, not sending them out, please send us, our needs are great, we're going to close the mission if you don't respond. It was totally by faith, believing that God was big enough to know. And he wrote this letter to a friend. This is a portion of that letter. He says, Without them, we could never know how tender, faithful, and almighty our God is. An absolutely phenomenal thought. That in the midst of pain, rather than the complaining, rather than focusing upon the chamber pot, you know what he did? He set his eyes upon the most beautiful thing that there is. Upon a faultless God. The perfection of a holy God. The final point I want to bring out, and then I'll close, is that Christ is unveiled with an eternal mindset. In 2 Corinthians, the 4th chapter, the very last verse, in the 18th verse, he says, So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal. And he's continuing his argument, okay? So it's not a different thought, it's a continuation of the arguments that he had presented. But do you know what he's saying here? That Christ is unveiled through an eternal mindset. What do I mean by an eternal mindset? You see, Paul was not living for the moment. He was not living for the possessions. He wasn't living for the ease of life. He wasn't living to accumulate more stuff. He wasn't living for retirement. He wasn't living for the time where he could go into play mode. He wasn't living for this thing or that thing. He had his eyes set upon a creator God. He had his eyes fixed upon the beauty of this being. And you all know what? When we look upon his beauty, we begin to see the reality of what the world is. C.S. Lewis had this radio program, and on one of his radio programs he had this story that he brought out, or this analogy that he brought out. And it had been a time that he had gone through suffering with the cancer of his wife, which he had married late in life, and she was dying or had already died, I can't remember which. But he spoke of life as shadowlands, that we're just living in shadowlands. And what he was referring to was that shadows are not real. It's just an image of what is real. And so when the sun is setting, the shadows are long. And you go and you try and grab a shadow, but there's nothing to it. It's just a representation of what is real. And he was referring to this life as just a shadow. But yet we become a people clinging to the shadows, living for the shadows, not realizing that the shadows are pointing to another world, to another life, to what is real life, and that we've not gotten to the real life yet, that we're just in the shadow world. And yet as Christians we can cling to the shadows, we can cling to this, thinking this is what life is. I'll be happy when I have stuff. I'll be happy when I have this, when I have that, when I attain this situation. Not understanding that Christ is unveiled when we gaze upon Him and we live with an eternal mindset. There's an old saying, and I just always have disagreed with it. It's the idea that people have said that some people are so heavenly minded, they're no earthly good. That's an absolute lie. You know, the problem is we're too earthly minded, so we're no heavenly good. If we were more heavenly minded, we would be of tremendous earthly value. That's what's needed to be more heavenly minded, to have our eyes fixed upon the beauty of this God, the magnificence of Him. Not upon me, not upon the chamber pot, not upon the world even the chamber pot lives in, but upon the magnificence and beauty and majesty of this God. And so we need to ask ourself a question, is Jesus all you need? You know, that's an easy thing to say until He's all we have. It's an easy thing until you go through your wilderness experience and God says, will you live for 40 years on manna and never have another change of clothes or another change of shoes? Am I enough if you have no more in your life? Am I enough if you don't have any more natural blessings in this world? Am I enough? Am I enough for you? Or must you have Jesus and houses and Jesus and stuff and Jesus and possessions and Jesus and money? Must you have Jesus and this world? Or is Jesus more than enough? Now that may sound radical, but you know, that's what it's all about. Because guess what we're going to have in heaven? It's going to be Him. It's not really going to be Jesus and mansions and Jesus and streets of gold. Those things are going to be meaningless. When we walk through pearly gates, we're going to fix our eyes on absolute beauty. And it's not the new Jerusalem. It's going to be Him who sits on the throne. Let me share with you a final story, and then I'll close. Hudson Taylor lost his first wife on the mission field. She died. He married a missionary in China, and they had a couple children together. They'd been married 12 years, and now she was dying. And she was a precious woman of God, had the fire of God in her, and was a tremendous influence in the work that Hudson Taylor was doing. And so as she is dying, the room is filled with silent people that were some missionaries and converts. And they're there when she is breathing heavily, when her face is so ashen that you could tell it was only moments away. And then she finally breathes her last breath, and something phenomenal happens. Hudson Taylor falls to his knees and raises his hands and says, Thank you, Jesus, for 12 wonderful years with this woman. Thank you for the children you gave us. Thank you for the souls we want. And he just began praising and adoring and thanking God, even in the midst of the loss. You know what I think happened there? I think missionaries looked at that man, mouths gaping open, and he went and says, I can do that. And those converts looked at him, overwhelmed with Christ being unveiled in him and saying, I could be like that. Do you know how absolutely beautiful that would be to gaze upon it, to see Christ unveiled in the life, whether it's in the midst of prosperity or whether it's in the midst of pain? And the hope that it gives to others, the attractiveness that it is to others? He wants to be unveiled in our life. Let's look to the Lord in prayer.