Lesson 1: The Purpose of Salvation

Hey everyone, welcome to the Heart Ablaze course. I am so excited about these next six sessions. Let me tell you something. It's from this book called A Heart Ablaze. I wrote it in 1999, but honestly, the truths of this book are more urgent and important for today than they were even in the day I wrote it 25 years ago. Now, let me say this. We are talking about a journey of truth here. Now, Paul writes to Timothy and he makes this statement. He says, for in the time will come, and I believe this time is right now, when they will not endure sound doctrine, but according, and doctrine means teaching, fundamental teaching, but according to their own desires, because they have itching ears, they will heap up for themselves teachers and they will turn their ears away from the truth and be turned aside to fables. Now, what in the world does the word fable mean? It actually is defined as a falsehood. So, we could say error, we could say unsound teaching, we could say fake teaching, okay, or fake truth. That would be the definition of that word fables. Now, you have to understand these unsound teachings aren't coming from like a phone book, an encyclopedia, a religious book from another nation. These teachings come with scripture involved in it, but the scripture is not rightly divided

as the Word of God says. You know something, here's the deal. We can preach error as truth for so long that eventually when the truth comes along, we reject the real truth because we've embraced error as truth. I hope you got that. It's really important to understand that. It is so important that our foundation is rooted in the Word of God. We've got to be like the Berean believers who what? They studied the scripture. They didn't even believe Paul. They had to go in and dig in the scriptures to make sure what he was saying was true. Now, I think it's interesting that Paul says, the day is going to come where they will not endure sound doctrine. Here's the deal. For him to say endure means what? Truth's not easy. Sometimes truth is very hard to swallow. That's why he says endure. You know, if truth was just so easy and so simple and so delightful, the world would be banging at its door to come in. But the truth is sometimes the truth can be difficult. It can be hard, but it always produces great results. We have to remember Jesus is coming back, not for a lukewarm church, not for a cold church. He's coming back for a hot church,

a church whose hearts are aflame for him. This is what this message is all about. So why do we want to go through this course? Let's do the why first. All right. In these times we're living in today, why is it that 80 percent of our new convents are eventually drifting back into darkness? Why do so many in the church lack passion? Why have we spent billions of dollars? I'm talking about the Western church. We've spent billions of dollars on the gospel, yet we don't have an on-fire church. What is the answer? It's the lack of the fire of God. Now, on the same side, let me ask these questions. Moses, he left a lifetime of achievements, pleasure, luxury, opulence. For what? Why would he do that? What about Jeremiah? And what about Isaiah and the other prophets who the more they preached the truth, the more they were persecuted and even imprisoned? Why? What gave the early church the strength to be able to continue to preach boldly the Word of God even when they knew they were going to be severely persecuted? The answer to all these is the fire of God. If you listen to Jeremiah, his word was in my heart like fire shut up in my bones. That is the purpose of this course. This is why we're talking about this, because let me tell you something.

I want you to be one of the five wise virgins when Jesus returns, not one of the five foolish virgins. Remember, they all have lamps. They all are looking for the Messiah, the bridegroom, I should say, coming. They all are awake, but yet they ran out of fire. Their lamps started going out, not in the middle, in the end, right before his second coming. That's why this teaching is so important. So if you desire to ignite the fire of God within you, let's begin. Right at the onset, I want to make a statement, and I want to make this point so clear. God's desire has always. been to inhabit, listen to the word, inhabit his people, not just to visit them. We hear people sometimes say we need a visitation from God. I don't want a visitation. I want a habitation. I want to be someone he inhabits, and this is his desire. One of the greatest promises that God makes to us in the New Testament, this one is mind blowing, and I don't understand why we don't talk about it a whole lot more, is found in 2 Corinthians, and that's chapter 6 where the Apostle Paul writes. He's actually quoting from God speaking to the children of Israel back in Exodus. He said, I will, this is God speaking through the Apostle Paul, I will dwell in them and walk among them. I will be their God, and they shall be my people.

Now, Paul in the same light writes in another letter to the church of Ephesus. He says, in whom you are being built together for a dwelling place, not a visiting place, a dwelling place of God in spirit. That's Ephesians 2, 22. So, this is a powerful, powerful promise. Think about it, God Almighty, the one who put the stars in the universe with his fingers, named every one of them, weighed every drop of water on this planet in the palm of his hands, weighed the mountains in his scales. I want to dwell in you and among you. Oh my goodness. Are you grasping the magnitude of his desire and this promise? But here's the deal. Every single promise of God has a condition. So, we got to ask, what is the condition for God dwelling in me and among me? Here it is, 2 Corinthians 6, verse 17, just a couple of verses earlier. Therefore, God says, come out from among them and be separate, says the Lord, do not touch what is unclean and I will receive you. Now, he's saying, come out from among them. Who is he talking about? He's talking about the world. He's talking about unrighteousness, lawlessness, living and pursuing what unbelievers live and pursue.

Come out from among them and then I will receive you. In other words, if you come out from among them, I will receive you. If you don't come out from among them, I won't receive you. Are you hearing this? I don't care if you prayed the sinner's prayer, I don't care if you attend church every week, I don't care if you're in Bible study groups, it doesn't matter. If you don't come out from among them, unrighteousness, lawlessness, pursuing what the world pursues, I will not receive you. But here's his desire, I want to receive you. Therefore, if we simply just do this, coming out from among them, he will receive us. Listen to it from the message translation. I'll live in them, move into them. I love that, move into them. I'll be their God and they will be my people. So leave the corruption and the compromise. Leave it for good, says God. Don't link up with those who will pollute you. Listen to the word pollute. You can have a clear glass of water, you throw a foreign substance in it, you've polluted it. Now, none of the water is good to drink. So listen to the word God's using. Don't hook up with those who will pollute you. Now, here's the final statement. I want you all for myself.

If you look at the Apostle James, he writes in his letter, chapter four, verse four, in the New Living Translation, if your aim is to enjoy the world, you cannot be a friend of God. I'm gonna say it again. If your aim, if your goal is to enjoy the world, you cannot be a friend of God. You have to come out from among the world and be separate. And IV says it like this. Anyone who chooses to be a friend of the world becomes an enemy of God. It literally means they make themselves. God doesn't want you as an enemy, but you make yourself an enemy of God. That's the New King James Version. So what is your aim? Let me ask you that. Is it friendship with God or is it friendship with the world? You need to ask yourself that question because if your aim is to be a friend of the world, to be celebrated by the world, to be embraced by the world, then this might not be the course for you. But if you want to be a friend of God, then you need to keep listening to the truth of the word of God because it's going to liberate you and it's also going to give you the great joy of being in his presence.

So what is the very next verse of scripture? See, a lot of people miss the connection. God says, I will dwell in you, walk among you. I'll be your God. You shall be my people. Come out from among them, be separate, and I will receive you. I'll be a father to you. You'll be my sons and daughters. Very next verse happens to be chapter seven. So a lot of people miss the connection. because the very next verse he says, therefore, so in other words, I'm an author, okay? I've written 25 books. I've never started a chapter with the word therefore. Therefore means I'm continuing the thought. Therefore, having these promises, what promises? I'll dwell in you. God Almighty's saying, I'll dwell in you. I'll walk among you. I'll be your God. You should be my people. You'll be my sons and daughters. Having these promises, beloved, let us, now listen to this, cleanse ourselves from all, not some, not 99%, all filthiness of the flesh and spirit, that's your intentions and motives, the spirit, perfecting holiness in the fear of the Lord.

Now, notice he says, cleanse yourselves. He doesn't say the blood of Jesus is gonna cleanse you. Wait a minute, John, John, John, are you teaching us that the blood of Jesus doesn't cleanse us from all filthiness? Never, never, never. What I am saying is don't confuse the work of justification with the work of sanctification. There is a massive difference. You say, those are two big words. I'm gonna help you. Justification is what happened to us the moment we gave our lives to Jesus Christ. At that very moment, when he became the Lord of my life, of your life, he cleansed all sin away, all record of sin, judgment, was eradicated. Though our sins were as scarlet, he made us white as wool. However, the moment we're saved, the moment we're justified is the moment that the work of sanctification begins, and that is a process. And the work of sanctification is when we get out of us what he saved us from. He saved us from sin. He broke the power of sin. A person who pursues sanctification or holiness, remember he says, perfecting holiness in the fear of God is a person that is on a journey. I am on a journey to become more like Jesus because God has given me his power of grace so that I could live like him.

Now, it makes more sense. We have to cooperate with this. In other words, we have to obey what his word says. We have to yield to the power that is within us because Paul makes it so clear. We have the flesh, we have the spirit. And as a believer, we choose. Are we going to listen to the desires of our spirit, which is born again and made in exact image of God? Are we going to listen to our flesh? And are we going to do the dictates of the flesh like the world does? See the world, they are dead spiritually. So they're going to do what their flesh desires. They're not in conflict. The ones that are in conflict are the Christians who have a brand new spirit that are actually yielding to the flesh. Those are the most miserable people in the world. Yeah, they are the most. A sinner is doing what he's supposed to do. He's sinning. That's his nature. So there's no conflict. The believer who is actually being led by the flesh, not cleansing himself from the desires and the dictates of the flesh is the one who's living in conflict. He's the person who's got a war going on between their heart and their head because they are living in a realm they shouldn't.

And see, God's word, his spirit, gives us the ability. The ability. Listen, this is the good news. What you couldn't do before you got saved. I couldn't walk away from this. I couldn't stop being mean to my wife. I couldn't stop being mean to my kids. I couldn't stop looking at pornography. Whatever it was, God now is giving you the ability, the power. Ephesians 3, 20 says, now unto him who is able to do exceedingly abundantly above all you can ask or think according to the power that's at work within me. The power is in you. See, religion wants to say, oh, we're just sinners saved by grace. Oh, you know, we've got to obey the dictates of our flesh because we still live in this body. No. Paul said, I am crucified to the world and the world is to me. And he said, I am crucified to my flesh. Those that are Christ have crucified their flesh and its desires. Jesus said, whoever wants to come after me, let him deny himself, take up his cross, which means crucifying the desires of your flesh and follow my way of living. When you do this and a fire gets ignited and you're going to see this scripturally and now you have a heart ablaze and now the more you walk in obedience,

the easier it is to walk in obedience because if you continue to sin, you become a slave of sin. So it's really important. You know, in order to really understand what Paul is saying here, we got to take this all the way back to where God first said, I want to dwell in them and I want to walk among them. You know, it's really interesting. I find so many times we'll read these verses and the reason these verses are. more important to people is we don't understand the background. We don't understand that it's taken thousands of years for God to get us to the place where He can dwell among us and walk among us. I kind of like it, liken it to, you've got a typical movie. I actually remember very specifically when I was a very young boy, there was this really popular movie called West Side Story. And it was about this couple that fell in love and they were born on the wrong side of the tracks. Their families hated that they were in love, but they were in love. And I think at the very end of the movie, something happens really tragic to the guy. And I wasn't much into that. I'm a young kid. I'm eight years old. All I care about is sports and all that. I'm not saved yet. But, you know, I was the only boy of six children. And I'll never forget, never forget this as long as I live. I was upstairs doing some homework or something.

And I came down into our living room, our family room where the TV was. Now, back in those days, we had small TVs. And my sisters and my mom and dad are all huddled around. And they're watching this movie. And it's the last 15 minutes of the movie, right? They'd already been watching an hour and 45. I have no idea what's going on. I walk into the movie and the big, big moment hits in the movie. It's when the actor says something, I think right before he dies. I don't even remember fully. But all of a sudden, my sisters are boo-hoo and they're crying. My dad's got a sad look on his face. My mom's crying. The world is going on. I miss the hour and 45 minutes. This set me up for that climactic moment. People read 2 Corinthians chapter six. They miss the thousands of years that God has spent getting us to this place. So they don't appreciate what he's saying. So to do it, we got to go back to the book of Exodus and we got to realize that God's people, the children of Israel were captive. Egypt had taken them captive. They were slaves. They were being brutally treated. They were eating the scraps. They were living in the slums. And yet they knew they had a promise from their father, Abraham, that God would visit them again and deliver them out.

Well, God raises up this man named Moses who was actually born a Hebrew, but raised in Pharaoh's court. And Moses is trained in all the ways of the Egyptians. But yet there's a day that comes that Moses has a desire to go back to his people. God starts moving on his heart and he ends up trying to avenge two brothers that were Hebrew. He ends up having to flee to the backside of the desert. He's there for 40 years. And then all of a sudden, God appears to him. He appears to him in a bush and God speaks to him out of that bush, the bush that's burning, but it's not being consumed. And God says, I've raised you up. You are my deliverer. I want you to go back and tell Pharaoh to let my people go. So Moses goes back. He tells Pharaoh, let my people go. Pharaoh gets stubborn. God does these 10 magnificent signs. I shouldn't say magnificent. They were horrendous for Egypt, but magnificent in the eyes of Israel. And finally, after the 10th one, where all the firstborn of Egypt were killed, Pharaoh says, go, go. And so Moses delivers Israel out of Egypt after 400 years of being there. Now, I ask people this all the time, and I want you to answer this out loud. I want you to say it out loud. Where was Moses taking the people when he brought them out of Egypt? Where? Okay. A lot of people, when I ask this question,

you know what they say? The promised land. No, no, no, no. What did Moses say to Pharaoh seven times? Thus saith the Lord, let my people go that they might worship me in the wilderness. Why in the world would Moses want to take them out of Egypt into the promised land before first bringing them to the promiser? I see an amazing contrast here. Okay. I look at Israel. They're abused by Egypt, right? All the things I told you about. Children are put to death. They got stripes on their back from the whips, from the taskmasters. They're working all their life to build somebody else's inheritance. They come out of Egypt, and they're constantly, go read in the book of Exodus and Numbers. They're constantly saying, let's go back to Egypt. It was better for us. But then I look at Moses, and Moses is raised in the most beautiful home on planet Earth. He can have anything he wants. Pharaoh is his grandfather. He can throw a national party. He can have a big sports day. He can have any kind of electronics he wants. I know there's no electronics back there, any kind of car, any motorcycle. I mean, just think in today's terms, right? He comes out of Egypt, and he never once says, I want to go back to Egypt. It was better for me.

Yeah, it was way better for him because he was in the desert. Now, I look at this, and Moses, why does he never want to go back to Egypt? Because he had one encounter with God at that bush that burned, and it changed him forever. And so he wants Israel to experience the same thing. He wants them to meet the God he met in that bush. So he brings them right to where that bush was, which was Mount Sinai. It takes them, I think, a month or two to get to that mountain. Once they get out there, there's 3 million Jewish people, Moses goes up and has a private meeting with God. And this is absolutely amazing. I'm gonna read from Exodus 19, verses three and four. And Moses went up to God. So this is a private meeting, okay? And the Lord called to him from the mountain, saying, thus you shall say to the house of Jacob and tell the children of Israel. So what God is saying to Moses, he's saying, you tell the whole 3 million of the people that are down there at the foot of the mountain. Go and bring them this message. Here's the message. You have seen what I did to the Egyptians and how I bore you on eagle's wings. Now listen to these words, and brought you to myself. There's the whole reason you got saved.

There's the whole reason God delivered Israel out of Egypt was to bring us to himself. He is a father. He has always had a father's heart. He didn't like become a father in the New Testament when Jesus was raised from the dead. He has always had a father's heart and he wanted to meet his children. He was so excited. He had delivered them out of Egypt with a very strong hand and an outstretched arm. And he was like, I can't wait to introduce myself to my kids. So we continue reading. Then the Lord said to Moses, go to the people and consecrate them today and tomorrow. Now, these are really important statements, okay? And let them wash their clothes and let them be ready for the third day. For on the third day, the Lord will come down upon Mount Sinai in the sight of all the people. Oh, there is so much in these verses. First of all, go to the people and consecrate. What is the word consecrate? It's another word for sanctification. It's another word for holiness. It means set them apart for me, okay? God is a holy God. It is his characteristic that stands out above all other characteristics is his holiness.

And holiness, I will explain it later in one of our messages, but it means that he is above his creation, set apart above. He transcends above all of his creation and he wants us to do the same by his power. And so he says, go down and consecrate them. Now, how are they going to be consecrated? Oh, also, let me add this. He said, go to the people and consecrate them today and tomorrow. That's two days. Now stop and think for a minute. Peter makes the statement. He said, a day with the Lord is a thousand years and a thousand years is one day. In other words, one of God's days is a thousand of our years. That's 2 Peter 3, verse eight. Now, what is Peter saying? One day to God, thousand of our years. How long has it been since Jesus was raised from the dead? It's been 2,000 years. It's been two days. What has been our responsibility the last 2,000 years to consecrate ourselves, set ourselves apart for when he comes? Because when he comes, he's coming back for the description, one description of the church. She is a holy bride without spot or wrinkle

or any such thing. So what he's saying to Israel, he's actually prophetically speaking because God knows the end from the beginning to the church. He's saying, hey, you got 2,000 years to get in line with what my word says, to set yourself apart, to come out from among them and be separate because I'm coming for a holy bride. I'm not coming for a girl who says she's a bride who's sleeping with the world. I'm coming for a holy bride. And make no mistake about it, praying the sinner's prayer only does not make you a holy bride. That is the beginning. But you've got to sanctify, consecrate yourself. You've got to work it out. Remember Paul said, having the promise of him dwelling in us and among us, let us cleanse ourselves from all filthiness of the flesh and spirit. That's the garment of the flesh, the garment of the spirit. Now listen to what God says. Let them be ready for today and tomorrow and let them wash their clothes. What's he saying to them? Wash the filth of Egypt. Egypt is a type of the world. Coming out of Egypt is a type of being saved. God is saying, I'm giving you 2000 years

to wash the filth of Egypt off of you so that you will be a prepared bride for my son. Oh my gosh, I'm preaching myself happy. Are you getting this? God's showing how this is gonna happen. Way back 3,500 years ago, when Moses delivers Israel out of Egypt, God already knows what they're gonna do. He knows what the people of Israel are gonna do. So God says, okay, I'm gonna speak prophetically to my church, my son's bride. Cleanse yourselves, wash the filth of the world off of you because I so much wanna be with you. You know, here's the deal. Is God being mean? No, he's never mean. God is saying, I'm so holy, I'm so. I'm so, He is so perfect that if He gets into our presence and we're embracing filth, all of a sudden judgment comes and it's not good for us. God wants to prepare us so that we can enter into His chamber to have intimacy with Him. Oh my gosh, this is so exciting. So let's close with some thoughts here. The whole reason that we were saved and created is because God wanted to bring you and me to Himself. That's His number one reason for creating us. He wanted to have a family, a family He could be intimate with, a family that wouldn't be,

you see people that come into the presence of this Holy God like Nadab and Abihu, people like Uzzah who studies the Ark, they come into the presence of God. You look at Ananias and Sapphira in the New Testament, they come into the presence of this Holy God with irreverence, with unholiness, still clinging to the world's ways and all of a sudden there's instant, instant reaction. Let me tell you something, He wants us prepared because He's coming in glory. He came as a lamb, He's coming back as a lion. He said, when I come back, He said, everyone, every eye is gonna see Him. Every eye is gonna behold Him, even those who pierce them. The underworld is going to see Him when He returns in His glory. We, His people are gonna see Him when He returns in His glory. And the thing is, will we do what Israel did or will we be ready? And we're gonna talk about in this next lesson what Israel did when God came down in His glory. It was really a very sad and tragic day. Listen, I wish we were on lesson two right now. I'm so excited, I can't wait to get to it. So read the corresponding chapters, think about what you've heard today, pray about it, and let's look forward to being together on lesson two.