Address—T. Roach
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Good morning.
Let's sing hymn #333.
We're thankful to be here today so you can sing a song, a song of thanks and praise.
#333.
Someone start that please.
To feel good, our hearts we racing.
So.
Their philosophy is very much towards good works.
To maintain a good world and if you don't live up.
To the good standards you will lose.
Salvation.
If you backslide into sin, Satan tells you you will lose your salvation and Satan uses these tactics good, well meaning people. He uses these tactics to destroy your assurance of your salvation. Satan wants to make you doubt your salvation, however, even if your sins are more than the hairs on your head.
The power of the death and the shed blood of the Lord Jesus Christ is more than enough to cover your sin.
Romans 325.
We'll read 24 as well-being justified freely by His grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.
Whom God has set forth to be a propitiation through faith in his blood, to declare his righteousness for the remission of sins that are passed through the forbearance of God.
Propitiation through faith in his blood.
It is faith in the blood of the Lord Jesus that will give you assurance of your salvation.
You can trust the work and the shed blood of the Lord Jesus to have taken away all your sin, to have covered your sin. The Lord Jesus took that punishment for you on the cross. You will never come in to condemnation.
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We can learn to answer Satan the same way when he comes up to us with these temptations, we can answer Satan the same way the Lord answered Satan, the Lord the Lord, Jesus said when he was tempted. He said it is written as you memorize verses of scripture at Sunday school.
Hold on to them. As we are older, we tend not to memorize the verses, but we need to be familiar with them because it is the Scripture that will turn Satan aside and protect you in the temptations that he uses against you.
We can answer the temptations and the doubts that Satan presents to us with verses of Scripture.
When Satan tries to make you doubt your salvation, there are verses that you can use.
Jesus promises in John 28. He says you will never perish in John 5/24.
Says Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that heareth my word, and believeth on him that sent me half everlasting life, and shall not come into condemnation, but is passed from death unto life. When you believe in the Lord Jesus you have it's a present possession, you have eternal life.
You will never lose it. You will not come into condemnation. You have been passed from death unto life, and that's very.
Freeing for you to realize that you can never lose your salvation. You don't have to live in fear that you might backslide and lose your salvation, and it gives you freedom and liberty to live for Christ and not to worry about what he has done for you.
You will never perish. Let's go to Romans 12.
The next device of Satan that we want to talk about is pride and selfishness.
Pride and selfishness This mindset of pride and selfishness begins as children.
I choose first. I want to have the biggest cookie. I remember when I was I was young, we were always taught that if you chose first, you were supposed to take the small cookie and let the next for your friend have the big cookie well.
My mom, she offered two cookies. One was big and one was small. And my brother and I I was going to be very generous as hell. You go first. You choose first. And he did. And he took the big cookie. And I said, what? That's not right. You're supposed to take the small one if you choose first.
And so he says, well, which one would you have chose? I said I would have chosen the small one.
He said. Well, that's what you got, so just be happy with it.
We are selfish by nature.
That is my toy. Don't you touch that. Give that to me.
And then we send our children to public school and the government has an agenda that they want to present to the children, to formulate them so they can be a part of the future society.
And we send our children into that arena where there's people, children of the world, children of disobedience living there going to the same school and our kids, they learn all these same things that are being.
Acted out and taught in the schools.
As parents, we are told as a father.
I am told to bring my children up in the nurture and the admonition of the Lord.
I'm not told to send my children out to learn the ways of the world. I'm told to bring them up in the nurture and the admonition of the Lord.
That's a big responsibility.
If I don't choose to homeschool my children, I had better sit down with my children.
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And impart to them the ways of God, bring them up in the nurture and the admonition of the Lord. Because when they go out into the world, there's going to be all sorts of things that are going to come against them. Satan doesn't want them to grow up.
To serve the Lord. He doesn't want them to grow up to bring glory.
To the Lord Jesus.
We don't need to teach our children how to be selfish and proud. That's part of our nature. We're born with the pride and the selfishness in US. Let's read Romans 12 and verse three parts of it.
For I say to every man not to think of himself more highly.
Then he ought to think.
It is true.
Satan will tempt you to look down on your brethren. He wants to make you think that you are more holy than they are, and he will make you proud of your spiritual level.
And when you get to that point where you're proud of your spirituality, then you start making demands of everyone else, trying to make them live up to your extra biblical standards of what you think righteousness is.
And if the and if and if you don't live up to those standards.
I won't have anything to do with you.
This is not from the Spirit of God.
It can only be from the devil himself. Let's go to first Peter 5.
In Proverbs 16 it says pride goes before destruction and the haughty spirit before it fall.
If we get too proud, God may need to send to us a humbling situation.
And allow Satan to tempt us.
And it may be that we will fall into a grievous sin.
First Peter, Chapter 5.
And verse 5, the end of the verse.
God resists the proud and gives grace to the humble.
To prevent spiritual pride and selfishness, we need to remember that it is only by the grace of God that he chose us. We did not choose God.
We have nothing that has not been given to us.
But yet if we were left.
To our own deceitfulness.
The deceitfulness of our hearts and our own wisdom. I believe we would quickly become weak.
And act wickedly, just like the unsaved.
Do you know that the wrath of God is going to come down on the children of disobedience?
That's not a believer.
Children of disobedience are the unsaved. They're going to The wrath of God in hell is going to come down on these people.
But yet.
We find that Christians are doing some of the same things.
Some of these things should not be named among us.
We should be humble.
And always consider others to be better than ourselves.
God resists the proud and gives grace to the humble. Let's go to Psalm 42.
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This next device of the devil.
It is confusion and doubt when our prayers go unanswered.
Do you ever pray and find that your prayers seem to go unanswered and then we have doubts about who God is? Let's read Psalm 42 and verse 3.
My tears have been my meat day and night while they continually say to me, where is thy God?
Where is Saigon?
At the refugee camp.
Nearly long way in Malawi.
You hear a lot of sad stories, people being chased out of their country by war.
This one man had some unexplainable and inexplicable pains going up and down his back and his neck, and he couldn't live. He couldn't sleep. So he went to the missionary Dr. that was there and the doctor examined him and he could find no reason.
For these pains this man was experiencing in this discomfort.
Two weeks later, someone else from the refugee camp talked to this missionary Dr.
And he told him that this man back in his country, in Rwanda, Burundi, Congo, in that area.
This man and his wife were taken and tied up to a tree.
And then, one by one, his seven children came before him, and the rebels murdered his children before his very eyes as he stood there helpless.
When we experience disaster, it can shake our faith to the core.
And we think that God does not answer prayer.
Lamentations 3. It says when I cry aloud when I cry and shout, he shutteth out my prayer.
Oh, the prophet, he felt that.
He felt that the prayers were not answering and he was suffering and weeping.
Maybe you're unemployed and you can't find a job and you don't know how to provide for your family.
Maybe you have a disease for which there is no cure.
And you continue to regress.
Maybe there's a loved one that's died.
And you're filled with despair and you're dealing with loneliness.
There is a driver of a minibus in Malawi.
Who had a sign on the side of his van?
And it said capital letters. Why, God, why?
That was his business slogan. Why, God, why?
The injustices that we see in this world make it seem like God doesn't care about our personal lives.
Yet the Lord himself, he understands those feelings.
As a man on the cross.
The Lord Jesus felt deserted.
He felt alone.
And he cried out. My God.
My God, why hast thou forsaken me? Why? Why art thou so far from helping me?
Oh my God, I cry in the daytime and now here's not.
We might be like Mary.
In the garden.
After the Lord rose from the dead and her soul was empty.
And her heart was full of grief.
Jesus was there in the garden with her.
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But it was as if there was a curtain in front of her and he was hidden from her.
When you get into a condition of despair.
Or depression and loneliness.
We need to be like a Bartimaeus.
Who cried out? Jesus, thou son of David, have mercy on me.
The Lord Jesus promises you.
He says I will not leave you comfortless.
I will not leave you comfortless.
And so we know that the Lord will make himself known to us again in some way.
Back in the garden, the Lord Jesus said one word. He said. Mary.
She turned around and said master.
Oh, the relief that came over her heart in that moment when she recognized that the presence of the Lord was with her there in the garden of her distress.
Let's go to Luke chapter 4.
I.
Satan has many devices by which.
He tries to trick us, try to discourage us.
But in this device of the devil he will leave you alone.
And he won't tempt you at all.
And I believe that this device is just as dangerous as the rest.
When things are going well.
And we become rich.
We become rich in this world and we're chasing success and we consume it upon our lusts.
And then we lie to the Spirit of God by giving him a giving a pittance to the Lord, while some poor afflicted soul is casting in all their two mites.
Satan becomes successful in his Wiles.
We find that when the Lord after the Lord was tempted in the wilderness.
Let's read Luke 4 verse 13.
And when the devil had ended all the temptation.
He departed from him for a season.
After the devil got finished tempting the Lord, he left him for a season. He left him alone for a season.
But then it was that he came back in full fury at the cross.
Satan will leave us alone, and he'll let us make, and he'll let us think that things are going well.
For a season.
For a time.
We may think that we're pretty good Christians because we don't do any any vile works, any wickedness.
But we become distracted by life.
We get busy in this world.
And we become in danger of becoming lazy Christians.
And it's that at that time when Satan will get in there and he is successful and he'll catch us off guard.
In Malawi we, especially this time of year, there's been a lot of hunger and it's made worse because there's a lot of hunger and famine throughout Africa. And so they come down, all these other countries come down and buy food wherever they can find it and take it back.
And so that makes the prices go even higher. And so when we give food to the assemblies there in Malawi, we leave it to the judgment of the brothers there in the assemblies as to how they're going to distribute that food to the Saints.
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And it's interesting to see how they determine how much each one gets.
And they tell me that.
The faithful, they call them strong Christians. The ones who are always at the meetings and always being there to help one another. They call them strong Christians.
Then the Christians who they don't come out to all the meetings.
Sometimes they're there on Sunday, but they have other priorities in their life and they they put a low priority on their Christianity, and they call those ones, they call them lazy Christians. And so when they're distributing the food, they give a double portion to the faithful and they give 1/2 portion.
To the lazy Christians.
Let me ask you.
What size portion would you get if you were hungry and had no food?
Would you be considered a lazy Christian because you missed a lot of the meetings? Maybe you only come out Sunday morning?
You don't come to the prayer meeting.
You don't come to the reading meeting.
And you wonder why there's no food for the Christian?
Let's go to first Timothy chapter 6.
First Timothy chapter 6.
In verse 17.
Charge them that are rich in this world, that they be not high minded, nor trust in uncertain riches, but in the living God who give us, giveth us richly all things to enjoy.
I want you to think.
But maybe you want to serve the Lord. Maybe you don't want to be a lazy Christian and you want to do something to serve the Lord.
Many of us, if we were asked.
What can you do to serve the Lord?
We might respond.
I don't know. I don't have a clue.
But what could you do? Others may say, well, oh, I'll just. I'm going to go out and tell everybody about the Lord.
That's good, but how are you going to implement that plan?
How are we going to tell others about the Lord Jesus? You don't have to go to India or to Africa or some foreign country to be able to share Jesus Christ with other people. You can do it at work. You can talk to your neighbors. You can do it at school. Share Christ with those that the Lord puts in your pathway.
It takes a little bit of thought to serve the Lord.
It takes a little bit of initiative.
To serve the Lord, it takes a little bit of faith, perhaps the size of the grain of a mustard seed, a little bit of faith to serve the Lord.
And it takes a little bit of spiritual energy.
It also takes a little bit of love. You need to love the people you're talking to.
We're also told by Love, serve one another.
But now, if you have that desire to serve the Lord, and perhaps you are serving the Lord, and you're faithful, don't be discouraged if it seems like no one else seems to be sharing the gospel. Nobody else is preaching the Word. Nobody else is living the truth. I just want to encourage you.
Be faithful yourself.
The verse in Roman says Do you have faith?
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Have it to yourself.
Each person needs to be exercised on their own as to what they are going to do, how they are going to serve the Lord. You can't have jurisdiction over someone else's faith and tell them how they are going to serve the Lord. I am responsible for me.
To those of you who may be.
Lazy Christians or in a spiritual slumber?
I ask you.
Why are you sleeping?
Mark 14 reminds us to watch.
And pray so that we don't fall into temptation.
Watch and pray.
So you don't fall for the devices of the devil. Let's go to Mark, chapter 10.
This will be our last device of the devil that we'll look at in Mark chapter 10 and this device that Satan uses.
His carnal friends and relatives.
Many times Satan attacks us himself or through his demons.
But with this device, it's different. Satan attacks us.
With other people whom we trust because Satan does not want you.
To serve the Lord.
And he'll use any means he can to take away glory from the Lord Jesus.
Satan uses other people whom we trust, like a friend or a relative.
To tempt us, for example.
Adam and Eve were in the garden.
And Eve was deceived, and she took the fruit, and she went over, and she tempted Adam with that fruit.
Eve was deceived, but Adam disobeyed.
He was. He was stumbled.
By a carnal relative, his wife.
Jo.
We know the story of Jove and how all the great much affliction and troubles that he went through Indiana his life.
And when it got to such a point, his wife said to him, Joel, curse God and die.
The Lord Jesus himself. He had a circle of very close friends and one of his closest friends was Peter.
And Peter tempted the Lord Jesus to turn away from going to the death of the cross.
The Lord Jesus had to say to him, Get thee behind me, Satan.
Let's look at Mark chapter 10, verse 28.
Then Peter began to say unto the Lord Jesus, Lo, we have left all, and have followed thee. And Jesus answered and said, Verily I say unto you, There is no man that hath left house, or brethren, or sisters, or father, or mother, or wife, or children, or lands, for my sake.
And the Gospels.
There's a whole list here of friends and relatives and possessions.
All of these things can become distractions for us. If you want to serve the Lord, you have to be willing to be able to leave your family and your friends and not give them a first place in your life. And to follow the Lord Jesus, we need to have our priorities in a proper perspective.
And to have Christ to be first in our lives. But it is our friends and relatives, our carnal friends and relatives who are going to better the closest to us, that will have the most effect on us. And I remember that 10 years ago when I was preparing to move to Malawi.
And to live there, a carnal friend who was gathered to the Lord's name came up to me. And he said, I think you are a fool for going over there to preach the gospel.
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Let me tell you, that hurt.
About the same time.
A carnal relative talked to me and he said it's a waste of time for you to go over there and try to change those people.
Let me tell you, it was a waste of time for me to try to change those people. When you try to change a culture that's 1000 plus years old, you can't change the culture. But the Lord Jesus Christ can come into their hearts and he can change them.
It's the closest people to you who are going to be the biggest discouragement when you sit out to serve the Lord.
Tonight, Saturday night.
You haven't seen your friends for a long time.
You want to enjoy their friendship, but as you enjoy your friendship, don't let Satan tempt you. Don't allow your closest carnal friends to tempt you, because it is your closest carnal friends who will tempt you to go out and drink with them.
Or to play poker with them.
Or to go to the movies.
Or to have sex with them.
And it is your closest friends and relatives.
Who will tempt you to leave the Lord's table?
So you need to be aware of these things.
And have a verse of scripture ready.
To present.
To the devices of the devil.
If you are determined to serve the Lord.
I want you to be prepared to experience all of these different types.
Of Satan's Wiles, and the and of these temptations.
But even though there's a lot of people and friends and relatives who will discourage you.
There are many, many. Let me say there are many people who will encourage you and be thankful for your desire to serve the Lord.
Today it's difficult to practice. Mark chapter 10, verse 28 to 30.
Because carnal friends, they don't want us. They influence us in a way that makes it difficult for us to preach the Gospel. And so, as our verses are saying, you may need to forsake your family and your friends to be able to worship the Lord in holiness, and to be able to do it according to the knowledge of the truth and to be able to go out and serve the Lord.
But if you are willing to give up the comforts of carnality.
God promises you 100 times the amount that you have given up in suffering for the Lord's sake and for the word of the truth of the gospel. Look what it says in verse 30.
But he shall receive in hundredfold now in this time Houses and Brethren, and Sisters, and Mothers, and Children, and Lands with persecution.
And the world took and and in the world to come, eternal life. The Lord Jesus promises you, if you're willing to give up some of the pleasures of this world to take, to have your family and your possessions take a second place in your life and give Christ the 1St place and go out and serve him.
He will bless you, He promises you blessing, but he does not promise you an easy life, he says. These things will come with persecutions.
If you want to serve the Lord.
You need to think about how you're going to do it. You need to take some initiative to go out and serve the Lord, and then you need faith to step out.
In spiritual energy.
And then by love you can serve one another.
Let's end by singing hymn #181.
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Times about up, so I'll just read a couple of the verses. When Satan appears to stop up our path and fill us with fears, we triumph by faith he cannot take from us, though OFT he has tried the heart cheering promise the Lord will provide. He tells us we're weak, our hopes is in vain. The good that we seek we never shall obtain. But when such suggestions are spirits have tried, this answers all questions the Lord will provide.
What are we seeing the last two verses of #188 of 181?
No strength.