Jesus Gave All and So Must We

By Rev. Ernest O'Neill

Your nets are what you're caught up in and entangled with, that's it. Your nets are what are catching your feet. I mean with the disciples, they were the means of earning their money. With us, our means of earning our money often becomes the things that entangle us. They become our nets. We're caught up in a thousand impossibilities. Well, I have shares in IBM, what would happen to them? Well, I have a retirement plan. What would happen to that?

Now I ask you, can you ask any good Westerner to give up their retirement plan, can you? I mean, who would look after me? And then we go on and on and on. If you men and women who have received education are like me, I was faced with my parents saying, "You have got a good education. You ought to use it to make good money and make a good living for yourself." And so we find that our education becomes a net that entangles us. And of course, we want to rise to that, it appeals to us. Of course, we have got a good education, but the Lord gave you a good education to do the same with it as he did with his position with the Father. "He did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, and humbled himself even onto death, death on a cross."

Do you see you can't live with that Lord and have done less than that? You see that. I mean, let me just put it to you humanly, you'd feel uncomfortable, you'd feel uncomfortable. I mean you just wouldn't feel right in heaven. You just wouldn't feel right. I mean they're all -- and dear love them they won't be -- but you know they're showing their scars, and you're sitting there with your clean hands and not a mark on you. It can't be. Those of us who believe in the crucified one, we have to take up our cross and we have to follow in whatever that means.

Of course, my job this morning is not to tell you what that means because I don't know what it means for you. I don't know what it means for you, or for you, or for you, or for you, I don't, that's not my job. That's the job of the Holy Spirit to tell you that, but he can only tell you it if you have determined that you will not live a controlled surrendered life but you will give everything to your Lord Jesus. It will be life for life and the reason for that is that in Christianity, the truth is, it's all or nothing. That's the truth.