All to Jesus - Part 1

If I were to ask you tonight, you're saved, you say, yes, I'm saved. When? Oh, so-and-so preached, I got baptized. Are you safe? What are you safe from? Hell? Are you safe from bitterness? Are you safe from lust? Are you safe from cheating? Are you safe from lying? Are you safe from bad manners? Are you safe from rebelling against your parents? Come on, what are you safe from? The Lord Jesus Christ is first, and for him I surrender everything.

To him I give all. To Jesus Christ, my Lord and my Savior, he can command me. He's ahead of my wife, he's ahead of my children, he's ahead of my ambitions.

He is first, and everything else is last. Anything else is not New Testament Christianity, brother and sister. Anything else is a compromise, and it leaves people half-saved, confused, frustrated, bewildered, and in the dark.

Jesus Christ is your exclusive Savior, and all other relationships are determined and conditioned by this one overwhelming, almighty relationship. And we think all the great men of prayer lived a hundred years ago. There's a man that's 50 miles away from where I live, he's 33 years of age, he prays 10 hours a day, here in America right now.

Come on, you fellas that come by and show your strength. How much stamina do you have to pray? How much vision? How much passion? How much burden? There's a man outside Waco, 60 years of age, who prays six hours a day. My brethren, what we need is the power of God, and let the public think what they will.

And if we have the power of God on us and live like Christians, regardless of what the world says, I don't care what the world thinks to me. Any man, anywhere, at any time, if he'd be in Christ, he's a new creation. He isn't patched up, he's made a new creation.

He gets a new heart, a new spirit, new desires, new hopes, new longings. The cannot be satisfied at the broken systems of the world. He preached the greatest sermon the world has ever had, he's got the answer for our day.

Christianity has not been weighed in the balances and found wanting, Christianity has been tried, founded, because and rejected. Christianity is not only too difficult for the world, it's too difficult for the church. God's problem in the world is not communism, romanism, lunism, or any other ism.

God's problem in America is dead fundamentalism. We know all the cliches, we know all the words. For me to accept Christ means that I am to accept him in every part of my being, and that I am to form an attachment to him, an emotional, an intellectual, a volitional attachment which is complete, leaving no part of the life unaffected.

If he cannot save, he cannot control you, he cannot save you. And if he cannot control all of you, he cannot control any of you. And then it's to be an attachment that is exclusive.

I mean that Christ is not to be one of several interests. My goal is God himself, not joy, not peace, not even blessing, but himself, my God. It is his to lead me there, not mine, but his, at any cost, dear Lord, by any road.

So faith bounds forward to its goal in God, and love can trust the Lord to lead her there. Upheld by him, my soul will follow hard, till God has last fulfilled my deepest prayer. No matter if the way be sometimes dark, no matter if it cost be often great, he knows how I best shall reach the mark.

The way that leads to him must need be straight. One thing I know, I cannot say him nay. One thing I do, I press to all my God.

The secret of the life of the apostle was this, if you want to know, it's this one thing I do. He never got in sight, in fact. He never got into business like so many preachers do.

This one thing I do, it will be hell to get there. I forget one of the old Puritan preachers said in the 1600s, you have to go through hell to get to heaven. You have to lose everything in order to become the part of the bride of Jesus Christ.

One thing I know, I cannot say him nay. One thing I do, I press to all my Lord. My God, my glory here from day to day, and in the glory there, my great reward.

Christianity hasn't been tried and found one thing. It's been tried and found difficult and rejected. And my dear friend, the only thing which can turn the course of world history and shatter the colossus of communistic power and bring every false god upon its face, the only thing that can resist the tremendous powers of evil abroad in the world today, is the Holy Spirit released through spirit-filled man.

The force of evil, but they are mighty true God to the pulling down of strong. The church today is helpless without the Holy Spirit. He says, consider yourself dead to all the worldly contacts.

Loathe them, hate them. Hate what? Well, have nothing to do with sexual immorality. Have nothing to do with dirty mindedness.

Have nothing to do with evil desire. Have nothing to do with uncontrolled passion. Don't lust after other people's goods.

You see, and it's hard to say again, if Christ has been born in me, he wants to live in me. He wants to talk in me. He wants to work for me.

It's not a struggle that I'm trying to be addressed in. Life, life, life. He says, I'm come that ye might have life and that ye might have life more abundant.

I'm sure I don't have to tell you just to know that your sins of ignorance doesn't constitute your salvation. The fact that you happen to be on the way to heaven and you don't now happen to be on the way to hell, that doesn't constitute your salvation. Your salvation, of course, derives from the fact that as a redeemed sinner, no longer on the way to hell, but already on the way to heaven, Jesus Christ, as God creator, has come to invade your humanity, to play that role in you for which you were created.

To give him the right 24 hours a day in your business, in your home, in your school, on your college campus, whether you're on recreation, in vacation, in business, no matter at any time, under any circumstance, 24 hours in every day, seven days in every week, you give Jesus Christ as God, the right to be God in you without reserve. Then you're beginning to get saved. That's what it means to become a Christian.

We've conveniently reduced salvation to a moment in time when we raise a hand, walk down the front, or get baptized, or have our name put upon a church roll, and we call that salvation. Nothing, of course, is farther from the truth. That's totally divorced from the revelation given to us in the word of God, which is our sole guide in every matter of faith.

Salvation involves the reoccupation by God of a guilty sinner in such a way that Jesus Christ has the unchallenged, absolute, perpetual right to dictate the terms whereby that individual henceforth will run his life.