God's Solution for Corruption

Now, I say all that because I don’t want to just—well, I felt the Lord prompted me to say it—but I don’t want to just be in the abstract. I want this to come down to the place where *you* live. It affects *you*. Your destiny is at stake. It’s not just theology. It’s how we live.

There is no abstract theology in the New Testament. You cannot find it. Every time there’s a theological truth propounded in the New Testament, it’s applied to the way we live, without exception. You can look; you’ll never find just abstract theological truth.

So, let’s come down now to the basic. Anyhow, we all agreed on one thing. The thing that God hates most is what? Pride. Let’s say that again. The thing that God hates most is pride.

Amen.

So, we come down back to 2 Timothy chapter 3, which is where we were before.

“But know this, that in the last days perilous times will come,”

dangerous times, tough times. The marginal reading in this version is, “‘Times of stress’ will come.”

Why? Because men will be certain things. What is the root problem? It’s the decline of human character and behavior. And it’s progressive. And it cannot be reversed.

This is something God showed me. Corruption is irreversible. Once a thing becomes corrupt, you can halt corruption, you can slow corruption, but you cannot reverse it. Take any piece of fruit, any vegetable, anything like that. It’s corrupt.

And if you leave it, its corruption will become totally manifest. You can take the most beautiful, succulent-looking peach, but leave it a week, and it looks much less beautiful and tastes much less succulent. Now, you *can* do something. You can put it in a refrigerator.

A refrigerator will not reverse the process, but it will slow it. And, forgive me for saying this, but I think the church is like a refrigerator.

You put a person in the church; it doesn’t change his corruption, but it does slow it down.

But God is so realistic. He doesn’t *try* to reverse corruption. He has only one solution: a new birth, a totally new start.

“If any man be in Christ, he is a new creation: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new. And all things are of God.”

The new creation is totally God-originated. There’s not one element of corruption in it.

So, you can remain in your corruption. If you want to sit in your refrigerator, you can do it. But the only thing that will change you is new birth, the new creation. And if you’ve never had that, you need it.

Young or old, man or woman, makes no difference. There’s no sex in the new birth.