Difference between revisions of "Internal and External Conquest"

Latest revision as of 15:29, 29 October 2025

Internal and External Conquest

And having in a readiness to revenge all disobedience, when your obedience is fulfilled. (II Corinthians 10:6)

The idea of the above verse seems to be that the rebellious cannot be punished until first the obedience of the saints is complete.

Complete, stern obedience to the Fatherùthis is the need of the hour for believers in Christ.

The Christian must be conquered internally before he or she is ready to fight the external battles of the Lord.

All the while the Jews were in the wilderness, before they arrived at Jericho, the Lord was attempting to conquer them internally. God gave them commandments to keep, animal sacrifices to restore their fellowship to Him when they fell short of the commandments, and an abundance of trials and tribulations to test their character.

While there were skirmishes before they crossed Jordan, including the conquest of the Plains of Moab, the Israelites were occupied primarily with learning and obeying the ways of the Lord, with the conquest of their own personality.

The adults who left Egypt, with the exception of Joshua and Caleb, failed the program. They were not permitted to attack the external enemy in the land of Canaan.

In the present hour God is dealing with the internal conquest of the Christians. We would like to sally forth in the conquest of our environment and the peoples of the world. But before the disobedience of the world can be punished the obedience of God's people must be complete.

We don't like this. We much prefer to criticize the government or the United Nations. But the Lord didn't say if the government or the United Nations would humble themselves, pray, and seek God's face, but if His people would repent of their wicked ways.

God has no problem healing the land. God's problem is with the worldliness, lust, self-will, disobedience, unbelief, stubbornness, and rebellion of His own people.

Today the Spirit of God is sending the fires of judgment on the Christian people. If you haven't been baptized with fire yet, get ready.

God wants us to confess our love of the world, to repent of it as sin, and to ask God to remove it from us. How many Christian people of our day are occupied with making excessive amounts of money, professional sports, watching television, spending hours on the Internet doing nothing constructive, buying things they do not actually need, selling, marrying, giving in marriage, partying, preparing for their retirement so they can spend all day playing golf or traveling around in a vacation trailer?

If you are immersed in such activities, not redeeming the time, not presenting your body a living sacrifice, not taking up your cross and following Jesus, not pressing forward in Christ, and the Lord loves you and wants to save you, then get ready for a great deal of trouble. You can save yourself much grief by turning to God before He judges and chastens you.

If you will judge yourself, you will not be judged.

"Brother Thompson, I am too old." Are you breathing? Well that is more than some of them are doing. You are not excused from the program of salvation until you no longer are breathing. Ask God for health and energy and quit your worldliness!

Continued. ===Internal and External Conquest, 2===

For if ye live after the flesh, ye shall die: but if ye through the Spirit do mortify the deeds of the body, ye shall live. (Romans 8:13)

Then there are the sins of the flesh. The Christian churches are filled with every form of lust, idolatry, anger, gossip, slander, party loyalties, drunkenness, cigarette smoking, drugs, robbery, dishonesty, sexual perversions including child molestation, haughtiness, arrogance, pride, personal ambition, envy, competition, profanity, pornography. These are but a few but they give you the idea.

You say, "I would never do any of these things." Oh no?

Many years ago Thelma Chambers came from the revival in the Armory in Detroit. She ministered for a while in the tent pastored by J. O. Dowell. She told us how the Spirit of God was moving in the Armory causing the Christians to confess their sins and get rid of them.

Yours truly was preaching what we called "the death route." The answer to sanctification was to reckon yourself dead.

We held out for a while. But it was obvious that reckoning yourself dead was one thing but confessing your sins was another.

So we stood in front of the mirror, in our little trailer in Chula Vista, and said, "Lord, if there is any sin in me, please show me."

The Lord wasted no time. We have been confessing our sins over the succeeding forty- seven years.

You may think that no one could be so wicked they would be confessing their sins for forty-seven years. Well, I don't make a fetish of confessing my sins but there is hardly a day goes by that I don't look up to the Lord and ask Him to remove something that has shown its head.

Maybe I am more wicked that everyone else. I wasn't raised in church!

The heart is deceitful above all else and desperately wicked.

How about your heart? Is it deceitful above all else and desperately wicked?

Here's an idea. Stand in front of the mirror and ask the Lord to show you if there is any sin in you. Then fasten your seat belt.

Paul never meant "reckon yourself dead" to be the way to achieve purity in the Lord. Rather, reckon yourself dead is the way your orient yourself to the Christian program of deliverance. You reckon that your first personality is dead on the cross with Jesus and your new born-again inward nature is risen with Christ to the right hand of the Father.

Once you do this the Spirit can begin to call forth the worldliness, lust, and self-will from your personality.

Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead but Jesus did not remove Lazarus' graveclothes. Lazarus came hobbling out. That is what is true of us. We have been raised from the dead but we are bound head and foot with graveclothes.

Well, how about you?

We Christians have problems with the love of the world and the lusts of our flesh. Jesus Christ through the Holy Spirit helps us get rid of every trace of these.

But there is an even bigger monster lurking in the dark caverns of your personality. While you are singing "Sunlight, sunlight, in my soul today" this leviathan crawls back further into his cave.

He is willing that you be delivered from worldliness. He is resistant but finally willing that you be delivered from the lusts of the flesh.

He is willing that you be very religious and enter Christian service.

Just as long as he is untouched!

Do you know the name of the leviathan?

It is self-will.

Self-will is a bigger problem in the Kingdom than worldliness and lust put together.

Continued. Internal and External Conquest 3