Eric Ludy Sermon Podcast: Church at Ellerslie

The human body demands constant refueling. We don't eat once in a lifetime, but everyday; and not just everyday, but often three to five times daily. The body needs food in order to live, and the spiritual man is no different. There is a need for the believing man or woman to learn to partake of the heavenly feast, not just once, but daily; and not just daily, but daily without ceasing. This message is meat and potatoes for the spiritual man. It's the most basic food of Heaven that the spiritual man must constantly be chewing, swallowing, and digesting in his soul.

This is a peek into the intimate worship of the apostles and the Church triumphant throughout the ages. It's on the sweet-smelling savor of the saints being offered forth before the throne of Jehovah. Many of us know how to sing our praises, but it's those who know how to live out their praises that truly stir the heart of their King at the deepest levels. The concept of the "upside-down cross" comes from a famous quote from the venerable Jerome (an early-Church father) writing about the martyrdom of the apostle Peter, and it is sure to stir you.

There are many bold and brawny statements in the Bible regarding the believer's Cross-purchased authority and position over the powers of earth and hell. But many of us feel awkward appropriating such grandiose notions into our personal faith. For some reason, it feels presumptuous. As a result of this hesitation, an ever-growing discrepancy between the grand promises of the Word of God and the modern Christian demonstration of the Word of God continues unabated in our generation. We must ask ourselves, “Are these grand promises merely poetical phrases to offer us psychological encouragement? Are these promises to be deemed merely wishful thinking? Or does God mean what He says?” It's high time that we stop lowering our expectations of God to the level of our personal experience and start raising the expectations of our personal experience to the level of God's promises. Because if we actually were to believe the Word of God, we would find that the Church of Jesus Christ is supposed to be an unstoppable force within this world. (NOTE: one of our cameras had problems about halfway through the sermon, and as a result, the final 40 minutes of the video version of this message is captured only from the side camera angle. Please forgive us for this.)

Christianity's greatest heroes are not of the celebrity sort. Rather, they are the ones who have forsaken reputation and have allowed God to bend them into the prayer closet, and thusly, often into anonymity as well. But it is an anonymity for the glory of King Jesus. For it is the anonymous praying saints, and not merely the famous preaching ones, that carry the match to light Heaven's bonfire here on earth. Throughout Christian history, men and women have willingly placed themselves "under the stage"in travailing prayer in order that the message being trumpeted on the platform above would ignite the hearts of its listeners. And the same history attests that when such a force of prayer was present in the undergirding of the proclamation of the great Gospel message, culture-shaping revival inevitably followed closely in its wake.

The 38th Parallel is an internationally instituted boundary line between two hostile nations, North Korea and South Korea. If a soldier of either side takes one wrong step into the territory of the other, it's instant death. This line marks a demarcation between two kingdoms, two value systems, two agendas, two opposing powers, and has historically meant the lifelong separation of loved ones. Like this earthly boundary line, there is a spiritual equivalent in the Line of Blood that divides the two opposed kingdoms of Heaven and Hell. For the kingdom of Heaven to thrive on earth, this line must be guarded with all vigilance. In fact, how we monitor the 38th Parallel in our spiritual lives will define whether it will be Heaven or Hell that will ultimately hold sway over our earthly bodies. This is war!

One of the most dangerous places on planet earth today is inside a mother's womb. The place that all natural reason would suggest is the safest place of all has become a modern-day Auschwitz. In America, one in four babies doesn't make it out of Mommy alive. And yet, rather than fighting to see this horrific trend change, the Church has all but gone silent on the issue. Oh, we may speak out at the ballot box, but we've been socially hogtied and gagged from doing anything beyond that. This provocative message isn't a call to mere political action and picket lines— it's first and foremost a call to get down on our knees and pick up our spiritual sword for these vulnerable ones. This message was accompanied by a powerful video trailer produced by The Life Project.

This particular message could easily transform your life. It addresses one of the most important themes in all of Paul's Gospel training and effectively demystifies some of the most complex notions of sin, the flesh, the old man, the indwelling Spirit, and the body. For those of you who have struggled to fully grasp some of the grand themes in many of Paul's writings, this message will help to remove scales from your spiritual eyes.

Due to popular demand, we are making available this message of Eric Ludy's that he delivered in October of 2009. This is the message from which the Ellerslie Short Film, Depraved Indifference, was constructed. In this audio, Eric is speaking at a Pro-Life Gala in Santa Barbara, California. He had originally intended to deliver an entirely different message that night, and yet as he drove from the airport in Burbank, California to Santa Barbara, God placed these words upon his heart. We hope you are blessed by this stirring message.

In no uncertain terms, Jesus says to his disciples, "It's either the world or me—you can't have both; it's either or." When we choose to follow Jesus, like Jacob we are touched in the hollow of our thigh, and in this world's eyes we have a limp. We no longer have that ultra-cool swagger we once possessed. We now appear weak, foolish, lesser, and intellectually inferior. We are now Christians, and there has never been, throughout all of history, anything hip and vogue about following Jesus Christ with abandon. None of us wish for such a limp, but such a limp must accompany the Church triumphant, so that the impediments of self-centeredness and self-glory may be shed and so that the believer might run their race with humble, heavenly gusto.

In our western world, very few of us understand the meaning of covenant. And thusly, we struggle to fully comprehend the covenant meal, known in Scripture as “the Lord's Deipnon,” or “the Lord's Supper.” And the strangest thing about it is that the meal Jesus was referring to wasn't bread and wine—the meal was Jesus, Himself, and the bread and wine were merely symbols of his body and blood. Jesus was saying, "My body is real food, and my blood is real drink." And unless we partake of Jesus, we can have no part in Him. Jesus is meant to enter into our bodies, to be digested into our inner man, to come in and wholly alter us. He was the body of God made food. And we are called to follow His example and feed a spiritually hungry world with our obedient lives.