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Death Has a Demand

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Scripture reading: Romans 8:2

Have you ever considered the fact that sometimes obedience to the Holy Spirit clashes with what was the righteousness of the law? Let us look at that thought. Jesus was walking through the corn field on the Sabbath day. He actually disobeyed the law of their time by picking corn and eating. David disobeyed the law by going in and eating, and giving to his men to eat, the shewbread, because they were hungry. That shewbread, according to the law, was only supposed to be eaten by the priests.

Let us look at the difference between the righteousness that is of the law and the righteousness that is of Christ. The righteousness which is of Christ says that I must obey the Spirit of God. “I must walk in the Spirit and I will not fulfill the lust of the flesh” (Galatians 5:16). We find, then, that there are two laws working one against another: the law of righteousness of the Spirit, and the righteousness that is of the law that was given to Moses.

Now, it is all well and good to be a philanthropist, but it profits me exactly nothing if my motivation in giving is that I might be a great name as a philanthropist and be looked up to and respected by people. My motivation makes the very act of righteousness unrighteous. It cancels the righteousness that I would actually do. So, then, I have no redress from God for my righteousness, and because of this, sin, therefore, is no longer an abstract thing, but it becomes very personal. Sometimes sin will even reason with you because sin is the opposite of God and the opposite of God is Satan. So, Satan is the master of sin and he works in sin and in sinners. Paul, speaking to us in Romans 7:22, says that he sees another law. “For I delight in the law of God after the inward man: 23 But I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members.”

Now, the law of sin is also the law of death (Romans 8:2). The law of life in Christ Jesus and the law of sin and death become personal and active since the Spirit of God uses the law of life and the spirit of Satan uses the law of death. Let’s go over that then. The law of life in Christ Jesus cancels out the power of the law of sin and death and it makes me free from the other law of sin and death. Now, what is the difference? If I am in the law of Christ and I make a mistake and do the wrong thing which normally is called sin – the law of life chips in and says you need to do something immediately to cancel the wages that are coming to you from that death, from that mistake. So immediately I would repent and the law of life would come into focus and cancel the effect or the wages that would normally or naturally come upon me for the sin.

Let us look a little deeper into the situation of these two laws. Why are the wages of sin death? The wages of sin is death because it is a transgression against God and God Himself has laid it down that every transgression against God must be paid for by life. In other words, death has a demand. It has a demand that “this person is mine because he did so and so and so and so. Because he fell, he belongs to me.” Jesus said, “No, I redeem him by life – I pay for it, I pay for the debt.” So, what we are doing is demanding from God a certain amount of payment for the things that we do.

Now, you ask yourself the question, “What kind of a thing is this? How is it that Jesus is going to pay?” The scriptures say that Jesus Christ came and by His Blood He paid for every man that cometh into the world. My goodness! He pays for every man, every sin, every wickedness, and every error that comes into the world. When He pays, the man himself has to accept the payment or else he is still in debt, so that some human beings have a preponderance of debt hanging over them. They have become bankrupt in the world of the spirit so that the wages that they owe are so great that they are in debt. They have become a slave to death and they no longer are free as human beings. But the Blood of Jesus is available for everyone who accepts the payment.

(Excerpt from Keeping in Touch, September, 2009)

Thought for today: The law of life in Christ Jesus cancels out the power of the law of sin and death and it makes me free from the other law of sin and death.

Righteousness under Christ

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Scripture reading: Romans 6:1-11

When we look at the word “sin,” we notice that is it always contrary, opposite to righteousness. If we define the nature of God as being that of righteousness, then it would follow that that which is unrighteousness (sin) is therefore the nature of the devil. So, we find that there is an opposite pole to every thought, every action, every desire, as well as every plan. What this means is that anything and everything outside of what is God/Righteousness must be sin. Now, thoughts, actions and circumstances, can be of man or of the Devil but we understand from the scriptures that anything that is not of God, that is of the flesh or of the Devil, is sin. Therefore, when we try to find out what sin is, we find that the very fact of our redemption by the Blood of Jesus Christ means that we were redeemed from sin, we were redeemed from sinning and continuing in sin. So, whatever is not of God is sin. Now, this concept brings a very, very sharp distinction. That is to say that if I should say that I am a free moral agent – I am free to think my thoughts and to do my thing and to walk as I please and to help my family and everything like that – it would mean that I would be living in sin, because I am excluding God from my environment.

Living in sin is the opposite of living in Christ. If a man obeys Christ, he is living in Christ, but how can we obey someone whom we cannot see? And how can we obey one whom we cannot hear? And how can we obey one in whom we don’t believe? First of all, to obey Christ we must believe Christ – not only to believe that there is a Christ, but to believe IN Christ so that we know that every thought, every action, every plan is motivated, delivered, sent and executed by the Christ in us and not by the selfish thoughts of our own imagination. So, when it comes to the gifts of the Spirit: there is no space for imagination; there is no space for human conjecture; there is no space for our reason.

What this really means is that we become prisoners to truth and righteousness, if we can put it that way, because righteousness, therefore, is no longer just doing right things. Under the law, righteousness was doing right things. You gave to the poor, you gave your body to be burnt; basically, you sacrificed yourself for others. All that looks very good and it is, in a sense, righteousness, but in Christ it cannot be righteousness unless it is motivated by the Spirit of Christ. If, for instance, I give to the poor because I believe that the Lord said that he that giveth to the poor shall receive blessing, and I am motivated to give to the poor in order that I might receive a blessing – then it means that I am not serving God, I am serving a law of giving and receiving.

Over the radio or the television sometimes you hear the ministries that preach that “if you give you will be blessed” and how many people were blessed because they gave so and so and how when one gives so much, he receives back so much in return. I can well see Satan working with this law to capture people. It becomes a psychological trick to capture you. So, one can actually be in sin yet think that he is in righteousness.

We can see, therefore, that we must walk in righteousness, obey Christ, in order to be righteous. What is righteousness? Righteousness under the law was one thing: a set of do’s and don’ts and the adherence to those rules that made you righteous. But under Christ, righteousness is obedience to the Holy Spirit.

(Excerpt from Keeping in Touch, September, 2009)

Thought for today: Righteousness under Christ is obedience to the Holy Spirit.

Let My People Go

This message entitled “Let My People Go“ was given by Brother Cecil duCille in 1970s.

For more audio messages please visit Audio Messages – Foundational Teachings.

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Scripture reading: 1 Corinthians 6:19

It is an ordinance of God that God moves with an individual, and then from that individual He moves with a people, and from that people He moves into the world. This is God’s plan. He moves through you as an individual, then from the individual He moves to the people, and from the people He moves to the world. Now, if you as the individual have a blockage, the Holy Spirit can move with you only so far, but then when He is blocked, He turns and moves with somebody else. But He wants to be able to move freely through the whole people.

Now, as our minds are turned and tuned towards God, it creates an anointing. Did you know that? It is like me trying to lift some heavy thing, but I can’t lift it. So I say, “Come and help me.” Yet, we still cannot lift it. But then, three or four people come, and we lift it. Amen. So, the weight of the anointing is coming through you. Then it builds up, and it builds up, and every time it gets into you, it fixes something that sometimes for years had been locked inside of you. God comes in and fixes it.

So God is a workman in our midst and He gives us a beautiful example: the body. Those of you who are medical people and have studied the body realize what a magnificent operation it is that the blood will flow through and get into every part of the body. One time, my toes began to feel a cramp, and I said, “Why are my toes cramped?” You see, something was wrong with the circulation. So I went to a therapist and he dug down into my calf. It got very painful. I said to him, “Why are you doing that?” He replied, “Well, you see, the arteries run through the muscles and if the muscle tightens up like this, it squeezes the arteries and the blood won’t get down to your toes.” Amen.

Oh, God, I wish we had wisdom to really look at God’s business. That’s your Bible! Your body is the Word of God. The Word of God is written in the Temple of God, and your bodies are the Temple of the Living God. You can preach a message from your body, just by looking at what occurs in the body. Then you know exactly what God is doing in the Body of Christ. This is the reason why He called the congregation of saints the Body of Christ. Amen.

There is a healing that is going through the Body, but this healing has been hindered by stoppages. Stoppages. The heart valve, the valve to the heart is leaking and the blood is draining down into other parts of the body making them sick and weak. You have so many arteries going to the heart and they are blocked. I remember once, the doctor said to my brother, “I don’t know how you can be standing here before me! You should be dead! Ninety percent of your arteries are blocked. You are living only through a ten percent opening.” Somebody said, “Oh, we know what to do. We can give you a substance, a mixture, a cocktail, they call it chelation.” So they give you a cocktail that will go in and get into those arteries and break up the blockage.

But God has better than the chelation. God has a healing power that has been going through the Church for two thousand years now to heal the blockages. But the Church has been resisting and resisting and resisting. Yet, God has a time. Hallelujah. He has a time! Get into your Bible sometimes and look into all the things that happened on the seventh day. All these healings! You see, there is a secret there and the secret is that God has a time when He is going to finish the job in us, in the Church. Because He says He is coming for a Church without spot, without blemish, or without wrinkle. If He is coming for a Church without spot, blemish, and wrinkle, and if His coming is near, the nearer we get to the coming, the less spots we are going to have, because He is going to wipe the spots out. He is going to knock them out. He is going to blow them out! Whatever it takes, He is going to do it! Hallelujah! I don’t think some of us will survive! But then, that will be also God. Because, you know, if we get so entangled with the spots, and the blemishes that you cannot differentiate the spot and the blemish from the person, then, somehow, the person has to go. God will just let that person pass because HE IS CLEANSING THE CHURCH!

(Excerpt from Keeping in Touch, May 25, 2003)

Thought for today: God has a healing power that has been going through the Church for two thousand years now to heal the blockages in His Body.

Remember Thy Creator

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By Mavis duCille

Scripture reading: Ecclesiastes 12:1

There is a scripture that has been very strengthening to us, and to many people with whom we come in contact, who have been having problems and difficulties. We encourage them by saying, “Remember now thy Creator, in the days of thy youth, while the evil days come not, nor the years draw nigh, when thou shalt say, I have no pleasure in them” (Ecclesiastes 12:1).

When we store up while we are young in the Lord, it comes back to bless us. As we grow older, as the scripture says, “when the eyes begin to fail, when the grinders cease” (Ecclesiastes 12:3), those are the days when we are to have pleasure in the Lord. If we do not have pleasure in the Lord while we are young and while we are strong, we will not be able to endure the end of the day. But praise God, His goodness endureth forever. Hallelujah. So, as we partake of His goodness while we can, we are storing up, storing up, storing up, because there are many who have entered into evil days when they cannot store because they have not stored while the days were good, and so the evil has caught upon them. You go into the hospital and you see it. But praise God for what He is giving us now to store that His goodness will endure forever in us.

We are in the days when the battle of good and evil is seen clearly and God has helped many of us to store, to store, and store and we are encouraging young ones, store, that the Lord can enrich and give you all the strength, that we walk in the goodness and not in evil. We reap the goodness and not the evil. Praise God. Amen.

(Excerpt from Keeping in Touch, May 25, 2003)

Thought for today: When we store up while we are young in the Lord, it comes back to bless us.