What Happens When We Don't Move Forward in Our Faith?

By Rev. Ernest O'Neill

 

Now, why I am hitting this, this morning is, I would point you to a verse that a dear man used to talk about. I never knew it or looked it up before in detail but it is Daniel 4:33, "Immediately the world was fulfilled upon Nebuchadnezzar. He was driven from among men and ate grass like an ox and his body was wet with the dew of heaven, till his hair grew as long as eagle's feathers and his nails were like bird's claws."

The dear man who first told me about the victorious life used to say that, "Yeah if you don't go into that brother, your body will be wet of the dew of heaven and your hair will grow as long as eagle's feathers and your nails will be like bird's claws." Obviously what he was referring to was that Nebuchadnezzar was a man who was prospered mightily by God and had a mighty kingdom. But he did not stay under God's trust and under God's dependence and this is how he ended up.

Now, could I testify to you from my own experience? That's what you'll end up like, if you don't go on. If you don't go on into the deliverance that God has wrought in Jesus, low and behold loved ones you'll end up with Satan making a  clown of you. You really will. He will make a mockery of you. He will, he'll bring you to a place that is humiliating and that is pitiful. He will. I think many of us you see think, "Well no, Satan is not that bad and he won't take us right to the end." He will. He is ruthless. He has no love of you or me whatever. He will destroy you and then re-destroy you and then re-destroy you after that.

He will keep on burrowing in until there's nothing left of you. And some of us say, "Well, we don't like the idea of dying with Jesus," but you either die with Jesus or you'll die under this guy's hands. You will either die with Jesus or you will eventually come to a place where your Christianity is a laughing stock for you. And where your Christianity is laid on the ground and you find yourself in this position.

Why? Because if you're really born of God, you're spoiled for the world, You're spoiled for the world. You're really spoiled for the world. You have known something of God. You know there is a better way and there's no going back. You can never go back. So if you go back like Nebuchadnezzar, you end up in this spot. You can't feel your way through again to the kind of ignorant, independent sin that you were involved in before. So if you don't go the whole way with God, you'll end up like this.

Now the reason I testify to it this morning is that the death must be complete. That is, I don't know if you can really catch it but it really does mean Bob Scott, Bob Fehling, Bob Cook, Clyde Anderson, Dan Fowler, John Spaulding, Jim Raymo, Ernest O'Neill, it means us being crucified and ended as to what we have been up to this time. That's what it means and that's what God, I remember showed me 20 years ago. It means the ending of us men and women for what we have been in our life.

It means the dying of what we have been known as. It means a dying of us. It means that all that we have been up to this moment is crucified and destroyed by God in Jesus. It has already been done and we're saying that we accept that. If you say "Does that mean from now on, you're nobody?" Yes, that's right, you're a nobody. Thank God you don't end up a nobody. He gloriously fulfills His promise of filling you with the Holy Spirit and moving you on and moving you into that victorious life that Jesus is living at the right hand of God. But that's what you become.

You become a vessel in whom the Jesus Christ, who is the Son of God, lives His victorious life. Actually you, yourself don't get anymore of that selfish satisfaction out of it. You regard your own life as finished and dead from that moment. And that has to be a complete worth loved ones. That's what the Holy Spirit witnesses to when He fills you. He witnesses to the completeness of that work.

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