Hallelujah. You know, a few years ago, we had a service, and it was a nighttime thing, and I remember going, and God was bringing this up to me this week, where I went into this service, and I began to pray, and I began to say, “God, you know, I want you to move in my life. Lord, I want you to have authority over my life, and I want your Holy Spirit to move freely in my life.” He gave me the word “liberty.” “Liberty” is a word that I use a lot. It's used in the Constitution. It was used in the founding of our country. Liberty means the right for one to do and move as they want, and that was my prayer to God: “God, may you have liberty. May your Holy Spirit have liberty, the freedom to do as you want, the freedom to move as you want in my life.” And it has been a prayer that I've kind of prayed over myself and my home and my family.

And I started to notice the funniest thing happening as I began to pray that prayer. I started to notice things changing in my surroundings. It was funny. At my job, it seems like every time I get into a spot where maybe it gets a little dicey or something's happening, it seems like one of you happens to show up on the scene. I don't know why. It reminded me because Sonny, the other day – I was on an accident, and the guy was upset that I was giving him a ticket, and as I was handing him the ticket, you know, he's getting all mad, and Sonny walks by, and he's like, “Hey, Pastor Kris!” And the people were like, “What did he just call him?” You know, it was kind of weird. And then another time, I remember I was on the side of the road, and I was investigating a DWI, and as I'm sitting there kind of getting ready to run them through field sobriety tests, I hear my name and I kind of look around, and I see Janet. “Kris! It's me, Janet! Kris!” You know? And I was like, “Hi” I’m on body cam, “Hi!”

Another time, I was dealing with a girl who was under the influence of narcotics. It was right out here, and she was really upset, and she was cursing and spitting at me and my partner and was all upset. We're trying to deal with that, and I look over, and there's Joanne and Lucas out the window, “Kris!” waving their hands. And I started to say, “God, what's going on? There's no way that this could be by accident. It seems like every time it's somebody that I know, somebody from the church shows up.”

See, what was God trying to teach me? Something on the outside. He was saying, “Look, when you pray and you say, ‘God, have freedom in my life,’ God starts to move as He sees fit.” Now, that's a silly example on the outside, without a doubt, but the point of it was that when you give God the liberty to move in your life, you will see Him take control and move in ways that you never thought possible. Amen. When we give God that liberty, when we give God the ability to move, when we give and open up ourselves, you will see things start to happen because, remember: liberty means that He moves as He sees fit.

So the question today, Church, is: Does the Spirit of God have liberty over your life? Does the Spirit of the Lord Jesus Christ have the room to move and do in your life as He pleases? Today, I pray that the Spirit of God would be opened up in your life, that your very life would be utilized by Jesus Christ, by the Spirit of God. Today, I'm praying for liberty for the Holy Spirit to move in your life.

"Does the Spirit of God have liberty over your life?"

My first question for you today is, who has the liberty in your life: self or Spirit? The title of my sermon today is “Self or Spirit” because one person has the freedom. One or the other: either yourself, your flesh, your carnality, what you want, and your whims have the freedom in your life, or we have surrendered it and the Spirit of God is moving freely in our lives.

One of the truths that I came to in preparing this sermon was that the truth is we are either opening up God – we are either freeing the Spirit of God to move in our lives – or we are grieving Him. It's one or the other, because Jesus Christ does want to move freely in our lives. We make room for Him by putting aside distractions of the world, moving in obedience to the Word, and seeking communion with Him, but we also can stop Him from moving. How? It's very easy: by giving our flesh free reign, by giving our carnality free reign, by holding on to those rights that we hold onto so dearly. Our ability to do as we want, think as we want, feel as we want— in doing those, in holding on to those rights, we then stop the Holy Spirit from moving in our midst.

Today we need to come to the truth that if we want the Spirit of God to move in our lives, then we need to give up the reign of carnality that we have allowed for so long. Give up our rights and instead give the authority over your life to Christ Jesus that God's Spirit might move freely in your midst.

So my first reading today is from Romans 8. It says, “Therefore brethren, we are debtors, not to the flesh, to live according to the flesh. For if you live according to the flesh, you will die. But if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live. For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, these are the sons of God”.

We need to realize today that there is a debt owed. There is a debt owed. That debt remains to the Lord Jesus Christ who went to the cross and died that we might be free: the redemption of our lives. That redemption was not free. It was paid for by the blood of the Lord Jesus Christ. It was not so that you could just be free in your own self and in your own flesh and do as you please. No, that freedom was bought by the Lord Jesus Christ so that God, that the Holy Spirit, might have authority over your lives, so that you might be free from all the ways of sin, free from the carnality, and the Spirit of God might move on you.

He redeemed our lives, and since He redeemed it, the debt of living in the Spirit of God remains. We like to think – and I see this a lot in the world, especially with the younger guys, right – we like to think that we are in some way indebted to this world. We are in some way indebted to this world. There are so many pressures in this world. There are so much outside forces that try to put pressure on you that say, “You need to live, you need to act, you need to think, like the rest of the world.” Let me tell you today, you owe the world nothing. You owe the world nothing. Amen.

"You owe the world nothing."

The ways of this world, the sin of this world, have always been and will always be trying to drag you down and destroy you. That was our destiny, people, if it were not for the Lord Jesus Christ intervening on our behalf and going to the cross, and calling us out by name, and having that roar of the Lion of Judah that called out and was there in our time of need and rescued us and pulled us from the grave.

We have a debt today to live, to be those who worship in Spirit and in truth, to be those who have prayed and asked God to take authority over their lives and say, “God, may I give up my ways of flesh, may I give up my ways of carnality, and Lord, may Your Holy Spirit move freely in my life and overcome all of the flesh, all of those old ways. May they die, and may Your Holy Spirit come in and overtake my life.”

We must be willing to put away the ways of flesh, to no longer make our own decisions, our own way of life. That starts even in the mind. That starts up here, even in the way that you think. We must be willing to even take every thought captive in the mighty name of the Lord Jesus Christ, to no longer accept a mindset of worldliness and instead adopt a standard of godliness in our lives.

What does that mean? That means that your plans of revenge, your thoughts of anger, your schemes to get ahead, they must be caught in the mighty name of Jesus. The second that they come up, lest they take root, and they must be subjected to the Word of God and brought down, and said, “God, I cannot hold on to even these ways of thinking if I want Your Holy Spirit to move in my life.”

You see, everything must be taken. Everything must be taken hold of, every part of flesh and carnality must be taken hold of and presented to God, and say, “God, I've seen what my flesh has done in my life. I look at my life and say, I have seen firsthand what my flesh has resulted in. It wasn't godliness. It wasn't goodness. It was my demise. Yet You stepped in. You came in and redeemed my life for a reason. God, I do not want to have that flesh. I don't want to even let that one thought take root, God, because I want Your Holy Spirit. I don't want that flesh running my life. I want Your Spirit to have liberty over my life.”

We must be willing to abandon control of our lives, of our agenda, and release the kingship and give it to Christ. Then, and only then, will the Spirit of God have the freedom to move in our lives as He sees fit.

We must ask ourselves honestly, judge ourselves soberly on an average day of the week. Let's take Sunday out of it because you guys come in here and you leave with the Word. Let's take an average Wednesday that you guys go and go about your day. Who has the freedom to move as they see fit? Is it you, is it self? Or is it the Spirit? Is it self or the Spirit that is running our days? Does He have the given right to intervene in your day as He sees fit?

You know, I was really touched by the sermon a couple weeks ago where we talked about who has the reign in our lives, who has the kingship. How do we judge whether or not God has the kingship in our lives? Very easily: is the Spirit of God moving freely in your life, or do you call the shots every single day?

The whole point of salvation, the whole point of Jesus Christ going to the cross and dying for you, was so that you could be free from the ways of flesh, that you could be free from the ways of sin that have held men down for so long and come into the freedom of the Holy Spirit of God, that you would be a slave to God, that God would be calling you, that you would bow a knee to Him and say, “God, You are my King.” Because the truth is, it will be the Holy Spirit of God that transforms us, that will deliver us into heaven, that makes us into the likeness of the Son; it will not be our flesh that delivers us into eternity.

So people of God, we have to say, “Lord, transform me, move me, bring me down, that You might reign this morning.” You might say, “What's the point, Kris? Why would I do that?” Let me tell you that when we read the Bible and we read about the fruits of the Spirit, they are fruit of the Spirit. You need the Holy Spirit. You can't have one without the other. You can't just say, “I want love and joy and peace and patience and goodness and kindness and gentleness and self-control. I want all those things, but I want them in my own ways. I want them while I still hold onto my own stature and my own way of doing things and my own way of thinking and my own way of going about life.” No, that's not how it works.

The fruits of the Spirit come where the Spirit is. They are the byproduct of a life that has been submitted to God and the Holy Spirit is reigning and moving freely in a life.

Let me tell you, if the Spirit has liberty over your life, then He is attracting you into godly things. The godly things of the church and of His Word are what's attractive to you. The worldly things are no longer attractive. Things like serving in the church and being in God's presence begin to fulfill your heart in the same way those things of the world used to. You are excited for the challenge to prove that God's power is greater than what is found in the world, and He is prompting your heart to display godly fruit, and you are responding.

Things begin to change, like how you raise your children, how you treat your spouse, how you go about your day, what you do with your roommates. Everything begins to change. For what does that verse say? “For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, these are the sons of God.”

See, being led doesn't mean a physical following; it means that your heart is being led to care, being burdened, being moved, and that causes the physical movement. That causes you to physically move. That gets you up and you begin to pray and you begin to worship and you're excited to be in the house of God, and Sunday morning is all of a sudden appealing to you. It's not a burden to get up. It's not a burden to stay up late and pray. All of a sudden, the things of God are becoming appealing to you because the Spirit of God has freedom over your life, because you have laid down your carnality.

Since God has been showing me these things, my prayer has been, “God, move in my life. May I put down the fleshy things, God. Show me if there's any area that still runs things. God, I will submit it to you, for I know where my flesh causes me to go. And God, I want Your Spirit to reign in my life.”

So I ask you today, people of God, who has liberty in your life? Is it self or is it Spirit? We must examine this and really submit ourselves to God so that God might produce a harvest in your life through His holy salvation. Hallelujah. Amen.

So I started off saying, “Who has liberty over your life?” Secondly, I'll say, “Who has liberty over your homes: self or Spirit?” This is something I've been praying about all week. The question remains, who has liberty over our homes? Is it self or is it Spirit? Does the Spirit have authority over your homes? Does God decide what is going to happen in your home? Or do our carnal whims and desires at that moment dictate the direction of our homes each and every day?

We as believers, as the sons and daughters of God, ones who are being led by the Spirit, we have a solemn responsibility to ensure that the Spirit of God is moving freely in and over our homes. We have a responsibility to our children and our loved ones and our roommates to put them in an atmosphere of God's Spirit that cultivates a relationship.

You know, my son's coming to an age now, you know, as young as he is, where I'm starting to say, “God, I want him to even start turning to You on his own.” Up to this point, it's been a lot of me and Jessica's kind of relationship that has brought him in. But even now, I want to say, “God, may he start to know You on his own two feet, may he stand and turn to You and begin to pray to You and begin to develop that relationship with You even now.”

You see, it is my responsibility to make sure that when he is praying, when he turns to God and when he begins to seek Him, that he is in a household where the Spirit of God reigns, where the Spirit of God is alive and moving freely and has liberty, so that when he calls out the name of God, God is there saying, “Yes, son, what can I do? Let me speak to you. Let me talk to you. Let me tell you about who I am. Let me introduce myself.”

You see, we as the people, the sons and daughters of God, have a responsibility to ensure that the Spirit of God is moving in our homes. If the flesh has rule, if self has authority in our homes, then there will always be a cap that every person that wants to connect with God will have to fight through each and every time. But we, as the sons and daughters of God, take up the responsibility to ensure that the Spirit of God has authority and reign in our homes.

When I was thinking about this, one of my favorite verses, and I've preached on this verse before, is from Genesis 28, where Jacob goes and he ends up falling asleep in a certain place and has a dream. It says, “Jacob had a dream in which he saw a stairway resting on the earth with its top reaching to heaven, and the angels of God were ascending and descending on it. There above it stood the Lord, and He said, ‘I am the Lord, the God of your father, Abraham, and the God of Isaac. I will give you and your descendants the land on which you are lying’. When Jacob awoke from his sleep, he thought, ‘Surely the Lord is in this place, and I was not aware of it.’ He was afraid and said, ‘How awesome is this place. This is none other than the house of God. This is the gate of heaven.’”

I love this verse. One of the reasons I really like this verse, and God was speaking to me about it, is because I can see that this place that Jacob was in, it was tied to a specific location. God said, “I'm going to give you the land that you are sitting on right now,” and Jacob's amazed.

In this specific location, he's having a vision of angels, the messengers of God, ascending and descending from heaven, carrying out their duties, and the voice of God at the top of the stairs making a declaration and a prophecy. We all know that Jerusalem has always been a special place to God, a place that He has held holy for generations.

But I am praying today that our homes become like that place, like that dream that Jacob had, like that place where he rested down his head and God said, “I will give you the ground that you are laying upon.” I am praying that your homes would be like that, where the angels ascend and descend, where God is sitting above it and there is a straight shoot right to Him and you can hear Him making declarations and prophecies over your homes, where the very Spirit of God will be dwelling in your midst, where He has ultimate authority, where He's able to move freely and touch the members of your home, where He's able to speak freely and give words, words of prophecy and words of encouragement and words of truth to the members of your home, where He's able to bless even the rooms of your home, that every person that walks into it will be blessed. Hallelujah.

That's the type of home that I want. That's the type of home that I'm praying for. That's the type of home that I say, “God, may You have authority. May You move freely. May You have the liberty in my home today, amen.”

We have to know what have been those things in our homes in the past. We have to be ready to fight, to break up the heavens, the things that stand in between you and an open Heaven, that God might move freely in your homes. Things like generational curses and strongholds that have plagued families for generations can be abolished in the mighty name of the Lord Jesus Christ. Things like lies and fear and anger and sickness can be broken by His blood so that the airspace of your homes is clear. Amen. And your home becomes a safe place from the perils of the world.

I was reading this, and I read another verse this week, and He began to speak to me about Jesus on the mount. Jesus goes on the mount, and Satan brings Him up there and begins to tempt Him, and he goes up real high, and he says, “Look, I'll give You all of this. All of this land I will give to you.”

Think about it from Jesus' perspective. He's saying he's pretty much giving Him what He wants, because what did Jesus come for? He came to win back hearts and to take back the land and to break it up so people could be free. So he says to Him, “I'll give it all to You. You won't have to go through the pain, the suffering, the cross. You won't have to go through the anguish. You won't have to go and do any of that. I'll give it to You right now if You just bend a knee and worship me.”

Jesus refuses, right? He won't do it. He says, “There will be no authority over Me.” He was unwilling to accept any amount of Satan or any amount of bending a knee to anyone else. He refused to be under any authority besides the authority that was granted to Him in Heaven in that moment.

You see, He was willing to go, and He was willing to fight, and He was willing to die on the cross that we might be free from the ways of sin, that we might be free from the authority of Satan that has held the power of sin that has held over man for so long. He went and died for it.

So I ask you today, who has ultimate authority in your homes? I know we all listen to worship music and read our Bibles, but who has the ultimate authority inside of our homes? When we want to go our own way, when we want to do our own thing, when it's so much easier just to compromise, is there an ultimate authority over our homes that says “no”?

When the sheep want to go and they look across and they see a field that is just across the other side of the fence and the grass looks so much greener on the other side and they begin to move that way, is there an ultimate authority over our homes? Is there a shepherd over our homes that says “no” and that the sheep listen to? Who has authority over our homes? Who is moving in our homes? Is it self or is it Spirit?

Jesus was unwilling to be under any other authority. People of God, we must be willing to fight to ensure that Jesus Christ is the ultimate authority in our homes. Don't accept an imitation that looks like God on the outside, but on the inside is lawless. Today I pray that your homes would be under one authority as the Lord Jesus Christ is One. Amen.

When the Spirit runs your home and it's no longer self, God's moving freely. There are acts of love and work to uplift one another. There is respect for one another and honor for God's law. The Spirit becomes tangible and the members of your home take up a personal responsibility to ensure that they maintain that Spirit every day. God is there when you call and His ear is attentive to your prayers.

"God is there when you call and His ear is attentive to your prayers."

In the same way where the Ark of the Covenant was a blessing to every camp that it entered, so the Spirit of God is a blessing to you and your household. His face shines upon you and your home prospers.

So the question maybe some of you have today is, “How do I get that into my home? Kris, that sounds great. How do I get it? How do I receive that Holy Spirit? How do I allow that Holy Spirit to move freely in our homes?”

I'm going to give you a really simple recipe: three steps. I should write a book. Three steps for you guys to get the Holy Spirit to move freely in your homes.

Just in the same way a lot of you guys had Thanksgiving this week and you invited people over to your home, it's the same concept. Step number one: we invite Him. We invite Him. Through prayer individually and with members of our homes, we ask Him to come in and take authority over our homes. I have learned in my life to bless my property, to pray, to seek God's will, and even in the little things, to put my family above myself, to ensure my actions and my speech exalt God. All of these things invite the Spirit of God into your home. So that's step number one.

Step number two, you prepare for Him. No one wants to go to a dirty home. Like it just is what it is. No one wants to go to a home where there's stuff all over the place and go to Thanksgiving dinner and there's dirty laundry on the couch. Nobody wants to do that, and in the same way, you don't want to invite somebody into your home when you know you have a lot of cleaning to do. Look, I've been in some homes that you do not want to be in, some gnarly things, like I'm afraid to turn my back to the wall because I feel like a cockroach is going to go for my gun. Nobody wants to be in those homes. In the same way, sin and fleshiness are like the rodents and the bedbugs to the Spirit of God. No one wants to be there. We must be willing to prepare our homes, to clean our homes, to receive such an honorary guest.

So we said we invite Him and we prepare for Him. Number three, we're a good host. Just as many of you on Thanksgiving ensured that your guests were well taken care of and comfortable and at home, we know that we are inviting the King of Kings into our house. And we give Him the honor that He is due. We ensure that we are worshiping Him in Spirit and in truth.

I think about Jesus and Mary, where Jesus showed up into the house, and He turned to the Pharisees and He said, “You didn't even give me water to wash My feet when I walked in the door. But look at this woman who is down at My feet, perfuming Me and wiping My feet with her tears. We realize that we are not just calling anybody into our homes, but we are inviting the Spirit of God, the One who is there at the creation of the earth, the One who went and died for us.

The Lord thy God is One. We say to Him, “God, You are the King of kings. You are the Lion and the Lamb, and today, may You have authority over my home.”

God has reign over our homes because we have given Him reign over our homes. I pray today that He would be freely moving in your homes as the members of your households have gathered together, abandoned their own ways, and have submitted themselves to His authority.

So I started off saying, “Who has liberty over your lives: self or Spirit? Who has liberty over your homes?” And finally, who has liberty over your souls: self or Spirit?

To understand this point, we have to understand where the soul comes from. The soul is the life that was breathed into you that has given life to your body. If you look in Genesis, when it talks about the time of Adam, He formed Adam out of what? Out of the dirt, the dust, the clay. He formed Adam's body, but where did the life that inhabited Adam come from? That life came from the lungs of God. That soul was given to Adam. It was breathed into him. It came from the very lungs of the Father.

Your soul is the physical life that was put inside of you that dictates how you run your life. Here's the thing, though. Sin has hardened the soul against God. It has hardened the soul of man against God. Things like inherited sin, past experiences, hurt, oaths, immorality, trauma, these things have hardened the soul of man against God. It hardens them from connecting back to God.

For so many, their souls become like a spiritual Tower of Babel that stands tall and says, “I don't need You, God. I can stand separate from You. I can do it on my own. Never again will I go through that. Never again will I go through that pain. No, God, I'm good on my own.” It stands separate from God because of what sin has done.

The soul is the seat of your will. So you can see where the will stands up and says, “No, God, I can do this without You” because that is what sin has done. Sometimes you'll hear pastors refer to people who are run by their flesh as “soulish men.” Your soul is what decides what you want, when you want it, and how you're going to get it. Your soul is where sin is conceived. Your body just carries it out. It's just the tool that carries it out. The soul is where that sin was birthed.

So we can look and say, “Our soul is what has made us look like the world time and time again.” So I tell you, it is our souls that need to be overcome by the Spirit of God.

Who has freedom over your soul: self or Spirit? Who is running things: self or Spirit? Has the Spirit of God overcome your souls this day so that you no longer resemble the world, but instead you have come into the likeness of the Son? For that is what the Spirit of God does when it moves freely upon a man or upon a woman. It begins to go deep inside of them, deep to the core of who they are, deep to the very foundations that make you you, and it begins to transform you to look like the kingdom, like the Spirit of God, like the Son of God.

My verse is 1 Thessalonians 5:23. It says, “Now may the God of peace Himself sanctify You completely, and may your whole spirit, soul, and body be preserved blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.”

So we have to look at some real deep things about us. Some really deep questions that we have to ask ourselves. What makes you make the decisions that you make? What shapes your thought life? Where do your desires stem from? These are questions that are really core to who we are as people. They go deep to the core of who we are, and these are the questions that we need to examine. Are we run by the unsanctified soul of mankind that makes us live separate from God, or are we run by the Spirit of God who transforms us into the likeness of the Son? Who is it? Who has the freedom to move over our souls? Is it Spirit or is it self?

One of the biggest problems we have in the American church today is men and women who are run by self yet try to fit Christianity into their lives, into their soulish lifestyle. It's like an arm's-length type of Christianity: “I'll go to church, I say I believe, but the Spirit of God, the things that transform me, the things that want to make me bend a knee in any meaningful way to God, I keep those at arm's length, and I stay over here. I still go to church and I still believe, but I'm just kind of doing it on my own terms.”

You see, that type of Christianity doesn't work in the kingdom of God. For God wants to have freedom upon your souls. God wants His Spirit to move freely upon your souls that you might be transformed.

I got a call at work the other day. Somebody called me from the prosecutor's office, and they called and they said, “Listen, hey, Kris, I know you're a pastor. I know you're in the church and stuff, and there's a lot of pastors doing this. We wanted to know if you want to become a drug counselor.” They said, “We'll send you to school. You’ll go and get all your clinical hours and everything.” And I was kind of like, “Not really…” I kind of turned him down a little bit.

Look, there's definitely a place for that. I'm not saying it's bad. The world needs those people and I'm so glad that they're there. But here's the thing – we as the sons and daughters of God need to stop trying to deal with symptoms and start dealing with the root causes. Amen.

We as the children of God, as ones who hopefully have had God unleashed upon their life, where the Spirit of God is moving freely, need to say, “Dealing with the symptoms is great, but has your soul been sanctified? Have you been sanctified completely that you might be found blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ?”

Because this verse is very descriptive. We must be sanctified completely. May your physical body, the soul that lives inside of you, and your spirit, which is that part of you that connects with God, be sanctified. Sanctified means set apart, made holy, overtaken by the Spirit of God. Why? So that you might be found blameless on the day that Jesus Christ appears.

"We must be sanctified completely."

The truth is that there is a coming judgment upon this world. It will not even be like the court cases we see today, where someone's actions are kind of weighed about whether they broke a law or not. No, the coming judgment that is going to come is when Jesus Christ will look and say, “Were you overtaken by the Spirit of God? Have you been transformed into Holy Spirit-filled men and women? Did your actions come from a place of godliness? Is the Spirit moving inside of you? Has the Spirit been unleashed upon your life that you have been so transformed that every movement that you do has been ordained by the Spirit of God and has been called forth and everything has come from the good place of God? Or did his sacrifice change nothing? And are we still soulish men or women that have existed since the sin of Adam?

Ezekiel 18:4 says, “Behold, all the souls are mine. The soul of the father as well as the soul of the son is mine. And the soul who sins shall die.”

This soul, the body, everything that we have been given has been provided by God. It has come from the very lungs of God. Our soul should not be used as a tool against God to live as our own, for it came from God. Instead, our will should be fully transformed so that we might willfully submit ourselves before our God in Heaven and have our souls transformed.

When that happens, your decisions are no longer made from the flesh, but they are made from a place of honoring God. Your thought life is no longer yours to command as a general commands his army. No, your thought life all of a sudden changes from the physical things into spiritual things. Your desires are no longer about making the best you or whatever makes you feel good at the moment. No, your desires come from bringing God glory in your life. This is what a sanctified person who the Spirit is moving freely upon their soul looks like.

I imagine what somebody like that looks like, somebody who has said, “God, come in and take ownership over my soul. Move freely in my life. Move freely upon my soul. Transform me, God.” This is what makes people leave careers to serve in the ministry. This is what makes people go away and go on missions trips and do missionary work. This is what makes people willing to step out to follow God and, in doing so, see the glory of God fall down and transform lives.

I started today's sermon talking about God having liberty over our lives, and I'm ending talking about God having liberty over our souls. They sound so much alike, but in truth they are not. When God has freedom over our lives, we see His Spirit being utilized to do miraculous things in our lives. When God has freedom over our souls, we see His Spirit utilizing us to do miraculous things in the kingdom.

Mankind has a problem, and it's been a problem since the time of Adam. Sin has come in and corrupted the soul of man. It has corrupted the soul to turn against God. Since that first day in the Garden where for the first time a man's will was used against God, it has been a problem, and man has been under sin's power.

But Jesus Christ came, and He willfully laid down everything. The Bible says that His soul, while He was in the Garden, was in anguish. He felt it. He had that soul. He felt it, yet He submitted all to God the Father and went to the cross. He did that so that the power of sin over man's soul would be broken and that you could be free. He did it so that the Spirit of God could be loosened upon your life.

My prayer today is that as Jesus Christ laid down His body and His will in obedience to the Father to redeem us, we would use that blood-bought freedom to lay down everything of who we are before Jesus Christ. That the Spirit of God might come in, take hold of us, and utilize that freedom to empower us and bring transformation upon the world.

There's something that you can say, when God has done something upon your soul, when God has moved upon you, when you ask yourself those deep questions on the core of who you are, and you say, “God, I'm surrendering who I am to You. Everything has been surrendered to You. My flesh and my soul as it is won't make it to Heaven. It has to be transformed. Your Spirit has to come in and do a transformation upon me, God.”

When God does that, we can say, “It is well with my soul.” That's where that song comes from. “It is well with my soul. My soul is held in Your hands.” When I go before that judgment seat, I know I will be found good and holy, not because of me, but because of God, because of what Jesus Christ has done and because of how He has rescued me and redeemed me from the grave.