A Successful Life Means Gaining Mastery Over Our Inner Selves

We have been talking about how to live a successful life. As you know, for me the word "successful" means much more than the superficial interpretation we so often give to it, and to the word "prosperity" as well.

Many times, when people hear about success in life, they think of material success, they think of money, they think of influence; they think, rather, of things that are merely human, material, and social. And unfortunately, as I have said so many times, there are pastors who often lend ourselves to that easy interpretation of what prosperity is, and we believe that God is simply a cash machine, a spiritual ATM that is always there giving us money, and that this is our right.

But remember that we have always said that the way we are framing this idea of a successful life is much broader and, I believe, much more successful. It includes a creative life, a life of perpetual growth and inner personal development, and an ever-increasing acquisition of self-mastery: mastery over our appetites, mastery over our intellectual and educational limitations.

Mastery over all those forces that so often control us and prevent us from having that abundant life, that prosperous and fruitful life that Christ came to give us when He said, "I have come that they may have life, and that they may have it abundantly." Amen?

So when I speak of a successful life, I am speaking, rather, of an abundant life, to use language that is easier for us to understand. And one of the things the Lord put in my mind this morning—because what I thought was going to be a single sermon has turned into several sermons on this subject, and there are other things I will address later—is that when we begin to touch on these different points, associations arise, and then one hears, I believe, from the Lord, and one then understands what God wants to say, and sometimes we focus on one aspect of that sermon and of that meditation.

So that is what I want to do this morning. I want to address the subject of personal freedom. So this morning I want to emphasize that one of the areas God wants us to cultivate, and one of the aspects of a truly successful, powerful, influential life—in the positive sense of the word—is when we have control, and I am not even going to use that word because it has compulsive associations; no, when we have mastery over our own inner being.

In English there is a beautiful expression for which there is no equivalent in Spanish: self-mastery, which could be translated as dominio propio, but that does not quite capture it. And one of the things Christ came to give us is precisely mastery over our being, amen? Mastery over our appetites, our weaknesses, our imperfections. Mastery not in the sense that I grit my teeth and keep under control every day those demons that want to possess and control me, but rather that, little by little, through a process we call the process of sanctification and the process of perfecting, we acquire inner harmony.

And those things that once dominated us, controlled us, and determined our lives compulsively, beyond our awareness of those forces and beyond our ability to subject them to a higher principle, which is the principle of the Word of God.

When a man or a woman enters the ways of the Lord and receives Christ as Lord and Savior, that person enters a new dimension, and among other things, that dimension is the dimension of freedom. The Lord Jesus Christ said, "You shall know the Truth, and the Truth shall make you free."

And what I want is for us to focus for a few minutes on the Christian life as a process of personal emancipation. You may never have heard the word emancipation, but it means freedom from slavery. When a person is emancipated, emancipation means that the person is freed from slavery, and in a sense we are emancipated, we are freed, we are redeemed. That is another very biblical word: redemption. Redeemed means that we were purchased by the blood of Christ Jesus from a slaveholder who had us under his control, and now, interestingly, the Word says that we come under the control of another, but it is benevolent control and not destructive control like that of the enemy of our souls. Amen?

But we are free, and the Gospel must be conceived of as a project of continual personal liberation. When we enter the ways of the Lord, Christ wants us to be free, and we enter—as I was saying in one of the two services, though I no longer even remember which one—using the image of Lazarus.

When the Lord Jesus Christ imparts life to Lazarus and says, "Lazarus, come forth," Lazarus is dead and Christ imparts life to him; but when Lazarus comes out, how is he? He is bound with all the gravecloths that were placed on a dead person in those days to preserve the body. Then the Lord says, "Loose him," and for me, and for others who have seen this beautiful image, it has always meant precisely that.

When you enter the ways of the Lord, the spark of God's life is within you. You are now potentially a new creation; God sees you as a new creation, and He sees you free, He sees you powerful, He sees you wise, He sees you mastering your appetites, He sees you manifesting the fruit of the Holy Spirit: joy, peace, goodness, kindness, benevolence, generosity toward others; mastery over anger, mastery over anxiety, over fear, over depression, and over all those things that enslave us. The Lord wants us to be free from all those things. And it is about liberation from those areas, from those things that grip us. And we have to believe that—that God wants us to be free, and free from all those things.

An image from English literature comes to mind; I believe it is Gulliver. How many of you have heard of this character? Gulliver—I believe that is how it is said in Spanish. Gulliver is a man who, through the magic of the book's literature, is transported to a place where only very tiny people exist. In that place to which Gulliver is transported, he is a giant, and for some reason he falls asleep, and when he wakes up he finds that he is tied down everywhere with little threads that he cannot break.

These dwarfs, relatively speaking, have tied him down with cords because he is a giant and they are afraid of him. Suddenly Gulliver wakes up in this land he does not know, but discovers that he cannot move because he is completely bound over every part of his body with threads—threads to him—that prevent him from moving.

And I suggest that this is an image of our lives. When we enter the ways of God, all of us, like Gulliver, when we awaken to that new land, that new territory before us, discover that—oh!—suddenly we realize we are bound and limited everywhere by invisible but very strong restraints: rage, anger, wounds from the past, terrors, appetites, mental and emotional addictions, and sometimes addictions to drugs and other things—a great many things.

We are profoundly imperfect beings, profoundly limited, and then the process of liberation begins. For when human beings live a life without God, without an absolute and true point of reference, which is Christ Jesus and the values of the Kingdom of God, they think they are free. A slave who was born into slavery, who knows nothing but slavery, and who has never been able to compare his condition with that of a totally free person because somehow he has always remained within the realm of slavery, does not know that he is a slave.

He thinks he is a normal person, but then one day he suddenly discovers that there are people who can decide when they go out and when they come in, when they eat, what they eat, when they get dressed, and what they wear, and he says, "Wow, what a difference! I want that." But then they discover that there are bonds limiting them, and many human beings are like that. They do not understand that there is a spiritual dimension called the Kingdom of God.

And that is what the Church is supposed to be. The Church is a presence, a sign in the midst of the world that allows people to see that there is something different. Then, when those people enter that realm represented by the realm of the Church of Jesus Christ, a process begins, as it began in each one of us, of beginning to see life in a totally different and new way; now the values are different.

What we thought was red now turns out to be blue; what we thought was good now turns out to be bad; what we thought was bad now turns out to be good; what we thought was slavery is now eminent and imminent freedom; and a process of self-liberation, of growing awareness, of renewal of the mind begins. That is why the Word says, "Be transformed through the revelation of your understanding."

When we enter the ways of the Lord, we enter a project of redemption, a project of perfecting, a project of gradual liberation, a project of gradual emancipation, until we are conformed to the image of Christ Jesus. That is the successful life. Part of the successful life can be seen as a project of liberation from all those things that bind us and limit us in our personal growth.

So I want to reach a point where we talk about how the brain can gradually reconfigure and transform itself through that process of continual liberation, right? We have talked about how sometimes there are skills within us that we want to develop but cannot because we have not been taught how to develop them.

So all these things, right, that we need in order to change—honesty, humility, clarity, good reading, good conversations, stimulating environments—all these things take time to develop gradually. But we have to understand that, yes, it is possible to develop them, that it is possible to attain all those things, and that we have to align our lives with all those things stretching out before us.

But let me focus once again on this matter of personal liberation for a moment. If we go to Proverbs chapter 16, verse 32, it says there, "He who is slow to anger is better than the mighty," and here is the key; it says, "And he who rules his spirit than he who takes a city." He who rules his spirit is better than he who takes an entire city. That is to say, the person who gains mastery over his inner being is more powerful than the one who gains dominion over a city or a nation.

Sometimes people think that the powerful person is the conqueror who enters with his military forces and establishes his dominion, but a physical conqueror may be under the power and dominion of a great many inner demons and forces over which he has no control. And when that man takes off his glorious uniform at night, unbuckles his sword and sets it aside—his revolver or whatever it may be—he is merely a man struggling with terrors and difficult situations. Perhaps he has a ruined marriage; perhaps children who do not love him and whom he lost long ago; perhaps he does not have the appreciation of those around him, but rather they want his power, his influence, or what he can do for them.

But that being who has control over a city or a nation is merely a human being. The Word, however, says that the person who has mastery over his inner being is stronger and better; that truly requires great strength and great power. The person who has gained control over his inner being—and we cannot do that ourselves; we have the power of the Holy Spirit, the Grace of God, which wants to set us free.

Because when you have that mastery over yourself, then there is that mastery over anger, for example, as it says here in Proverbs 16; mastery over the offensive word, mastery over impulsiveness, mastery over resentment, mastery over inferiority complexes or shyness or low self-esteem; mastery over the hold that other people's opinions have on your life; mastery over pornography or any other sexual deviation, of which there are so many; lust, manipulating others, materialism. All these are things, threads that prevent us from moving in the power that God has declared over our lives.

We have to tame all those things one by one, and the Power and Grace of God within us make that possible. So when a person, with the help of the Holy Spirit, acquires and gradually gains mastery over his land—and I use that image very deliberately, over his land—he gradually gains dominion over every area of his life, over all those things that he or she identifies as areas that need to be conquered, right?

Then, with the passage of time, that individual becomes a true giant, a person of power. And that person, brothers and sisters, who has wisdom, who has God's grace, who has love, who has generosity toward others, who is able to forgive, who is giving, who knows that God is his provider, his helper, his representative—that person who is secure in herself because she is planted in God and does not need the praise or adoration of others to know that she has worth, because she knows that the Eyes of her heavenly Father value her when they look upon her.

How beautiful that is, isn’t it? For example, when a person knows: I have worth, not because someone assigns worth to me, but because the greatest witness of all, my God, looks upon me with approval from His Throne and says: I love you, you have worth, I created you in My image and My likeness, and I am with you through every step of life; I will never leave you, I will never forsake you, I will always be with you with the Power of My right hand, as the Word says.

When a woman or a man walks secure in the knowledge that no one can snatch me out of God’s Hands, that even if I fall short, even if I fail, even if I offend Him, God’s love covers me with His mercy if I repent and acknowledge that I need His Grace.

Listen to me, imagine what kind of spiritual giant a person with that kind of assurance is. That person will succeed in life. That person will be happy, that person will have influence, people will see the radiance of God in her or him, and they will want to draw near to that person.

That is why I say that we often put, as the saying goes, the cart before the horse. People therefore work themselves to death saying: I want influence, I want friends, I want money, I want comfort. But they do not understand that before acquiring those objects and tangible things, there are qualities that must first be acquired, which then enable a person to obtain those things as part of an organic process. Do you understand what I mean?

The problem with many people is that they obtain material things and become disfigured and deformed in the attempt to acquire something: a political office, a fortune, the top position in a corporation, partnership in a law firm—when the Word of the Lord says, “Seek first the Kingdom of God, and all these things will be added unto you.” And that is part of running the race lawfully, as we were saying earlier.

God is not interested simply in giving you things. God does not want to give you a little piece of hard candy, as we sometimes want: No, Lord, I want just a little piece, and that is all. God tells you: I am not going to give you candy; I am going to give you a process, I am going to give you sanctification, I am going to prepare you so that when you reach what you want, you will be prepared to handle it.

God is a systemic God; He is an organic God. He works from the inside out, He takes His time, and we have to understand this: above all, God wants us to acquire the qualities of Christ Jesus, the character of Christ. That character is powerful, that character is sublime, that character is capable of bringing a person true happiness, because what good does it do you to possess so many things and lose your soul, as the Bible says? The Bible says: “What does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses his soul?”

And I believe that we Christians have to change our values and say: Lord, yes, I want this, I want that; of course, it is legitimate, but I want it Your way, in Your time, with You taking me through a process until I get there. And part of that process, as I say, is that self-mastery, that control over the areas of our lives that keep us from being happy, because often, when we reach those things we want and are not prepared, what will happen is that the compulsiveness within us will undo and destroy everything we want.

That is why so many people win the lottery and, because they did not get there through an organic and coherent process, the money they obtain often destroys them. Studies have been done on this; after a few years, most of these people have lost their entire fortune and are worse off than when they acquired it. I know you will say: Well, I would like to give it a try and see what happens to me.

But the truth is that we have to be wiser than the world, and the Church has to be teaching people: Look, what God wants above all is for you to acquire control, dominion, lordship—mastery—over your inner realm. The interior of a man or a woman is vaster than any physical territory; it is the microcosm of the mind, of the spirit. It is a land without dimensions.

Nowadays, physicists know that our sense of space, time, and distance is entirely relative. The interior of a human being can, in a certain sense, be vaster than the whole world and the entire universe. Therefore, our inner being is a land that must be conquered, and the life of every believer should be a project of personal conquest over everything God has placed before us. The Christian journey should be a quest for liberation from everything that oppresses us and makes us less than what God wants us to be.

When death finds me, I want it to find me with sword in hand, fighting one of the giants against which I continually battle within myself. I want my life to be a perpetual journey toward personal emancipation, personal liberation, and that gives my life tremendous interest, passion, and adventure. Anyone who gets bored with the Gospel has only his own foolishness to blame, because the Gospel is the most beautiful and adventurous thing in the world; it is not boring at all.

Friedrich Nietzsche, the great philosopher—great in a German sense—said that Christianity was a religion for slaves. That is the most demonic lie in the world. Christianity is a religion for powerful beings because Christianity demands the most difficult thing in the world: mastery over a being who is exactly like you, knows your every thought, and can anticipate every move you are going to make because he knows you perfectly. It is you yourself.

Imagine an opponent who, before you even think of striking him, already knows exactly what you are going to do and where you intend to land the blow. That is your life; that is your struggle. The person who defeats an opponent identical to himself is truly powerful. And that is why I say that Christianity, if it is properly understood as a project of liberation and of acquiring mastery over every area of our lives that previously enslaved us in the world, is clearly something that only a very powerful person can undertake. The problem is that we have impoverished Christianity.

What Nietzsche saw was a formal, social Church which, as the saying goes, “spoke of godliness but denied its power”—the Church of his time and culture. But a Church lived heroically according to the values of the Kingdom of God, authentically in keeping with the principles of the Gospel, with men and women perpetually crucifying themselves, bleeding throughout the journey of their lives, and continually fighting giants like the knights-errant and ladies-errant of old—that Church is supremely beautiful, heroic, powerful, enviable, and glorious: what the Bible calls a Church without spot or wrinkle.

So remember that passage: “He who is slow to anger is better than the mighty, and he who rules his spirit than he who takes a city.” Another passage I want to point out—let us turn to 1 Corinthians, chapter 6. The apostle Paul continually spoke about the freedom we have in Christ; that was one of the watchwords: we have been set free. And part of your project for a successful life will be to identify and make an honest, lucid diagnosis of those areas of your life that must be conquered by the power of God within you and that must be reconfigured and reshaped into the image of Christ Jesus and according to the values of the Kingdom of God.

And when you identify those things, you write them down, you acknowledge them, and you stop projecting: Oh, the problem is my wife—the woman You gave me—as Adam said to God: The woman You gave me made me sin, right? Oh, if God had given me a certain kind of wife, I would be a great spiritual giant. She says the same thing about him. Oh, if I had not been born in such-and-such a country, or in that little rural village in such-and-such a country, I would be something different. Oh, if there were not so many bad people in the world.

So we live our lives projecting instead of saying: You know what? I am responsible before God for my own personal territory, and there are areas of my life that I am going to name, and I am not going to be ashamed to say: Yes, I am impulsive; yes, I am hot-tempered; yes, I am bound to this thing and that thing; and I am going to invest a large part of the rest of my life in gaining mastery over each of those dimensions of my being.

Because sometimes we are too spiritual. We talk about sin, and we have spiritualized “sin” so much that we do not understand that it refers to all those behaviors, all those things that cause people to stumble in life and keep you from becoming happy in life. And let me take a brief detour—but it is not a detour; it is an illustration.

I think that is why it is so difficult so often when one preaches—and sometimes I bend over backward to be very specific about the things I preach, to be concrete, and not to go around talking in spiritual abstractions—but I find, because I hear the stories about the things that happen when people leave the Church, that very often, precisely after I have preached a sermon that makes me say, “Father, wow, I was exceedingly clear,” you know what? Someone leaves here and immediately does exactly the opposite of what I preached, before they have even really left the Church.

Not long ago, on a Wednesday night, I preached a sermon about love and anger and other things—a brief meditation. Later I learned that two people—one of them approached the other, with whom that person had had a dispute for many years, and right there began insulting and speaking harshly to that person. The thing is that the Church is not made up of perfect people; you know that. The Church is a hospital, and sometimes it is an insane asylum. That is how it is. The Church is not—anyone who is scandalized because there are sinful people should move to Mars or Pluto or someplace like that, because that is the Church.

Christ made the Church a hospital, a refuge, a place of healing, and here we all are, half crazy, including the chief psychiatrist. And I ask myself: How could that person, after that? I bent over backward trying to preach something very concrete. How could that person hear all of that, submit to that teaching, and then go out and, a couple of minutes later, do exactly the opposite of what I preached? Not I—I hope it was the Holy Spirit.

And do you know why that is? It is because people have not learned to bring the Gospel down to its concrete, individual, circumstantial manifestations and to name the things in their lives. We have something like a psychological filter that prevents us from understanding that what is being said is meant for me, because we have developed some terrible defenses. And so we hear something, but it is as though someone were speaking to us in Italian, because there is a part we do not understand—or in Portuguese. And so the message is garbled, all tangled up by the enemy and by our own minds, the defenses we have, and the games we play with ourselves.

In the Name of Jesus, I invite you to ask the Lord for introspection and self-knowledge. Ask the Holy Spirit to continually enlighten you and show you which areas of your life need to be addressed. Do not be afraid—quite the opposite. When you discover that you have an area of your life that needs attention, say: Glory to God! Wonderful, I have identified you, and now I am going to defeat you in the Name of Jesus. I—amen. I rejoice every time I discover a new area that needs to be conquered, not because I am a masochist, but because I say: Wow, a new aspect of the project of personal liberation that I am going to accomplish with the Power of Christ Jesus in me, and I will be better as a result of that experience.

So, the passage in 1 Corinthians 6:12—I am about to finish, do not worry, I am wrapping all of this up now. All the things we had today have taken a little of our time, but amen; all of this is glory and wisdom. Look at what Paul says in 1 Corinthians 6:12. And I tell you that if you learn to see the Christian life and the Christian project as a perpetual project of personal liberation, and see it in terms of freedom and slavery, introspection and personal knowledge—which then enables us to be like Christ—there are many passages that you will see in a very different way.

Look at what Paul says in 1 Corinthians 6:12: “All things are lawful for me, but not all things are beneficial.” All things are lawful for me, and here is the key: “but I will not be mastered by anything”; but I will not be mastered by anything. That has been like a mantra for me, a motto for my life. My motto is that God has made me free and that I have within me the image of the living God; I have Christ Jesus within me. I have the sublime, noble, holy, beautiful values of the Kingdom of God within me, and that being whom I am in Christ Jesus must not allow himself to be enslaved or mastered by anything in this world.

I will never say: You know what? I cannot free myself from this. What I will say is: I will keep fighting until the last breath of my life, and if I do not overcome it completely, then when Christ frees me from this body, I will be completely free. But in the meantime, I will never say: No, that is just how they made me; I cannot free myself from this; that is simply how I am, period—or it is my genetics, or whatever. I will say: No, even though I do not understand all the mysteries, I am going to pay the price, and I am going to be engaged in a process of self-emancipation until the last day of my life.

Call that project whatever you wish, but I will not allow myself to be dominated by any of them. And that passage is long and profound because it says, “All things are lawful for me.” You know what? There are things that may not be bad in themselves, in the absolute sense of the word, but they are not necessarily beneficial to my well-being or to the well-being of those around me, and in that case I have to set them aside for the sake of a greater good.

And I cannot say, “No, it is simply that I am this way.” I have to be thinking about what is beneficial to the whole context in which I live. That is why many people do not understand this part. They say, “No, it is fine to be this way; one has to live however one wants; one has to be free.” But the thing is, you do not live alone on an island; we live within a context. There is a saying that goes, “No man is an island; we are part of a continent.” We are involved and immersed in a reality much greater than ourselves, and what I do affects the contextual reality around me; it affects my family; it affects my wife.

There are many things in marriage, for example, that one has to give up, not because they are bad in themselves but because they are not conducive to living with another person. Say amen if you agree—isn’t that right? There are many things in marriage... I sometimes meet with couples to provide counseling, and I have discovered that if I lose myself in her accusations or his accusations, I will become entangled and will not get to what I need to do. Because many times she comes and tells me a great many things about him, and I say, “Poor woman, she ought to be sanctified; she ought to be canonized right now. She deserves a four-bedroom condominium in heaven.”

But then he comes—the monster, the ogre—and presents me with a completely different picture, and I say, “Oh, but this man is a holy man; this man is going to heaven with his shoes and all. Poor fellow, I did not understand. Forgive me for judging you wrongly.” So what I have chosen to do instead is present them with the alternative of the Kingdom of God: How does a sound, healthy couple live, and what values should they practice? Because many times each one has their own version of the matter and says, “No, the thing is that I am right,” and they may indeed be.

But the thing is that this collective being that the two of you are, this two-headed, bicephalous being composed of the man and the woman in marriage, now needs other things so that this new system called marriage can function. So many times we have to give up things that are not lawful—yes, in the absolute sense of the word they are fine; in another universe, perhaps, they would pose no problem at all—but in this world in which we live, in this social and cultural time and space, things have to be viewed from a collective perspective, whether one wants to or not.

Nowadays, almost exclusive emphasis is placed on that: human freedom, autonomy, individualism, each person’s personal diversity and worth. But what about the community? Because we live in a world and a society, and we have to think about that as well. One can go from one extreme to the other. In any case, I do not want to get sidetracked by that.

What matters is what Paul says: “I am not going to allow myself to be dominated by anything.” When you identify something in your life that is contrary to the Word of the Lord, surrender it. And one final text, Galatians 5. I will simply read it now—Galatians 5, forgive me—Galatians 5:16–24. Paul speaks about freedom in terms of, of course, the law, religiosity, ritualism, legalism, all these things; but there is a dimension there that he speaks about, because he speaks, for example, of the flesh and the spirit and all of this. And with this I will leave you.

And remember: the core of my presentation is this—and place it within the context of all the other presentations I have given—that if you want to live a successful life, you must see your life as a process of perpetual self-liberation, in the power of the Holy Spirit and with the resources of heaven, from all those specific things that keep you from being like Christ. There it is in summary; that is the goal of my preaching.

Then Paul says in Galatians 5:16: “I say then: Walk in the Spirit, and you shall not fulfill the desires of the flesh. For the desire of the flesh is against the Spirit, and that of the Spirit is against the flesh; and these are opposed to each other, so that you do not do what you would.” Do you see the human struggle there? We are at the mercy of forces, of kingdoms in conflict, and there is a part of us that is fleshly, animalistic, demonic, earthly, as James says, which opposes the values of freedom, blessing, nobility, justice, love, and generosity; and so it sometimes takes us captive and leads us to do what we do not want to do. We know we should not, but we do it anyway.

Then Paul offers an alternative and says, “But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the law”—in other words, you are not under slavery—and then he says, “Now the works of the flesh are evident.” That is why I say that the Gospel is always specific. The Gospel is not a matter of vague and abstract spiritualities; we have to give names to the demons and those little dwarfs that control us.

The works of the flesh, which are what the Bible identifies as negative, are: adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lustfulness, idolatry, sorcery, hostilities, quarrels, jealousy, outbursts of anger, strife, dissensions, heresies, envy, murder, drunkenness, orgies; and just in case something was left out, it says, “And things like these.” There you can name everything else that was missing. There you can say, “Oh, thank You, Lord.” But there is something that is your responsibility, and those are the works of the flesh within you. Name them.

“Concerning which I warn you, as I have also told you before, that those who practice such things will not inherit the Kingdom of God.” Those who practice them, those who submit to them, those whose lives exemplify and are characterized by those things, who have made these sins into something systemic that governs them, controls them, possesses them, dominates them, and determines that person’s actions and image.

Now, as for the person who is struggling and is in the process: if God finds you in the middle of your struggle, still fighting and battling many of those things, but you are a person who has said, “Father, I have entered into battle against those things. I acknowledge that I am a sinner. I acknowledge that those things are negative, that they are contrary to Your Kingdom, and I have sworn enmity against all of them, and I am in the process of becoming sanctified”—even if life finds you, even if death finds you in the midst of your struggle, you can be at peace. God adopts you as His child. God will never be ashamed of you; He will never reject you, because you are in the process; you are in the struggle.

The problem is when you are not in the process, when you have submitted to slavery, when you have embraced certain things and simply said, “I am going to let them dominate and control me because this is the way I am, and this is who I am.” Woe to the one who glorifies his sins; woe to the one who celebrates them and calls them by another name. God is indeed at enmity with that person—it has to be said. But the person who humbles himself before God and says, “Father, I acknowledge that I am a sinner. I acknowledge that I am involved in a process, a project of personal emancipation, and I know what the values of Your Kingdom are. I acknowledge that the giant against which I struggle is not from You, and I will be at enmity with it every day of my life.”

Rest in the grace and mercy of your God, because God is with you. Then verse 22 says—and I promise you that I will finish here—it says: “But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faith, gentleness, self-control.” Against such things... Just as there are things like these in the realm of the flesh, there are also things like these in the realm of the Spirit. There are so many beautiful values that we must make the agenda of our lives, pursue passionately, and make our lives a perpetual quest. Like collectors of sublime works of art, we must spend our entire lives collecting virtues—not merely collecting them, but integrating them into our lives, right?

How beautiful: the fruit of the Spirit. Let me tell you that every day I am very clear about one thing: the formation of Christian character is not preached enough in the Church of Christ. That is why there are so many fleshly churches. That is why, throughout the centuries, the Church has perpetrated so many atrocities, and people would leave a church to whip slaves in the South, or leave another church to kill Jews in concentration camps, or leave another church to kill their brothers in a religious war in the sixteenth or seventeenth century, or put them to the stake in the name of Jesus Christ.

Do you know why people and the Church have committed all those atrocities and continue to commit them? It is because not enough importance is given from the pulpits to the formation of the image of Christ within us.

If you leave here today with anything, let it be that. The Christian life is a perpetual process of sanctification, of becoming more like Christ, of freeing ourselves from all those forces that enslave and deform us. That is the true frontier. It is not that you give a great deal of money to the Church—although if you want to give it, amen. It is not that you devote ten hours a day to Christian service, no. It is not that you leap and jump until your hair bun falls out here during worship. It is not that you speak in tongues and then speak badly of people outside. It is that you allow the character of Jesus and the fruit of the Spirit to be formed within you.

If you do not have the attributes of Christ—those gentle, generous, kind, loving attributes—you still have a long way to go. You are not going to bribe God with money, you know, nor will you bribe Him with time spent in church and with good works. God is appeased by a heart that worships Him in spirit and in truth, in accordance with the heart of Christ. If you wish, let us set about doing the hard work of personal sanctification.

That is the frontier; that is the struggle; that is the guiding point; that is the goal: to incorporate into ourselves those values that will set us free to be what Christ wants us to be. Verse 24 says: “But those who belong to Christ have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires.” Okay? I will leave you there, my brothers and sisters.

I hope that the core of these teachings remains engraved upon your heart this morning. Bow your head for a moment, as I am going to do in my spirit, and let us ask the Lord, in this project of becoming perfected, on this journey toward a successful life in Christ Jesus, to free us from everything that keeps us from being like our Master, our Lord.

Father, right now I identify so many serious things in my character, so many attributes that dishonor You and contradict everything I have preached. I am so conscious of them, Lord, but I will not shrink from my duty and privilege of acknowledging them and of knowing, first of all, that You love me just as I am, but that You also call me to become more and more like Christ Jesus; that I am not alone, that we are not alone in this struggle.

We have Your excellent Spirit—generous, compassionate, tender, powerful and strong, steadfast, loyal to the very end. Your commitment to us, Father, is unbreakable, and thank You because You have not left us alone. You have provided Your Holy Spirit, the great Comforter, the Paraclete who stands beside us to accompany us in that battle, in that struggle, in that adventure of self-improvement. We want to be free in Christ Jesus.

We remember the words of the Lord: “If the Son sets you free, you shall be truly free.” Set us free, Lord, so that we may then live joyful, full, abundant lives. Thank You for Your Word, which energizes us, equips us, and gives us hope, Lord. I bless my brothers and sisters this morning and declare Your peace over them. May none of them leave here, Lord, in agony because they see only a God of judgment, control, criticism, or condemnation; rather, may they see that incorruptible, just, compassionate Father who wants us to win the race and who has committed Himself to us to the point of sending His Son to die on a cross and coming down again upon the earth through His Holy Spirit to accompany us until the final day.

We thank You, Lord, and surrender this time to You. Thank You for everything we have heard, experienced, lived, and done in Your Name. We leave here filled with hope for the future. In the mighty Name of Jesus, the people of God say, “Amen.” God bless you, my brothers and sisters. May the grace of the Lord be with you. Free in Christ Jesus.