Brother Figeroa Saturday Evening 7/18/15

Brother Figeroa Saturday Evening 7/18/15

Rom 7:1  Know ye not, brethren, (for I speak to them that know the law,) how that the law hath dominion over a man as long as he liveth?

Rom 7:2  For the woman which hath an husband is bound by the law to her husband so long as he liveth; but if the husband be dead, she is loosed from the law of her husband.

Rom 7:3  So then if, while her husband liveth, she be married to another man, she shall be called an adulteress: but if her husband be dead, she is free from that law; so that she is no adulteress, though she be married to another man.

Rom 7:4  Wherefore, my brethren, ye also are become dead to the law by the body of Christ; that ye should be married to another, even to him who is raised from the dead, that we should bring forth fruit unto God.

He was speaking to them that knew the Law.  He settled in verse three what He wanted to tell us in verse 4. 

Thank God we are not under the Law of Moses any more. 

Rom 5:21  That as sin hath reigned unto death, even so might grace reign through righteousness unto eternal life by Jesus Christ our Lord.

Rom 6:1  What shall we say then? Shall we continue in sin, that grace may abound?

Rom 6:2  God forbid. How shall we, that are dead to sin, live any longer therein?

Rom 6:3  Know ye not, that so many of us as were baptized into Jesus Christ were baptized into his death?

Rom 6:4  Therefore we are buried with him by baptism into death: that like as Christ was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life.

Rom 6:5  For if we have been planted together in the likeness of his death, we shall be also in the likeness of his resurrection:

Rom 6:6  Knowing this, that our old man is crucified with him, that the body of sin might be destroyed, that henceforth we should not serve sin.

Rom 6:7  For he that is dead is freed from sin.

Rom 6:8  Now if we be dead with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with him:

Shall we continue in sin that grace may abound?  In plain English, “No way.”

Dead people don’t walk, talk, or act.  They are dead.  You go to the funeral and you can pinch and poke them and they don’t move; they are dead.  We are dead to sin.  How shall we that are dead to sin live any longer therein?

There are several deaths here.  We are dead.  Sin is dead.  Jesus’ death.  We are dealing with three deaths in these verses.  Have you noticed how many times we read the word death? 

The apostle Paul, what an anointed man of God!  What a powerful man!  He was so anointed that he would straighten out congregations just by writing a letter.  When those letters came problems and situations in a congregation were worked out.

Romans is full of the doctrine of Christ:  Justification, sanctification.  It is also full of instruction of how to treat others.  It deals with the life of a Christian in society. 

He begins in chapter one and goes to chapter 12.  He says, “Therefore, that is the way it is, let us present our bodies a living sacrifice.”  He enters the practicality of the gospel:  It is one thing to be justified the other is to live the life. 

We study the bible so that we can find a light to guide us in these conflicts, issues, and problems of our day.  Some old timers say, “The good old days.”  The ones alive then said, “The good old days of my parents.” 

Some that reach a certain age, they refer to the “golden days.”  I don’t find any gold.  I found arthritis, back pain, and I can’t eat what I used to. 

The Word of God will teach you to live a practical life, not a fanatic, not worldly, but fulfilled to the point that you can rejoice.  Some say, “I am saved,” but don’t really rejoice.  How long has it been since you said, “Thank God that I am saved!” 

Why haven’t you said it?  Because you are not saved.  If you were, from time to time it will come out.  When you say it, you are saying, “Thank God I have hope, peace, joy, a friend with me, I am not all alone.” 

In Romans chapter 5, Paul deals with the wonderful experience of being saved by grace.  He expounds upon it; speaks how Jesus died and came to save the world from sin.  He speaks of justification, you are forgiven and appear as you have never sinned.  You are conscious of your past life, but you no longer feel the guilt.

Guilt doesn’t come from God.  He never makes you feel guilty.  Your conscience makes you feel guilty.  You are convicted of sin by God.  Guilt is a negative thing.  Conviction is not.

We find the marvelous grace in Romans five and we stand amazed that God came down to earth.  He became flesh.  It is so deep to me that I cannot begin to scrape the surface. 

He became flesh.  It is worse than if I would become an earth worm.  Would you like to become an earthworm so that you could understand that mentality?  This God that we serve had never dealt with sin before. 

Adam was as God on the earth.  God checked on Adam in whatever he did.  He was proud of Adam.  Adam was not divine; he had a free will.  One day He looked down and something happened.  God knew that it had.  Adam hid.  The one that hides is the one that feels guilty.

We find God.  Even though He knew that this was going to happen.  God knew that man was going to sin.  We find the Lamb of God was prepared even before the foundations of the world.  Before the disease came, the remedy was ready. 

Jesus came to deal with something that He had never dealt with because He was a part of the triune God.  It is as if the teacher goes back to school.  He has to know how a sinner deals with this issue of his sins.  He came to talk to them, to be a friend of sinners.  He brought the cure with Him.  The cure was in Himself.  You could be in Romans 5 for a month studying. 

This wonderful grace is as if a bird falls in love with a fish.  They have a problem.  One flies, the other one is in the water.  It is a practical impossibility.  There is no way that they can become married.  To hold hands would be impossible.  The bird flies around, looking down at the fish in the pond, “I love you honey; we have a problem.”  The fish looks up and says, “My beloved, I wish I had wings like you.”

The one that is free to fly decides, “I love that fish so much that I will become a fish and I will jump into that pond and we will be happy forever after.”  This is what Jesus did for me.  I was the fish.  I couldn’t go up.  He came down. 

Jesus came down to earth.  He was God.  By the Word of His mouth everything was created by, for, and through Him.  He is the Alpha and Omega and everything between.  Alpha is the first letter, omega is the last.  He is that and everything between.

The man that wrote Amazing Grace was an awful man.  One of the worst sinners of his time.  He found grace.  He was a changed man.  When he was an old man he had dementia; he was mopping a floor, still trying to minister in his old age.  He told a man, “I can still hear the screams of those slaves.  I took their children, enslaved them.  Took them to Cuba...”  All these things of the past still haunted him.

We need to be thankful for all the things that we did not do.  The less that we do in sin the less it can haunt you later.  Those things will haunt you like a dog.  The devil will use your past to haunt you.  You are cleansed, freed, but they will haunt your mind.

We think of the grace of God and the wonderful work of grace.  This book of Romans brought a revival in Germany.  It introduces a work of grace that we take for granted.  This monk tried to do works to be saved.  One day he read, that we are not saved by works, we are saved by grace.  We don’t have salvation or love or forgiveness from God unless the blood is present. 

The revival that happened because of this monk’s salvation went through the whole country and spread through all Europe and broke the yoke of Catholicism.  This is glorious and we say Amen.

Then we come to chapter six and there discover that even though grace is wonderful, powerful, and sweet.  For the first time in your life you understand what true happiness is.  People that pursue happiness never get it.  You can buy and accumulate things of all kinds.  You will not find true happiness in them. 

Blessed means many times happiness.  We deal with a place that is not perfect.  We deal with drugs, child abuse… all these things.  We find in Chapter six that it is not just about getting something from God, forgiveness, grace, and hope. 

We are not doing this to just be happy.  If you are then there is a certain amount of selfishness there.

We find in chapter six the word death.  “The grace of God is wonderful, we are saved by His grace.  But we cannot abuse the grace of God.”  Since grace is so great, shall we continue in sin?  Since God has forgiven me and has forgiven me of sin can I continue in sin?  No you will not be in grace, you will be in disgrace.

Paul deals with the thought of the necessity of death. 

Rom 6:15  What then? shall we sin, because we are not under the law, but under grace? God forbid.

This is what some religious people teach.  The more you sin the more grace you have.  They say every night, “Forgive me of my sins.”  The preacher says before he preaches, “Forgive me of my sins.”  That means that he has committed sins.

There was a liberal pastor that began to tell the people that no one could live holy but had to commit sin.  That is not true, the truth is it is holiness or hell.  Black or white, good or evil.  Darkness or light.  Up or down. 

He began to say, “My flesh is too weak.  We all commit sin.”  He went on with his preaching for about an hour until everyone was under that influence. 

It seems that the pastor of the congregation did not have a backbone.  He asked if someone wanted to dismiss in prayer.  An old man prayed, “Thank you for Jesus.  Here is this preacher that breaks the law.  He says, “Thou shalt not commit adultery.”  He has probably committed adultery.  He says, “Thou shalt not kill how many times has he killed?””  Lord please give us another preacher. 

The ‘old man’ finally died.  Baptism symbolizes death.

Rom 6:3  Know ye not, that so many of us as were baptized into Jesus Christ were baptized into his death?

We have been baptized into His death.

Rom 6:4  Therefore we are buried with him by baptism into death: that like as Christ was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life.

Rom 6:5  For if we have been planted together in the likeness of his death, we shall be also in the likeness of his resurrection:

You have to die.  Somebody has to die in order to get rid of this situation that is so prevalent that is breaking up marriages, and causing people to go into drugs…  Some have brains that are so fried that they cannot live normally. 

We were dealing with a young lady and we asked her, “Do you read the bible?”  She said, “I don’t know what to believe, some in my family practice witch craft.  Others believe in Voodoo.  They believe all these things.” 

We find a 24 year old in America that doesn’t have a bible.  She doesn’t know anything.  America has to be reeducated. 

There was a time that you could mention things of the bible and they would know about them.  In America everyone used to have a bible even if they were not saved.  Their marriages and births were recorded in it.  It was the most important book in their home.  It is not so today.

He was saying, “You need to die or someone has to die in order to live right.”

This takes us to Romans seven.  Under the Law of Moses the bible said that a woman really was not free to marry another man unless her husband died.  Thank God we are not under the Law of Moses.  The woman that has a husband is bound and imprisoned, in a cage by her husband under the law.

He presents the relationship with Christ as a marriage.  In other words we cannot be married to Christ until the ‘old man’ dies.  Jesus is presented in the Bible as the groom.  We are presented as the bride. 

There are surprises in the thing of getting married.  Everything changes.  The looks change.  The shape changes for some.  A lot of things change.  Remember how sweet he was?  He opened the door for you.  How long has it been since he opened the door for you?  He doesn’t do all these things because he has you.  You are stuck.  Like it or lump it.  Remember the, “I cannot live without you?” 

We had a long engagement, about 2 years.  I called her so many times that I realized it would be cheaper to marry her. 

A lot of young marriages today have lost what they had when they were engaged, the attraction: “I still think that you are the most beautiful thing in the world.  I would go to the moon and back again.”  Now they have a hard time to go to the grocery store to get some cheese.

Things begin to cool down.  For you men that are here, she is the same little girl that you fell in love with.  The fact that there is more now to love doesn’t change the fact that she is the one that you fell in love with. 

He has gotten old, has a pot belly, and his hair is falling out, but He is still the same handsome man that you fell in love with.  He may not be as strong as he was, please go deeper and find him.  He is there.  You bring it out with love, understanding, talking.  In most marriages they just holler at each other.  They bark at each other like dogs.  There is not that sweetness in the marriage.

Some couples today that have been married a while hardly ever hold hands.  The husband doesn’t put their arms around their wife.  We practice affection.  She is your property.  The man is the wife’s property.  The man is the head, but she is the neck. 

When we begin to lose the affection in public then it slips into intimacy.  All of a sudden you are living together as two strangers.  Soon all you talk about is money, the children…

Christ got the bad deal in this marriage.  He has to put up with you and me: unstable, lazy, lukewarm, no affection.  He doesn’t get as good a deal as He should.  We say I love you with our mouth, but where is our affection?  “How come you never open my book?  How come you have such a hard time going to your room and talking to me?”

Christ got a bad deal in this marriage.  If it had not been for His patience with us, where would we be?  How many mistakes have we made?  We get in a depression state and He has to put up with us, no glory, no praise, just going through the motions.

It is like, He comes home from work, you didn’t take a shower, you didn’t wash yourself, you have stains all over your clothing.  You say, “I am glad that you are home.  Deal with these little devils.”  You didn’t want to spank them so the bad guy is him. 

Christ’s love for the church is so great.  He has to put up with our hard headiness, instability, naivety, and laziness. 

The church becomes lazy.  Christian people become lazy, they become involved in their own little world.  They think that little world in which they move is what life is all about.  We have different races, cultures, there are people all over the world that are not in your world.  The computer has connected us with other cultures.  It is good.

All of you know about David:  the persecuted David, the anointed King David.  He was not a king in his kingdom, but God had anointed him as king.  He was the king in Israel.  He did not want to kill Saul.  The time was not right.  He knew that you cannot build what God has not built yet.

His own soldiers said, “This is not coincidence, come on, let us kill him.  God has delivered him into our hand.”  They had found him sleeping with no one awake in a cave.  He went into the cave with a knife and David couldn’t kill him.  His hand shook.  He cut a piece of his mantle. 

We have lost the fear.  “I should not have said what I said.”

This David was in a hard place, they had run out of supplies.  They needed food.  There was a man close by that was named Nabal.  He was a rich man.  The name Nabal means ‘a fool’.  He was married to a woman called Abagail. 

David sent some of his men to ask this rich man if he would spare some food.  This man got upset and did not acknowledge David, “I am not giving anything to anyone.  Especially not that man David.”

He got drunk and other things were going on.  Abagail was beautiful and wise.  She said, “This fool of a husband that I have doesn’t realize that he has done.”  Her husband was drunk so he didn’t know what was going on.  She got food and filled many mules with food and went to meet David.  She thought, and she thought right, that David would kill Nabal.

She saw this hunk of a man, nice looking; his presence was imposing.  It was not only his size, he had authority that emanated from him.  He had killed a giant and had his sword.  (There is no way that you can be the same once you have seen the king.)  When she saw this man, the king, David.  There was love at first sight.  She could do nothing about it because the ‘old man’ was alive. 

She said, “Please don’t kill him; he is a fool.”  God in His great power and mercy, He is a just God.  That night the man died of a heart attack.  At the moment he dies, the ‘old man’ finally died.  “I am free.”  David, “Is the old man dead?  I am ready to marry you.” 

David took her and she became his wife.  Sometimes we get confused in crucifying flesh with the old man dying.  The ‘old man’ is the man that you used to be.  Whatever you were in sin, the old man or woman has to die if you are going to end up marrying Jesus. 

Jesus doesn’t want to be your lover, your weekend relationship.  He wants to be your husband.

If your ‘old man’ is not dead, He will not accept you.  Of course we have to be sanctified and deal with the carnal nature; we are not talking about that.  The ‘old man’ is who you used to be.  That is why the ‘old man’ has to die.  The baptism is a death, a burial.  Whom are you burying when you are being baptized?  The ‘old man’ is being buried.

The ‘old man’ has to die; you have to die to your life of sin or you cannot be a Christian.  You cannot be a Christian and sin at the same time. 

Shall we sin now because grace abounds?  No.  The ‘old man’ is dead.  I am dead to sin.  The ‘old man’ is foolish.  Much of the problems that we have in life is because of our foolishness.  You did not listen because you thought your parents didn’t understand.  Your friends dirtied your brain.  You listened because you thought that they were cool. 

When you have tattoos all over, when you get older that skin hangs everywhere, they will not be in the same place that they are now.  When you get older, everything comes down. 

As we deal with this.  Nabal is a picture of the ‘old man’ that dies.  Because he dies David can marry Abagail. 

The ‘old man’ has to die.  The way you used to be.  It is worth it.  It is worth it to turn your back on your friends.  If you go to jail, who will come visit you?  Those that get you in trouble will run from you when you are in trouble.  They will not say, “Take me too, I am guilty.”  They will not bring you sandwiches. 

People pay millions of dollars to have their bodies redesigned by burning.  People do crazy things living in sin. Then they call us fanatics because we follow Jesus and come to this place to worship God.  We can rejoice without going through the mud to have these great moments. 

If you are in sin then many times you put your face where it was never meant to be: The toilet.  You vomit.  You don’t even think right.  You lose sensitivity.  You are bound.  Hate it, but are hooked on it. 

You are blessed if you can marry Him and the ‘old man’ dies and you go through this death.  Death has to occur in order for a miracle to occur.

“Jesus, our friend Lazarus the one that you love is sick.” 
“Oh really,” He went about doing the same thing that he was doing. 
“Are you going to see him?”
“No.” 

This was Jesus, his friend.  The disciples got fidgety. 
The news came, “The old man is dead.” 
“He had to die in order for me to do a miracle.”

No good would have been done by Jesus going and healing him.  What gives God more glory healing someone or raising him from the dead? 

Jesus said, “He is dead; it is the right time now.”

His sisters told Jesus, “Lazarus has been dead four days he stinks.”  Jesus is not afraid of stinking messes.  Jesus says, “I have a nose for this,” when others push you away.

When God gets a hold of you then you will be changed.  I found a man with long hair and had not taken a bath in many years.  He was on a pallet on the floor.  The parents said that he was crazy.  He was not crazy, he was depressed.  We began to talk to him, “Jesus loves you, you don’t have to be in this mess, and there is hope for you.”  The following week I see this man coming down the aisle of the church. 

You have been that way, your stink is inside.  When God smells you He says, “Son or daughter, you need a shower.  You need to be washed in the blood of the lamb.”  You can put on a good front; God knows what is inside.  He knows if you are really happy, feel complete, and have a hope in your life.

Your husband, parents, children may not know it.  God knows it.  You know it. 

“He stinks; okay take me where he is, roll the stone.” 
“Father I know that you always hear me when I talk to you, what is going to take place now is for the sake of these unbelievers.” 

Jesus knew that he was going to resurrect Lazarus.  He was not crying because Lazarus died.  He was crying because he saw the world stinking in a tomb, tied like a mummy.

“I am praying because of what is going to take place here because you and I are one.”  He called him by his name because if He had said, “Come out,” a bunch of dead people would have come out. 

Lazarus was dead and stinking.  All of a sudden he breathed and opened his eyes.  He had forgotten that he had died.  He couldn’t stretch out.  He was bound.  He sat up and saw a light.  The light at the end of the tunnel. 

Do you remember when you saw that light at the end of the tunnel?  He went toward the light.  You always want to go toward the light.  He began to struggle toward the light, “I am depressed, don’t feel very well, my life is a mess, I am hooked on drugs, but I have to get out of here.  I have some relationships that are causing me problems, but I have to get out of here.”

I don’t know if his sisters were rejoicing or were silent.  They had seen a miracle, a dead man that had been dead for over four days was coming out.  That is impossible!  Yes that is the meaning of miracle. 

Jesus said, “Loose him.”  That is what the church is for, to loose you, to give you a word of encouragement.  You have to come out, you have to be free. 

He went home and took a shower, put some ointment on.  Later on when Jesus was dining in a home, Lazarus sat beside Him.  You want to be close to the one that saved your life. 

He can take me out of any problem, any relationship that is causing me problems.  He can take me out of anything, depression, confusion, anything. 

I want to be close to Jesus.  We cannot let him go.  Lazarus was wise.  Stay close to Jesus.  Stay close to the one that resurrected you.  Talk to Him every day and let Him talk to you.  Prayer is not you talk, talk, talk.  Wait.  Be quiet for a while.  He might want to tell you something.  It is not like a dump truck, “I need, I want…”  You have a long list. 

There was a man that said, “I want to give you something for Christmas.” 
“I don’t want to impose.” 

Then when they insist, he brought a long list.

Jesus is not your delivery boy.  Do you hear from Him?  “I pray and nothing happens.”  Get up, walk about the room, praise God.  Sing a song of praise.  Don’t give up.  Fight. 

You get distracted with issues of life.  Home.  Stay close to Jesus and give Him the best praise of your heart.  There is a difference between singing and worshipping.  Not everyone that sings worships. 

Finally the ‘old man’ is dead.  That is why I can enjoy.  I am privileged that Jesus Christ took me in so that I can be His own.