Lifetime Guarantee (27 page)

Thus, I believe that God has shown me, “Always turn left, Bill, and you’ll be right. But if you ever turn right, you’ll be left.” Truly, any time a person takes a turn toward law, seeing himself on a performance-based acceptance with God, God will allow the individual to travel that wrong road until he hits a brick wall. He’ll allow the devil to punch the “hold” button on the person’s telephone and just let him sit there and blink. That person will never go on with God until he turns around and goes back to the fork where he made the wrong turn.

I care not whether the fork represents a law position on baptism, eternal security, forgiveness, acceptance, righteousness, holiness, justification, or anything else. You turn right and you’ll be left. You’ll wear out trying to measure up to law, and you’ll crash sooner or later. Tragically, the dear people who turn right at the salvation fork will be eternally left. You cannot
earn
God’s acceptance.

As C. S. Lewis said in
Mere Christianity,
“If, somewhere upon the road of life, you discover you have taken a wrong turn, the quickest way forward is to turn around and go back. Or, if somewhere along life’s road you find yourself traveling with a group which has taken a wrong turn, the first man to turn around and go back is the most progressive.”

I realize someone may use verses to “prove” that the Christian’s old sin nature didn’t die in Christ.
But he must arrive at that conclusion by turning right.
He must adopt the posture that a born-again person
attains
holiness through performance. The Word says, however, “The flesh [not the old man] sets its desire against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh” (Galatians 5:17). It’s not our old sin nature we struggle with. It’s the
power of sin
working through the old, worldly ways. You will never get good, solid victory in this battle we all experience until you see by His Word and
appropriate
the truth that the old man literally died in Christ. It’s not positional, it’s literal.
Dead men tell no tales.
Those “tales” you experience moment by moment are being offered up to your mind by the deceiver of the brethren through your flesh.

Answers in “Answers to Questions for Further Study”.

The pastor slumped in the chair across from my desk, his face giving silent witness to the turmoil within. He’d been very successful, having ascended to the position of heir-apparent of his denomination’s highest state office.

Then the young divorcée came to him for counseling. In his zeal to help her, he became emotionally involved, and they eventually fell into sin. Their secret was exposed, and the pastor was dismissed in disgrace. Dashed were his dreams of denominational honors and esteem. Dashed were the long years of labor as he’d climbed the ladder through the tiny churches to the large city church. There he was at the pinnacle he’d savored throughout his adult lifetime. Almost there. And then, crash! It was gone. All of it. He was totally defeated.

This was our tenth counseling session. I had discussed most of the truths in this book with him repeatedly. He could articulate quite well the principles he was learning, but to my knowledge he never appropriated them. They remained just “information” to him, “interesting insights.”

The only thing this dear brother wanted to discuss in our sessions was how he could recoup his losses. As far as I could discern, he never gave up his fleshly yearning for the honors of men. He longed for human acceptance and fleshly-generated self-esteem.

As with this deceived brother, a great deal of your flesh was generated by your efforts to get your need for acceptance and self-acceptance satisfied by extracting it out of people and the world system. You see, Christ was not number one with this pastor; his job and prestige were. It is my conviction that Satan’s
most effective tool
against Christians is to deceive them into continuing to use their old, green highways to satisfy this need we all have for love and self-esteem.

Jesus desires that we look to Him as
the
source, moment by moment, to supply this as well as all our needs. Once we’re called out to Him, He lovingly begins to woo us away as His bride from our “former lovers” through which we sought to get our needs supplied.

We hear a lot about the necessity for “brokenness,” but it seems that some of us have a hazy understanding of what we must be broken
from.
God seeks to destroy our Lord-of-the-Ring ways. They are harlotry! Often He has to allow suffering that our flesh can’t handle to come into our lives in order to break us. The book of Hosea presents a graphic typological study of this process.

Chapter 1 tells of the Lord’s command to Hosea to marry a whore. I don’t understand why learned men argue over whether or not this is literal. The Bible says very clearly in verse 2 that it was the Lord’s command to Hosea, and it fits perfectly into the book’s purpose as a typological study. Hosea obediently married Gomer, who proved to be woefully unfaithful to his commitment to her. That’s a picture of God and the nation Israel; Christ and His bride, the church; and Christ and you as an individual.

Gomer bore children by her various lovers as she flitted from one to another, seeking to get her needs supplied in ways other than her husband. Sexual intercourse was not Gomer’s primary goal, but simply a means to an end. She was trading herself to her lovers, allowing them to use her so she could get all her needs supplied. We, likewise, are tempted to return to our fleshly techniques in order to satisfy our need for love.

Let’s pick up the story in Hosea 2:5: “For their mother has played the harlot….For she said, ‘I will go after my lovers, who give me my bread and my water, my wool and my flax, my oil and my drink.’” Gomer was continuing to use her old techniques to milk her needs supply from the world system. This is a picture of the contemporary Christian who strives to climb the corporate ladder, denominational ladder, athletic ladder, club ladder, or whatever to generate and maintain acceptance and self-acceptance.

“Walking after the flesh” could range from clinging to physical beauty to striving for perfectionism in performance; from displaying Christmas cards from the “right people” to craving an invitation to the party where many of the “in” group at church will be gathering tonight; from striving to acquire the house with the right address so you can “feel good” about where you live to having to have your hair look “just right” before you can feel “comfortable” going out; from name dropping to having to have a snappy car or clothes or boat to feel better about yourself. Ad infinitum! All these things are fleshly techniques for obtaining acceptance and self-esteem from the system rather than from the Lord, your husband. It’s infidelity! There is nothing evil about many of these things
per se.
It’s the
motive
that is not of God.

Jesus, the committed Husband, reveals His divine plan for wooing His bride away from all competition. He fixes things so that flesh trips cease to be productive. He dries up the supply so His bride will wake up and turn to the one who really loves her instead of chasing after those who are looking to her as
their
needs supply.

God was going to make Gomer’s flesh less productive than before.

Christian, are you experiencing a diminishing return on
your
efforts lately in terms of the satisfactions you formerly derived? Are you traveling on “old roads”?

“And she will pursue her lovers”—she was reluctant to give up this “good” thing she had going for her—“but she will not overtake them; and she will seek them, but will not find them.” Then she will say,

Jesus likewise allows you to walk in your old ways, patiently wooing you and suffering through your infidelities to Him. He tearfully watches as you look to your former ways of extracting your needs supply out of the world system, ways you learned so well prior to the marriage (salvation). Then He allows you to begin experiencing a diminishing return on your efforts.

At first the unfaithful wife’s prayers are centered on asking the Lord to defeat the devil and restore her “victorious life.” Sound like any TV programs you’ve heard? As her fleshly effort weakens in productivity, she usually becomes frantic, believing the devil’s lie that the Lord must have put her on hold to take care of more pressing matters. She often begs Him to hear her plea, which seems to be falling on deaf ears. Oh, but He’s lovingly working.

Finally, the adulterous bride realizes there is something drastically wrong in her life. It’s at this point that she is most receptive to “returning to her first love,” Christ, her Bridegroom, to adore Him (see Revelation 2:4) and seek Him alone as her source.

She just
thought
she was getting her needs supplied by her fleshly effort, but it was God who was supplying her needs all the time. She thought her life would surely be a disaster without her source, the thing she had always depended on.

It all belongs to our Husband: “The earth is the Lord’s and all it contains” (Psalm 24:1).

Hosea 2:10,11 says that God vowed to put an end to Gomer’s ability even to
marginally
satisfy her needs through the flesh. It might even get so “bad” (from her perspective) that she would despair of life itself. This was what was happening to the lady who wrote the suicide note which began this book.

Can you discern with spiritual eyes how a well-meaning but unbroken, world-system-trained Christian counselor actually defeats God’s purpose if he “helps” such a “self-sufficient” person by making his fleshly techniques more productive? The client might get “better,” but he is working against the Holy Spirit’s goal of weakening the flesh. Hosea 2:12 states that Gomer’s supply which she attributed to her flesh would be destroyed. Then God said,

Why bring her into a wilderness? Did you ever consider how well your flesh will supply your needs in the wilderness? Let’s say that you have a fancy address, you come from the “right” family, or your bumper sticker boasts you are a native-born citizen of the “right” state. How much good will these things do you in the wilderness? The only thing you can try to impress out there are the jack rabbits! You’re going to find one source and only one out there, and that’s Jesus. He is your only hope in the wilderness. Everything else is unproductive. He will take you there because He
loves
you, not because He’s mad at you.

God finally hemmed Gomer into the box canyon of unproductive flesh, “I will give her her vineyards [supply] from
there
,” He said (Hosea 2:15, emphasis added). He had to take her to a point of despair before He could trust her to know who her source was. This way she got the message loud and clear that her flesh could not meet her needs.

Then God further stated, “The valley of Achor [will be her] door of hope” (Hosea 2:15). The valley of Achor is where Achan, the man who stole the forbidden “needs supply” at Ai, was executed in Joshua 7. Israel’s (and Gomer’s) fleshly effort had to be dealt with before she could move forward into an intimate walk with the Lord as His beloved wife. Dear people of God, verse 15 says,

Achor means “trouble.” God has to bring a Christian to the end of the “trusted old ways” before she will turn from her “former lovers” to Him alone. This is often painful but always essential.

Though God frequently has to accomplish this discipline through trauma, look at the results:

Whatever “song” is on the lips of the Christian who has yet to come to the end of the flesh’s resources is like the latest tune to hit the top forty. It comes with about a thirty-day warranty.
The only permanent, lasting song that any Christian will experience on this planet—the only one with a lifetime guarantee—is the one she learns to sing in the valley of Achor, where she comes to the end of depending on her flesh.
This may happen in different ways for different Christians. There will be different degrees of suffering for different folks. It’s all relative, and God is the one in control. He never
causes
it, but He allows it, and its purpose is love. He’s taking you to a deeper level of oneness. This is not something to fear. It is simply a matter of keeping your eyes of faith on Jesus. He is totally committed to your best welfare.