In this sermon, the speaker discusses the concept of vital truth in the Bible. He explains that while the Bible is full of truth, there are varying degrees of importance to different truths. He uses the analogy of concentric circles to illustrate this, with the most vital truths being at the center. The speaker emphasizes the importance of focusing on these vital truths, such as salvation through faith in Jesus Christ, rather than getting caught up in less vital truths. He also encourages reliance on the power of God rather than human wisdom or psychology.

Five weeks ago, I started a series on vital truth. Vital truth. Just to reintroduce it for the folks who are visiting, the Bible's full of truth. It's the book of truth. But like with anything in life, there are vital truths and less vital. There are circles, big circumferences in the word of God of truth. And this way out here is true, it is true. And then you get deeper into the center, most vital truths, and it's right there. So they're concentric circles that are going around of truth. So the qualifications for a deacon or what Israel, what happened at Mara in the Old Testament desert is not as vital as salvation through faith in Jesus Christ. You can become a Christian and grow strong not knowing about Mara, but you should learn about the place called Mara, which means bitterness. But those other truths, you really gotta focus on vital truths. It's like the bones in your body. You break a pinky, it hurts, and you got a broken bone. You break, I was in a car accident in Argentina a lot of years ago, and man, my interpreter sitting next to the driver, boom, the car was totaled. I was in a bankina, a ditch, went flying off, coulda all died, and he broke this bone here. Now you break your femur, that's a lot different than if you break your pinky. So I wanna talk about vital truth. And last week, I told you about two sentences that I read in a very spiritual book, devotional book, that I still use and consult. And these two sentences were so strong to me, so helpful, I wrote them immediately in my Bible. Whenever you read a good sentence, write it on the fly leaf of your Bible. You know, it has pages here sometimes that are just white like this, and you can just write those sentences, and maybe who said it, because they're a blessing. Here were the two sentences, let's look at them. All merit is in the Son. All power is from the Spirit. Say them with me. All merit is in the Son. That was last week. Now, all power is from the Spirit. And we learned last week, because this is a critical truth, and if you don't know it and stand on it and get it in your heart, the devil will have a heyday with you by accusing, accusing, accusing, and you can turn into a legalist, trying to live good enough to be accepted by God. All kinds of people are trying to do that. We're all, as Luther said, born legalists. We wanna earn, we wanna have merit of our own. Hey, I get to heaven because I did such and such. And then when we fail, we try to outdo the other ledger so that more good stuff happens than bad stuff. That makes sense. That's what you do in school. You get eight right, you get an 80. Nine right is a 90. Five right is a 50. 10 right, that's 100. You got it. And salvation has nothing to do with that, according to the teaching of Christ. Salvation is by grace. It's a gift. So you can't have a gift and merit at the same time. If you merit it, it's pay. If it's a gift, you didn't do anything except receive the gift. Now, all merit is in the Son. We are accepted by God only because of the righteousness of Christ, not my righteousness or your righteousness. How many got that straight? Say aloud, amen. Amen. It's Christ's righteousness which was imputed to me, counted in my favor, on my side as if it belonged to me. I gave him my sins when I put my faith in him on what he did on the cross, dying for me, shedding his blood. He gives me his perfect robe of righteousness. What a great trade. Dirty rags of sin we give him, and he gives us his perfect righteousness. So our standing before God, our standing before God never fluctuates no matter what we've done. You're not more saved one day because you read four chapters. You're not less saved the next day because you yelled at your wife when you shouldn't have. Salvation isn't, oh, how many are happy? How many are happy for that? Say aloud, amen, please. And if you think it is, then you're constantly looking in and checking yourself. Now you're not looking at him, and he is our righteousness. He is our salvation. Now, someone might say, as happened back 2,000 years ago, oh, I love that system. It's my grace. It's free. Doesn't matter how you live. You can never earn acceptance with God. I love that. I'm gonna party my life away. I'm gonna sleep around. I'm gonna do drugs. I'm gonna get drunk. I'm gonna curse. I'll lie. I'll steal because, Pastor, you just said, no matter what you do or don't do, you're not gonna be accepted by God by it, and Paul's teaching, the apostle, was twisted back then to an excuse for indulgence of the flesh, for lasciviousness, for law-breaking, because I'm saved by grace. Two things about that. Paul says anyone who thinks like that, obviously, has twisted the Scriptures to their own destruction, because when you come into a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, and he's your Savior, and you can sing, for all he's done for me, redeemed and set me free, there's no way you can know him and then wanna go back and do the things that nailed him to the cross. Who in the world's gonna practice what nailed him to the cross? No one. No one who knows him. So anyone who tries that just doesn't know him. They're trying to twist the Scripture to justify their own lifestyle. No, but then there's a second reason. When a person becomes a Christian, puts their faith in Christ, they're not only justified, just as if they've never sinned. Just think, before God today, it's just as if we've never sinned. The salvation of Jesus is so great that it's just as if we've never sinned, because we have the righteousness of Christ. And if you say, no, that's too good to be true, well then, how much sin do you want on you? Because even a little will keep us away from the portals of heaven. So it's just as if we've never sinned, all because of Jesus. How many are happy he's washed away your sins so that they're all gone? Wave one hand at me, please. All right, so we're together. The other thing is, is that he puts his Spirit, his Holy Spirit within us, and that's what makes us, you hear the expression, born again Christians. Jesus said to Nicodemus, you must be born again. And that new life, born again, is a supernatural life, the Holy Spirit coming in and living within us. Romans chapter eight says, if anybody does not have the Spirit of Christ living within them, they are not of Christ. They're not a Christian. So it's not church membership, and it's not even mere mental confirmation of the Word of God. It's belief in the heart that culminates in the Spirit coming in and living in us, and that's why the Bible says, don't you know that us collectively and individually, don't you know you're the temple of God, and the Holy Spirit lives within you? So as God looks down from heaven today, there's two kind of people in the street. He doesn't know race. If you know race and concentrate on that, you're not looking at God's viewpoint. He doesn't look at political party. He doesn't look at denomination. These things are foreign to him. There's just two kinds of people, people who have the Holy Spirit living in them and people who don't have the Holy Spirit living in them. They're not born again. Some of those people who are not born again go to church, but they're not born again. Their life has never been changed by the Spirit living within them. Now we come to the crux of the matter. All power is in the Spirit. The Spirit that was first given to us was given to us so that we would be able to say, Abba, Father, He's my Father. Why? I'm in His family. I know it. The Spirit bears witness inside of me that I'm now a child of God. Am I everything I should be? Nope, but I'm a child of God. The Spirit tells me that, bears witness with my spirit. How many know by that that you are a child of God? Just say amen. All right. Now, the Holy Spirit was put inside of us also so that we wouldn't have to keep living the way we were living before. Because wouldn't it be a downer if you taught me justification by faith, all righteousness in the Son, right? And I went back. And then the same habits of the flesh, the same stuff that ate my lunch all before I met Jesus, same anger, same hatred, same jealousy, same pride, same lust, same pornography, same drugs, same alcohol, same sleeping around. That was characterized my whole life. Now I'm in Christ and praise God I'm going to heaven, but I have to live like that. Like, you know, I'm just impotent for the rest of my life. And the world has its way with me because the world has power. It can squeeze you into its mold, make you think not according to the Word of God, make you think the way it thinks. How many people today go to church on Sunday? They don't think according to the Bible, they think according to the world. They're so immersed in the world, drink in the world, drink in the media, drink in the movies, drink in the TV, drink in everything, they talk and act just like the world. But they go to church and they're trying to be Christians. And then the flesh has power. Those habits, those ingrained habits. You know, when you do something 500 times, it's a habit. Right? You know, you feel pressure, you go for a bottle, and you drink something to numb you. Or Oxycontin or anything, it could be in any area. And then the devil has power. The world, the flesh, and the devil, they all have power. And God said, I'm not going to let you live powerless. I'm not going to let you just remain what you are. My salvation is a full salvation. I not only justify you and gain acceptance for you into heaven with me through my son Jesus, but I put the third person of the Godhead, Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit inside of you so that you can experience the power that he will give you to be what I want you to be. You don't have to be what you used to be. Now, do we all understand that, take advantage of it? Sadly, no. Some more than others. But let's just look at this verse here. These are the last words of Jesus according to Acts chapter one. On one occasion while he was eating with them, he gave them, this is after his resurrection, he gave them this command, do not leave Jerusalem, but wait for the gift my father promised, which you have heard me speak about. For John baptized with water, John the Baptist, but in a few days you'll be baptized with the Holy Spirit. Then they gathered, yes, around him and asked, Lord, are you at this time going to restore the kingdom to Israel? They had a prophecy question. He said to them, it's not for you to know the times or dates the father has set by his own authority. Don't be trying to figure out the prophetic chart. But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria and to the ends of the earth. You will receive power. I've died on the cross, shed my blood. You now have acceptance with my father. But I have something else for you. You're gonna have power through the Holy Spirit. This is very interesting. The father sent the son. The son lived for 33 and a half years, basically, ministered for three and a half years on the earth. Then his mission and time was up. He died on the cross, he resurrected, then he ascended back to heaven. He now sits in heaven, praying for us as our great high priest, and one day he's coming back again. But right now, the location, if you will, of Jesus is in heaven. To be alive, the Bible says, is to be absent from the Lord, to be in your body. Now, just like the father sent the son, Jesus, when he returned to heaven, sent the Holy Spirit in a way that he had never been before for his mission. The father sent the son, the son did his part, and then he now sent the Spirit. The only agent God has on earth right now is the Holy Spirit. He is a he, he's not an it. He's not an impersonal force. Unfortunately, the King James translation of Holy Ghost, rather than Holy Spirit, has led to, at least in my life growing up, I thought the Holy Ghost was an it. But he's not an it, he's a he. Just as much God as the son, just as important to us right now, as what the son did for us on the cross of Calvary. We needed the son, he came, God knew it, he did what he did for us. Now God has sent the Spirit because he knows what we need. We need power, or we're gonna be pushed around like a bunch of weak children. He sent power, he knew what we needed. He sent power. But the power is associated with a person, and that person is the Holy Spirit. Everywhere in Scripture, he is given personhood. He has feelings. He can be hurt. He can be grieved. He can be vexed. He can be rejected. He can be made sad. He lives inside of all of us. That's why many Christians have these ups and downs, and they want counseling, but their behavior patterns are making the Holy Spirit inside of them sad. So of course you're gonna feel that, because he's linked to your spirit. So you go and gossip, or you say something, maybe it doesn't bother you because you're so used to it, but it bothers him because he doesn't like that. Now he's sad. Now you feel a loss of peace. Where did my joy go? Why don't I wanna pick up my Bible like I used to? How come when I read it, it's a closed book? It's because the Holy Spirit, who is the only power that does anything for God on the earth, has been just made sad. He's been vexed. Everything that happens right now that God is associated with in anybody's life here, let me just use the choir, and these are the sopranos, right? Everything is done by the Holy Spirit. Does she ever feel like praying? It's the Holy Spirit. It's not her. It has nothing to do with her. It's the Holy Spirit working inside of her. Does she ever read a verse, and it comes alive, and she shares it with someone? Totally the work of the Holy Spirit. Everything God does has to be done through the Holy Spirit, everything. Everything, because the Holy Spirit is the only agent God has on this planet. Jesus is seated at the right hand of the Father. When we say that his presence is here or Jesus does something, he's doing it through the Holy Spirit, who is often called the Spirit of Christ. Theologically, it's the work of the Spirit. Jesus said, when he comes, he'll take the things of me and make it real to you. When he comes, he'll do things I couldn't do because I only could be with you. He'll be in you. Peter, I was with you three and a half years. You still denied me when I got arrested. Ah, but when he comes, he's gonna make you into totally new creations. If any be in Christ Jesus, they are a new creation. Why? Because God had promised in the Old Testament, I'll give you a new heart, and I'll put a new spirit inside of you. And this spirit transcends anything kind of life on earth. You know, a tuft of grass can look at a rock on a mountain and look down at the rock and say, you're inorganic, massive, just hardness, and I have life in me. But then an animal can look down on the grass and say, you might have life and can grow, but I have consciousness of some kind, and I am of animal life. But then a 12-year-old kid can look down at a dog or whatever animal and say, you might have consciousness, but you can't reason. You can't think up things. You can't create. And as high as those different levels of the life are, now we're talking about life in the Holy Spirit. This life from the Holy Spirit, this power that God promised us, transcends anything that's human. Let me give you one great example of that. When God said we need power, we need power for a lot of things. I'll end with a couple here in a minute. But we need power to understand God's purpose for your life. Do you know God's purpose for your life? The only one who can tell you is the Holy Spirit. Do you know what this Bible really teaches? I'm not saying intellectually. Because you can have a PhD and read this Bible and know nothing about it because it's not made real to your heart. Only the Holy Spirit could teach you. For example, let's just look at this passage. My message and my preaching were not with wise and persuasive words, but with a demonstration of the Spirit's power so that your faith might not rest on human wisdom, but on God's power. What a challenge that is to me. Because here's Paul the apostle, the preacher, saying, here's my style of preaching. I didn't come to you with wise and persuasive words. You think I was eloquent? You think I spun the phrase and had you all just like, oh, what a speaker? He said, no, I didn't come that way at all because God never intended me to preach that way. It was not with wise and persuasive words, but with a demonstration of the Spirit's power. What did that look like? As he spoke, the Spirit took his words and penetrated people's hearts, not just their minds and said, oh, how interesting. It went into their hearts, so they got convicted and said, I need Jesus. Oh, I'm a sinner. I walked in here, was proud, thought I was great, and now through this guy's preaching and the Word of God, through the Spirit, I'm undone, I need Jesus. So that your faith would not stand in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God. To summarize this, the church was supposed to be run by the power of the Holy Spirit, not by talent, not by production, not by smoke and mirrors, not by nice-looking people who have great voices that had nothing to do with the way God intended his church to be built. He said, you'll receive power, and when that power rests on my people, they will do my work, they will be witnesses, they will make converts, they will make disciples, they will build up other believers. It won't be because what's in her or what school she went to or how good her voice is, it'll be because she's a vessel that the Holy Spirit is gonna use. And the Spirit will draw people to Christ and bring conviction and be a blessing to other believers. And without the Spirit, you know what churches will become and are becoming? Productions. You don't meet God, you see a production. And it's got a little religious wording to it, but it's basically a production. It's a display of human talent, human rhetoric, human intellectual power, not God's power. God says, no, I'm gonna build my church with poor and lowly and simple things, because the poorer you are and the lowlier you are, the more my Spirit can use you because you won't put your confidence in yourself. You'll put your confidence in my power. Imagine when Peter preached the first sermon, and less than two months before, he had denied the Lord three times. And here he was preaching. Who would you depend on if you were Peter? Your track record? How great you were? You were a fisherman. You haven't been trained for anything. So the church was supposed to be run not on human psychology, Freudian thought. That's what people in the world who don't know God can do. We're supposed to be doing something nobody can do because we have the Spirit with us. And you can't even explain it when God is working. It isn't two plus two plus two equals six. It isn't. It's two plus two plus two equals 1,050. Because how do you get there? Because God's in it. I remember as a college-age kid, I'm in the church. The Spirit is manifesting Himself in the service. It was a church, thank God, like I grew up in. It wasn't that church, but where Carol dad pastored, that believed in what I'm talking about, the person and work of the Holy Spirit, that He's alive. He's not dead. We don't come here to study a dead book and go home deader. Jesus is alive. Come on, can we say amen? Through the Holy Spirit, He's alive. The sweetness of God's presence is in the service. And a visitor was there, and the pastor had been told she's an opera singer and she has a lot of great talent, great voice, and they had arranged she's gonna sing a song. And lady got up to sing, and she had a good voice. The only trouble was she knew it. So she did a musical display with her voice and was all over the place, and she could flat out sing. But what grieving. The whole sweetness of the meeting was deadened because some little puny human being was trying to use their talent to show off or impress somebody. And the Holy Spirit is only there to glorify Jesus. If while I'm preaching, I try to glorify myself or this church, but the Holy Spirit will say, oh, you're lifting up Jim Cimbala, I'm out. I wasn't sent for that, you're on your own now. Keep talking, do whatever you want. Oh, you wanna lift up Jesus? Okay, good, I'll come and help you now. I'll bless you, I'll strengthen you, I'll inspire you. Same with a choir, same with a soloist. So, oh my goodness, this song was so beautifully sung, and the meeting just bottomed out. You could feel it palpably. And the pastor was sensitive. He knew something had gone south. There was an announcement or something. He knew he had to get up to preach. And you don't wanna get up to preach where the Holy Spirit has just left. So he said, Sister Evelyn back there, Evelyn, would you just come up and get a song? And would you just go talk to the piano player? I want you to sing before I speak. She was totally caught off guard. He knew she could sing a little. And she walked up, and I remember thinking, what's going on? And she went over to the piano, and she talked, they talked. And then he brings, he says, Sister Evelyn's gonna sing before I speak. Some simple hymn. You know what? She might have been good enough to make the choir. Maybe she would have passed Carol's vocal test that you all took, maybe. But it didn't matter. Maybe she was a touch flat on the high notes. She just closed her eyes. And sang from here. And the Spirit came. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh. It's not by might, nor by power, nor by talent, but it's by my Spirit, saith the Lord. Now, the world laughs at that. I'm not gonna show the verse, but read it later. 1 Corinthians 2. The world laughs at that because it can't understand spiritual things. Spiritual truths, spiritual things can only be understood by the spiritually minded who have the Holy Spirit, who can decipher it and know it. It's foolishness to the world. That's why people who are arrogant or rejecting God can come in. No matter what testimony they hear, no matter what I speak, the very words of Christ, it's a joke to them. They don't get it until the Spirit gives them revelation. And then they get it. Come on, don't you remember when you didn't get it before? Do I get an amen here when we didn't get it? And now we get it. Oh, yeah. The Spirit is teaching us. He's the only one that can make the things of Christ so real that it changes your life. Otherwise, it's just intellectualism. You can be a teacher at a seminary with a PhD, be a professor, and be totally out in left field, not even know the first thing about God, even though you know everything. And you can be a third grade dropout and be this close to Jesus and be full of the Spirit. So because the Spirit is the only one who can do anything through us, remember, just like we can't be accepted by God except through Jesus, I can't do a thing. I can't preach, I can't treat my wife right, I can't be polite, I can't be humble, I can't be pure, I can't be, you name anything in the world, and I'm telling you, I can't do it unless the Holy Spirit works through me. He's the only one who can produce love, peace, joy, meekness, kindness, long-suffering. He's the only one who can do that in your life. So look, just like some people try to work their way into heaven, a lot of us get the revelation of it's, all merit is in the Son, we get that, but then we're gonna go to work. Oh yeah, I'm gonna show God I love Him. I'm gonna do it. Oh wow, I see those faults. I'll try even harder. No listen, I'll try harder. I said I'm gonna try harder. You think I'm joking? I know I've said that about 200 times, but this time I really mean it. And if that wasn't so sad, it would be funny, because we've all been there. I'm gonna change my life when God says, you'll receive power. Jesus said without me, you can do nothing. That's so hard to accept, because we're all go-getters, we're all spiritually type A. We all wanna have a piece of the action. Did you know His power is so great, it can break any habit? Any habit. Tell me what you have. Not you break it, the Spirit can break it. Spirit can break anything. It broke 22 years of my dad's drinking. Broke it. Broke it. He was sober as a judge till the day he died. You grew up around racism, white racism, black racism, Latino racism, Korean racism, any kind of racism. That stuff is in you. You took it in with your mother's milk. The only one who can break that. You can have teaching until the word comes out of your ears, it won't change you. Only God's Spirit can change you. Pornography, Oxycontin, a mouth that's out of control, jealousy, depression, negativity, insecurity, fear. Only the Spirit can break that. You can talk about it till the cows come home. Nothing's changing until God, the Holy Spirit comes. Until you say, I do believe this. Just like I believe all merit is in the Son, I believe that all power is from the Spirit. See, it's so hard for us to stop. Unless I'm speaking for myself, I'm a fighter. I'll try 10,000 times. I'm Polish, we're not smart, but we keep going. We just, hey, hey, one more, one more. Then when you get to the end, Spirit come. I'll never change. I'll never change. God doesn't mind you saying that, if you have the humility to say it. Last word, though, remember. A lot of people wanna be delivered, let's say, from pornography, but they don't wanna be made like Christ. They don't wanna keep stealing or doing something with the IRS because they don't wanna get caught, but they don't wanna become like Jesus. And remember, the Spirit doesn't come as a Band-Aid. The only way he delivers us with his power is by making us more like Christ. And he makes Christ the goal, so that as we're pursuing Christ and he's creating in us all the fruit of the Spirit. Remember, fruit of the Spirit, not your fruit. Not my fruit, fruit of the Spirit. Love, joy, peace. As that stuff is being filled in us through the filling of the Spirit, all this other stuff just falls off. You don't stand and fight it. I'm not gonna do that, not gonna do that. Not gonna yell at her again. You will. But as you become more like Christ, you won't even be able to ever lift your voice to her because you're becoming more like Jesus. The Spirit is working in you. Do you all receive what I've said here this morning? How many know it's the Word of God, say amen. How many wanna be more filled with the Holy Spirit? Lift your hand. If you're behind me battling something, if you're up there battling, and I'll tell you one last thing. In prayer last night, I felt the Lord wants me to say this. If you're running out of gas, the Spirit is the only one who can give you endurance. If it's hard and you're going through a hard season, He's the only one. Listen to me, listen to me. I've told you about the times when the phone rang, I would start to cry. That's how bad my nerves and my inside was. And I wanted to run, I wanted to flee. I say this to my shame. One Sunday, my late father-in-law was still alive then, and it was just demasiado, it was too much for me. I couldn't come to church, I couldn't. My daughter was away, everything's going crazy. My wife had had surgery, and she's talking about not wanting to live anymore. I'm telling you, I am out of it. My nerves are shot, and I lost my endurance. And my father-in-law and I ended up on the phone, this is at 8 o'clock, 8.30 in the morning on a Sunday, and he goes, you gotta go to church. I'm not going, I'm calling you to just say, I don't know what I'm gonna do, but I can't go. I'm out of gas, come on. Has anybody here ever got out of gas? Am I the only one here? Just as they say in Spanish, demasiado, too much. And I can hear my father-in-law say, Jim, you're gonna go, you're gonna go. God's gonna help you, you're gonna go. You're gonna go and you're gonna preach. And he prayed for me, and the Holy Spirit came. And he gave me strength, and I came to church, and no one knew I was hanging by a thread. What do you think, I'm gonna tell you all that? I'm going through that, and I got up and preached, and God helped me, and after the service, people hugging me, oh, what a word from God. What a wonderful man of God. Oh, how God used you. I didn't wanna go to church that day. It was the Holy Spirit. It's never us, it's always him. Come on, can we say amen to that? It's never us, never. Always him. Close your eyes with me. If you're needing endurance, because it's hard right now, just stand up where you are, don't come forward, just stand up where you are. Spirit of God, give us eyes to see and ears to hear what you're trying to show us today. That God in his love has sent all the power we need. It's the same power that raised Jesus from the dead. It's divine power. And there's nothing facing us that the Holy Spirit can't help us over or through. Nothing, nothing in this world. Nothing he can't change. Nothing he can't overcome. Nothing that he can't give the victory over. Nothing, nothing, nothing. And on top of that, nothing. He has all power. He has God's power, he is God. Help us to believe that like little children. And not lean on our own understanding and our own power, but trust in you like little children. So that our faith would not stand in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God. I thank you for all my brothers and sisters, first time visitors. May you touch them. May they go back to wherever they come from, full of the Holy Spirit, full of the word of God, full of Jesus. And we're gonna live out a beautiful day today. You're gonna help us. Bless the children and whatever that was planted in their hearts today, in their lessons. Holy Spirit, water it, water it. Work in the children, work in the children. Even the three and four and five and six, work in them, Spirit of God. For with you, nothing is impossible. Help us not to look to men, but to God, who gave us his Son and gave us his Spirit. We pray it in Jesus' name. And everyone said. Praise God. Can we give God one last hand clap of praise? Would you turn and gently give five or six people a hug or a handshake, whatever is appropriate?