We're looking at the introduction
to 1 Timothy, and we're focusing this week and last week and in
the weeks to come on some doctrine that is essential, that is taught,
which is sort of oxymoronic and redundant. which I believe is misconstrued
in our day, in our culture. I think a lot of times we use
words like grace and peace and mercy and love and friendship
and hunger and all these different things. We use them in a strange
way. And sometimes we even, though we may have the definition correct
because we can all look it up now, we may not know the true
context of which a particular term or understand the context
in which a particular teaching is supposed to be held. And so
when Paul writes his letters, as we've seen here, let's read
the first two verses of 1 Timothy again, and then we're just going
to continue where we left off with a little bit of refreshing from last week.
It says, Paul, an apostle of the Lord Jesus Christ, by command
of God our Savior in Christ Jesus our hope. To Timothy, my true
child in the faith, grace, mercy, and peace from God the Father
and from Christ Jesus our Lord. And so there's a lot of things
there. There are a lot of things there. There is Christ. What
does that mean? What's the term mean? It's the
English transliteration of the Greek word Christos, which is
a translation of the word Meshach, which is in English Messiah,
which means the holy anointed one of God, the anointed one
of God, the one God has chosen and anointed to be his one. And
we see all the prophets of old, we see God in Genesis, in the
creation of the world, pointing to the Messiah, pointing to the
one who would come, pointing to the one who would save His
people from their sin, pointing to the one who would be their
righteousness. In the Scripture, that's the message, that's the
meta-narrative of the Bible, that's the overall story of Scripture.
Even though it is 66 different writings over hundreds and hundreds
of different years by multiple authors, multiple recipients,
it is God's Word compiled by Him and His divine power for
our instruction that we may know who He is and know what He has
done for His people. That is eternal life. And that
is why we gather, because God has commanded it. God has commanded
that the church be organized in such a way that it is overseen,
and that it is nourished, and that it is fed, and that it is
defended, and that we live together in such a way that the gospel
of Jesus Christ and the name of the Lord is glorified, or
is edified, or is exalted. The whole point of us living
in this life as believers is to praise God, to thank Him,
to honor Him, to worship Him for His grace, which is glorious,
Ephesians chapter one, several times, which means He reveals
the essence of all that He is and ever could be and ever will
be and ever has been. So that this is the epitome,
salvation is the epitome of God's self-revelation to His people. And that's why we think the gospel
is important. It's not just about getting saved, whatever that
means in today's vernacular. It's not just about coming to
the truth, whatever that means to some of us. It means God has
revealed Himself to His people. And His revelation is the salvation
of His people by His sovereignty, by His power, by His purposes,
and for His namesake. And we'll see that some this
morning. We saw last week that Paul inserted mercy in between
these three things. Grace and peace is very common
in Paul's writing, but we saw last week that Paul inserted
mercy, because mercy, by definition, it instigates the idea of extreme
intimacy, that something that there's a deep concern, If you're
merciful to someone, it's because you have great compassion, it's
because you have great love, it's because you have great intimacy
with the idea that you want to help them escape what's coming,
or that you want to give a stay of something. And so when we
think of God's salvation through the Lord Jesus Christ, we think
of the Father putting forth His Son to be the satisfaction of
His wrath and His death, we need to understand, beloved, that
that is mercy. that the instrument of God working
in His grace, as His grace is manifested, mercy is a great
picture of what grace is. Peace is a good fruit of what
grace produces. Because we are no longer at odds,
we are no longer aliens, we are no longer enemies, we are no
longer sinful in the eyes of God, but we have been brought
near through the blood of Christ. We have been brought not into
the Holy of Holies that we may lay down a sacrifice, but the
sacrifice has been laid down for us in the body and the blood
of Jesus Christ. And then the walls of the temple
and the curtains of the Holy of Holies have been Moot. Made moot. They've been eradicated. There is no need for them. For
the high priest, Jesus Christ, who was also the sacrifice, finished
the work of atonement, finished the work of redemption forever
and ever and ever, and there is nothing else left but the
work of Christ for our salvation. There is nothing the sinner must
have, or accomplish, or do, or obtain. There is no mindset to
which we must approach God to receive anything that's being
offered because the good report is not an offer that one must
see, but it is a finished work that God the Holy Spirit will
show that they have been surely planted in the center of. And
these may be subtleties to a lot of us. These distinctions, though
always and only biblical, may seem not important. But beloved, I'm going to tell
you, lies often come with a skin of truth. Deception always comes
with some truth. Satan did not lie in the garden. He deceived. Satan did not lie
to Jesus in the wilderness. He deceived him. How did he do
that? He used truth in a manner in which it was not intended
to be understood in hopes that he could cause doubt. Doubt in
what? Doubt in the promises of God
and the power of God and the providence of God and the purposes
of God for the people of God. There's a sermon. All Ps. That's what the devil does. The
devil doesn't come with obvious and easily identifiable alternatives. That's easy. He comes as an angel
of light. And beloved, the enemy will use
our sinful flesh as the beloved of Christ. He will use our sinful
mind. When we focus on us and our ways
and our thoughts and our ideas and our understanding, we have
already missed the point of God's sovereignty. When we are right,
stomp our feet and plant, we are wrong automatically. Because
that is not the mind of Christ. So to understand this grace,
to understand this mercy, to understand this peace, Timothy
didn't have to be taught this. Timothy spent years and years
and years with Paul. And so before we're done with
this introduction in a couple of weeks, I'm gonna talk about
what it means from Paul's perspective for Timothy to be a true child,
and more importantly, possessively, my true child in the faith. I want to talk about that because
I think that that would be a good way of looking at the process
in which God brings revelation and brings understanding to His
people. He doesn't start with a lie and then mull us down to
the truth. He starts with the truth and
ends with the truth, and there's a whole lot of lies in between.
There's a whole lot of misunderstanding in between. There's a whole lot
of confusion in between. That's why it's so hard for some
of you, and I know most of your testimonies to some degree, some
of you have struggled deeply with the idea, is my faith substantial
enough for salvation? Now think about that for a second.
How is it that your faith could be the measurable power for God's
salvation? It can't. Your faithfulness is
not a measure of your redemption. Your obedience is not the center
of your assurance. Many cults and atheistic individuals
have greater moral standards or as good a moral standards
as the Bible would call for and can live accordingly and Christians
should live accordingly. Otherwise we do what? We practice
loving correction, which is also known as church discipline. which
99% of goes on without incident. We just, we correct each other
in gentleness because we are also sinners and until I am perfect,
absolutely as Christ is perfect, I have no right or authority
or permission to approach you in your sin. But I can encourage
you in the faith and we can encourage one another. The word of God
will confront us, you see. We aren't the spirit. We aren't
the warriors of God to bring about change in life, maturity. We are the slaves of Christ to
have His mind to lay our lives down for one another as Christ
set His life aside as a sacrifice for us. So this grace, we saw
last week, we went and read a lot of scripture. We read the second
chapter of 1 Corinthians. We read the, not the whole eight
chapter, but a lot of the eighth chapter of Romans. and we've
looked at grace. And so for our sermons about
grace, in the context of them being, of that term being possessive
to God, the New Testament solely and only talks about grace in
the context of salvation. So I said last week that grace
needs to be understood from the New Testament point of view when
it is God who has the grace, it is always salvation to His
people. There was no other use of the
term whatsoever. No other use of the term. But yet we have
seen historically a lot of things where people would use the term
in other ways because what does it mean literally? It means unmerited
favor. It means a gift. It means thankfulness. It means to be gracious. It means
to bestow favor. It also means to act freely.
In other words, there's no payment there. There's an action-free
life. So God works in this way, but grace needs to be understood
by the New Testament church as our salvation. By grace, you
have been saved. But we also talked about last
week that grace in and of itself is not this thing. It's not a
tangible thing. It's not a power. It's not, you know, a substance. It's not an object. It's not
something like, you know, this thing that we tap into. It's
not something God has pockets full of, like I think I used
the illustrator. Got some candy over here. I got some grace over
here. You know, we don't throw it out at parades. It's not this
obscure, movement of God. It is God, His disposition, and
His favor toward His people, and how God acts, and what God
does. And so God reveals His grace,
how? Through the death of Jesus. And
the Scripture reveals the death of Jesus as what? As the instrumental
power of salvation. As the cause of salvation. as the centerpiece of redemption,
the cross of Christ. This is the point. The gospel
is that Christ has died. The gospel is that Christ is
God. The gospel is all that God has
accomplished through Jesus Christ to be learned from the prophets
and to be understood through the apostles. You see, we can
still learn the gospel through the prophets. Through the illumination
of the Spirit of God, we can see the apostles showing us what
the prophets meant and to what they pointed, even sometimes
when they themselves did not understand. You get it? The grace
of God. And we close out our time last
week talking about the grace of God in a way that we could
see it working and that we could see the apostles And we can see
the authority of the scripture in the apostles. We talked about
all these things. And so therefore, we do not interpret
scripture in light of Tippin's, nor do we interpret scripture
in light of history, nor do we interpret scripture in light
of theological things. We interpret scripture first
and foremost by its immediate context, because that's how we
read a book. And when we read letters, that's
how we read letters. And I know that in music school,
when I was in music school years ago, and there was this one of
my friends, one of my peers, and he decided he would be really
creative and he wrote a bunch of music, about 12 pages worth
of piano music, and then he throws it on the floor and he picks
it up out of order and he plays it thinking that it would work.
And it was a terrible failure. So he got a zero on that assignment
because it sounded like cats in a blender being poured out
over a piano. It just didn't work. Transitions weren't there.
But that's where most of us are in our theological understanding
of things. We don't have a grasp on Scripture itself. We have
a grasp on the theology of Scripture because of someone else's teaching
to us. And so I say all of that because
I want you to know that you need to be a student of the Bible.
How are you to be a student of the Bible? Put up your study
Bibles and study your Bible. Put down your pencils and read
it. Set time aside every day to hear the word of God. If you
are at work, do you listen to a podcast? Do you listen to music?
Put the scripture, you can put 10 minutes or 15 minutes, put
the scripture in your ears because it alone, it alone will teach
you the truth of Christ. The spirit of God will show,
I promise you, I promise you, if you read the Bible over and
over and over again, the Spirit of God will teach you things
that you will never glean. You will never glean. And they're
not epiphanies. They're instruction. The Bible
is instruction. Test me by that. Don't test me
by what you think you know. Test me by what the Word of God
says. Because I am a very, very sinful person. But yet I am clothed
in a righteousness that's not mine. Because God has given His
Son for me and for you, beloved. And we are right before the Lord. In Philippians chapter 1, verse
29, I think this is where we picked up, left off last week.
We'll have to just see. Paul writes these things to the
church. For it has been granted to you that for the sake of Christ
you should not only believe in Him, but also suffer for His
sake. So, there's some things there
that I want to point to in the context of understanding grace.
It has been granted to you. Like Paul would pray, granting
repentance, granting the gift of faith, giving understanding,
giving the heart and the mind of Christ. See, these aren't
things that we accomplish. These aren't things that we strive
for, and though people have written a lot of books about how we can
get together and follow a particular plan of action and learn the
mind of Christ, or live as Christ lived, or wear a bracelet that
would always pose the question for us, what would Jesus do?
These are not spiritual maturity. These things do not lead us into
worship. They lead us into the law. They
lead us into legalism. They lead us into things of always
being fearful that we're not doing things correctly, nor are
we approaching God in a right manner, because we're not in
the right type. We're not clothed correctly.
And that was Adam and Eve's problem. They clothed themselves out of
their own providence, because they would not believe the gospel.
that said, I am the life giver, you are with me in intimacy,
and if you were to remain in this innocence, don't eat of
these two trees, because when you do not believe my promise,
you will surely die. See, that's what it was all about.
And death entered the world, and man was fallen, and all his
progeny are guilty before God. But God created the world and
He created the garden and He created the first couple and
He created the first family so that He could show the reason
for it all to display Himself and to show His glory to His
people. to which the world at large will
not want to see. So what has the religious of
the world at large done? They have created an alternate
Christ. They have created an alternate
gospel. They've created an alternate Eden. And we've seen it throughout
history. We see it with the fig leaves.
We see it with Cain. We see it with the generations
up to Noah. We see it at Babel. We see Abraham
lying about who Sarah was. We see Hagar. And the apostles
used all these things, not as, look at how bad man is, and look
how faithful man is, but look at how sovereign God is, that
when He does let His creation set in their place, they will
do what they are able to do, which is fail. Free will is failure. One billion percent. There is
no decision that we can make that does not fail in the economy
of righteousness. And that is why we must live
with a currency that comes through the economy of grace, which is
an empty hand. We cannot pay God for anything. Grace, mercy, and peace. So the grace of God needs to
be understood, as Paul wrote to Timothy, as God doing for
undeserving sinners that He loves in an everlasting way, through
the Savior, our God, and the Christ, who is Jesus, our hope. Grace to you. Grace to you. And I had a list
in my head, and last week I think I just spilled them all out,
you know, one after the other because it was at the bell. So
today, let's pick up with some of these things in a little more
organized manner. What is God's grace? How are
we to understand? I think we need to look at it
in the context of how the Word reveals it. And the first thing
we need to see in relation to what God's grace and how it should
be understood is God's love for His people. God's love for His
people. God loves His people. There's a phrase and a term that,
you know, when we see the hands of God and the eyes of God and
the heart of God and the mind of God and all these different
things, there's a phrase or there's a term called anthropomorphism.
That means we ascribe, you know, physical attributes or traits
to that which is not physical or intangible. And the word like pathetic means
that we sort of ascribe a fallacy, the pathetic fallacy is when
we ascribe emotions to inanimate objects. Like the speaker cried or something,
you know, not necessarily. But I think sometimes we mix
all this stuff up and we do the same thing with God. We think
that God's love is like our love. And the gamut of our love can
be pizza or our children. Use the same term, same phrase. Nice weather. Heaven. Oh, I just love the idea
of heaven. I just love the summer. Really? I love the Lord Jesus. I love
apple pie. I mean, folks, we have lost our
minds, really. But that's how we are. But we
don't put that upon God. We don't say that God is like
us. The Imagio Dei is not, as we've learned, those 18 sermons
that we talked about in the beginning of this, before we got into Timothy,
going through Genesis 1-5. Beloved, learn that. The one
who is in the image of God is Jesus the Christ, the God-man. The righteousness of God. And philosophers have done a
very good job of deepening our ideas and our ideology and broadening
our thinking in the context, but the idea of revelation is
not about how we think about it to discover it, it's about
how it's simply stated. Revelation is simply stated.
How do I get to the such and such store? Well, if you look
hard and go that way, It'll be obvious to you. I mean, is that
direction when you're lost? You're downtown Los Angeles and
you're... You don't need that. You need three blocks, take a
left, one block up, take a right, and run for your life. You'll
find it. We don't learn Scripture through
ambiguity and cross-references and numerology and deep thinking
and incense and We learn Scripture by the Holy Spirit and it's simply
taught to us in the sense that we need each other and each one
of us needs the Word. God does use other people to
teach us by what they say and what they write, but the Word
of God is the template through which we measure their accuracy. So see if we put the cart before
the horse. And there are some deeper things to consider, to
contemplate, but these things are not beneficial for all believers. All believers don't need them.
All believers don't care, and it's not laziness. It's not immaturity. It's maturity to go, I'm not
really interested in all that stuff. It's okay. But what you must be interested
in is the teaching of the apostles. the plain and simple instruction
given to the church and the reminder and the correction and the commands
given to the beloved of God because that is part of our worship to
Him. But the love of God is ours. The peace and the kindness of
God, the kindness of God is related to His love in such a way that
the kindness of God is revealed through Scripture. Verbally,
through the narrative, through the prophets, through the apostles'
instruction, the kindness of God is shown to be His grace
and mercy and love toward His people. And we see this and we
understand it in such a way that we realize that we've received
something that we don't deserve. Saving faith rests in the sufficiency
of what God has accomplished. You see. Not in how we've approached
it. Not in what we've understood
about it. It's not an academic issue, folks. And don't hear
what I'm not saying. We do use our minds and we do
learn. But regeneration is not academic. It's not a list and
subset of things that we go, I confirm, like a robot. Sometimes, especially for young
children, it is a resting hope that they are sometimes unable
to express rightly. But that wasn't good enough for
history, so what did we do? We created catechisms. And when
children could answer the catechism, they were saved. That's hogwash. It's the only safe word I can
say about that. And then most evangelicals cata-what?
Is that a disease? Put on a mask. I mean, you know,
I don't want to catch a catechism. We don't even know what that
just means. Questions, answers. Some evangelicals, they've never
heard of that because it's, you know, evangelicalism by and large
is contemporary, very new. They're the new kids on the block.
It's got a Bible and that's all we need, you know, that kind
of stuff. Okay, good, you're not reading it, evidenced by
the fact of what you're saying. But yet, we still have catechism
being created. And other individual people are
saying, well, here's my catechism. Here's my litmus test. Do you
at any time or have you at any time enjoyed your sin? Presently,
past, or possibly in the future? Yes or no? I mean, you ever had
that question? Oh. And you know you're going
to lie, so you're going to sin. You're going to say, no, I hate
it. That's a lie. If we hated sin so much, we would
fight it. Well, you know, I haven't murdered
anybody in about 20 years. Murder ain't the only sin out
there. Pride, fear, doubt, uncertainty, irritation, aggravation, yelling,
screaming, silent treatment. I mean, you know, the opposite
of all these things, whatever it might be. Feeling frustrated.
In your mind, punching people. Or sinful. And God is not in
the business of doing transformative work to make us worthy of Him.
He's in the business of doing redemptive work to clothe us
in Himself. So we learn from the Scripture.
We learn because of God's kindness. We learn because of God's grace.
We are given mercy. The story that Jesus tells about
the publican. the tax collector. What were
tax collectors? They were just thugs. They were first century gangsters.
That's all they were. So you want to think of the hardest
of hard people in today's terms, whether it be a drug dealer or
a gang or, you know, I had a few other things, but we have children
present. You know, there's a lot of bad things going on in the
world. I mean, the publicans were just first century thugs.
They were thugs. And they were political thugs,
they were spiritual thugs, and they made their living by shaking
down their kinsmen. by knocking on the door saying,
the Lord is here to take His tax, you know, because that was
Caesar's title, the Lord. And anything that they took over
what was required was theirs to keep. I had a lot of humorous things
to say just then. But they were thugs. And we see that Jesus says the
spiritual ones, the Pharisees, the ones who were looked at as
the most righteous because of the way they lived and prayed
and served and their verbal piety, they prayed in a way that everyone
knew that they were serious about God. And they never did anything
wrong and they always answered the law. Paul said that, right? I'm not making this stuff up.
Paul said according to the law he was blameless and no one No
one in the temple work could bring a charge against him. He
followed it accurately. That's not a lie. He did it right. There's only one way to put the
toilet paper on. Over the top. Out the front. Everything else
is wrong. Just throw it in the floor. Paul did it right. People looked
at the Pharisees. Jesus even says, unless your
righteousness, unless your perfection, unless your holiness, unless
your sanctification, unless your divine essence is greater than
the Pharisees, you cannot enter into the kingdom of heaven. And
everybody there that heard him say that were horrified. Why? Because Because in their eyes, these
people were the epitome of spiritual maturity, the epitome of true
righteousness, the examples of God-centeredness and holiness
and goodness and perfection. And beloved, even if a well-devoted
like the rich young ruler who was high up in the ranks of religion
in his day, He still could not do what the Pharisees could do
because He could not rule. He could not enter into the places
of worship like those people could do. He could not be a priest.
He could not ultimately fulfill all things according to the law
because He did not have the legal right to do them. He could not
give up everything he had in business to serve the temple
for. It was not his call. He had not
been appointed to such a task. So there's no way he could be
as good as the Pharisees, but yet he was close. And what do
the disciples say when he leaves Jesus? When Jesus says, you must
be as God is, perfect. He says, yeah, I've been practicing
that since my youth. I've been keeping those things since my
youth. I've been doing the work of the divine. He's basically
saying, I've been like God since I can remember. If you eat of
these things, God knows that you will be like Him. That's
why He doesn't want you to touch it. That's always man's plight. It's the opposite of grace. It's
gain. I want to gain in my humble boast,
my purity before the Lord. Oh, Lord, thank You. But what
does the Pharisee do in the story of Jesus? The Pharisee stands
out and prays and preaches. And if he were to die alive today,
he'd vidcast it and put it out on social media for everybody
to see. And he'd debate the dude on the corner who doesn't know
his hand from a hole in the ground, and he would boast in it. Pray
for this stupid, idiot, lost man. It's not what they say,
but that's what it means. Look at me, Lord. I don't steal
and lie. What did Jesus say? You don't
love anybody. That's your problem. Not stealing won't get you to
heaven. But the publican, the thug, the
thief, the guy that takes advantage of his own people, shakes down
his own mama. She got three coins, he's taking
two of them. She doesn't owe but a half, he's
gonna take two. You know Caesar, mama, he's up the ante. Sorry
about that, I got three houses to keep. I mean, Caesar's got
it, you know, as a raise, just put it like that. Well, you know,
your cousin so-and-so just hit the camel lottery. Oh, really?
Thanks for telling me. Let's go see cousin Susie. We'll get it from her. And what
is the cry of the public? And what is the cry of the tax?
What is the cry of the criminal? And who were the people that
Jesus hung around? The prostitutes, the thieves,
the criminals, the thugs. the tax collectors, the haters
of God, the insolent, the drunkards, the liars. He didn't hang with
the Pharisees, he rebuked them. He called them out on their self-righteousness.
And what if the prayer, and the cry, and the scream, and the
heart's beat, the heartbeat of that publican in this story says,
oh dear God, right? Have mercy on me, a sinner. Now why would he scream that?
Why would he cry that? Well, that was a hypothetical.
It did not happen. It was a story. It was a parable. But he says something interesting
in the text. When you study that text, and
you study the language in that text, you actually hear him say,
propitiate for me. Satisfy your wrath for me. So
the mercy of God is God satisfying His own righteous justice. How does that work? God's grace
at work for His people. Satisfy your wrath for me. Because
that sinner had been taught, had been taught there's nothing
he could do to reconcile himself before the Lord. But yet the Pharisee had all
the right answers, had all the right actions, and had all the
right attitudes. But he went home condemned. Now,
beloved, when the Lord Jesus Christ even tells a story about
condemnation, that'll make us sick. Because it is a horrible
thing to fall in the hands of the righteous God. And none of us deserve to be
in His hand. None of us deserve to know His
mercy and peace and grace. None of us should understand
the blessings of Christ. But that is why God made the
world and everything in it, that He may reveal Himself as a Father
of grace toward His people through His Son. So there is no boasting. There is no condemnation. There
is nothing. By grace, you have been saved
through faith, and this is not of your own doing, but is the
grace of God. It is the gift of God, effectual
unto your eternal life, unto your eternal salvation. It's
like Paul saying, God, as he would say many times in his writing,
showed me the chief and worst of sinners. You know, Paul took
that moniker as he aged. not as when He began, as He aged. I have received grace, and above
all men to be receiving grace, I am the least deserving. Why?
Because in His zeal for what God's Word said, He persecuted
those for whom Christ died. Undeserving sinners escape the
wrath of God and are delivered from judgment because they have
been given eternal life through Jesus Christ. How do we know
we have life? Because Jesus lives. If Jesus were not the Christ,
when He died, He would stay dead. Because the wages of sin is death. Christ took a payment that He
did not earn, so it had no power over Him. And so if He took the payment
and He paid it, if He took the penalty and He paid the payment
in His own life, in His own flesh and blood, then how can we also
then pay that payment? We can't. We can't pay that payment.
There's nothing to be paid. It is all of grace. We have been given eternal life.
We have been given faith. We have been adopted as children. Beloved, that is... That is our
assurance. That is our confidence. We talked
about election last week a little bit, about the four ways in which
the Scripture teaches election. But beloved, election is grace. How is it that we are able to
know God's business? Because God has told us His business. He's taught us. We have been
predestined. We have been elected. We have
been called. We have been adopted. We have
been purchased. We have been snatched. We have
been grabbed. We have been drawn. We've been
rescued. We've been made alive. Look at
these words. Who is the one doing this stuff? Us? No. In all ways, God is the
one doing this stuff. He is the actor in them all.
These are works of grace. taught to the church through
the New Testament writing to be understood as salvation alone.
Salvation. Because until we get this straight, we're really going to mess up
a lot of other stuff. We have been predestined to believe
the gospel. God reveals Himself and His purposes. We've been predestined. The pinnacle
of grace. God, in His disposition toward
His people, toward evil people, that He has called His own. Chapter 1 of Ephesians. We read
this last week. Let's read it again. Blessed
be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Remember what
Paul just said to Timothy. God, our Savior. Jesus Christ,
our Lord, our hope. Jesus, blessed be God and Father
of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with
every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, even as He chose
us in Him before the beginnings of the world, that we should be holy, set apart,
that we should be blameless, forgiven, Before Him, in love,
He predestined us for adoption. An act of grace. Adoption to
what? To Himself. Are we adopted as
servants? Are we adopted as neighbors? We're adopted as sons and daughters. When you see sons, it's a plural
understanding of siblings. Through Christ Jesus we're children.
See this old adage, everybody's a child of God. No, you're not.
No, they're not. You know, that's just, that's culture that says
that. Everybody's a child, everybody's a creation of God. But the children
of God have an everlasting love, an everlasting hope, an everlasting
predestined electing grace that loves them because God loves
them. Because what's the alternative?
We must do what's the good news God has done. And why does the flesh hate that
so much? Because we, whether we want to or not, even in our
ability to try to make it humble, it's prideful. We hate the fact
that what we've done or what we've become has no merit. We hate that. We hate that. What does Paul say about those
things? I counted all as loss. He didn't say God chose me to
be the apostle to the Gentiles because of all of my Jewishness
and all of my superior knowledge and all of my understanding and
all of my learning. Because who better to teach the
Gentiles who were dumb as a bag of tater chips about the atonement
of the Lord Jesus that they've never even heard of than me,
the greatest of all Jews. He said, I don't know anything
but Christ. And all that other stuff I count
as garbage to be left aside. I don't know anything. Now did
Paul forget it all? No. Paul was a sly fellow. He was a very, very... He might
not have been able to do public speaking. He might have come
to Corinth and trembling and stuttering and not been able
to give a good argument. But he didn't need to, see. The
grace of God eradicates argument. The grace of God disposes of
apologetics. The grace of God destroys the
wisdom of man. It is all of God. I mean, what did Joshua and Moses
and all those people, what did the people leaving Egypt think
when they hit the sea and they look back at the dust of the
chariots on their butt? What did they think? I tell you
what they thought, because not only does it show us in the Exodus,
the prophets talk about it throughout the history of the Old Testament,
and Paul deals with it very clearly in Hebrews. They doubted God. Now what are we going to do? I mean, what is Moses? He's got
no flak jacket. He's got no ammo. He's got no
tanks. He's got no artillery. He's got
no razor wire. He's got nothing. He can't stop a goat, much less
a chariot. There's the ocean and death,
and it's coming in, and a million people go, ah, we're gonna die,
you know. This is over. You should have let us stay.
At least we were gonna live, see our babies die. They're whining, they're moaning.
That's why God killed all the first generations, 40 years in
the wilderness, because they didn't believe the report of
His power. And He showed them that day,
didn't He? Here's Moses, the commander of all God's people, an old murdering
man, who's a melancholy, suffering with depression, wondering, second-guessing
everything he does. And God gave him a stick. I'm with you wherever you go.
Here's your stick. He couldn't speak either. He
had to have Aaron speak for him to the Pharaoh. But what did
God do? He parted the seas. What did
God do? Led them by a pillar of smoke.
Led them by a pillar of fire. What did God do? Fed them every
morning with manna. And yet they're still looking
for that manna. They're still looking for that temporary provision
that they moaned and groaned. That's what our flesh does. It
looks for that temporary provision. You know, I gotta find a way.
That's how canning started. Putting food up in freezers.
Let's try to can this manna. And it never worked. That's why
they wanted to know in John 6 when Jesus fed the multitudes, the
5,000 men plus, and they came back the next day and Jesus says,
you know, what are you doing? Why are you looking for me? You're
not looking for me because of me. You're looking for me because
you're hungry. You want more food for your stomach. You want
your flesh to be fulfilled. We want our flesh to be fulfilled.
We want to sit down knowing, like I do every single night
of my life, every night of my life, knowing that my house is
secure and things are where they need to be, and although there
might be some scatter from here to there, I know where that stuff
is. I know things are taken care
of. I'm content. Doors locked, alarms set, lying
at the front door, Cobra at the back, here we go, let's go to
sleep. That's what we want, we want to secure our salvation
in some means through which we can, even if we say thank you
God, in some means where we can feel confident that we have buttoned
all the latches and pulled down all the sashes and all these
things and that everything is at peace in our heart with what
we have done according to what God has gifted us with. And I'm
not talking about stewardship of life, I'm talking about salvation.
Well, beloved, what does that get us? Nothing. They asked Jesus,
what miracle do you bring? What sign do you bring, rather?
Where is the manna? Because the mission of the mythology
of Israel, that's where a lot of times we know what these people
really thought. A lot of people don't realize,
but even in the Old Testament days, people thought because
brothers were commanded to take the widows of their older brothers,
People thought that the firstborn son of that union would be the
reincarnation of the brother. It's written in the histories.
I mean, the Jews had a lot of weird stuff in antiquity. And
one of those myths was that somehow, by divine process, somebody had
learned to preserve manna and put it in the Ark of the Covenant
with the staff of Aaron that would have a bud on it. And it
was just like an eternal flower and eternal bread. They wanted
Jesus to show that bread. And instead of him saying, well,
here's this bread, he says, here's the bread, I'm the bread. I'm
the bread that came down from heaven. That pointed to me. What
does it mean? In the midst of wilderness, when
you didn't believe in Me, when you moaned and complained and
blamed Me, this is God speaking to His people, and saw that I
brought you out by power, and then promised you what I promised
you because it was not there for you to tangibly measure by
your own sufficiency, you groaned against Me, so I'm going to destroy
you because that is the wages of sin, and what is sin? Not
believing in the grace of God. And that is the sin of the generations
and the exodus. I gave you bread, you would not
starve. I gave you water from rocks. That's what caused Moses'
life, right? I showed you my power, but you
were stiff-necked. You still wanted your own. Bread. Now, here is the Christ. Here
is the God-man eternal, the Creator of the world. And here He's standing
before you. He's proven who He is, that He
is the Creator. He is the God of heaven in the
flesh. And you want Him to show you a magic trick? You want Him
to show you some temporary pasty bread that He made thousands
of years ago that your forefathers ate and still died? You can do
all that you want to do, and you can take the providence of
God in any way you want. And He feeds the wicked, but
beloved. It is not salvation. Only Jesus is the true bread
of life. Only Jesus. And what does the manna in the
wilderness show you? Only God can keep you alive. Only God
can keep you in His presence in Eden. Only God can save you. As we continue to think about
these things, we need to understand that... I think I might have
went to... No, I didn't go there, did I? To Romans chapter 11. We might have just talked about
it. People would come by and say,
oh, you know, in a temporal sense, this is what the flesh does in
a temporal sense. Israelites, those are chosen people. Those
are pictures. Because even there, there was
a remnant, right? God is not a respecter of persons.
He did not create an ethnos that would be special. He created
a people out of every nation, tongue, and tribe. Abraham was
not. He was Chaldean. He lived in
Ur. He worshipped the moon. And for those of you who have
served over there, you've seen the ziggurats, these big staircase pyramids,
so they can get as close as they can to that which is divine,
so they can burn an offering to it and pray to it. Our flesh is always about creating
our own way to whatever God we create. And beloved, the evangelical
world, the Christian world, Christendom, church history is full of false
Christs and false Gospels and false everything. And I think
there are as many in the reformed camps and the sovereign grace
camps as there are in any other camps of any cults known. It's
just another condition, another thing that somebody else is going
to add as a means through which you can know that you have eternal
life by what you are or what you've done rather than what
Christ has accomplished for His people. Well, it can't be that
simple. That is the simple revelation
of God of Himself. That is the grace of God to us.
People say, well, God has rejected His people. In Romans 11, Paul
deals with that. He asked, has God rejected His
people? By no means, for I myself am an Israelite, a descendant
of Abraham in blood, a member of the tribe of Benjamin. Don't
forget this. He told the church of Philippi a little bit more
about that. God has not rejected His people whom He foreknew, loved eternally. That's what
that means. Do you not know what the scripture
says of Elijah? How he appeals to God against
Israel? Lord, they have killed your prophets, they have demolished
your altars, and I alone am left, and they seek my life. You remember? But what is God's reply to Elijah?
I've kept for myself, listen to this, I've kept for myself
7,000 men who have not bowed the knee to Baal. See too at the present time there
is a remnant chosen by Grace. But if it is by grace, it is
no longer on the basis of works. Otherwise, grace would not be
grace. What then? Israel failed to obtain
what it was seeking. The elect obtained it, but the
rest were hardened. Those whom God had foreknew obtained
it. Why? Because God gave it to them.
God snatched them into Himself. God gave them to Christ. But the rest were hardened as
it had been written. God gave them a spirit of stupor. Eyes that
would not see and ears that would not hear down to this very day.
Beloved, if you want to know how this looks, go to Isaiah
6 and then go to John 12. You see this. Jesus says this
is fulfilled today in your hearing. Though they know that I am the
one, the Christ, because I have raised Lazarus and his rotting
corpse from the grave, they refuse. Why? Because God has hardened
their hearts and blinded their eyes and deafened their ears
and dumbed down their minds so that they could not see. But even if he had not, they
would not. See, it's not about how we see
or when we see or if we see or why we see. It's the fact that
God makes us see that shows we're His. Let their table, as David
said, become a snare and a trap, a stumbling block and a retribution
for them. I mean, think about what I just said. How many people
in the world today, even in the context of Understanding sovereignty and
grace. Get offended by that. David prophesied
that by the Lord. People will not like that table.
When people sit at that table, people go, I'm not eating that.
That's not the God I know. That's not the Bible I read.
You know why? Because people read the Scripture in precepts.
Pretexts. Not precepts. They do. Pretext,
it's always about this verse, and that verse, and the other
verse, and all these other different verses. But beloved, I can get
a recipe book, and I can just blindly go through, and with
a yellow marker, turn the pages and just mark, and I guarantee
you that I can get enough ingredients to create something in that highlight. You can do the same thing with
anything. You can do the same thing with any story. You can take Moby Dick, and you
can turn it into an adventure for children. You can pull out
lines from any movie. You can change the narrator on
a trailer, and I've seen people do this on a movie, and take
a horror flick and make it a comedy. You can make anything say what
it needs to say, but the Scripture, if understood and read in its
fullness, book after book after book, over and over and over
again, you will get it. Let the table become a snare
and a trap and a stumbling block and a retribution for them. Let
their eyes be darkened so that they cannot see and bend their
backs forever. So I ask, Paul says, that they
stumble in order that they might fall by no means rather through
their trespass salvation comes to the Gentiles. So as to make
Israel jealous. By grace, by grace we are one
with Christ. By grace, we are redeemed forever. By grace, we have been caused
to see and to hear the call that works through the Word of God
to know the voice of our Shepherd and to know the truth. And beloved,
now we are to come together and to make disciples. Who are we
to make disciples of? Anyone willing to remain with
us. Think about that for a second. All nations. teaching them to
obey everything I've commanded you." And that was given to the
apostles. I even said that last week. But yet the instruction
now is to teach, and the elders are to teach the church to do
the work of the ministry, which includes instruction in the right
manner, in the right relationship. We encourage one another in the
Scripture. We are to remind one another about what we've learned
and what we are continuing to learn. We are to edify one another
with the truth and sometimes admonish one another, which has
a negative connotation, which comes with a warning. You know
what? You better watch out. Don't think that way. Don't act
like that. Because of the Lord, do this, you know. But we're
all in the same bag and we're recipients of grace. We're all
in Christ together and none of us are without sin. None of us
are able to condemn another. And beloved, if someone is willing
to continue to talk with you and to have conversation about
the Scripture, no matter what quirky mess they may have in
their understanding of the Gospel, they may not even be regenerate
yet, but if they want to learn the Scripture, take the time. Because that is the composition
of the church, the wheat and the chaff. And God is in the
business of sorting them out at the day of judgment. Correction
and teaching, patient endurance, even in evil things with evil
people, patient endurance and teaching, with teaching, is God's
remedy for correction to the praise of His glorious grace,
because that's the ultimate end of it all, isn't it? It's why we do
what we do. It's why we learn what we learn.
It's why we are what we are, is to praise God for His grace,
which reveals Himself perfectly to us, to the praise of His glorious
grace. But, beloved, if you're like
me, little things in life could happen, and thoughts could just,
you know, and I don't want to praise anymore. I feel like the
world's coming to an end. And Lord, help me, you know,
the way I used to be in my younger days. These types of things would
just encompass me completely and destroy my very being. But
beloved, God is gracious to us. He's merciful to us. We are able
to stand and endure and know that it's not in our strength.
It's not in our resolve. It's not in our restitution.
It's all in God's mercy and power. and we have been born again.
The Scripture teaches us that the Word of God became flesh
and dwelt among us, and we have seen His glory, glory as the
only Son from the Father, full of grace
and truth. And the Lord teaches us in His
Word that even the boy Jesus grew in understanding and wisdom
and stature. So just be patient. The Lord
will grow you. If the God-man himself had to
learn and grow, he never sinned. He could not sin. But if the
Lord Jesus himself had to learn and grow, then so do we. Let us be patient with one another.
And most of all, let us be patient with the promises of God and
not take things into our own hands to try to perform in a
way that would resolve in our redemption knowing that it is
only by grace and only because of the love of God. Let's pray. We thank you, Father, for the
truth of the cross of Christ. Lord, I pray for so many who
doubt so much because of the things in life, marriage issues
and health issues and money issues and children issues and family
issues, Father. We could have a list of billions
of issues and problems things that just tie us up. And Father,
then we see the world around us, and politics, and disease,
and culture, and medicine, and everything else, and then we
see all the fighting, then we see people hating each other,
and we see bigotry, and racism, and crime, Lord, we just think,
oh, where is the peace when the peace is not of this world, Lord?
Remind us of that over and over again, that Your peace is not
like the world knows, and it comes only from Your mercy and
Your grace. and that we are at one with You
because we are at one with Christ. And His life has been given to
us in our credit. His obedience has been given
to us to our credit. His death has been credited to
our guilt. And Father, His resurrection
had been promised to our hope. So if we can't do anything on
the Lord's day, but learn that over and over again, that we
might encourage ourselves and one another throughout the week
in that, and that, Lord, our love and our good works unto
You would be a fragrant sacrifice of praise to Your grace, to Your
glory, to Your name. And Father, I thank You for saving
us, and I thank You for keeping us, and I thank You for Your
patience for us, Lord, for without which we would all need to shudder
in absolute horror. And I thank You, Lord, that You
did not bring the gospel in fear, but, Lord, You brought the gospel
in peace. And that even though our hearts
fear, and even though our hearts condemn us at times, Lord, You
are greater than our hearts, as John would tell us. For you
are love, and all that you are is love. And your love is manifest
and seen and shown to us through the death of Jesus Christ for
us. And then you continue to work and do works of grace for
you, for your people, for your name, so that we might praise
you for it. Lord, help us to embrace one
another, the hurting, those who seem to have it all together.
Help us to embrace one another first and foremost in prayer,
and Lord, then in service. that we might be instruments
of grace to each other. And as we take the Lord's table
today, as we take the reminder of Jesus Christ and what He's
done in His death, Lord, help us to be very mindful that we
are instruments of grace, that we are recipients of grace. And
Father, that we have received mercy in a time of need. In Christ's
name we pray. Amen. Let's prepare our hearts
for the...