The last few days, I've had to do quite a lot of work in the house. I wonder if there are still some people who are crowded outside the door. There are some seats there for those of you who don't prefer to have to strain your necks. There are two or three seats here. Do feel free to come in. We are a little bit crowded today. There are also seats here in front. Please sit in front. You are welcome. Just make yourself comfortable. There are still two or three seats here. Would you like to come in? There are two seats here side by side, so you don't have to squeeze. All right?
As I was saying, I was doing some work in the house. You know, our house is getting a little bit old. And you know what happens is that all kinds of things stop functioning properly. For example, the sinks in the house, the faucets. What happens is that first it starts dripping because the washers are gone. And you can change the washers. But then you discover that the whole thing is corroded. It is all getting, it is simply rotting away, to the point that when you just push it, the metal will just break in your hand.
So I had to try my hand at plumbing. Something I hadn't done before. But then plumbers these days are so expensive, they're about as expensive as seeing a doctor. So I decided to go at it myself. Now putting in something new is the simple part. Taking out the old is the big problem. The whole thing is corroded so it's all stuck together. Just to try to get the faucets off the sink is a problem because it's all rotten underneath and it's all rusted into one lump. So at points I have to cut through the metal, just cut the pipes away. Then I have to cut the faucet off the sink. Then you have to try and get the faucet off, otherwise you have to change the whole basin because you can't get the faucets off.
Some of you may have tried this before, of course, and you use various types of saws or hacksaws or whatnot. This thing actually is not even made of metal. You can bend it. This simple innocent-looking thing can cut through steel. No teeth on it, you don't see any saw. But how quick this can cut through a metal pipe will astonish you. Of course, I don't mean that you're going to take hold of this and rub it back and forth. You will also be safe to put on a pair of gloves, since what you want to do is cut through the metal pipe, not your finger. When I put this thing onto the electric drill, cut the pipe, it went through the pipe in a few moments. I can run my hand over it, it won't even cut my finger. How does it do it? What seems to be so weak, so soft, but when I apply it to the metal pipe, even such a pipe will go through it in a few moments.
So having cut the pipes, I still got to take the faucets off because underneath all the nuts are corroded. You can't get the faucet off. Look at this nice, rather nice-looking thing, silver, black. Now this, another innocent-looking thing, can cut through a steel or metal nut in a very short while. So what do you do when you have cut the pipe? You slide this up along the pipe, up to where the faucet is with the corroded nuts. When you get it up there, what you do is you start tightening this thing, this screw here, and then you just turn the rod. Then you see here a sharp point, and as you tighten this, it will simply split anything apart. Steel, metal, it will split it all apart. The screw inside the nut will be cracked. And then when that is cracked, of course you can lift the faucet off.
Now, why am I telling you all this? Because as I was working on it, I was thinking about God and His creation. When God first made creation, when God first made man, everything was beautiful, everything's fine. And then something came in and corrupted the whole thing. What was a beautiful faucet in the beginning, it was all corroded. So I was trying to put the beautiful things and then I have to replace it. Now I have a beautiful new faucet on there. But what an effort one has to go through to renew, to remake the whole thing.
When man was corrupted by sin, when man was trapped in the grave, and all the things we have to suffer as a consequence of that today, the result is God has to remake everything again. That's why Christians speak about something called regeneration, or being born again, born anew. The old has to be removed. The new has to be brought into place. But the point also is that removing the old is not that simple. It is a major problem to remove the old. And the instrument that God uses in the first place is the cross.
The cross, when you look at it, seems rather like this thing. A rather weak and harmless instrument. You can see that the steel cord, it is like this piece. But the power of this thing is quite amazing. Look how light it is. Look how smooth it is. Don't be deceived by what it looks like. This thing can cut through a steel door with no exaggeration. A steel plate, it will go right through it. Look at the cross. It looks so light, so simple. It is a tremendous weakness. But Paul says it is the power of God to salvation. What you experience of it is what is transforming for one's life.
So today I want to share with you basically three principles very quickly. Three fundamental principles. First principle, I would just state it plainly. We don't really understand anything properly until we experience it.
When we speak about the resurrection, we have to speak about a death. If there is no death, there cannot be a resurrection. Resurrection presupposes death. How many of you have died here before? Could you raise your hand? It looks like nobody has died before. Therefore, since you never experienced death, you only know death as a definition. You may have seen somebody else die. That doesn't mean you know what death is. You haven't yourself experienced it.
I remember the first time I saw my grand aunt. I had talked to her one or two days before, and then they called me into the room and said, your grand aunt has died. I remember seeing her lying there, and I looked at her, and I was trying to understand death. What is it? I just saw her lying there. I talked to her only a few days ago. And now she's lying there. She doesn't move. She doesn't speak. And I was only 12 years old. I kept looking at her and thinking, well, I've heard of the word death. I know what the word death means. But I look at her, and I don't understand what exactly happened here. I've heard of death. I've seen death. But I really don't understand what death is.
Now, if we don't know what death is, how do we understand what resurrection is? Because resurrection means coming back from an experience of death. This means that we neither know experientially what death is, nor what resurrection is. And if it is the case that we do not understand a thing properly, then we will be in danger of either speaking nonsense.
Unfortunately, there is often the case, especially in the church, when we speak of high and lofty things, that we end up talking nonsense. And I'm one of those people very fearful of talking nonsense. And when we start talking about things we don't really know, we don't really experience, we can do just that.
For example, how many of you have been to heaven? Nobody. How many have been to hell? Nobody. So, when we talk about heaven and hell, we talk about things we have no experiential knowledge of. So you can see how great is the danger we end up talking nonsense. What is heaven like? Some Muslim friends tell me that heaven is a place with lots of trees, a lot of nice streams and flowers. And of course, for them, it's very important to have lots of pretty girls around. The problem is that for girls, that picture may not be very interesting. Because it didn't say there are lots of nice boys around. Seems to be an all-male sort of heaven.
So you see, the result is, are we talking nonsense, or how do we look at this thing called heaven? And then the same thing with hell. I sometimes cringe when I hear things said about hell. Because what you have is a picture of some horned animal, which is supposed to be the devil, with some kind of a pitchfork in his hand. And his job is apparently to barbecue all those people who arrived in his domain. And even I'm told that this will go on forever.
So hell is a place where if you're unfortunate enough to land in, you're going to be barbecued for who knows what eternity means. And notice, we don't even know what eternity means. Is eternity a hundred million years, a thousand million years, or who knows what that is? We don't even know what a hundred million years means.
And then of course all kinds of questions come to our mind. If this unfortunate piece of barbecue is because he has lived a life in sin for, what was it, sixty years or seventy years? You would think that if his sin span the duration of sixty years, he should be barbecued for sixty years. It's not very clear to us why sixty years of sin should produce six thousand million years of barbecue.
Now all this sounds somewhat humorous. But if hell is a place where sin is dealt with, then the whole question is no longer very humorous. Because it's not beginning to make any sense. And if we start talking nonsense, nobody wants to believe in this thing anymore. And anyway, if heaven is a place with a few nice trees and flowers and whatnot, I mean, why don't we just go take a walk in the park? Why should heaven be of any interest to you and me anyway? And some of us have hay fever. And when you have flowers and things, are we going to risk an eternal hay fever?
What happens is very important subjects are reduced to the ridiculous because we don't understand what we are talking about. So what about resurrection? We don't even know what death is. There are some people who have gone through a death experience. So when I asked if anyone died, I wasn't really joking.
# A New Man (Side B)
The death experiences. Maybe you've heard some people have experienced death. They were pronounced medically dead. Their heart had stopped and no more functions were to be seen. There are some people who may have died and actually come back to life. Maybe a few minutes later, sometimes a few hours later, and sometimes even a few days later. And because they came back, they call it a near-death experience. That means if they didn't come back, it wouldn't have been near. It would have been permanent.
Now, if you've gone through such an experience, you will have had some sort of taste of death. And if you came back from such an experience, you'll have had some sort of experience of resurrection. In the Bible, you have one or two people who went through this kind of experience, of having died for a time and coming back to life. The widow's son that Jesus raised. Or Lazarus. These people died and they came back to life. They understand death in a much deeper way than we would do. And yet they do not know what Jesus' resurrection was about.
There are two kinds of resurrection we must distinguish clearly in our minds. One kind of resurrection is the kind where you physically die like Lazarus did, and you are brought back to life, and you return to the kind of life you lived before. This kind of resurrection does not involve any change in your physical condition before death and after the resurrection. The resurrection body is the same kind of body he had before he was raised by Jesus.
But the resurrection of Jesus is different. Because when He rose again, His body was not the same body as what He had before. It was a body that could go through walls. So that when the disciples were gathered in a room, Jesus suddenly came into the room, though all the doors were locked. Yet it was not an ethereal body. It was not a misty, cloudy sort of body. He could eat with that body too. People could touch Him. You could feel His person. But the fact is that this body never dies again. As for Lazarus, of course he died again later. All those people who were raised back to life in the Old Testament, they died again later. But in the New Testament, when it speaks about the resurrection in the New Testament letters, it's not talking about that kind of resurrection. It's talking about the resurrection in which when you are raised again, your body is incorruptible, it will not die. That's why Jesus said, "He that believes in me shall never die."
But I'm just saying with this first principle, which I hope you keep in mind. We are now at this time experiencing death and resurrection here and now, in order that God will help us to understand the reality of the death and resurrection of Jesus. If you have not experienced death and resurrection, you obviously don't know what Jesus' death and resurrection means. That's why I seldom hear anything significantly said about the death and resurrection of Jesus. You don't know what it means.
It is in connection with this fundamental principle, principle number one, that Paul makes a statement that many Christians don't understand. In Philippians 3:10, where Paul says, "That I may know Him." From what? How? "In the fellowship of His sufferings, and being conformed to His death." You see, to be conformed to His death. Why does Paul say that? "That I may know Him and the power of His resurrection." That's how you get to know it. Not by reading books. But by experiencing it.
To summarize on this first point: you only understand spiritual things in proportion as you experience it.
Now this takes me quickly to the second point. And by the way, when I said, did anybody experience hell? I'm not joking either. In fact, we all have had a little bit of experience that we can describe as so pleasurable as to be heavenly. And we have also experienced something that we can call hellish. It's like hell on earth, sometimes we say. But a few years ago, the Lord actually gave a certain lady an actual experience of hell. He actually took her into hell. And this was not one momentary experience. It was an experience that she was given over a considerable period of time, in fact several months, if I recall correctly. Day after day, the Lord would take her into hell, bring her back home, and then take her back into hell. This lady wrote a book, which if any of you are interested, I can tell you about it. The description of her experience in hell causes us to realize that hell is in some points what we thought it was like, in other points quite unlike what we thought it was like. So here was somebody that God gave the experience of hell to. The purpose was to tell people what it is like to be in hell. To warn people about it. That it is not just some kind of a joke in which people are fried like sausages.
Now the second principle is this. If I ask a Sunday school child, I'm sure you know how to answer the question: when did your physical life begin? You say, of course, when I was born. But we have so many Christians here, and if I ask you when and at what point your spiritual life began, I wonder what you would say. Oh, you say that's simple, regeneration, or these kinds of terms. And if I ask you what does regeneration mean, then the answer might not come quite so fast. And if I ask a few more questions, I might get no answers at all. If I told you that spiritual life begins with death, you might have a shock. And yet that is the biblical teaching. Regeneration is not like a physical birth, not even comparable to it. It is so difficult.
That is why when the Lord Jesus spoke to Nicodemus, that Pharisee, about regeneration, he thought it was a matter of going back into the mother's womb and being born again. How ignorant. The Lord didn't even bother to reply to that question. The Lord simply said, "Are you a teacher in Israel, and you don't understand these things?" I wonder how many of our teachers know these things. How many of you know that spiritual life doesn't begin with a birth, it begins with a death? And that may be why there are so few real Christians around.
So we have a distressful situation in our churches today. We have a lot of people who don't bother to think. Because the only people who accept nonsense as reality are those who never bother to think. So we have a lot of Christians who never actually died. I'm sure everybody has read Romans 6. And what does Romans 6 say? Where did our spiritual life begin? At baptism. Not just an external ritual of baptism. But a baptism in which we actually died with Christ and then rose with Him. How many know what it is to die with Christ? How many of you know in your experience what it is to die with Christ? If you haven't died with Him, how do you rise with Him? No death, no resurrection.
What kind of a Christian are you and am I? Have we died with Him? Now this is a fundamentally important question. Our churches are filled with people who never experienced death with Christ. Do you know what I'm talking about? Not unless you've experienced it. Now you see the illustration of my first point. What you don't experience, you don't really understand. You haven't died with Christ and you don't know what I'm talking about. Even worse, you don't know what the Bible is talking about. You don't know what Paul is talking about in Romans 6. And that means you don't really know what baptism was about, even though you were baptized. The church is full of people who have been baptized and haven't got a clue what happened then.
There are two kinds of Christians. What kind of Christian are you? The kind of Christian who says, "Oh, I believe. I'm saved by faith." I've already said I'm tired of listening to nonsense. Nonsense in relation to the definition of faith. You are saved by faith. Would you tell me what faith is? Tell me what is the faith you have. Oh, you say, easy. I believe. I believe there was such a person called Jesus Christ. You're doing well. And this Jesus Christ got crucified. Not bad so far. And then this Jesus actually was raised from the dead. Wonderful. You're doing well. I believe all that. So I'm saved.
Sorry, my friend. What you believe, the devil also believes. Of course the devil believes. He knows all this to be true. So why shouldn't he believe it? They are simply facts. But the fact that Jesus died doesn't mean that you are saved, even if you believe it to be historical fact. Jesus died for us, but we are not saved until when? Until we have died with Christ and we have been raised with Him. Is that something I invented? Not at all. It's all in that elementary chapter of Romans chapter 6, which nobody seems to understand.
That is the second principle. Spiritual life begins with death. And not just any kind of death, but death with Christ.
Now what did Jesus die to? Anyone who's been to Sunday school would know the answer to that. Romans 6 again, we haven't even left Romans 6 yet. Jesus died to sin once, and for all. And with it, He died to the world as a system dominated by sin. "World" in the Bible does not mean the sun, moon, and the earth as a globe. It refers to the world as a system, a human system dominated by sin. So when it says, "Do not love the world," it doesn't mean don't love the flowers and the trees. But it means do not love the world system as dominated by sin.
So if Jesus' death was a death to sin, then you have only died with Christ when, like Him and with Him, you have died to sin. And with that, you have also died to the world system of sin. You have died to what the Bible calls the flesh, that element of flesh which stands in opposition to the Spirit. And that means if you have died with Christ, there is a total change in your way of thinking.
So, have you experienced this? Is that something that you can say, "Yes, that's happened to me. My whole life has been changed." If that has happened, it takes us to a final point very quickly.
I said, in the first point, we must experience something to understand it. This applies specifically to the spiritual life. The second point is that spiritual life begins with death. And I've already come to the third point. This is not any kind of death, but a death with Christ. And what happens when we die with Christ is that we are also raised with Him. That means here and now, we are experiencing the reality of His death to sin and the power of His resurrection life. That makes you a very different kind of Christian.
Now you begin to understand statements like what Paul said, which are otherwise incomprehensible. For example, he says in Galatians 2:20, "I am crucified with Christ." He says, "I am crucified with Christ, but now I live in the power of Christ." Is this your experience?
Now today is Easter. And Easter will be just another Easter day in which everybody says all the right things at Easter. But unless you experience the reality of God's life operating in you, you haven't experienced the meaning of Easter at all. To experience Easter is to experience the reality of becoming what? A new person. Something new. A newness of life. Again, Romans 6. We have died to sin in order to walk in newness of life.
Paul says this: "If any man is in Christ, the old things have passed away" because you've died. "Behold, everything has become new." I took off the taps, all those rotten, corroded things. And now we have new shining taps. They're functioning perfectly. There's a sense of newness. How do you feel? Do you experience something new?
The Lord has called me to a job, a task, a ministry. And one of the heaviest burdens in my life that I share with you from my heart is that I see often very little newness. I see people who say, yes, they've become Christians. They've been baptized. But they are the same as what they were before. I don't see any fundamental change. Not after one year. Not after five years. Not after twenty years. They are the same people with the same bad habits, the same unpleasant characteristics as they had before. Where is Paul's statement? "If any man is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has gone. The new has come." I only see the old. It's hard to see anything new.
And I ask myself, what have I worked for all these years? For what have I labored my life long? For what have I sacrificed my health? I have more pleasure changing faucets, I can tell you. Why? Because you see something new in front of you. Because you can see a new change. All those dripping faucets are no more. These gleaming, well-functioning faucets now stand in front of me. All those hours of work worth it.
Have you tried changing faucets? Working under the kitchen faucet is quite something, I can tell you. Because there isn't any space to work with. It's all in cabinets underneath. And you have to climb underneath there. Your back is hurting at the end of this. You don't even know where to put your head underneath there. And you can't use strength trying to get at this thing underneath. And then when I come out of there, I am stiff, I am aching. But when I look at this nice faucet on top functioning perfectly, you see your job's progress. It's worth it. You really feel it's worth it.
And when I'm working in the church, what do I find? I'm on the telephone for hours. In Hong Kong, sometimes I'm like a stockbroker. One phone in this hand, one phone in the other hand. "Excuse me, I've got a call coming in this side." It looks ridiculous. Two phones in. I think I would be better off in the stock market. Because at least sometimes you get the news saying, oh, your stocks have gone up. But I can tell you in my work, few people ever call me to tell me some good news. "We got this problem here. How do we deal with this one?" After several hours of this, sometimes I have to say, "Excuse me, I got to get a drink." I can tell you this thing can ruin your health. It's really hazardous to your health, the job.
I used to tell those people in full-time training, I tell you, this ministry is a very tough ministry. And sometimes they think I'm exaggerating. And then you just ask them now, after they work for a couple of years. The great thing is, we don't mind dealing with problems. But the question is, if you keep on dealing with problems but you don't see the newness, the transformation, I can tell you you're left tired and discouraged. The human nature is something that we have to deal with all the time in the ministry. We have to keep using the cross. The cross can destroy the old nature if we let it. But if you don't want to become new, then the cross won't do anything for you. Because you don't want to become new. So you hang on to the old. You hang on to your old habits, your bad temper, your irritability.
So for this Easter, my prayer is this. In this year, I pray that each one of you may desire the new things that God has for you. And let God, with His cross, cut away the old. And no matter how hard that old is, it may be harder than steel. Let me tell you, He will cut it away. And the new life of God coming into you.
I heard a TV interview with a famous pianist, a concert pianist. He was describing his life and his character. And he said at one point in the interview, it stuck in my mind, he said, "I have a characteristic about me. In every silver lining, I see a cloud." You have to understand the English proverb. The English proverb is actually saying that in every cloud, there is a silver lining. There is hope. There is something good, even in the worst situation. But this pianist says he sees in every silver lining a black cloud. In other words, you can see he has a very negative disposition.
And yet many people are like that. We meet people like this all the time. I would say, here is a wonderful situation. And just when you're happy, they say, "Ah, yes, but..." There is this problem and that problem and the other problem. And by the time they finish, all the joy you had has been washed away. If you have one or two people like this around you, I can tell you your life will be lived in constant dark clouds. The old mentality, which is always living in gloom and darkness. You wonder why they like to live in the darkness and unhappiness. Is it something they enjoy?
But resurrection is about the triumph of life over death. It is darkness being overcome by light, light overcoming darkness. And that means also unhappiness being overcome by joy. Because Paul lived in the resurrection life, he was able to say, "Rejoice always." If you live in joy, you know that you are living in newness of life. Because this joy is not from the earth, it is something that God gives to us.
It is like that well-known account that made such an impression on John Wesley. As he was crossing from Britain to America, way back in his time, some 200 years ago, that wooden boat was sailing across the Atlantic. And it was caught in a storm. I can tell you a storm in the Atlantic is something terrifying. Again, I speak from experience. I was in such a storm. So it was a terror and the ship was in danger of sinking.
What transformed John Wesley's life was that he saw a group of Christians in the ship. All the other people were panicking. Death was staring them in the face. But this group of people were so peaceful and so happy. There was not a sign of fear in them. The women with their children around them, and the children looked at their parents and saw that their parents were not frightened or panicking. That was wonderful. When John Wesley looked at that, he couldn't believe his eyes. This was victory over death. There was the peace and the joy that comes from resurrection life.
Does your life make an impression on your colleagues at the office or at the college? Is there that new quality in your life that speaks to the people around you? Do you have to show that you are a Christian? Not unless you have died and risen with Christ. May that be your experience.
Let us pray.