Grace Revolutions Aren't New

Allow me to begin by introducing you to somebody. I’m sure you’ve at least heard of him, but it’s important for you to know him for a number of reasons, not the least of which is because I hope you’ll see him as a distant relative of sorts – a kindred spirit. You may end up identifying him as somebody whose life was a template for the direction you’ll want to take in your own life.

I hope you’ll come to feel what he felt about the things he saw and that you see. I hope you’ll react similarly to how he reacted to those things. Many people who know his story would call him a hero. The strange thing about it, though, is that when you end up walking the course he traveled, many of those same people will despise you. The man was, without a doubt, a world-changer. It’s no exaggeration to say that, in many respects, your life today is what it is because of him.

But I get ahead of myself. Let’s start at the beginning, on a day that began like any another ordinary day for him. As things turned out, that day brought change to his life that came as fast as a lightening bolt. Life works that way sometime. We’re walking along, minding our own business, when suddenly God cuts in on us and, in a moment, everything is different. But more about that later. For now, back to his walk down a dirt road on a rainy day.

The lightning cut through the dark sky, like jagged arrows of high-charged anger being hurled at him by God Himself. The menacing clouds hung low over him and there was no place to hide. In fact, there was nothing to do except either submit to the fate of certain death or run. So he ran. He ran fast and he prayed as he ran. "Help me, Saint Anna and I will become a monk!” he cried in desperation. He ran faster and faster, trying to get home before the justice of the Almighty finally balanced the books on his ungodly life by engulfing him in one of the fiery bolts that he was so desperately trying to escape.

Thus began the spiritual journey of Martin Luther, the man who would spend many years of his life struggling to be the kind of priest who would make God proud. Little did he know on that day in the storm that the commitment he made to God would lead him through far greater storms than the one he was praying to escape right then. He only thought he had seen a storm. Those that would later be brought on him by the self-righteous leaders of the religious world in which he lived would make this one look like a stroll in the garden on a sunny day. I told you he is seen as a hero today, but many didn’t see it that way then.

On that note, and before we move on with Luther, I want to ask you to make a mental note to yourself right now. Self-righteous, religious people can be as mean as hell. Please don’t be offended by that statement. I don’t make the statement lightly, nor do I intend to be profane. To some old-fashioned churchgoers it may sound like I’m using bad language here or just being mean, but I’m not. I’m using the H-word in the way it’s used in the Bible, so don’t get skittish. That’s one of the things empty religion does to people – makes them paranoid about things they don’t need to be paranoid about. Political correctness has high-jacked the church world just like it has the rest of western culture.

I’ll go ahead and tell you now: I’m hoping to challenge you to become a revolutionary of grace and no revolution has ever been ushered in through political correctness. So the sooner you get used to plainspoken truth, the easier it will be for you to move forward. Contemporary religion has sanitized a generation of church-going people without sanctifying them. It has caused many to think that blunt truth boldly spoken is less than gracious, but nothing could be further from the truth. If ever there was a time when the church needs plainspoken truth, it’s now. Gracious ministry is grace-filled ministry and grace seeks to save people even when they don’t know that’s what is doing.

The hypersensitive prefer a domesticated god in a domesticated church world where playing nice and feeling good are the most important things. However, there are others who believe that the contemporary church world needs divine intervention. They are the ones who intuitively recognize that, just like the church world in Luther’s day, something has to change.

I hope you fit in the latter category of people and if you do decide to become proactive in moving the grace revolution forward, be prepared because – here it is again: Self righteous, religious people can be as mean as hell.

For those who will accuse me of such, I want to assure you that I’m not going for shock value in making that statement. I’m making a literal assertion, an observation made by many who have been sent and used by God the Father to accomplish His purposes. If you doubt the accuracy of the statement, ask yourself who it was that put the Son of God on the cross two thousand years ago. It was the religious mob that was the in-crowd down at the temple that was responsible for His crucifixion. Mean-spirited forces of hell cheered as mean-spirited religious leaders handed Jesus over to be crucified. The self-righteous handed over the Only-Righteous on the scene that day because He was a threat to the stability of the religious system they had spent years getting just right. They weren’t about to let Him mess it up now with all this talk of a Kingdom whose basic tenets of operation stood in stark contradiction to their own. He had to go – end of discussion.

Luther too would come to experience the wrath of the religious in his own life some years after his initial day in the rain. He indeed was a revolutionary who was used by God to shake up and wake up a slumbering mass of people who had drunk the Kool-Aid of religious legalism being served up in the church world of his day. That didn’t happen right away though. As is the case for many who come to discover God’s grace, not only for salvation, but for Christian living, Luther spent a number of years between his initial surrender to God and the time when he came tor understand what God truly wants from us as Christians, which has nothing to do with works.

Ultimately he came to see that there is only one response mortal man can have to a sovereign God and that is to simply trust in what He has already accomplished, to accept and live our lives in celebration of His finished work. “For what work greater than the work of God can we do?” Luther once asked. He went on, “But here the devil is busy to delude us with false appearances, and lead us away from the work of God to our own works.” Although he championed this message as a revolutionary, he traveled the rocky road of self-loathing for years before the fullness of God’s acceptance became clear to him.

As Luther’s understanding of grace broadened, he became increasingly zealous in his attempt to make that reality known to any and everybody who would listen. To him, the essence of our Christian walk is simply to believe and rest in the fulfilled promises of God concerning what He has done on our behalf in Christ.

In his Babylonian Captivity of the Church, he wrote:

For God does not deal, nor has he ever dealt, with man otherwise than through a Word of promise. We in turn cannot deal with God otherwise than through faith in the Word of his promise. He does not desire works, nor has he need of them; … But God has need of this: that we consider him faithful in his promises [Heb. 10:23], and patiently persist in this belief …

God has done the work and promised us that it’s enough that we simply believe that fact. It took Luther time to see and believe it and to lead others to see and believe it. In that way, his world was like ours.

Many fought Luther and many followed him, but at the end of His day grace had triumphed. If you grew up in a church where you were taught that becoming a Christian means believing that the finished work of Jesus Christ at the cross accomplished everything necessary for you to enjoy salvation and that your works don’t have one single thing to do with it, you can thank Martin Luther for that. The church in his day had partially lost sight of that.

Luther’s original intention wasn’t to establish anything new. His desire was for reformation – a re-forming of the church so that it would again be an expression of what He understood the Bible to say that the church is intended to be. He had no interest in being seen as a rebel against the church. He wanted to be a facilitator of change, but in spite of all he could do to avoid it, he began to be seen, not as a facilitator, but as an instigator who refused to leave well-enough alone. Be advised: that’s a risk you will run if you become of part of the grace revolution that has begun in the church today.

Self-righteous, religious folks can’t stand grace for at least one reason. It takes them completely out of the limelight and gives all the glory to God. Tell the church leaders in Luther’s day that people’s good works didn’t move them one inch toward God and, like Luther, you would have been considered a heretic.

Today this fundamental fact about salvation probably makes sense to most who read this. After all, the Protestant Reformation was five hundred years ago and the issue has long ago been settled. Works have nothing to do with salvation. Every Christian knows that. Though it was a controversial matter back then, that fact is a no-brainer in the church world today.

It’s a slightly different grace related issue that will get you into trouble with many in the church today. It’s not about salvation, but about sanctification – how a person becomes holy and then lives a holy lifestyle. Tell many at church that works don’t define salvation and they’ll say a hearty “Amen,” but tell them that the Christian life isn’t defined by works and you’d better take a step back and prepare yourself for the verbal lashing that is likely to follow.

In many ways, Protestant denominations today have lapsed right back into the same errors that stirred Luther to action in his day. The difference is that the controversy then surrounded what it took to become a Christian while today the issue revolves around what it takes to become a good Christian. It’s the same battle, just a different battleground.

To suggest that Jesus is the answer in both instances may seem obvious, but when you look at the message given in the modern church world, an unbiased observer would hardly come to that conclusion. Ask almost anybody in almost any contemporary congregation what a good Christian is and then listen as they describe all the things that person will be doing. They may have learned that at church but it sure didn’t come from the Bible.

The fact of the matter is this: Christianity isn’t about what we do. Neither entering nor living the Christian life revolves around doing. It has only to do with Jesus Christ and nothing else. I didn’t say we won’t do anything so please don’t read into my words something I haven’t said. Of course Christians do, but we don’t do to be good Christians. We do precisely because we are good Christians. We’re good Christians, not because of anything we may do or not do, but because our good God has put His good Spirit in us where He lives and defines us, giving us our very identity. Your goodness has nothing to do with anything you do. It’s because of what He has done.

Against my better judgment, I’m going throw out a bone here by mentioning works in their proper context. Yes, Christians do good works. There, I’ve said it. I’m sure somebody will read that statement and feel like a smoker who gets his first long draw after not having had a cigarette all day. If that’s you, savor the moment. Yes, we work. It’s inherent to who we are. I hope you feel better now, but I warn you – it’s going to have to last you because most of what I ever say or write isn't primarily about works, but grace.

You realize of course that I’m teasing the legalist here, yet at the same time I’m not kidding. Many need to detoxify from the addiction to works and stop having the need to constantly be reassured about the whole subject.

I can almost hear the voices now: “People may misunderstand what you’re saying and think works don’t matter at all!” That’s a risk anybody takes who teaches the pure grace of God, but it is a risk that must be taken if we’re going to avoid diluting the truth of the gospel. To make grace clear, we just have to run the risk.
The great Bible expositor, Martyn Lloyd Jones wrote:

The true preaching of the gospel of salvation by grace alone always leads to the possibility of this charge being brought against it. There is no better test as to whether a man is really preaching the New Testament gospel of salvation than this, that some people might misunderstand it and misinterpret it to mean that it really amounts to this, that because you are saved by grace alone it does not matter at all what you do; you can go on sinning as much as you like because it will redound all the more to the glory of grace. If my preaching and presentation of the gospel of salvation does not expose it to that misunderstanding, then it is not the gospel.

I hope you’ll begin to find yourself more and more addicted to grace and a biblical understanding of what it means to relax and simply allow Christ to live out His life through your lifestyle. If you get antsy when somebody like me talks about works not being the foundation of Christian living, keep reading. Like Luther’s experience in the storm, maybe you need a spiritual lightning bolt that turns your whole life in a new direction.

Works -- it always has been a hot topic in the church. It was the subject that triggered the revolution that led to reformation in Luther’s day and it’s the subject that the growing grace revolution hinges on today, five centuries later. Despite the fact that the Apostle Paul himself said that works and grace are impossible to mix , those who speak out boldly against works-righteousness as the basis of Christian living had better be prepared for resistance. The religious world hasn’t changed since Paul’s day or, for that matter, even Luther’s day when he addressed the subject as it relates to salvation.

Some have argued that “going too far with grace” can cause people to grow lax about sin in their lives. They imagine the Summer Youth Trip at the Local Community Church turning into a “Girls Gone Wild” video. That kind of assumption is totally ungrounded in reality. It ranks right up there with “There’s a boogey-man under my bed.”

Grace doesn’t cause people to go wild in sin. That’s a ridiculous idea perpetuated by two groups of people: (1) Those who are fearful because they don’t trust the Holy Spirit inside other people to lead them and (2) those who are afraid that they will lose control over other people if they actually begin to believe this grace teaching is true.

You can’t go too far with grace. That’s like saying, “don’t go too far with Jesus.” Paul wrote in Romans 5:17 that it is by the abundance of grace that we learn how to reign in life. The real threat to the church isn’t that we will go too far with grace, but that we won’t go far enough. Paul told Titus that the grace of God teaches us to deny ungodly behavior and empowers us to live like the righteous people we are. Show me somebody who is sinning and calling it grace and I’ll show you somebody who is telling a blatant lie. They’ve embraced disgrace and have given it a slanderous new name.

Do you feel an inner defense mechanism suddenly kick in when somebody like me starts to talk about how works aren’t the basis of the Christian life? If so, I encourage you to ask yourself why. Is it because you’re afraid that grace might cause people to become lazy or even passive? Grace won’t do that. The Apostle Paul commented on his own level of work when he said, “I labored even more than all of them, yet not I, but the grace of God with me” (1 Corinthians 15:10).

Paul was willing to put his works ethic in the Christian life up against anybody. What was it that he said gave him such a strong motivation for works? It was the grace of God at work in him. You don’t have to be afraid that grace will make people lazy. True grace never does that. To the contrary, it motivates us toward authentic righteous works as opposed to mandating artificial religious works that only masquerade as being righteous.

In the contemporary culture of church life, where teaching grace as the norm for Christian living is so conspicuously absent, to point out the need for change can be misunderstood. It could sound to some like grace revolutionaries are against the church of Jesus Christ simply because we call for change in areas where we see unbiblical approaches. Be assured that another thing grace won’t do is turn people against the true church, but not everything you see out there is the true church. Religious, legalistic lunacy inside "the church" is another matter.

Some time ago I wrote an article in my newsletter about the danger of legalism in local churches. I was plainspoken, giving examples of what it looks like when a congregation is in the throes of legalism. Shortly after the article was published I received an email from a man who was outraged.

“How dare you be so critical of me and my church!” he wrote. He proceeded to move on from that point to give a quite articulate and thorough assessment of his opinion of me and of my ministry. I wasn’t surprised. That kind of thing has happened before and will happen again.

When I wrote him back, I reminded him that I had never met him nor had I ever been to his church. The only thing I had done was to describe what legalism looks like in practical terms. He’s the one who connected the dots. I’m not against anybody and I’m certainly not against God’s church.

I don’t want to be known for the things I’m against, but for the things I am for, but . . . A person who loves flowers will hate weeds. A person who loves health will hate disease. A person who loves grace will hate the things that take its place. That’s not unloving. That is love in action.

The very nature of revolution is the uprooting and overthrowing of existing ruling powers in order to establish a new authority. That’s what must happen in the modern church world if we are to continue to make an impact on the world with the gospel. Legalism must be uprooted and supplanted with the message of pure grace.

There has been an undercurrent of change that has been rising to the surface in the hearts and minds of many Christians lately. A generation of believers is emerging who believe that the performance based, let’s-just-rededicate-ourselves-and-try-harder, approach to the Christian life has had its day in the sun and its time has ended. We believe the chance of injecting life into the dead corpse of legalistic religion is a hopeless cause and believe that God’s answer is to restore grace to the center stage of His church.

Research done by The Barna Group indicates that of the 77 million American adults who are churched, born-again Christians, eight out of ten do not feel they have entered into the presence of God, or experienced a connection with Him during worship. Revolutionaries of grace believe that legalism is a leading cause for that and are persuaded that something must be changed. Sensing the undercurrent of that change, we have embraced the growing grace revolution and are trusting in God’s Spirit at work through us and in the modern church world to turn the focus of the church away from the religious dog-and-pony show that is so prevalent today and back to the centrality of Jesus Christ.

We want to reach the whole world with the gospel, but believe that for that to effectively happen we too must fully understand the gospel. If we have any hope of changing the way the world sees Christianity, there has to be a change in the way Christians sees God. We believe that our God is not a tyrannical deity waiting for us to show our appreciation by serving Him as many of us have been taught. He is a God of grace; a God of good will toward man as evidenced by the cross; a God who calls on us to give up the silly notion that we can jump through enough religious hoops to please Him and just accept His acceptance.

The worn out, tired, legalistic approach to the Christian life that many of us have known for most of our lives has been tried in the balance and found wanting. Some of those legalistic habits have become a part of the doctrine of the modern church by simple osmosis. Particular practices have been so embedded in the culture of the church that it has become almost impossible for many to know what is a legitimate part of the church and what is man made tradition that has been added on along the way. When something is done long enough and has been sanctioned by the religious powers-that-be again and again, those things reach a place of privilege where it almost seems blasphemous to question them, but they must be questioned if the grace revolution is to succeed.

Over time it isn’t unusual for sacred cows to disguise themselves as sacred doctrines and to question them risks accusation and attack from those who find great comfort in the familiar and don’t want the predictable world in which they are well vested to be knocked off kilter by the silly nuisance of truth. The truth is that sacred cows aren’t sacred doctrines, but are idols. Grace revolutionaries are those who are willing to pull the mask off these sacred cows, exposing their hideous faces to the light of biblical truth. We don’t do it out of malice, but because we love our God, His Word and His church. They don’t die quietly, but they must die if the grace of God is to have free reign in His church again.

Change is coming. It must and it is. The growing grace revolution will gain momentum as we each come to grip with our own understanding of God’s grace and see it be clarified and fortified by the Spirit of Grace Himself. A Revolution is under way and it is a revolution of love and freedom that flows from the very heart of our God.

God Uses Unlikely People

Many a misguided promise has been made to God during times of crisis. The “If you’ll just let me live . . .” prayer has set more than a few people on a pathway that God never required. Until a person comes to know the heart of God, the default setting is to believe that what He wants most from us is service and sacrifice. Nothing could be further from our Father’s way of grace, but that misguided notion has created needless frustration for many a religious zealot who knew no better.

Twenty two year old Martin Luther’s pledge to become a monk during a lightening storm in 1505 certainly set him on a new course in life. True to his word, later that year he entered the Augustinian monastery at Erfurt and took his monastic vows the next year. He had just received a Master of Arts degree and had been preparing for law school, but now everything had changed so he backed away from his previous plans. After all, he had made a promise to God and, given what had been at stake, that promise couldn’t be forgotten.

Luther was a diligent student and was determined to please God, whatever it took. He spent long hours in prayer, fasted often, gazed on religious relics in hopes of nurturing his spirituality and was obsessed with confessing his sins. In fact, one time his confessor told him to go away and come back when he had something worth confessing.

Ironically though, as time passed he grew more and more frustrated with his own spiritual development. In spite of all his sincere efforts to become more holy, he found himself feeling more and more unholy and absolutely could not shake off the tormenting awareness of his own sinfulness. He tried and tried hard to be the person he thought God wanted him to be. He would later remark, "If anyone could have gained heaven as a monk, then I would indeed have been among them." He said, "I lost touch with Christ the Savior and Comforter, and made of him the jailor and hangman of my poor soul."

This phase in Luther’s life is important to recognize because it is an unavoidable part of the personal development of a grace revolutionary. Revolutionaries are passionate people by nature. That’s true even if what we are revolutionary about is our faith. Have you tried with all your heart to be the person you’ve believed God wants you to be but, like Luther, found yourself feeling more and frustrated instead of more and more free? If so, that’s good. You’re on the way to discovering the meaning of personal brokenness, a necessary step on the way toward the place of being mightily used by God.

As much as we might like to bypass brokenness, it just can’t be done if God is to really use our lives. Personal brokenness is the doorway to public usefulness in God’s kingdom. Jesus said it is only when the kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies that it will bring forth much fruit. In God’s economy of things, life comes out of death, strength comes out of weakness, and daylight breaks out of the darkness. That’s how it works.

The phase in life is one of restlessness. Don’t think that it’s a bad thing if you’ve felt restless because this time is actually a transitional stage. It’s a time when God is preparing you for a greater level of spiritual growth. The starting point isn’t restlessness about the church or other people, but about yourself and your own spiritual journey. Like Luther, many of us have experienced and thought the answer was to pour more effort into our spiritual walk. Ironically, God uses this time to bring us to the place where we realize the answer has nothing to do with our giving it more effort at all. Instead, it’s about discovering what it means to abandon all hope in ourselves and to rely entirely on His effort.

If you have always felt perfectly satisfied with your own spiritual journey; if you’ve never seen in yourself an inconsistency in your walk that nagged you and caused you to feel like you just couldn’t live up to what God expected; if you’ve never tried to boost your religious activity in an attempt to grow spiritually, what you’ll read here probably won’t connect to you. Those who think they have it all figured out and are in perfect step at all times aren’t candidates for grace. That’s not a criticism. That’s just the way it is.

If, on the other hand, you have seen in your own experience a gradual decline of enthusiasm in your Christian life; if you have dedicated and rededicated yourself to God with promises that you were going to do better in living the Christian life; if you have felt that your spiritual walk was a rollercoaster, an endless cycle of up and down ability to feel like you’re successfully living the Christian life and you felt that you had to find a way to consistently live the life you know you’re called to live, you may well be a grace revolutionary in the making. Some struggle a long time after committing themselves to God before they connect to the fact that it takes the same grace that brought them in to lead them on. Until they reach that place, they just keep giving it all they have.

Twelve years passed between the time Martin Luther entered the monastery and when he took the public stand in Wittenberg that would become the defining moment of his legacy. During that time, he tried with all his might to live a life that pleased God and gave him a sense of personal fulfillment, but as time passed he became increasingly unhappy. No matter what he tried, nothing worked. He became more and more miserable as he grappled with the whole concept of the righteousness of God and how a person can have it. He especially hated the passage that talked about living with the righteousness of God in our lives, because no matter how hard he had tried he could not achieve that goal. It became an obsession with him that caused him to feel rage at times, both toward himself and toward God. He found it almost maddening that despite all his efforts to walk a righteous pathway, the only thing he could find was a restless pathway and nothing he did could change that.

Don’t think for a minute that you don’t qualify to be a grace revolutionary because you aren't spiritually strong enough. As strange as it may sound, that is exactly what does qualify you. It is only when we are aware of our own weakness that we will truly trust in Gods strength because it is only then that we fully realize we have no other choice.

So if you’ve felt frustrated about your own life, take heart. God is using that dissatisfaction to move you into the place where He can transform you by His grace. Before we can be used by God to change the world around us He must change us. We have to become fully persuaded of the true nature of grace and personally experience the transformation it brings. We can’t take people to where we haven’t been. We must accept our personal weakness before we will ever learn to cast ourselves in complete abandon upon the empowering grace of God.

I was a believer for twenty-nine years before I began to understand this principle of brokenness. I thought what God wanted was for me to be more dedicated and to try harder. Like Luther and, I suspect like you, I often revved up my own religious rpm’s in an effort to move further down the road toward the sense that I was living the way God wanted me to live but, in spite of all my efforts, frustrations mounted and discouragement came on me often. I lived in what I have called the motivation -- condemnation -- rededication cycle.

People are leaving the traditional church world in droves for this very reason. They’ve been told that their greatest need is to be more committed to God when what they needed to hear is that God is fully committed to them. It is only when we realize this truth that we find the motivation and ability to fully commit ourselves into His hands.

Let me put it another way so that if you haven’t connected with this idea of brokenness yet, it may become clear with this explanation. If you’re waiting to get your act together before you will step up to act as an ambassador of Christ, spreading His grace in this world, you’ll wait forever.

Don’t think for a moment that God uses people who have worked out their spirituality to the place where they’re in a different league than you. The truth is they are more like you than you may want to know, but you need to know it because, by knowing that there are no Super Saints, you may be more likely to believe that God can use you to advance the cause of His grace in this world and, even more difficult than that these days, in His church.

One guy said to me, “If you only knew the things I’ve done, you’d know why God couldn’t use me.” “Really?” I asked. “Are the things you’ve done worse than murder? Adultery? Stealing? Lying? Drunkenness?” Read the list of those mentioned in Hebrews 11, the “faith-chapter” that lists those set forth for us as examples of faith from biblical history. Look at their lives individually. They did everyone of those things and more.

As you consider their sins, remember that the sinful things they did were, for the most part, after they had been called by God and began to follow Him. So don’t try to fall back on the yeah-but-my-sins-were-done-after-I-trusted-Christ excuse. So was theirs.

Check out that list in Hebrews 11. Then go back and look at the things the Old Testament tells us about what they did. After doing that, you may be inclined to ask, “Is this the best God can do if He wants to give us a list of people who had great faith and were mightily used by Him?” Yes, it is. So don’t think God can’t use you.

Don’t believe for one minute that anybody who sets himself up above you today, as if he has some spiritual advantage you don’t have, is telling you the truth either. This whole idea of there being super-saints in the church today who are somehow different from the rest of us is an enemy tactic meant to discourage us from thinking God can use us. When we see them we may feel like we don’t measure up, but just remember looks can be deceiving. In spite of the way some religious leaders present themselves to us, the truth is that people are just people. We all have the same kind of struggles, doubts, temptations and weaknesses. If you doubt that, then ask yourself again why God listed the kind of people He did in Hebrews 11. Maybe there’s a higher quality of saints in the world today? Maybe back then He listed them because there weren’t so many good examples as there are today? Yeah, right. You know that’s not true. People have always been the same and God has never looked for perfect people to use. He only looks for people who will completely trust Him – nothing else. You might not be able to clean up your act the way you’ve wanted to in the past but He isn’t asking you to do that. He’s just asking you to trust Him. You can do that much, can’t you?

There are no second-class citizens in God’s kingdom and you don’t have to think for one moment that you lack anything that would keep you from rising up at this very moment to be used by God. In Jesus Christ, you have been made complete because you have all of Him and in Him resides the fullness of Almighty God Himself.

Living As Yourself

“I’ve never known what I want to do with my own life,” a young mother said to me at a after I had spoken about living our God-given dreams. “I want to fulfill God’s plan for my life, but I can’t figure out what it is. I don’t even know what I want to do,” she continued.

After asking her a few questions, I said to her, “We’ve just met, so I obviously don’t know you. But I’d like to offer one common reason that often applies when people can’t seem to identify the unique plan that God has for them. Is that okay?”

“Sure,” she answered.

I continued: “A very common cause for people not being able to figure out what they want to do with their life is that they’ve never given themselves the freedom to think about what they want because they’ve spent their whole life trying to please other people.”

I paused. The lady starred at me for a moment, then looked at her friend beside her with an expression of disbelief. “He hit that one on the head, didn’t he?” her friend laughed.

It didn’t take a counseling genius to figure out her problem, just forty years of talking with thousands of people like this young woman. A great number of people have never realized God’s wonderful plan for their lives because they’ve never allowed themselves to consider their own desires. Without doing that, they can seldom discern God’s will for themselves.

God gives you the desires of your heart. He places them there, but if you don’t know who you are you may spend your whole life trying to fulfill other people’s plan for your life. Many a frustrated person has struggled with finding fulfillment in life because they’re trying to be something and do something they’ve never been directed by God to do.

The meaning of grace, in part, is “divine enablement.” By His grace, God enables you to be all that He has called you to be and do all that He has created you to do. But remember this: His grace doesn’t empower you to be and do what somebody else has indicated for you to do. You live in union with the Triune God of heaven. His Life dwells in you and sees to flow through you in powerful expressions of creativity expressed through love in this world.

Who He has made you to be is wonderful, so you must resolve to be that person. Any effort to be somebody else is an affront to Him because it suggests that you (or others) better know who you’re supposed to be and what you’re supposed to be doing. Don’t live for other people. It will wear you out.

Instead, live from the union you share with your Father through Christ. Know that you are empowered by His Spirit. Then you will be free to be and do all that you were designed for. The Apostle Paul once said, “I’m not trying to be a people-pleaser! No, I’m trying to please God. If I were still trying to please people, I would not be Christ’s servant” (Galatians 1:10 New Living Translation).

If you want to find fulfillment – if you want to be and do all that you were created to be and do – stop living your life trying to run the course other people set for you. Your desires count because God has placed them there.

Allow Jesus to express boldness through you. Rise up and seize the day, filled with optimistic faith in the Creator who designed your blueprint for living. Let Him live through you and watch your life be transformed!

If You Don’t Forgive Others, God Won’t Forgive You

There are times in each of our lives where we might be holding unforgiveness towards someone else. If you take that statement at face value — “If you don’t forgive others, God won’t forgive you” — it would mean there are unforgiven sins in your life. If there are unforgiven sins in your life, and you were to die without them being forgiven, then I suppose you would be separated from God forever, wouldn’t you? At the very least, we would be in big trouble even in this life if God looks at us and sees unforgiven sins.

Not surprisingly, this teaching creates a lot of anxiety among Christians. Others might preach at us and tell us we ought to forgive. They make it sound so easy. But it’s not easy. All of us have been hurt by others; some of us severely. We do people a disservice by heartlessly pounding on them to forgive those that have injured them, and it can be even more heartless when we use Bible verses to pound them with. How much greater is the damage when our teaching causes people to feel that God rejects them because they have been unable to forgive others for inexcusable actions.

However, we still need to make good sense of the Bible’s teaching on forgiveness, because the difficult verses in question come from Jesus Himself. Jesus says at the end of His model prayer (that we’ve called “The Lord’s Prayer”),

For if you forgive others for their transgressions, your Heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive others, then your Father will not forgive you your transgressions. Matthew 6:14-15

If we read those words alone, then it seems like game, set, and match. How could we come to any other conclusion than to believe that our forgiveness totally depends on our forgiveness of others? However, we must never forget that verses must never be interpreted on their own out of context, but must always be interpreted in light of the whole Word of God.

Jesus did say those words, but let me remind you again of the need to consider when Jesus was speaking, to whom He was speaking, and what he was doing. Those are things you have to remember whenever you interpret the Scriptures. Not everything Jesus said is to be applied to you personally, because everything changed at the cross.

TAKE A FRESH LOOK AT THE SCRIPTURES

When Christ died, the Old Covenant was made obsolete, and the New Covenant was brought into existence. The night before He died, Jesus took cup and passed it, saying,

This cup which is poured out for you is the new covenant in My blood. Luke 22:20

Covenants in the ancient world were almost always inaugurated by the blood sacrifice of an animal. That practice was similar to a contract today being put in force through signing on the dotted line. Jesus was indicating beforehand that His death would bring into reality the long-promised New Covenant. This New Covenant is both different and superior to the Old Covenant, the Law of Moses:

But now He [Christ] has obtained a more excellent ministry, by a much as He is also the mediator of a better covenant which has been enacted on better promises. For if that first covenant had been faultless, there would have been no occasion sought for a second. Hebrews 8:6-7

This means that Jesus’ death not only inaugurated the New Covenant, but it also simultaneously brought the law, the Old Covenant, to an end:

When He said, “A new covenant,” He has made the first obsolete. But whatever is becoming obsolete and growing old is ready to disappear. Hebrews 8:13

I can’t overemphasize the importance of getting this: When Jesus taught, He was speaking according to the law to people living under the law. Whenever you read the words of Jesus recorded in the gospels, you must keep this in mind. When Jesus taught, “You must forgive in order to be forgiven,” He was magnifying the demands of the law in order to provoke people to understand their need for Him as Savior. But when He died, was buried, and rose again, the New Covenant was inaugurated by His death, and things changed.

That’s why you read in later New Testament writings a different order of reasoning. First, the New Testament teaches us that we are forgiven already:

In Him we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of His grace. Ephesians 1:7

When you were dead in your transgressions and the uncircumcision of your flesh, He made you alive together with Him, having forgiven us all our transgressions.Colossians 2:13

Then, on the basis of the forgiveness we have already received, the New Testament urges us to forgive others — but notice the change in order:

Be kind to one other, tender-hearted, forgiving each other, just as God in Christ also has forgiven you.Ephesians 4:32

So, as those who have been chosen of God, holy and beloved, put on a heart of compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience; bearing with one another, and forgiving each other, whoever has a complaint against anyone; just as the Lord forgave you, so also should you. Colossians 3:12-13

Do you see the distinction there? Before the cross, the Bible says you forgive to be forgiven. But after the cross, the Scripture teaches that we forgive because we have been forgiven.

CLARIFY YOUR THINKING

The idea that if you don’t forgive others God won’t forgive you is an Old Covenant teaching, even though we hear it from the lips of Jesus. It was prior to the cross, which is where the law ended. Why did the Lord teach it? Because He often held up the law to raise the awareness of sin in the people’s hearts, so that it would pave the way for them to recognize their need for a Savior. By His death, burial and resurrection, He accomplished the work, and the good news is now preached in His name.

Today, to tell someone that if you don’t forgive others God won’t forgive you is to tell a lie. That’s not applicable in the New Covenant. The truth is, we forgive others because we have been forgiven. As I acknowledged in the beginning of this challenge, forgiveness is often difficult, if not impossible for us on our own. We need supernatural power to find forgiveness in our hearts. The best source of that power is a heart that has been changed by first receiving the amazing grace and forgiveness of Christ.


(This blog is one of the chapters in my new book, 52 Lies Heard In Church Every Sunday (And Why The Truth Is So Much Better) You can order a copy by clicking this link:
http://gracewalkresources.com/item.asp?cID=0&PID=635 )

God Is For You!

God is for me.” Can you make that statement with a deep sense of certainty? He is, you know. When things are going the way you want, God is for you. When life seems to be falling apart, God is for you. When the Philistines chased David down in Gath, he wrote, “This I know, that God is for me” (Psalm 56:9). What a time to make a declaration like that!

Many of us have found ourselves in a place similar to David’s situation at times. Life is closing in . . . the enemy seems to have us cornered and there appears to be no way out. Pleasant circumstances disappear before our eyes and the world turns dark.

At times like that, we may be tempted to cry out, “Why is God against me?” Not David. He assured himself with the truth, “God is for me.” He didn’t say, “This I feel, that God is for me.” There are many times in life that we don’t feel like God is for us. No, he said, “This I know, that God is for me.

Will you affirm this truth in your own life? God really is for you. Nothing can ever change His mind or heart toward you. If you are His child, His lovingkindness toward you will last forever. (Read Psalm 136 sometime!)

Circumstances may be suffocating you at times, but God is for you! Negative feelings may seem to be strangling you, but God is for you! Life may not make sense at a given moment, but God is for you! Trust Him. When you feel like you’re drowning in an ocean of problems, cling to your Heavenly Father. He will prove Himself strong in your life by assuring you of His love.

Your circumstances may or may not turn out like you want, but He will hold you in His loving and sovereign arms and gently whisper His love to you again and again. Sit in quietness for a moment and listen to his loving voice assure you of that fact until, like the Psalmist, you may say, “This is know, God is for me!”

The Grace To Shut Up

“I just say whatever is on my mind,” a person who was expressing an opinion in an animated way recently said to me. I didn’t respond to the comment, but couldn’t help but think about the Bible verse that says, “A fool uttereth his whole mind, but a wise man keepeth it in till afterwards” (Proverbs 29:11, KJV).

When I was young man I felt an internal mandate to not only express my opinion, but also to convince others that mine was the right way to see a matter. I’m not sure if it’s simply a matter of maturing with age or maturing in grace, or maybe a combination of the two, but I don’t feel the need to always make others agree with me anymore. To the contrary, I find myself often saying nothing at times when my thoughts may be in direct contradiction to what somebody may be expressing to me.

The Bible makes it clear that there is a virtue in learning when and how to be quiet. James wrote that we should be quick to hear, but slow to speak. (See James 4:19) Paul wrote to “let your speech be always with grace” (Colossians 4:6). Another time he taught that we should study to be quiet and mind our own business. (See 1 Thessalonians 4:11)

Highly opinionated babblers can be trying at times. I know because I used to be one. Maybe I still am at times, I’m not sure. I do know that I’m a verbal processor who tends to sort through things by talking about them. I recognize that I need grace to enable me to shut-up sometimes.

When I see opinionated, non-stop talkers like the one I mentioned in the first paragraph, I occasionally ask myself, “Do I still act like that at times?” That’s certainly not what I want.

Do you say too much, too often? If so, pray for God’s grace to flow through your actions in such a way as to cause you to know when to say nothing and then enable you to do it. Sometimes grace never looks better than when it enable us to simply shut-up.

Grow Old But Don't Grow Up

Growing older isn’t really a choice we can make, given our options. However, growing older and growing up are two different matters altogether. When we were children or perhaps later, when we acted like irresponsible teens, we were all admonished at times to “grow up!” Those words of advice were probably well intended, but the more I’ve thought about it, I don’t think it’s such a good suggestion.

An argument could be made from Scripture that God’s desire is for us all to remain children at heart. When trying to explain the kingdom of heaven, Jesus once lifted a child onto his lap and said, “If you want to enter the kingdom of heaven, you have to become like this.” (See Matthew 18:1-3) We are to become childlike. That’s what Jesus plainly said.

To remain a child at heart, however, requires constant grace in a society which tries to force us into growing up. G.K. Chesterton once said, "I think God is the only child left in the universe, and all the rest of us have grown old and cynical because of sin..” Has this sinful world stolen away your childlikeness?

The desire of your Father’s heart is to free you from the shackles of an old heart and empower you to be young again. Like a child, your role is to trust Him completely, laugh heartily, live playfully, run intently, dream imaginatively and love unconditionally.

Life in this world is a warm-up for what comes later. One blip on the screen of eternity and our time on this planet is done. Why waste ourselves away with headaches and heartaches over things that won’t even matter to us a hundred years from now?

The call to childlikeness isn’t a lure to childishness. Of course we are to act responsibly, but not become bogged down in the muck of artificial maturity. In the midst of responsible living, the indwelling Christ will equip us to move ahead experiencing life through the heart of a child.

Our Father has everything under control. He has every detail of our lives worked out already. We don’t have to live like we are the captains of our own destiny, because we aren’t. Just relax. Your privilege is to join hands with your Father and enthusiastically run through the fields of grace He has planted for you in this world. He’ll see to it that you reach His intended destination for you.

Grow older if you must, but don’t grow up. Stay a child at heart. One day you’ll see that the things that worry you most now didn’t even matter in the eternal scheme of things. Live with eternity in view. Play – it will do your heart good and your Father will be pleased.

Journey On

For a long time in life I believed that my responsibility was to faithfully live out the reality of the biblical truths I had learned throughout my lifetime. I had a sense of security in knowing that because of a solid background in church and a sound education in college and seminary, I was equipped to live the lifestyle inherent to being a good follower of Jesus Christ.

So that’s what I did. With sincere determination I resolved to live out my faith with integrity and consistency in the best way I could. I believed that the journey in faith consisted of conducting myself in a way that would allow me to hear the words, “Well done, good and faithful servant” when I saw my Savior face to face one day.

In 1990, everything changed for me when I came to see that my journey through life involved much more than simply living in a way that was consistent with what I had understood thus far. Like a Damascus Road lightning bolt, the truth of my identity in Christ and what it means to live outside the domain of the Law hit me and knocked me off the religious horse I had been riding since I was a child. I wrote about that experience in my first book, Grace Walk. I will forever be thankful for what happened to me that year. It literally turned my thoughts and my lifestyle around one-hundred-eighty degrees.

I had friends who thought I’d lost my mind when I began to speak of this newly discovered understanding of the grace of God. Words like “passivity” and “antinomian” and “sinless perfection” were often used against me when they were coupled with charges of having “gone off the deep end” and of “embracing error” and even of having “fallen into heresy.”

While the criticism was unpleasant and the rejection was painful, I couldn’t help myself. The problem with believing that God’s Spirit has caused you to know something is that once you know it you can’t “unknow” it. And to make matters worse, (or better –depending on your perspective) you can’t shut up about it either. I remember a leader in the church where I served then as Senior Pastor saying to me, “We understand how important this grace thing is to you, but can’t you move on to other things in your preaching?”

I tried. I really did, but I just couldn’t. Like Balaam trying to open his mouth to curse Israel only to find a blessing pouring off his lips, I sought to “find balance” in my messages but despite my efforts, what kept pouring out was grace. God’s grace has that effect on a person, you know.

In the years that have followed I have continued to seek out the depths and breadth of my Father’s grace. The Apostle Peter admonished us to “Grow in grace and in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.” There is always more to know when it comes to the grace of God. Show me somebody who has a closed-end understanding of grace and I’ll show you somebody who has turned the grace of God into a new religion.

Like our Father’s nature itself, the bounds of grace are without limit. We all have the opportunity to be growing, to be learning and coming to a deeper understanding of that grace all the days of our lives. In fact, I believe we will still keep plumbing the depths of His grace throughout eternity. After all, His loving grace is “fathomless” and is thus without a bottom. The Apostle Paul used words like “unsearchable” to describe it, meaning you can explore it all you want but you’ll never fully figure grace out because it’s just too big and overwhelming.

The Psalmist once said, “Blessed are those whose strength is in You, who have set their hearts on pilgrimage” (Psalm 84:5). You and I are on a pilgrim walk that involves growing spiritually. That growth means more than that we simply behave better and better as we go forward. It means we know more about our Triune God than we used to know. It means we grow as we go. And to do that, we change. We see things about Him that we haven’t seen before and we embrace those things.

Your Father’s loving grace is infinite. The nature of the flesh is to want to take the truths He has revealed to us and misinterpret them. He reveals Himself to us, not just information. Please consider that statement again, for it has great importance. Your God reveals Himself to you, not just information about Himself.

The approach of the flesh that causes us to misinterpret what we have seen of His Self-Disclosure is the inclination to take what we have seen of His Person and turn it into mere propositional truths that can be categorized and filed away as another part of our belief system. In other words, what He has shown of us Himself becomes a doctrinal viewpoint instead of a Living Reality.

When this happens in the realm of grace, we may find ourselves in a place where we become Grace-Pharisees who think we finally have the official understanding on the subject of grace. We believe we have arrived. Our present understanding becomes the measure of what it right and what is wrong with views that don’t’ perfectly coincide with our own. And in the process, we become legalists all over again. We once again morph into the very thing we thank God that we have been delivered from. We no longer dialogue about grace. Instead, we dictate what grace is and is not to those who differ.

Stagnation is a threat to all living things. A muscle that stops being exercised atrophies and can no longer be used. A stream teeming with life that is dammed up into a small pool can become stagnated to the point that every fish in it suffocates and floats to the top. A mind and heart that comes to believe it is filled with absolute and final knowledge of grace stops being a conduit of Living Water and becomes a religious reservoir that exists to preserve and protect what is already there. The ebb and flow of giving and receiving authentic grace stops and what we have known becomes stale and stagnant to the point that nobody can be refreshed by it anymore. Not even ourselves.

As you move forward in your own grace walk, I encourage you to keep an open heart and mind toward God’s grace. When it comes to understanding it all, we won’t ever cross the finish line. Certainly not in this life.

Don’t be gullible. Test the things you hear by the Scripture and the witness of the Spirit within you. Don’t be gullible, but do be teachable. Know that just because something you see in Scripture doesn’t fit what you already know and believe is no reason to skip right past it as if it weren’t there. Consider that there may be another way to understand some things than the way you do right now that are perfectly consistent with what the Bible says.

Life is a journey. Don’t worry about the enemy causing you to get off track and miss the truth. We have the personal word of Jesus Himself that His Spirit “will guide you into all truth.” Trust Him and do not be afraid. He is indeed “able to keep you from falling.” God’s truth isn’t dependent on the vote of your friends. Trust the Spirit and the Scripture to guide you. You have a mind and He is honored when you use it. There’s nothing spiritual about being a religious lemming that simply follows the crowd we happen to live among at the time. The body of Christ is bigger than the handful we’ve surrounded ourselves with. There is diversity of thought about biblical matters in that body.

Sometimes, to “go on with God” we have to be willing to rise up above our backgrounds, our traditions, our underlying religious viewpoints, the opinions of others and embrace a “where He leads me, I will follow” attitude. Some people will celebrate with you and join you in the journey. Some will criticize you and distance themselves from you. But the One who leads you holds you heart, your head and your whole life in His hands. Trust Him. Follow Him. Don’t follow Religious Pied Pipers but listen to the Inner Voice that directs you and boldly step out to follow Him deeper into The Journey that ultimately leads you home.