Open-Hearted Living

Transcript

Alright, thank you very much. And hello again radio friends, how in the world are you? You doing alright today? Well I trust everything’s alright at your house, if you’ve struck a rough day remember you can look up and say, “Lord Jesus see me through this one,” and He will. For He hath said, “I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee, so that we may boldly say the Lord is my helper and I will not fear what man shall do unto me.” You don’t have to be afraid of even the rough days because God will see you through. Hallelujah for that.

Yes, it’s your friend Dr. Cook, and I’m with you in the third chapter of First Timothy. We just started to walk around in the 16th verse, “Without controversy, great is the mystery of Godliness.” We looked at some of the mystery verses in the New Testament, and then we discovered that the starting point of Godliness is your and my procedure in inviting God to take up residence in our lives.

Now sometimes this involves a certain amount of difficulty on our part; it involves some house cleaning you might say, sometimes. Notice what Paul says in Second Corinthians, I’m just turning over to it now. He says, “If you really want your heart and the scope of your life to be enlarged,” verse 13 Second Corinthians 6, he says “Don’t be unequally yolked together with unbelievers, for what fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness? And what communion hath light with darkness? And what concord hath Christ with Belial? Or what part hath he that believeth with an infidel? And what agreement hath the temple of God with idols? Ye are the temple of the living God. As God hath said, ‘I will dwell in them.'” See here it is, “I will dwell in them and walk in them, and I will be their God and they shall be My people.”

Now what will produce that blessed result? Inviting God in involves, verse 17, Second Corinthians chapter 6, “‘Wherefore, come out from among them and be ye separate,’ saith the Lord, ‘and touch not the unclean thing and I will receive you and will be a Father unto you and ye shall be my sons and daughters,’ saith the Lord almighty.” It involves housecleaning.

The perceptible presence of God in your life is directly proportional to your willingness to deal with that which you know is not right with God. Oh, that is such a simple but frightening concept. So often I’ve found myself praying, “Oh Lord bless me,” but down in my heart I was saying, “Lord let me have my way.” Have you ever been that way? God says, “Listen, if you want My Presence, you have to deal with the things that hinder My Presence. If you want My blessing you’ll have to deal with the things that hinder My blessing.” He said, “If you want Me to live in your life and walk in your shoes, you have to cut loose,” said He, “from those things that belong to the world system, and to the ruler of the world system, Satan himself.” He said, “There isn’t any fellowship, there isn’t any agreement, and there isn’t any concord-” that means working together. You can’t work together with the things of the world and have the blessing of God, there is the truth of it. Oh, I have to learn that and relearn it and relearn it, don’t you?

Because every day presents a different facet of living, and you have to apply that truth to the new angles of life, so to speak. Well let’s do it. Your awareness of the presence of God in your life is directly proportional to your willingness to cut clean from the things that grieve the Spirit of God, and that have no part in God’s scheme of things. “Come out,” said He, “from among them and be separate. Touch not the unclean thing.” Oh may God help us to learn that. Jesus, your blessed Savior, dwells within you, and by His Holy Spirit will guide you. If you want God’s blessing, if you want His Presence, this is the way to get it. Invite Him in and at the same time follow His direction in spiritual housecleaning, Godliness. God was manifest in the flesh. Then he says justified in the Spirit, and this, of course, so far as the incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ is concerned, has to do with the times when there was a voice from Heaven saying, “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased, hear Him.”

That voice came at the occasion of the baptism of the Lord Jesus Christ. “The Holy Spirit of God descending upon Him, and the Spirit of God-” I’m reading now from Matthew chapter 3- “Jesus, when He was baptized, went up straight way out of the water.” The Baptists, and I was ordained a Baptist minister, love to quote that verse ’cause you can’t equate going up out of the water with any form of baptism except immersion, I guess, but then we’re not arguing about that. I think there’ll be a lot of Presbyterians and Methodists and Lutherans, and people who were never baptized at all probably in Heaven if they have faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, just like the thief on the cross. Well we won’t get into an argument will we? It says He, “Went up straight way out of the water and lo the Heavens were opened unto Him and He saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove, lighting upon Him, and a voice from Heaven saying, ‘This is My beloved Son in whom I am well pleased.” Justified in the Spirit.

Now how does that apply to you and to me? Well, I think whatever form of baptism you practice it is a fact that believers’ baptism, properly engaged in in all sincerity and in commitment of your life to the Lord Jesus Christ, produces a tremendous spiritual experience where you are aware of the fact that the Spirit of God is witnessing with your own heart that you are indeed a child of God and that you’re going to live for Him. No question about that. Thousands of people have witnessed to it through the centuries.

So there’s one thing, but what else? Well, Paul says, “Be not drunk with wine wherein is excess but be filled with the Spirit.” This is a command, not an option, by the way, this is a command. It is God’s command for me to open every room in my heart house that the Spirit of God may fill me, and thus may control what I am and what I say and what I do.

Justified in the Spirit, so far as its application to you and to me, means, “Open your life to the Spirit of God, so that He can produce in you the righteousness of Christ, and can do through you the will of God, and can use you to help accomplish the eternal purposes of God.” That’s what it’s all about. Now how do you do this?

Dr. OJ Smith, who is now with the Lord, dear man of God and my own personal, precious friend through many years, said in my hearing one time; he said, “Now, this whole matter of being filled with the Spirit you can approach in the following manner:”

He said, “Make sure that you have received Christ as Savior, and if you are sure that you have received Christ as Savior, then sit down with a package of 3×5 index cards and write on a separate card every part of all of your life. Write down how much money you have and where you have it, your bank account, your possessions, your car or cars, your house, your clothing, your family, your loved ones, your job, your ambitions, your hopes. And then write down the areas of your life of which you may well be ashamed, your failures, and your weaknesses, and your besetting sins, and the places where you don’t get along quite as well. Write everything about you as separate entries on separate pieces of paper,” said he.

Then continued Dr. Smith, “You take each of these areas and visualize them as a room in a large house. And you take each of these entries one by one, and you hold that separate piece of paper in your hand and you pray about it in faith and you say, ‘Lord, just the same way as I received Christ Jesus as my savior, so now I invite the Holy Spirit of God into this area of my life.'” Let’s say you’re praying about your possessions, your money, and you say, ‘Lord, I invite you into this area of my life, money, and the things it can buy, and my ambitions about it, and my love of it, my desire for it, and my selfishness in the use of it, and all of the things that you know about, Blessed Lord, in the area of money as it relates to me, I invite you in by faith into that area of my life.'”

And he said, “You do that for every one of those rooms in your heart house until you have finished the list. And you have held out to God by faith a separate piece of paper on which is inscribed the name of a separate area of your life; you have held that out to God by faith and you’ve invited the Holy Spirit of God in.” Then said he, “When that is finished, you can by faith say ‘Lord, I thank thee that thou hast filled me with thy Holy Spirit.'” He said, “You can trust Him to fill every part of all of your life as you have offered each of those parts to Him by faith.”

I don’t know whether Mrs. Wasserzug is still living or not. The last I heard she was living in Florida, a dear woman of God, a great Christian leader. And I got acquainted with her in 1948, as I visited Beatenberg Switzerland. And then came later in August of that year to the World Congress of Youth For Christ leaders that was presided over by Brother Torrey Johnson, and anybody who was anybody in Youth For Christ was there. We had some good talks, Frau Dr. Wasserzug and I, and during one of them she said to me something like this:

She said, “When I began my ministry together with my husband,” (her husband had died some years previous to the time I met her. Dr. Wasserzug had been used of God to evangelize great portions of Germany and German-speaking Switzerland, particularly, and had started the Bible institute there at Beatenberg, the Bibelheim they called it. But he had slipped along to be with the Lord and now she was alone.) And she said to me, “In those early years when my husband and I had started our ministry, I was out preaching every night somewhere with him.” But she said, “Although I gave out thousands of copies of the Scriptures and religious tracts and leaflets, I wasn’t seeing very much fruit from all of my labors.”

And then she said, “Ruth Paxon came through this area and taught me something about the Holy Spirit of God,” and she said, pointing to a big outcropping of rock just above us on the mountain side there she said, “Do you see that big rock up there?” I said, “Yes.” She said, “I climbed up the mountain and sat on that rock and looked out across Lake Thun to the mountains on the other side of the Jungfrau, and the Matterhorn, and the other mountains.

And then I lifted my heart to God, and I invited Him into every part of all of my life. Same procedures I’ve just described to you from Dr. Smith. She said, “I invited Him into every part of all of my life,” and then she said, “when I finished that, I looked up in faith and said, ‘Lord, I thank Thee that Thou hast filled me with Thy Holy Spirit.'” She said, “Mr. Cook, I didn’t feel anything special, but I want you to know that the next time I preached the Gospel, people were convicted of sin and came to Jesus, and I saw the power of the Holy Spirit working in my life.

How do you deal with God and with His Spirit? By faith in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ. You trust Him to fill every room in your heart house, and what He does then and the gifts He may give you and the manifestations that you may experience are entirely up to Him. But beloved, please make sure that you’ve opened the door, that’s what all of this is about.

Dear Father, today we give ourselves to Thee, and by faith we open our heart house to the Holy Spirit of God. May we be filled with Him and live for Thy glory. We ask in Jesus’ name, Amen.

Till I meet you once again by way of radio, walk with the King today and be a blessing!