Full text of Derek Prince’s sermon titled “Who Has Bewitched You: The Only Basis for Full Salvation”.
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TRANSCRIPT:
Derek Prince – Bible Teacher
Tonight I’m going to speak about what Jesus obtained for us by His death on the cross. I’d like to turn to Galatians chapter 3. I’m going to read the first five verses. These verses have impacted me so deeply that, I don’t know whether I’m going to be able to share with you all that this has come to mean to me.
Galatians 3:1: “O, foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched you, that you should not obey the truth, before whose eyes Jesus Christ was clearly portrayed among you as crucified?” Now if you have the NIV or the NASB some parts of that verse are not there, but it makes no real difference to the actual sense, the reason being that there are different texts on which the translations are based. Some use one text, some use another, hope that doesn’t confuse you.
Let me read it again, this time I’ll read it as it is in the modern versions, leaving out the pieces they leave out.
Galatians 3:1-5: “O foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched you, before whose eyes Jesus Christ was clearly portrayed as crucified? This only I want to learn from you: Did you receive the Spirit by the works of the law, or by the hearing of faith? Are you so foolish? Having begun in the Spirit, are you now being made perfect by the flesh? Have you suffered so many things in vain — if indeed it was in vain? Therefore He who supplies the Spirit to you and works miracles among you, does He do it by the works of the law, or by the hearing of faith?”
Now if you analyze those verses, those Christians in Galatia had come to know the Lord Jesus, they had received the Holy Spirit, and God had worked miracles amongst them. They were on at least as higher level of experience as most of us here tonight, and yet Paul reprimands them with extremely forceful language and he makes an amazing statement. I don’t know whether you can receive it. He says, you’ve been bewitched.
Now that’s not a metaphor. The original Greek word means bewitched. Now it may astonish you, but I’ve come to the conclusion that a large part of the American church is bewitched, an amazing proportion.
EFFECTS OF WITCHCRAFT
Now what is the effect of witchcraft? This is where we come to my point. It’s all contained in that first verse.
How did Paul know they were bewitched? Because they’d lost the vision of Jesus Christ crucified. What had this sinister power of witchcraft done among them? It had obscured the cross, and I suggest to you that, Satan’s primary objective in the church, is to obscure the cross and what was accomplished by it.
Because through the cross we have total victory, over sin, over Satan, over his kingdom. Through the cross he’s defeated. But if we ever lose the sight and the understanding of what was accomplished on the cross, then he regains his position of mastery over us. That’s the critical issue.
So I’m going to try to speak on what was accomplished by the cross, and it will be interesting to see what results. It’s been germinating in my heart for several months and without going into details, it has arisen out of experiences that I myself have passed through.
I don’t know whether you can believe it but preachers sometimes make mistakes. My aim in the Christian life is never to make the same mistake twice. I believe God is very indulgent and merciful, the first time we make the mistake, He’ll straighten us out, He’ll correct us, He’ll show us where we’ve gone astray. I don’t want to go through that process twice.
So I have made mistakes out of which I have tried to learn, and I’m going to try to share with you the lessons which I believe have come to me.
Hebrews 10:11–14
So tonight we’re going to speak about the cross as the only basis and the all sufficient basis for every good thing that God offers us. It has no other basis. Apart from the cross, God has nothing to offer us but condemnation and punishment and final death.
The only thing that stands between us and those awful prospects is the cross. I don’t know whether you noticed, but in the hymns of the last centuries, the century before, the cross was a regular theme. There’s a lot of beautiful songs coming out in the charismatic movement but hardly any of them deal with the cross, which to my way of thinking, pinpoints the great danger that faces the charismatic movement, which is being bewitched.
Now that may shock you but if it does shock you, you blame Paul and not me. It’s very remarkable. If you study Paul’s epistles, almost every epistle he began, he began by thanking God for the grace given to the people he was writing to. He wrote two epistles to the Corinthians. Now there were all sorts of problems in the Corinthian church, there was drunkenness at the Lord’s Supper, there was a man living with his father’s wife, there was all sorts of carnality, but Paul spent several verses thanking God for His grace to the Corinthians. And he didn’t reprove them for speaking in tongues incidentally.
But when Paul wrote to the Galatians, he was so upset, he didn’t have one word of thanks, he just said, I marvel that you’re so soon turned away from the grace of God into another gospel.
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