Monthly Archives: August 2011
Grace and Holiness
Do grace and holiness really go together? I mean, if God is constantly having to give you grace, how can you be holy, if you need grace then you must have done something wrong, right? If you were holy then you wouldn’t need grace……would you? These terms seem like a contradiction because our understanding of them is usually based on a religious mindset.
In the English language we use the word “grace” in a very different manner than New Testament grace, which is the Greek word “charis”. When we hear the word we think of a grace period where our negligence is overlooked for a time and we are not charged the penalty of our transgression. In religious terms grace has come to mean being able to transgress the laws of God without penalty, that because we are under grace we will not suffer the consequences of our actions. God just overlooks our sin and we can go on our merry way. This understanding of grace has led to doctrines that frown upon grace or at least limit it because it is seen as a license to sin.
We are not in a grace period, where God overlooks our sin until we can get it all together, but we are in a dispensation of grace. Dispensation is defined as; an exemption from a set of rules or usual requirements. What does that mean? It means, you can’t break the law if you are not under it!!! There is a big difference in being given amnesty and being exempt from the law altogether. Under amnesty you are guilty but pardoned, being exempt means there was never a transgression in the first place!
Romans 6:14 For sin shall not have dominion over you, for you are not under law but under grace.
“Dominion over” comes from a Greek word that means lordship. In other words, do you want to be under the lordship of sin because you choose to be under the law or do you want to be under the lordship of Jesus Christ and under grace? Which one makes a better master, sin or Jesus? One or the other is going to be calling the shots and it is up to each one of us to make a choice.
There are some very religious people who have chosen to place themselves under the law, thinking they are submitting to Jesus when in reality they are submitting to the dominion of sin. The law has no power to change you, it only identifies wrong behavior and motivates by fear of punishment. If you are guilty of breaking the law you are condemned to receive the penalty for breaking it. In contrast, grace is by definition, the divine influence on the heart and it’s reflection in one’s life. Grace leads you into right behavior through a motivation of love! There is no condemnation under grace.
You see, the law has been fulfilled by Jesus Christ and his sacrificial death and replaced with the grace of God, which is divine enablement to fulfill the requirements of God without the threat of punishment as the motivating factor. In 2 Corinthians 3 Paul calls the law, and specifically the ten commandments, the ministry of death and the ministry of condemnation. If you are in Christ you are not under the law but under grace. “There is therefore now no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus!” (Romans 8:1)
Now we are beginning to see how you can be under grace and be holy at the same time.
Matthew 5:20
20 For I say to you, that unless your righteousness exceeds the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, you will by no means enter the kingdom of heaven.
Does that sound like a grace statement? I mean, the scribes were charged with making copies of the law by hand, writing each letter one at a time. They knew every letter and punctuation mark in the first five books of the bible by heart! The Pharisees were the lawyers of their day, they had studied the law and every commentary on the law until they could quote it forwards and backwards, they knew the law! To them, righteousness meant keeping the law without fail. They even had laws on how to keep the laws, their whole life revolved around the Law of Moses.
Now Jesus comes along and makes a statement like verse 20. It sounds like he is saying that to get into heaven we have to do a better job at keeping the law than the scribes and Pharisees. Impossible! How could Jesus expect us to do that? The issue here is that Jesus is talking about a different kind of righteousness, one that exceeds theirs. Exceeds means to go far over and above, super abundantly. The kind of righteousness he is talking about is so far above what comes from keeping a bunch of rules that you really can’t even compare the two, you have to contrast them like light and dark. If you get them confused you end up under the dominion of sin.
So what is Jesus saying here and how does he expect us to achieve that kind of righteousness? The answer is, he doesn’t! The kind of righteousness that he is talking about, the kind that super abundantly exceeds the kind that comes from the law is the righteousness of God! Jesus said, “Seek first the kingdom of God and HIS righteousness, and all these things shall be added to you.” Nobody achieves that kind of righteousness, they receive it by faith.
Paul, in contrasting his pedigree as a Pharisee and his position of being in Christ makes this statement in Philippians 3:7-9
7 But what things were gain to me, these I have counted loss for Christ. 8 Yet indeed I also count all things loss for the excellence of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord, for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and count them as rubbish, that I may gain Christ 9 and be found in Him, not having my own righteousness, which is from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness which is from God by faith.
Last week I was talking about trusting in grace, this is one element of that, we cannot trust in our own ability to acquire righteousness. And why would we want to when we can receive God’s by faith? In Romans 10:3 Paul says that the because the Pharisees were ignorant of God’s righteousness and tried to achieve their own, they have actually rejected the righteousness of God. Why would anybody refuse what God is willing to give them in favor of something they can’t attain?
In 1Peter 1:15, immediately after saying that we should put all our eggs in the basket of grace, Peter tells us to be holy, to not be conformed to our our former pursuits. He says that we should be holy because God is holy. Holiness is an outflow of righteousness, it means to be blameless and pure. We have already seen that when we are under grace that we are blameless concerning the law because we are not under it’s requirements. Therefore, our holiness is also something that is given by God and received by faith. We are His holy people because Jesus paid the price for our holiness and our conduct should reflect the righteousness and holiness that God has imputed to us through faith.
If sin is a major issue in your life, maybe you are under the dominion of it instead of being under the dominion of grace. You will gravitate towards the thing you focus on the most. If that “thing” is trying to keep a set of rules you will invariably break them! In 1 Corinthians 15:56 Paul says that the strength of sin is the law! It is a divine paradox that sin would be strengthened by the very thing that says don’t do it. On the other hand, if you focus on the goodness and grace of God then you will automatically begin to operate out of His goodness and even the need for the law becomes obsolete.
In Christ and under grace you are holy, blameless and above reproach in the sight of God. Grace and holiness go together like a hand in a glove. Holiness should be the outflow of the grace that is upon your life!
If you think that because you are under grace that you can sin and get away with it, that grace is a license to sin, you are not under grace but under deception! Satan has fooled you into thinking that God doesn’t care about your behavior because He loves you so much. Nothing could be further from the truth, He cares so much that He sent Jesus to fulfill the law on our behalf and then filled us with His grace so that we are no longer under the dominion of sin. We are now free and empowered to live the life that God has prepared for us!
Blessings,
Jeff
Trust in Grace!
What are your expectations for your life? Where do they come from and how do you expect to accomplish them? God has a plan and He has provided a means to help you achieve the goals He has placed within you.
1 Peter 1:13 Therefore gird up the loins of your mind, be sober, and rest your hope fully upon the grace that is to be brought to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ;
I recommend that you read the previous 12 verses but up to this point Peter has been talking about our salvation through Jesus Christ and how the prophets had been fascinated by what God was going to do and tried to figure it all out. It says they prophesied about the grace that would come to us. Peter even says “things the angels desired to look into”. All of God’s creation had been intrigued by how God was going to pull this off! How was he going to bring salvation to a people who can’t get anything right? We’ve screwed up everything God ever started! But he had something up his sleeve, he said “I’m going to do it with grace! I’m going to do it for them so that the only way they can screw it up is if they try to do it themselves!” God probably doesn’t say “screw up” but you understand what I mean.
Now I want to break verse 13 down for you and take a look at some of the word meanings from the original Greek language.
Loins, the waist area, it speaks of what we reproduce of ourselves. The mind has to do with what we think about and how we go about arriving at decisions. So to gird up the loins of your mind means that we have to be very careful and protect our thought processes. We need to have a mindset that is anchored in the truth of the word. Otherwise, we will be producing or reproducing the lies of the enemy. The focus of our thought life determines what type of seed we are planting. Abraham produced Ishmael because he allowed his mind to be taken off the promise of God and attempted to make it happen by listening to his wife’s reasoning. We have to be very intentional about what we allow to occupy out thoughts!
That includes putting our complete trust in the grace that God has extended to us by revealing Jesus Christ to us through the Holy Spirit! Trusting in anything else other than the grace of God produces religion and the letter of the law which produces death!
Be sober! This is not about getting the “warm fuzzies” or “tingly all over”, it is about a serious, intentional thought process that will produce the life of God in us! You can run all over the country to get that next spiritual fix from wherever God is moving or you can have him move in your own life. There is nothing wrong with going where the Holy Spirit is moving but some people chase the experience instead of pursuing His presence.
“Rest your hope fully upon the grace” let’s break this phrase down from the Greek, the word rest is not there, I guess they pull that from what is implied in the word “upon” but it has more to do with placing than resting. Hope means expectation, confidence, trust. Then the word fully means completely, without wavering to the end. Now, the word upon. This is an interesting little word, it literally means to superimpose, to place one thing on top of another so that both are still evident!
If you superimpose a photograph you place one image on top of another so that it appears to be one image. In the days of Jesus it would have been more in the form of an image on a coin. They would take a coin and place a die with an image on top of the coin and when it was struck the image would appear, superimposed, on the coin.
Finally the word grace, in the Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance and Dictionary you will find this definition for the word charis, which is the Greek word for grace- the divine influence on the heart and it’s reflection in the life! I thought it was unmerited favor, absolutely! I thought it was a gift, yes! In fact the word charisma and charismatic come from this word for grace but more than anything it is God moving upon the heart of man to see him line up with the plans and purposes that God has in store for him!
Our expectation of salvation should be superimposed on top of this grace so that our expectations and God’s grace look like the same thing! And we need to maintain that image completely without wavering to the end. How you finish is much more important than how you start. Don’t allow the enemy to get you sidetracked by past mistakes.
If your hope of salvation and the grace of God don’t look like the same thing, then you are trusting in yourself and not God! As much as we Christians claim that we stand on grace, we still, deep in our hearts, think that we have to do something for our salvation. And we induce that in each other because we don’t want anyone to be apathetic, we place guilt on people to get them involved or to do the right thing when all that is needed is a better understanding of the grace that is being delivered to us as Christ is revealed through the Holy Spirit.
I will probably state this every time I talk about the grace of God but grace is an empowering, enabling force that God uses to transform and equip his people. None of us deserve it but it is offered to all. Paul said in 1 Corinthians 15:10 “But by the grace of God I am what I am, and His grace toward me was not in vain; but I labored more abundantly than they all, yet not I, but the grace of God which was with me.” He understood that it was grace that motivated him and enabled him to do what God had called him to do. He knew that he wasn’t capable of what God asked but he superimposed his trust over the grace of God to the point that it appeared that Paul was doing it when it was God all along!
I caught the end of a live message by John Bevere, he was talking about how the church is turning to the world for ideas to draw people in when we should be turning to the grace of God because it empowers us to be better equipped than anyone else that doesn’t have a relationship with Jesus. They should be copying us, not the other way around. I wanted to jump up and cheer!
John said that English and writing were his WORST subjects in school, his teachers only passed him to move him along to the next person. When God told him to write a book he said, “you have the wrong guy, I can’t write anything.” but he submitted and allowed the grace of God to work through him and once he got started, he said he couldn’t keep up with what God was showing him. Now he has written 14 books that are read and translated all over the world.
We, as Christians, need to come to the understanding that it is the grace of God that enables us to carry out the plans that God has for us and that those plans are probably above our own ability! Only by superimposing our expectations over what God is doing in our hearts and doing it His way all the way through can we accomplish the plans that He has for us. If we mess up there is grace. If we go astray, there is grace but it is not there to coddle us, rather to empower us to rise above our weaknesses.
Blessings,
Jeff
Who am I? Part 2
I’m going to make another run at this. Last time I didn’t get into scripture much but I felt those things needed to be said and it is very pertinent to the topic of identity. All of us spend a good portion of our adolescent and adult lives trying to figure out who we really are and listening and comparing ourselves to all the wrong people. It is a search that some, if not most people never accomplish. I contend that almost all of us live far below our God given abilities and the intended purposes that we were created to fulfill. Every single person on this earth is here because God created them and placed them here to for a purpose. You are the answer to someone else’s prayer, You have something they need but if you never understand who God has made you to be, you and others will miss out on a great blessing.
Since God is the one who created us, who better to seek out our identity from than the One who designed us. We are all born into a fallen state and not what God intended for us from the beginning, so we are in need of a transformation. While fallen man is capable of tremendous things because of the giftings and talents that God placed there, he is not capable of realizing his true identity and potential because that is only found through a relationship with Jesus Christ.
2 Cor. 5:17 says that we are a new creation in Christ, the old has passed away and ALL things are new, this is the “born again” experience that Christians talk about when people get saved. We are beings that have a spirit, soul and body, the spirit is the part of us that is in need of being re-created, it is the part of us that communicates with God. The soul and body can never come into line with God’s purposes until the spirit man is renewed. Once this transformation has take place, the possibility is then open to learn from God exactly who He made you to be.
Colossians 3:1-4
1 If then you were raised with Christ, seek those things which are above, where Christ is, sitting at the right hand of God. 2 Set your mind on things above, not on things on the earth. 3 For you died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. 4 When Christ who is our life appears, then you also will appear with Him in glory.
This is a contrast Paul has been developing in ch 2, the earthly wisdom influenced by the demonic and man’s philosophy, i.e. religion, versus true wisdom which comes from above. Satan doesn’t mind you getting religion because there is no real power in religion. If he can tangle up your thoughts with performance for approval and acceptance then he can keep you distracted from where the real power is located—-in an understanding of who you are in and through Jesus Christ! This is why Paul says we should set our minds, our thoughts, on things above, not about how great heaven is but concentrate on seeing things through a “Christ” mindset because he sees us very differently than we see ourselves. He sees us according to our new nature and the way He created us for the kingdom of God. We need to ask God to help us see ourselves and others the same way He sees us.
Having our minds set on things above is not pining away for the sweet by-and-by but but having a kingdom mindset, a God perspective, where we see people and circumstances the way He does. This is where faith and a knowledge of God’s word comes in because with our natural eye and understanding there are times when it looks hopeless. The wisdom of man will tell you to trust what you can see but the wisdom of God will tell you to trust what God has already said.
You have to understand that the old you is dead and the new you is hidden together with Christ in God. You don’t even know who you are unless you understand who God has made you to be in Christ! Your true life, your true identity is only found through Jesus. The world has lied to you about who you are but when you set your thoughts on the realities of God’s truth you find out who He says you are. You need to behold yourself in the mirror of God’s word.
James 1:22-25
22 But be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves. 23 For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man observing his natural face in a mirror; 24 for he observes himself, goes away, and immediately forgets what kind of man he was. 25 But he who looks into the perfect law of liberty and continues in it, and is not a forgetful hearer but a doer of the work, this one will be blessed in what he does.
The perfect law of liberty is not the written law of rules and regulations, it doesn’t reveal all your ugliness and flaws but it is a reflection of Jesus Christ himself and when we continue to look into it and imitate what we see there, we are changed into the image we are beholding, we are transformed from glory to glory because what we see is also a reflection of who God created us to be. It is our life that is hidden in Christ and when that life in Christ is manifested, our true nature, our true identity, will be manifested together with him in the glory that accompanies the Son of God.
Like everything else that is beneficial and productive, we have to be intentional about the way we see things. It is so easy to revert back to a natural perspective and begin to view ourselves and our circumstances according to what others say or think instead of a kingdom mindset. That’s the person who forgets what kind of man he is, the reality is there but when unobserved it fades into all the other voices shouting for our attention and becomes ineffective in changing our life or anyone else’s.
Please be intentional about beholding yourself in the truth of who God says you are and let the reflection on Christ transform you from glory to glory.
Blessings,
Jeff Martin
stronggrace.com 