Transcript
Thank you, Arch. I’m going to invite your attention this morning to the book of Romans, chapter 8. The book of Romans, chapter 8. Romans chapter 8. We want to begin reading at verse 9 of Romans 8. Romans 8, reading at verse 9:
But you are not in the flesh, but in the Spirit, if indeed the Spirit of God dwells in you. Now if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, he is not His. And if Christ is in you, the body is dead because of sin, but the Spirit is life because of righteousness. But if the Spirit of Him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, He who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through His Spirit who dwells in you.
I want to give you a song, which I think I may have learned from my mother. Don’t worry, I’m not going to sing it. I’m only going to give you the words. The words went something like this: “Halloween, Halloween, oh what funny things are seen. Witches’ hats, cold black cats, broomstick riders, mice and rats.” Now I know that there are Christians who have problems about Halloween, and I certainly respect their right to their opinion. But I want you to know that I grew up in a home where Halloween was a day of fantasy and fun.
And, of course, nobody in the Hodges household really believed in witches, or ghosts, or ghouls, or goblins. And we knew that the devil didn’t have two horns and a tail and carry a pitchfork. We understood that in the Bible he was a beautiful angel with great intelligence. But my parents were experts at setting up chambers of horror and haunted houses. They knew all of the tricks, and, of course, if your haunted house was supposed to be the laboratory of a mad scientist, you had to have a corpse there. And then, as people were led through the dimly lighted rooms, you gave them the little extras. They were invited to touch a piece of hamburger meat and were told it was a brain, or they were allowed to touch a wet grape and told it was an eyeball. And Halloween at the Hodges household was a barrel of fun.
And, you know, last year, a couple of days before Halloween, I was called upon to preach at Victor Street Bible Chapel, and the thought occurred to me that, over all of the years of existence of Victor Street Bible Chapel, we had had preachers that preached messages for special occasions, you know, Mother’s Day, and Thanksgiving, and Christmas, but we had never, ever, to the best of my recollection, had a message on Halloween. So I preached a message on Halloween, and I decided that even though I’m here in Southern California in February, and last year’s Halloween is behind us, and this year’s is way ahead, that I just couldn’t resist preaching my Halloween message at Coast Bible Church.
And because this is true, I have a question that I would like to ask each of you, and I think it’s a question that sounds like it’s appropriate to Halloween. My question is: Are you among the walking dead? Now that question may be appropriate to Halloween, but it also touches directly on a very fundamental and basic truth of Christian living. And it just so happens that my question is also the title of my message to you this morning, and Arch didn’t get it quite right, so I’m going to repeat the title again, just to make sure that everybody has it, okay? My question is, my title is: Are you among the walking dead?
Now, all of us would probably agree, wouldn’t we, that if we took a survey of the scariest things that can happen on Halloween, or any other day for that matter, right up near the top of the list would be incidents in which supposedly dead bodies came back to life again. And we’ve all heard stories like that, or seen them on television. Somebody is out in a spooky graveyard, or they’re in a mortuary, or a morgue, or a funeral home, and suddenly a body that is supposed to be dead sits up and starts talking. And it’s even worse if all that there is to that body is a skeleton. And most stories like that end by the people who have these incidents happen to them getting out of there as fast as their two feet will carry them.
And let’s admit, shall we, that there are some stories in the Bible about dead people coming to life. And I suppose the most famous story like this is the story of the death of Jesus’ friend named Lazarus. And he had been dead four days by the time Jesus reached his gravesite. And you all know the story. Jesus said, “Lazarus, come forth,” and Lazarus got up, still bound hand and foot with his grave clothes, and somehow he shuffled and stumbled his way out of the cave. And there are a few stories in the Bible like that.
But I’m wondering if you realize this morning that there is something that happens over and over again, every day of every week, of every month, of every year, that is very much like that. Do you remember the words of the Lord Jesus Christ? He said,
Most assuredly, I say to you, he who hears My word and believes Him who sent Me has everlasting life, and shall not come into judgment, but has passed out of death into life.
Most assuredly, I say to you, the hour is coming, and now is, when the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God, and those who hear shall live.
The dead shall live.
And if you are a Christian this morning, and by a Christian I mean if you have believed in the Lord Jesus Christ for the absolutely free gift of eternal life, and you know for sure that you’re going to live with Him forever in His kingdom, if you are a Christian this morning, the day that you heard the gospel in faith, the day that you believed on the Lord Jesus Christ for the free gift of everlasting life, at the moment that you heard the gospel in faith, you passed out of death into life. You heard the voice of the Son of God when you were dead in your sins, and, having heard, you lived. And that’s happened to everyone who has been born again by faith in Jesus Christ.
And if you’re here this morning and you don’t know for sure that you will live with the Lord Jesus Christ in His kingdom forever, this is the morning that you can come to life.
Most assuredly, I say to you, he who believes in Me has everlasting life.
And the moment you hear His voice and understand that He is offering you eternal life on the basis of faith alone, the moment you hear that word in faith, at that moment you come to new, wonderful, eternal, spiritual life. Now, that’s good news, isn’t it? Isn’t that good news?
But I’ve got some bad news, and it’s for the Christians, believe it or not. If you are a Christian, as I’ve just said, yes, you are a person who has passed out of death into life. You are a living person. But you are dwelling in a body that is as dead as a doornail. I often say to people, if five minutes after you get saved you run to look at yourself in the bathroom mirror, the face that stares out at you from the bathroom mirror five minutes after you got saved will be the same face that stared at you out of that mirror five minutes before you got saved.
You see, the miracle of regeneration is a miracle that takes place inside of us, inside of us, and it doesn’t change the physical body. And the physical body in which we live is dead. How do I know that? The Bible tells me so. The apostle Paul states it clearly right here in the passage of Scripture that we read a few moments ago. He says, “And if Christ is in you,” notice those words. He doesn’t say, “if Christ is not in you.” He says, “if Christ is in you, the body is dead because of sin.” If you are a born-again Christian this morning, you are a living person inside a dead body.
Quite a few years ago, we had a Halloween party at Victor Street Bible Chapel, where I minister on a regular basis, and I decided that for this party I would go all out for my costume. And so I went to a costume shop, which is just a few blocks from the church, and I rented myself a bear suit. I mean, a full bear suit, which included a bear’s head that went over my head, and I came to the party dressed in that bear suit. Now, I really don’t know whether any part of the bear suit had ever come from a real bear, but if it had, that bear was long since dead, and therefore I was a living person inside a dead bear suit.
Well, that’s the most elaborate costume I’ve ever worn. So, did I have a good time? No, I did not have a good time. You see, that bear suit was hot. It was uncomfortable in there. But I could have put up with that. The problem was, I wear glasses, and if I take my glasses off to look through the bear’s eyes, I can’t see very much, and if I keep my glasses on inside the bear’s head, my breath stays in there with me, and it fogs up the glasses, and I can’t see a thing. And I’m sure I looked extremely dangerous, I’m sure I looked very vicious, but I couldn’t have hurt a flea, because I could barely see where I was going. I was a living person inside a dead bear suit.
Listen, the physical body in which you live, no matter how good it is in shape, physically speaking, no matter how attractive it is to people who look at you from the outside, is spiritually dead. That means it is totally unresponsive to the will of God. And that body is your bear suit. You are a living person inside a dead bear suit. Now that’s bad news, but it’s not the end of the story. It’s not the end of the story at all. You see, the wonderful reality is this, that even though you are inside a dead body, you are not in there alone, and the Holy Spirit of God is inside that body with you.
That is why the apostle Paul says to the Roman Christians that they are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, since the Spirit of God dwells in them, and he makes it clear that nobody is a Christian who does not have the Spirit of God. The Spirit of God dwells in every Christian, and therefore the body in which we live, and the Spirit lives, is dead because of sin, but the Spirit is life because of righteousness. And here’s the good news: “If the Spirit of Him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, then He who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through His Spirit who dwells in you.”
And here is the fabulous and amazing reality that, by the resurrecting power of the Holy Spirit of God, those dead bodies of ours can become the vehicles through which is expressed the very life of God, the very life of Jesus Christ. Now I know that a lot of people read this verse superficially, and they think it is referring to future resurrection, but that’s ripping it out of its context. As one good Bible teacher said many years ago, “A text taken out of its context is a pretext.” And the apostle Paul is talking here about the problem of his body, and he has been talking about that since Romans 7.
And he tells us in Romans 7 that even though his inward man delights in the law of God, he finds that his physical body continually defeats him. The good that he wants to do, he doesn’t do. The evil that he doesn’t want to do, he does do. And he finds another law in the members of his body, waging war against the law of his mind, and bringing him into captivity to the law of sin which is in his members. And when he reaches the end of Romans 7, he says, “O wretched man that I am! Who shall deliver me from this body of death?” And the answer of Romans 8 is that that deliverance is effected by the resurrecting power of the Spirit of Jesus Christ.
Now, if you folks out here in Southern California were like many folks around the country after the last presidential election, you probably kept your television sets tuned to the Florida recount. And I have lost count of the recounts that went on in Florida. And it occurred to me that they could have saved themselves a lot of time if they had simply used the results of a poll that has been right in every presidential election since 1972. You see, according to BuyCostumes.com, since 1972 the winning presidential candidate has been the candidate whose name sells the most rubber Halloween masks.
Now, I’m not sure quite why this works, you understand, and maybe it’s because when people buy Halloween masks they think to themselves, I want to buy the mask of a winner. What’s the use of having a mask of a candidate who is going to disappear as soon as the election is over? But according to BuyCostumes.com, which gets its information, by the way, from five mask manufacturers and a dozen costume companies all over the country, the score on this poll was Bush masks, 57 percent, and Gore masks, 43 percent. So it worked again.
Will you permit me to say it this way? Yeah, we live in a dead body, but God would like to dress us in a beautiful costume, and He would like to put on us the face of a real winner. He would like us to wear the face of the Son of God, the King of kings and the Lord of lords. And it is only by the power of the Holy Spirit that that can be done. That is why the apostle Paul writes in 2 Corinthians 3:18,
But we all, with unveiled face, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image, from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord.
As we see the glory of Jesus Christ in the mirror of God’s Word, says Paul, the Spirit of God changes us so that we are more and more and more like God’s Son. Now let me tell you something that I think a lot of Christians do not understand. There are a lot of Christians who think the Christian life works like this: I have to grit my teeth, and I have to make up my mind that from now on, no matter how hard it is, I’m going to do right. And when Christians try to handle the Christian life that way, they’re always defeated. They always find themselves back in Romans chapter 7.
And, you know, over the years I have heard Christians say some things that they ought to know better than to say. I’ve heard people say, “You see that guy over there? He claims he’s a Christian, but he couldn’t possibly be a Christian, because if he were, he wouldn’t do this, he wouldn’t do that, he wouldn’t say this, he wouldn’t say that.” What nonsense. What tragic misunderstanding of the truth of God. I want you all to listen to me. If you don’t hear anything else that I say this morning, I want you to hear this. If you’re a Christian, you live in a dead body, and you do not have the power to overcome the deadness of your body. You do not have it. Only the resurrecting power of the Holy Spirit can do that.
As you open yourself to His ministry, whether through prayer, or through the Word, or through whatever spiritual exercises are important, He and He alone is the one who changes us, as He fascinates us and attracts us and thrills us with the glory of Jesus Christ our Lord. God wants you to wear the face of His Son in this world, but to do that you have to do it through a dead body, and therefore God wants you to be among the walking dead. God wants you to be a person who knows the resurrecting power of the Holy Spirit so that your dead body can be the vehicle for the life of God.
Just last August, one Saturday, 83-year-old Teddy Tudor, lovely name for a lady, got into her car and she started out for the Fort Lauderdale airport to pick up her granddaughter. And she was crossing an overpass. She was hit by a hit-and-run driver, and the result was that she ran her car off of the overpass. It plunged 40 feet and landed in the branches of some mangrove trees that were in a swamp beneath the underpass. For the next three days nobody knew where Teddy Tudor was. Her family made an emotional appeal on television. The police were searching for her.
And the mystery was finally solved by a father-and-son road crew who were working on the overpass, who noticed the branches of the mangrove trees broken below, and the car that was down there. And the son later said, “She stuck her foot out and kicked it, and I said to my dad, You better call an ambulance.” Well, to make a long story short, they came and they got her, and it took 25 firemen about an hour, using chainsaws, to cut her loose from the mangrove trees and from the vehicle in which she was. She had been there for 78 hours. She had stuck the sun visor out and caught water that kept her at least a little bit from being totally dehydrated.
They hoisted her up on a stretcher, and although she was pretty badly dehydrated, although her body was covered with sores and insect bites, amazingly, amazingly, the doctors expected her to recover fully. And Fire Battalion Chief Dan Haynes said, “Unbelievable.” His men had to rappel down the side of the overpass to reach her. And then he added this statement, which was probably the understatement of the day. He said, “That lady is one tough gal.” Here was a woman, my friends, who would not let her vehicle become her grave. She would not allow her car to become her tomb. She was determined to live, and she waited for the rescue that came.
And if you are a Christian this morning, you have a choice to make. Oh, yeah, you can give up on the Christian life, and then you can walk around and show everybody what an ugly spiritual corpse you live in, or you can open yourself to the transforming power of the Spirit of Jesus Christ, and you can let God’s life flow through you so that people can see the beauty of the Son of God. The songwriter had it right:
“Let the beauty of Jesus be seen in me,
All His wonderful passion and purity.
O Thou Spirit divine,
All my nature refine,
Till the beauty of Jesus is seen in me.”
We pray. Father, help us. We are children who live in dead bodies. By the power of Your Holy Spirit, help us to show Your Son to the world in which we live. We ask it in Christ’s name, amen.