The Alternative

Dr. Tony Evans: The more you have of him, the more you experience of grace. Becoming more righteous isn't about the rules; it's about our relationship with Christ. So rather than saying, "I need to change," say, "I need to grow." Because if you grow, you will change.

Guest (Male): This is The Alternative broadcast, featuring the timeless biblical teachings from the archives of Dr. Tony Evans. Many people think that if they behave better on the outside, they'll get better on the inside. But today, Dr. Evans explains that real growth happens from the inside out and only through a gift from God that we can never earn. Let's turn to 2 Peter chapter 1 as he tells us more.

Dr. Tony Evans: This is a story about a man named Jed. Poor mountaineer, barely kept his family fed. But then one day while he was shooting for some food, up from the ground came a bubbling crude. Oil, that is. Black gold, Texas tea. Everyone remembers the Beverly Hillbillies.

But here's the question: exactly when did Jed Clampett become a multimillionaire? Was it when he discovered his oil, or was it when he acquired the property? You see, from the moment Jed Clampett acquired the property, he was a multimillionaire; he just didn't know it. He wasn't aware of what he had. And so he lived out a somewhat difficult and antiquated and sometimes pathetic existence until he happened upon the discovery of what he now possessed.

What made the Beverly Hillbillies so entertaining was watching them try to get used to what it meant to have so much. Mr. Drysdale had to help them to understand what they had inherited. And they had to grow in that understanding because even though they were multimillionaires, in a lot of ways, they were still living like peasants in their mindset, in their communication, and in how they operated.

It is unfortunate today that many Christians don't know what they have. They received it at the point of salvation, but the process of growing and understanding it and living in light of the benefits of it has become difficult. They are misunderstood and unfortunately consumed with miseducation, and therefore living a life of Christian frustration because they do not understand what it means to grow in grace.

Again, 2 Peter 3:18 says, "Grow in grace and in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ." Let's define grace again. Grace is the inexhaustible supply of God's goodness whereby he does for us what we do not deserve, could not earn, and would never be able to repay. You can't buy it, you can't work for it, and you cannot earn it. You've got to get that because what many Christians are doing is trying to earn the unearnable. But that is antithetical to the biblical concept of grace. It cannot be earned because once you try to earn it, you cancel it.

Then how do we grow in something that is unearnable and acquire the benefits of having found it, like Mr. Clampett found the benefits of finding oil on his property? In 2 Peter chapter 1, Peter helps us to take us deeper. He says in verse 2, "Grace and peace be multiplied to you in the knowledge of God and of Jesus our Lord." He says, "I want grace along with peace to be multiplied to you." I don't just want to add some grace; I want to multiply it.

So grace can be extended and it can be multiplied. He says, "I want it to be multiplied to you," and the way it is multiplied is through the knowledge of our God and Lord Jesus Christ. So grace has a dispenser—that is, someone who dispenses grace. And the dispenser of grace is called the Lord Jesus Christ. But here is the problem: many people want Jesus as Savior who do not want Jesus as Lord. And as a result of that, you're closing off the supply line.

Let's take this a little deeper. He says in verse 3, "Seeing that his divine power has granted to us everything in life and godliness through the true knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and excellence." The reason why you want to follow the lordship of Christ in order to experience the grace you already possess is because he has already granted to you, if you are a believer, everything. Somebody say everything. Everything means nothing is left out from his divine power through the true knowledge of him.

The more you have of him, the more you experience of grace. Grace must be understood not first of all as a theory and not first of all as a theology, but as a relationship. It is a theology—we teach about grace—but it's like talking about love. You can get the definition without experiencing the reality. So it is; you can learn about the doctrine of grace without experiencing the grace of the doctrine.

Please notice verse 3: "By his divine power," not your power, his power. By his divine power, everything related to life and godliness—that is all you're supposed to be as a Christian, your life and how to live to please God with your life—everything comes through the true knowledge of him. So God wants to give you what he's willed to you because it's already been willed.

But that's the difference between the Old Testament and the New Testament. In the old covenant under Moses, you had to do it to get it. That's why it was always conditional: "I will bless you if." The new covenant grace flipped it. God says in Ephesians 1, "I have already blessed you with all spiritual blessings in heavenly places." You get it before you do anything. It's a total flip. But if you don't make that flip, you'll try to earn grace. And if you try to earn grace, you'll cut grace off because grace cannot be earned.

Now, everyone in here, in your home, you have electricity. This electricity provides you power for everything that needs electrical power in your house. Everything you need comes from electrical power from whoever your power provider is. Because with your contract comes the power that everything in your house needs to be empowered to perform.

So it is, when you got your contract called grace, which is the new covenant, the power was in the contract. So the power needed to be all that God wants you to become, you already have. So anybody that comes to your door selling you power when you already have a contract for power is a snake oil salesman. Grace is always free. It cannot be earned.

Guest (Male): Dr. Evans will return with more about getting plugged into God's grace when he continues our message in just a moment. First, though, I want to tell you about the follow-up book we've selected for our current series. It's called *Anchored by Grace*. As you make your way through the individual devotions in this book, you'll develop the habit of turning to God for the free gift we don't deserve and can't do without.

You'll learn how to avoid the traps that restrict or cut off the flow of grace in our lives and discover why we're more likely to change as the result of God's work on the inside than our work on the outside. We want you to have this devotional book as our gift, along with a copy of Tony's current 12-message series, *The Magnificent Grace of God*.

Just visit tonyevans.org, make a contribution, and we'll say thanks by sending both of these resources your way. Make your request today before this limited-time offer runs out. Visit tonyevans.org or call 1-800-800-3222 and let one of our resource team members help you. That's 1-800-800-3222. We'll get back to the second part of our lesson right after this.

Dr. Tony Evans: I want to invite you to join me for the trip of a lifetime.

Guest (Female): Tony Evans invites you to journey with him through Israel this October. We're going to gather together with many of our friends to survey the sites of the Holy Land. You'll visit the site of the Sermon on the Mount, tour the old city including the Temple Mount, the Western Wall, and the Garden of Gethsemane.

You'll overlook Nazareth, stand on the Mount of Olives, and walk the road where Jesus made his triumphal entry. Along the way, Tony will share messages that'll give you new insights into familiar Bible stories.

Dr. Tony Evans: Not only will we have a great time in his word together, we'll have a great time being together with so many who love the Lord and who love his word.

Guest (Female): There's a lot more in the itinerary. Visit tonyevans.org today to get the details and register before space runs out. Don't miss this chance to add a whole new dimension to your faith. Visit tonyevans.org today.

Dr. Tony Evans: Looking forward to meeting you for a glorious time on our journey to Israel.

Guest (Male): Well, Dr. Evans is back now with more about that grace power God generates inside us. Let's listen.

Dr. Tony Evans: Grace is always free. It cannot be earned. You say, "Well, why don't I experience it yet?" Well, you have to grow in grace to experience what you already have. So how does it work? Verse 4: "For by these he has granted to us his precious and magnificent promises so that by them," what he's promised to do, "you may become partakers"—the Greek word partakers means a sharer in—"of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world by lust."

Now, stay with me on this, because he's going to tell you how to access the grace you already have and stop looking for false grace. By these promises, all that God says he will do, you have become partakers of the divine nature. When you accepted Christ, if you've accepted Jesus Christ as your personal sin bearer, you were born again.

The reason why the Bible uses "born again" is because it takes a physical reality to teach a spiritual truth. So we understand physical birth. The sperm comes and it enters the egg, conception occurs, and life is inaugurated. As the fertilized egg settles upon the uterus wall, a feeding system begins by connection. The umbilical cord from the mother is attached to the fertilized egg, providing a feeding tube.

The nutrients from the mother are sent down the feeding tube, penetrating the fertilized egg that feeds on it. You cut that tube, that seed's in trouble because that seed is not banking on a system; it's banking on a living system. And over time, within that nine-month period in the environment of the womb, legs begin to extend, arms, fingers, toes, nose, eyes, ears, gender, because growth is occurring by relationship due to the sharing of life.

He says you are a partaker of the divine nature. That is a sharing of life. As the fertilized egg piggybacks on the adulthood of mother, borrowing from mother the nutrients for it to become a fully grown child, so you and I are to be partakers, that is, a sharer of the divine nature so that God's feeding tube to us flows down with the nutrients from heaven so that there is growth of the spiritual seed.

Listen, when you were converted, you got saved in seed form. You weren't saved as an adult; you were saved as a seed. 1 Peter 1 calls it the imperishable seed. You didn't have spiritual arms, spiritual legs, spiritual eyes, or spiritual ears; all you had was life. But for that life to express itself, it needs to feed on something. And it needs to feed on something that's alive. And it needs to feed on something that is not only alive but is providing you the nutrients so that growth will occur.

See, many people are trying to change their lives without the connection. And because the connection is not right, all the effort to grow seems to be futile and no change is taking place and no victory is seen. This is not because they don't want to grow, but because the connection is not there, so the divine nature is not feeding it. And he tells you why the connection is not there.

Look at what verse 4 says. He says that you may be partakers, sharers of the divine nature—that is God that has been embedded in your soul, the seed—"having escaped the corruption that is in the world by lust." There it is. Worldliness will keep you from growing. If the seed is going to grow, then you must escape worldliness.

What is worldliness? Worldliness is that system headed by Satan that leaves God out. Until you choose Jesus as Lord, the nutrients won't flow and the growth will not occur, no matter how much church you go to. In every caterpillar is the nature of a butterfly. The caterpillar is slow, slimy, and ugly, but it's got something beautiful in there. It's got the nature of a butterfly.

And as that butterfly grows inside the caterpillar and then a chrysalis takes place and it breaks out, you never thought something so ugly could contain something so beautiful. I don't care how ugly you are, you contain the divine nature if you've accepted Jesus Christ. And if you've accepted Jesus Christ, it's the nature that must grow. We spend all of our time trying to be better-looking caterpillars. God is not trying to make us better-looking caterpillars. He's after transformation, not flesh manipulation.

Now the Bible says, "Desire the sincere milk of the word that you may grow," right? Desire the sincere milk of the word, 1 Peter 2:2. Now how does the baby desire milk? Because you've got to think about this thing because it's easy to say, "Okay, desire to learn the Bible." But no, it's deeper than that. Before we had all this sophisticated baby stuff back in biblical days, to desire milk meant to latch onto a life.

It meant to suck from a life. So when he says to desire the sincere milk of the word, he's not just telling you to have Bible study; he's saying lock onto the life of Jesus Christ through the Bible. And as you suck the life through the scripture of the person, the nutrients get down into the spirit that's located in the soul and growth occurs.

So rather than saying, "I need to change," say, "I need to grow." Because if you grow, you will change. And he says you grow by grace. Okay, so here it is. Now. Somebody say "now." Verse 5 says "now." In light of what I just explained, that this all happens due to divine power and divine nature what grace provides, now for this very reason also apply all diligence in your faith.

Okay, here it is. Because the natural question is: do you mean I do nothing? Do I just sit down and do nothing? This just happens? No, he says give diligence to add to your faith. So watch this now. You cannot earn grace. Grace is always free. But what you can do is access it. And there's only one thing that accesses grace: faith. Romans 5:1-2 says that faith accesses grace. So the way you suck up the grace that has been provided is through faith.

So it's a point of access, not a point of earning it, because you can't earn grace. But when you access it through faith, the more you exercise faith, the more you access grace. You move in light of what God says because you believe God is telling the truth. When God sees you move under the lordship of Christ in relationship to him—because you believe him, not the world, not your mama, not your daddy, not your cousins, not the media, but you believe him—and you begin to walk in faith, you now have activated faith entrance into grace.

And when faith accesses grace, you grow in grace because you've added to your faith action. So action is the outgrowth of faith, and faith accesses grace so that you grow in grace and in the knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ. Faith is the admission slip to grace, and what you do based on submission to the lordship of Christ shows you really have faith. So when you show you really have faith by what you do, that shows you believe God, that accesses grace so that grace can now flow to the new nature and you wind up changing from the inside out.

A lot of you have in your refrigerators orange juice concentrate, grapefruit juice concentrate, or apple juice concentrate. You have these different concentrated drinks. You take it out. You pour it into a container of some sort that you want to be full. You want to be full of grape juice. But what you poured out is only this much. But what you want is this much. So you've got to grow this much to become that much.

The way you get this much to become that much is you add water. When you add water to orange juice concentrate, it doesn't create something new. It merely expands what you already had when you opened up the can of fruit juice concentrate. You didn't bring something to change the nature of anything. All you did was bring something to cooperate with the nature of what's already there.

God says everything you need you got at salvation, but you got salvation concentrate. Now if you will add the faith of following me to that which is concentrated, I will fill up the pitcher of your life with my nature, with my glory, and with my transforming power. So grow in grace and in the knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ and watch him work.

Guest (Male): Dr. Tony Evans, talking today about how to put the concentrated power of God's grace to work in your life. This is part of his series on *The Magnificent Grace of God*. The full-length versions of these messages include material we won't have enough time to bring you on the air, and so we'd like to send you the complete 12-lesson set as our gift when you make a donation to help support the Alternative ministry.

Along with it, you get the companion devotional book I told you about earlier, *Anchored by Grace*. This special double offer is only available for a limited time, so be sure to make the arrangements before time runs out. You can do that today when you visit us at tonyevans.org or reach out to our resource center by calling 1-800-800-3222. Team members are on hand 24/7. That's 1-800-800-3222.

Now, before we close, please know how thankful we are for your continued prayers and partnership with the Urban Alternative. By God's grace and through faithful friends like you, Dr. Evans' ministry has recently reached a milestone of more than 1 million subscribers on YouTube, and we're honored to help take the gospel to the world together.

Well, as we've been learning, the key to increasing the distance between you and your sins is reducing the distance between you and your Lord. Dr. Evans will tell you more about that tomorrow as he talks about why grace is more than a match for any habit or hang-up we've got. I hope you'll join us for that.