TV 1741 | Those Who Overcome Part One

Well, praise the Lord, I've had a number of thoughts percolating this week, and I'm just trusting the Lord to bring them together and make sense out of them. I'd like to turn, just as a starting point really, to a familiar passage in Revelation chapter 12. It's one we use many times, but I want to go past this into something else that I think is critical. And I believe it's on the Lord's heart, not just mine. And so, you know, Revelation is a whole lot of, contains a whole lot of things where God reveals Himself in pictures and stories and all kinds of symbols. So you're not looking to see it super literally, and yet there is a literal truth behind the pictures. There's truth that people need to see. And I'm not going to try to unpack the passage, but you do see the picture of Christ coming into the world. And you see Him coming through the remnant of Israel, being born as a little baby. And you see Satan pictured as a dragon, ready to kill Him, and not succeeding in that, but the child is raised up to heaven. It pictures a great war in heaven. You talk about the battle of the ages, that's where it was fought and won. Praise God. Everything that was accomplished through Him was played out in the war between God's angels and the devils, those that had followed Him. And we know that the dragon is the devil because it says so in so many words, and describes Him as the one who leads the whole ... it says the great dragon in verse 9 was hurled down. There was a place that He held prior to this that He lost. Thank God. Thank God. We need to live with the reality of that fact, all right? He was cast down, that ancient serpent called the devil or Satan, who leads the whole world

astray. He was hurled to the earth and His angels with Him. So again, that's not talking about, well, boom, they were down laying on the ground, but it certainly is a picture of them losing a place where they had held an absolute control over this creation and this world system. Then, all of this behind you now, then I heard a loud voice in heaven say, now have come the salvation and the power and the kingdom of our God and the authority of His Messiah, His Christ. That's another word for it. For the accuser of our brothers and sisters who accuses them before our God day and night has been hurled down, all right? So the thing that is on my mind most about this right now is what we have often referred to as the finished work of Christ. And sometimes we have thrown out a few little grammar lessons here about the Greek. We talked many times about how the Greek present tense is an ongoing thing where I would say, I am breathing. That's not an event, that's a condition, hopefully. But anyway, there is another tense, however, that is used throughout this verse and it's called the aorist tense. Don't worry about that. There's no test here coming. But the aorist tense is a simple past tense. In other words, it refers to something that's happened in the past and it's done. Think about that. Everything that he says has been declared in verse 10, he uses the aorist tense, means that happened. It's history, it's an event that happened. It's not something that's ongoing as though, well, hopefully it'll work out. This is something God did and it's finished. So everything that stands, everything that we, every truth that we lived forth, everything

we base our hope upon is not based on something that we hope God can finish what he started. He's promised to do that, by the way, because there is a process involved. But it's done. In his heart and his mind, it's done. Thank God. Now have come, it came, in other words, it's really the sense of the Greek. It came. What? The salvation and the power. That's dynamite. That's dunamis. We need to be stronger than the devil, all right? And the kingdom of our God and the authority of his Christ. Praise God. Every bit of that was absolutely done in history and Satan lost his place. These are facts that are laid out and I just pray that God will make them more real in our lives because everything depends. depends upon the truth of what he is saying here. It is a fact that we are meant to base our destiny upon, okay? And it's salvation. Folks, the message we have is not lifestyle change so you can have a better life in the world. So much that's called Christianity is little more than that. But this is about something that goes way beyond this world. I don't need to be just to have a better life here. I need a savior who can get me out of here safely and take me to something that's so much better than this could ever be because this is all temporary and it's corrupted by sin. I need a savior. And so the people that actually benefit from what he did are people that come to a place

where they recognize they got a need. I need a savior. I don't need somebody to sort of fill in the pieces of my own strength and my own will and all of that. And I need power, folks. I do not have the power to stand up against what this world offers. The devil is still at work deceiving the world. Incidentally, that's a present tense where he talks about him deceiving the world. That's present tense. That means that's an ongoing thing. As long as he's allowed to operate, he will be carrying out a work of deception, leading people to believe in something that doesn't turn out to be true and their whole destiny will fall apart because they have believed a lie. Thank God. Oh, how we need his truth, don't we? But we need that power, don't we? Because not one of us here, starting with me, has what it takes to stand up to the devil. Even if we agree in our minds with the Lord, I don't have what it takes. I got to have some power operating or I'm going to be at his mercy and he doesn't have any mercy. All right. In the kingdom of our God, there's a new kingdom that's being formed and the authority of his Christ where he said, all authority in heaven and earth has been given to me. And on that ground, he said, go therefore, make disciples of all nations. So the picture being painted here is of something that has happened in the past. It's real. It happened. The devil knows it and God wants the people to know it and to bank everything on it. And then we come to the next passage or the next verse that we have used so often. They triumphed or they overcame is another translation of that same word.

It's translated differently in various places, but that's the whole idea. There's a war, there's an opposition going on from this devil, but they overcame him. So here he's talking about a people who overcome, all right? They overcame him or they triumphed over him by the blood of the lamb and by the word of their testimony, they did not love their lives so much as to shrink from death. Now the thing that jumped out at me as I thought about this, we've talked about it many times as the process that we're living out and that's true. But the language here is not about a process. This uses that same aorist tense. So what he's talking about here are people who have arrived at the end of their journey and now they're looking, now we're able to look back and say, we overcame or they overcame by the blood of the lamb. They triumphed by the word of their testimony and they did not, past tense, love their lives unto the death. So this is a testimony. These are people who have arrived at the end of life's journey and now their testimony is we overcame. There's so many things I've noticed about this and we've emphasized certain aspects of it, but the one that's jumping out at me, well one of them is jumping out is the fact that they lived their lives recognizing my only hope of standing before a holy God is what Jesus did and that's past tense at the cross. The blood is the only thing that stands between me and judgment and death and condemnation and death. That's it. My entire hope is based upon that and one of the things that you don't see in this, because this isn't emphasizing something that's past, it's a testimony, it's the saints from heaven calling down and saying, we've been there, we've done it and we have overcome. What this does not talk about in this particular passage is what they went through to get to that point. We have an expression that I think we pretty much understand, the bottom line.

The bottom line is how something turns out, but it doesn't really go into the details of how you get there. Because the reality is these ... These people had what he described here as a conflict. Why do you need to overcome something if there isn't something coming against you? So there are battles that were fought. It does not describe the lonely nights, the pain, the doubts, the struggles. It doesn't go through any of that. It doesn't talk about the weeping that endured for a night. Thank God for the joy in the morning. But it doesn't talk about the times when they were trying to feel God and He just did seem to be a million miles away and the devil was sitting there shouting in their ear all these lies that he was trying to bring them down with. It doesn't go into the process, does it? It just talks about the result. Thank God that there's going to be a people who will be able to stand there on that day and look back or it will be able to be said of them, they overcame him. So we know how it happens. But boy, this is something that should encourage us who are in the middle of the battles and looking to God and wondering. Sometimes the devil's saying, look at you, you're such a mess, you can't get it right no matter what you do and the devil's shouting. What he's doing is taking our weaknesses and interpreting them for us. See, it's not just the facts on the ground, it's how the devil explains those facts. If he looks at your weakness and says, see, that's proof, you don't belong, you'll never make it, you don't have what it takes, and we listen to that, we're not listening to what God's promised, are we? Because we're going to have to lift up our eyes and say, wait a minute, devil, that may be the fact. I don't have what it takes but I have somebody who does, who has promised to bring me through

and that's my hope, that's my confession today. That's the word that's coming out of my mouth in the face of your lies and your accusations. You may be saying something that's true in one sense because if you're talking about my worthiness of any of this, you're exactly right. I am not worthy and I don't have what it takes but I'm not trusting in myself. I have looked to one who has promised to bring me all the way through. Thank God, that's the picture that's being painted here. Another thing that struck me as I looked at this is the last part. They did not love their lives so much as to shrink from death. You know, there's a lot of people who preach what they call the gospel and it's like it's a free gift. Just ask him for it, it's free, that's all there is to it. And they have no idea what they're being saved from or anything else about it. It's just, hey, he just wants to hand it out, he's going to let you into heaven. Boy, this is a description of people who did not love their lives so much as to shrink from death. It costs something for this free gift. I remember hearing about a message one time that was entitled, The High Cost of the Free Gift. That is not the title of this, by the way. It could be, I guess. But The High Cost of the Free Gift. It cost everything to know him. Let me ask you this, what did it cost Jesus to provide this salvation? It cost him everything, didn't it? There was not one thing that this world and his life in this world had to offer that was more important than what he was called to do. He gladly laid that life down. He saw that there's nothing down here that's worth clinging to. Not one single thing that's worth clinging to, and so he willingly laid it down.

Do you know, that's what it costs to be saved. If there is a single thing in your life or mine that is more important than him, and our hearts are entangled with that, and that's more important. When you really come down to it, where does that leave us? Because we're in a time, I mean this is true of the age. This is true of the entire age, where everybody is essentially being put to the test. The devil is being allowed to work on people's hearts and to spread his lies, but God is spreading his truth. The question is, what happens to our hearts? So much of what is called, again, the church or Christianity, reforms the outside. It conforms people to religion. They learn to believe certain ideas. In their heads, they learn certain activities. They learn to curb their behavior in certain ways. And so outwardly, you would look and say, there's somebody who's a Christian. They're a Jesus follower. What does God look at? The heart, doesn't He? Man looks on the outward appearance, but God looks on the heart. And so what I was thinking of when I read this passage, when it just came back to my mind, I was thinking about overcomers. What is it that separates these people from everybody else? Why do they overcome and the rest of the world continue to believe the lies and wind up before the judgment to be judged and condemned? What set them apart? That's kind of important, isn't it? I mean, are we set apart because we're just a little more strong-willed than others? We're smarter or is there some human qualification that sets these people apart? Why did they prevail and others didn't? Interesting question, isn't it?

Because I believe one of the greatest concerns that the Lord has ... How many times did we hear Brother Thomas preach these kind of things, those who can remember? One of the great tragedies is when people grow up in the church or come to it, and by all outward appearances, they're Christians, they're followers of Jesus. They sing the songs, they participate in the activities, they're one of us. But then something happens and somewhere along the line, off they go and you find out where their heart's really at, and it's not attached to Christ, it's attached to something of their own earthly nature. What went wrong? Did they get it and lose it? I thought of a scripture that maybe is a leaping into this, the answer to this. John is the same author, by the way, of the book of Revelation, wrote to believers in the first ... In 1 John, there's a letter to believers, and there's a whole lot of truth there that is pretty critical. But there's something interesting he says in chapter five, in verse four. He makes this statement and he's connecting it with something that I'm not going to try to get into right now, but it says, everyone born of God overcomes the world. Do you catch what the difference is? Everyone born of God overcomes the world. It's not a matter of professing a belief or joining a religion. This has got to have something that goes down into the heart. What in the world do any of us have that enables us to overcome the world? If we're born into it, we have a nature that agrees with it, and we got a devil that's constantly appealing to us, and lying to us, and telling us our happiness lies in this and that and the other, and this is important, you got to do this. How many people are willing to supposedly serve God as long as they can do this or that? And then you wonder why. Peter uses some pretty strong language in one place, because he's talking about people that are with him for a while and then they go out. And he uses an illustration that doesn't sound very flattering, of course it isn't meant

to be flattering. The sow that was washed is returned to her wallowing in the mire. Now what good would it do if you're trying to help the poor sow from its life in the mire to wash it up, bring it into the household, dress it up all in nice clothes, and try to teach it table manners? What have you accomplished? You might even train it to do a little bit of that for a while, but what's going to happen? You have not changed what's on the inside. Sooner or later, that hog is going to go right back to the mire because that's what really is pulling at it. That's what its nature wants. If I'm going to, if I or anybody is going to serve God in this world and actually overcome it. I've got to have something that I wasn't born with. I've got to have a brand new heart and a brand new life because that's what sets these people in Revelation 12 apart. That's why you can go to the end of the story and look at the bottom line. Now it doesn't talk about all the winding trails that got them there, all the things they went through to get to that point. But the bottom line is no matter what came up, no matter what the devil threw at them, it was never enough to turn them away from God and saying, no, this is more important. The only thing that can enable anybody to do that is having been born of Him. That's kind of why Jesus told Dicodemus, you must be born again. We were born with a life that simply has no place in this kingdom that God has established. I don't care how much people reform their behavior and how much they do on the outside. They would never possibly be at home in that kingdom. I need a brand new life to be born on the inside. Even then, it's a war, isn't it? It's a battle. There's a whole lot of growing up to do.

There's a whole lot of ups and downs and here, ins and outs. There are times when we're going to be, like I said earlier, according to David, we talked about weeping, enduring for a night, joy comes in the morning. Times when, where are you, Lord? I've been praying and I don't hear. Times of struggle and times of doubt, but John says, everyone born of God overcomes the world. This is the victory that has overcome the world, even our faith. Where'd you get that, by the way? Yeah, we've talked about that many times. I wasn't born with the power to believe. That's something God had to give me. Now, he had to work with my will until I was to the point where I was surrendered. But again, salvation is not about reforming this earthly life that I was given. It's about replacing it with a brand new one. And I believe the burden on the heart of God involves people who are here or who may hear this, who have really, when you think about it, you have gone along, but you have never experienced what he's talking about here. You've never experienced it. Have you ever been really born again? Is there something on the inside that holds you when everything else fails? This has been the Midnight Cry broadcast. If you would like a DVD or CD of today's message in its entirety, please request it by program number. While it is not required, a donation of $10 for DVDs and $5 for CDs is suggested to help with expenses. Also for those who request it, we will send you our quarterly publication, the Midnight Cry Messenger, free and postage paid. Send your requests to Midnight Cry Ministries, Post Office Box 685, Southern Pines, North Carolina, 28388.

We invite you to join us again next week at the same time, and may God richly bless you until then.