Abounding Grace

Pastor Ed Taylor: Embrace the freedom that is yours today in Christ. Next on Abounding Grace.

If today you want to make a conscious decision to stop lying, God is ready to empower you to speak the truth the rest of your life. He can change you from the inside out, change your whole character. You may have been known as a lying, manipulative person before you got saved; God can change all that if you let Him.

Because you are free. You are free to obey God. You are free to enjoy God. You are free to access His power. You are free to follow Him. You are free to read your Bible. You are free to pray. You are free to worship because, in Christ, He has made the way for you.

Guest (Male): We are delighted and excited to share the next half hour together with you here on Abounding Grace as it has the potential to open your eyes to the freedom that is yours in Christ. Each of us has a choice to make on a daily basis: human effort, flesh, and bondage, or freedom in Christ as we live by grace.

This is illustrated for us in the lives of Abraham, Ishmael, and Isaac. Here is Pastor Ed Taylor in Galatians chapter four showing us grace is the only way to live.

Pastor Ed Taylor: Come back now to Galatians as we close up this chapter. He gives an illustration from the life of Abraham. The Judaizers and the Jews today very much revere and respect Abraham, the father of the faith. So he uses a true episode in the life of Abraham to prove a point, a point that is missed.

Often, that is what false teachers will do. They will even take you to a scripture, but they miss the point. They will take you to a scripture and try to confuse you, but that is not what it says at all, or there is a deeper understanding from the context of that scripture. So what Paul is doing here is he is going to take them back to that time in Abraham and Sarah's life where they were given a promise, a promise of a child.

Notice with me Galatians chapter four, pick up in verse 21 if you are there. "Tell me, you who desire to be under the law, do you not hear the law? For it is written that Abraham had two sons: the one by a bondwoman and the other by a freewoman." Let me define the words for you now. Bondwoman would refer to a woman named Hagar. Hagar, this was Sarah's handmaid. The other is a freewoman; that would be Sarah, his wife.

So now we are looking back to a time: Abraham and his wife and her maidservant, Hagar, Sarah, and Abraham. Verse 23: "But he who was of the bondwoman was born according to the flesh." What is his name? Ishmael. This is a reference to Ishmael. "And he of the freewoman through promise." What is his name? Isaac. You have the characters so far. This is a very important part and time in Abraham's life.

Then Paul says, "You know the story," and they go, "Okay, we have heard that before." Then he says this in verse 24: "Which things are symbolic." So there is something to learn here now with Abraham's life that points toward the grace of Jesus Christ. In the volume of the book, it is written of me. So now there is something in the true story, the real-life story of Abraham and Sarah that is going to point us to Jesus Christ. It involves these two kids, Ishmael and Isaac, and how they were born.

So they are symbolic of what? It says two covenants. The first covenant is the one from Mount Sinai that gives birth to bondage, Hagar. So the first child and Hagar that came through Hagar represent one of the two covenants. Now we know the two covenants: there is the old covenant and the new covenant. So this is the covenant of the law, the sacrificial system. He says when you think of Hagar and Ishmael, I want you to remember it is symbolic of the old covenant.

Verse 25: "For this Hagar is Mount Sinai in Arabia, and corresponds to Jerusalem which now is, and is in bondage with her children." Jerusalem, the physical Jerusalem, the city here, he says, is just like Hagar. They are under bondage right now. They do not believe in Christ. They are living life apart from Christ. They are living in their flesh. They are living in their own human effort.

Verse 26: "But the Jerusalem above," that is the future Revelation 21, the Jerusalem that comes down from above, "is free, which is the mother of us all." Paul takes a very complicated doctrine, a very difficult thing to understand, grace and law, and then he uses this, and you are like, "Wow, thanks. You have made it even harder to understand." But no, it is just a picture. You use the same language I use many other times to try to illustrate for people.

So he goes back to this time in Abraham's life, and it is really to answer the question: do you understand the law? Do you get it? When you go back, do you know what you are doing? You are going back to bondage. You are going to bondage for the first time. You were in bondage in paganism now; religiously, you want to go back to bondage religiously. You do not want to do that.

That is really the answer to the question. You want so badly to follow these false teachers and submit to the law, but do you really understand? Let me give you an understanding, Paul says. I want you to remember Abraham. He had two sons, Ishmael and Isaac. But before he had two sons, God came to him and gave him a promise. He gave him a promise.

He came to Abraham and Sarah when they were 75 years old and said, "I am going to give you a son." They looked at each other and thought, "I do not know about that. I do not think our bodies can do that." And they couldn't. Their bodies were beyond childbearing years. It would be a miracle for them to receive a child naturally through the womb. It would be a miracle, and that is what God was promising.

"I am promising you a child that you could never do on your own. I am giving you a gift that you could never produce on your own, ever." And they received the promise. Ten years pass, and the promise was still yet unfulfilled. And you know what happens when ten years pass waiting. Or maybe not ten years, maybe ten months. Or maybe not ten months, maybe ten weeks or ten days. For some of you, ten minutes will get to you.

And what does waiting do for us? It makes us very impatient. We have to make something happen. God promised. One day maybe they look at each other and say, "God gave us this promise ten years ago," and Sarah becomes impatient, maybe a little frustrated. According to the scriptures, the Bible says she came to her husband and said, "I know how the promise can be fulfilled. I have an idea."

"I have a handmaiden that I can give to you. She is of childbearing years. You can come into her sexually, produce a child in her, and when she gives birth to that boy, that is the promise." And that is exactly what they did. Abraham, being the knucklehead that he was, said yes. He volunteered himself to commit sin with his wife, even though perhaps it was culturally accepted.

It could have been a culturally accepted thing to do to have a handmaiden produce a child for you. But haven't you learned by now, just because the culture approves of something doesn't mean God does? It is an important thing for us to really keep our eyes firmly fixed on the Lord so that we follow Him and not culture. They made a culturally appropriate decision, a sinful decision in the eyes of the Lord, and Ishmael was produced.

And what a problem Ishmael was and has become in the side of the child of promise. Because after Ishmael was born, at the ripe old age of 99, God comes to Abraham again and repeats the promise. "Ishmael is not the answer to my promise, guys. I still have yet to work." And at 100 years old, Isaac was born from Sarah's womb. Isaac is the son of promise.

We see now back in Galatians, we see he is the son of promise. He is also equated in verse 26 with freedom. He is not the son of the flesh, it says in verse 23, or the son of bondage, verse 24. Those are the options before us: freedom or bondage. The options before us are waiting on God for Him to perform His work or for trying to help God out. Have you learned by now, church, God doesn't need your help? He doesn't need my help.

He is God, and we are not. When God makes a promise, we don't need to push it along, we don't need to make it happen. It is best to abide and wait, drawing on His power and His strength in our lives, not to go about the promises of God or to accomplish the will of God with human effort. That phrase, human effort, is very important because we are talking in our application in Galatians about legalism. Grace versus legalism.

The finished work of Jesus Christ to empower you to live a life that pleases Him or for you to take things into your own hands. Often you will hear us refer to it to be between a life of relationship or a life of religion or religious expression. And here is the thing: the reason why religious expression is so attractive is because it reduces down the complexities of relationship to a list so that you choose first to be a moral person instead of a godly person.

Do you know the unexpected things that happen in relationship? You know the type of trust that is necessary. You know the unpredictability of relationships. Well, a list of rules and regulations gets rid of all that. Let me give you an example. You want to be a good Christian; I think that is a great, sincere desire. I want to be a good Christian. But how I go about it is very important.

So that if I measure I want to be a good Christian and I come to it and I go, "Okay, these are the five things I need to do to be a good Christian," and I just list them out. And I usually will list out things, if I am a legalist, I will list out things that are easy to do for me. I'll smile, I'll say nice things, I something that I already have victory over, you know, I won't do this, I won't do that, and you live.

But then you find out that you can't even keep your own list because just like the sacrifices that come, you're still in a human fleshly body and you still sin. And there's still failure in your life constantly, continually, some less, some more, but constantly. So instead of looking to the Lord for your strength and coming to Him in relationship and repenting of your sin, you go to the list, you go to the list.

And here is what happens: when you can't keep the list, it frustrates you. It frustrates you because you're like, "Man, I still can't. What's wrong with me? I'm not a good Christian. I don't know if I'll ever be." And then you start beating yourself up, condemnation and on and on that list goes. And what happens with legalists is that when they can't keep their own list, they start imposing it on others.

And now they become the Pharisaical sense sniffers of the new covenant. Why don't you do this? And why don't you do that? And why can't you do that? When God offers you something far greater than a list, He offers you Himself. Let me give you an example. We have been talking about this for a while, but there's a big difference between having to read your Bible and wanting to read your Bible.

Your motive is very important. So if I come to the Bible, "Okay, I have to do it because I'm going to be a good little Christian. I'm just going to read it so I can tell other people I read the Bible," you're probably not going to get much. But if you wake up in the morning, make your coffee, and say, "Lord, I'm ready to meet You. It is such a blessing to read your Bible and learn about You. It is amazing what You're showing me." It is going to change your whole perspective.

So there you are, you're reading, drinking your coffee, have that motive of love to please the Lord, and you're reading in it, and you come across a verse. You come across a verse that says, "Don't lie." And as you're reading it, the Holy Spirit says, "That's you. You're a liar and you need to stop lying." And you're like, "Whoa, where did that come from?" "Don't lie. I don't want to lie."

But the Lord says you are a liar. If I was to come to you and call you out on that, maybe I have knowledge about your life and I go, "I would come hopefully gentler than that," but it's like, "Hey, bro, you've got to deal with your lying." "I'm not a liar. Who are you, Ed?" All right. Maybe you don't like the word liar, but you sure exaggerate all the time. That is lying.

All those half-truths, what do you think? You don't want to tell people the whole story; that is lying. Oh, and then you have a whole rainbow attached to what you say, so you have white lies, yellow lies, green lies, or truths, half-truths. All these little ways that you've lied. Like, I don't have the power to change you. I don't have the power to speak to you that's deeper than your mind, but God does.

And you don't need a list of rules and regulations because you have the Holy Spirit. So this week it is lying, and you deal with it. "I'm so sorry, Lord. That was a lie. I'm going to go make it right. I'm going to go ask for forgiveness." And then you go through and you respond to the Holy Spirit. So next week it's not lying anymore. You might put that onto your list: don't be a liar, don't be a liar. But God's already given you victory over it.

Next week it's your mouth. Not lying, but how you treat people. Ah, that's not on the list, is it? But the Holy Spirit knows what you need. He knows because you have a relationship with Him. And so you look to Him and you say, "Lord, just help me. Search me and know me. Show me if there's any unclean thing in my life. Reveal to me the way of everlasting."

Not "I will be a good Christian. I will be a good Christian boy, a good Christian girl, and I will experience the rewards that come from being a good Christian. I will be moral." You know, I find people even within the church that their whole goal is to be moral, and they hit the target, but they're not godly. They're not doing it for the Lord; they're doing it for themselves or for society.

You see, you can be moral and never hit the mark of being in relationship with God. You can be a good person. How many of we know we have people in our lives? They are so good. They're good people. They love people, they serve people, they're sacrificial, but they don't know the Lord. They're not doing it as an outflow of the goodness of God. That's the greatest motive, you know.

The greatest motive in doing anything in this world is love. And it is not love for each other, actually. That's not the greatest motive. You loving me and I loving you; that's not the greatest motive. The greatest motive is God's love for us. Right? We love God, why? Because He first loved us. Our response to love is the greatest motive. We love God with all our heart, soul, and mind, and we love our neighbor as ourselves.

And it is the love of God that motivates us to serve. He uses Abraham back in Galatians and says, "Look, you have a choice: human effort, flesh, bondage, or freedom in Christ that comes because God keeps His promises." You can even see it in Abraham's life because it says in verse 27: "For it is written: Rejoice, O barren, you who do not bear! Break forth and shout, you who do not travail! For the desolate has many more children than she who has a husband."

Talking about the present-day Jerusalem as he was writing, all in bondage waiting for Messiah, rejecting Him. Verse 28: "Now we, brethren, as Isaac was, are children of promise." We're children of promise. We are the result, our born-again life is a result of the promise of Jesus Christ coming and dying. We're like Isaac, children of promise.

"But, as he who was born according to the flesh," Ishmael, "then persecuted him who was born according to the Spirit, even so it is now." Two thousand years later, we can say the same thing. Today the conflict between the Arabs and the Jewish people, the Israelis, is ongoing today. And it comes back to this impatient decision of Abraham and Sarah.

So even now, there's a persecution and an anti-Semitic flow in the world today because of this decision, the choice of bondage, taking things into your own hands, the choice of human effort. Verse 30: "Nevertheless, what does scripture say? Cast out the bondwoman and her son, for the son of the bondwoman shall not be heir with the son of the freewoman. So then, brethren, we are not children of the bondwoman but of the free."

All of our life we have learned this reward system and punishment system, but God wants you to know that the relationship He desires with you is one of love and grace and freedom, not to reduce things down trying to do things in your own human effort. Maybe you do have a problem with lying, so what do you do? In your own human effort, you say, "I will never lie again," which is a lie in and of itself.

"I won't do it. I'm going to do my best." And you know, you do your best, but you still fail. You see, when it comes to human effort, you've got to remember this: when we do our best, that's the best we can do. It's like, oh, that's rocket science, Ed. No, no, no. Listen. The best that you can do is the best that you can do. You can't go beyond your own effort.

You can't go beyond your own power. You can't go beyond your own intellect. You can't go beyond your own resources. That's why you feel so frustrated. That's why it's so hard for you, because you're limited. You're limited in your abilities, you're limited in your knowledge, you're limited in where you are and what resources you have available to you. But in Christ, you have unlimited resources.

If today you want to make a conscious decision to stop lying, God is ready to empower you to speak the truth the rest of your life. Change you from the inside out, change your whole character. You may have been known as a lying, manipulative person before you got saved; God can change all that if you let Him. Because you're free. You're free to obey God.

You're free to enjoy God. You're free to access His power. You're free to follow Him. You're free to read your Bible. You're free to pray. You're free to worship because in Christ He has made the way for you. And that's really what Paul's saying. Do you want to go back to bondage? Remember Abraham and the problem he created in his own effort. Is that the kind of life you want to live?

There are still problems today because of that. Do you want to live a life of problems for the rest of your life? Then go back to the law and leave the simplicity of Christ. And that's my word to you. I don't want you to go away from the simplicity of Jesus. I want you to enjoy this new relationship. I want you to enjoy the freedom. I want you to enjoy the freedom of being set free from your past, being set free from addiction and bondage.

Even the thought of, "Well, you know, I've always been this way." But in Christ, you don't have to be. You've always been that way, we all know. You've always been that way, but you don't have to be. God is ready. "Well, then just tell me, tell me Ed, tell me what I need to show me what I need to do." Great: repent. Express godly sorrow toward the sin that you've committed against a holy and a righteous God. Repent. See it for what it is. Allow God to reveal to you not only the pain of sin and the problem of sin, but the provision of power to forsake sin. It's available to all of us if we'll just follow Him by simplicity.

Guest (Male): Grace is the only way to live. A good summary of this fourth chapter of Galatians and the title we've given this message from Pastor Ed Taylor on Abounding Grace. Don't go away; Pastor Ed has a bit more to say. First, I want to tell you how to hear this again. It's easy to do at AboundingGraceRadio.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

Pastor Ed Taylor: Hi, this is Pastor Ed, and I'd like to tell you about my newest book. It's titled Letting Go of Your Past. God has been using this book. It's only been out for a few months, and already so many are being set free and moving forward and gaining new insight on how it is to deal with the resentment in their life or the anger or the unforgiveness or what it is to heal from deep traumatic hurts. This little book is filled with wisdom of the Lord to help you move forward. Letting Go of Your Past is the title, and you can get it right now wherever you get books or at CalvaryStore.com. CalvaryStore.com. If you need any help, you can always call us. The number here is 877-30-GRACE.

Guest (Male): Again, that's Letting Go of Your Past by Pastor Ed. To order it today, call us at 877-30-GRACE. That's 877-30-GRACE. Or go online to CalvaryCO.store. Let's finish up our time now in Second Corinthians.

Pastor Ed Taylor: Let me show you the scripture before we leave. Turn over to Second Corinthians chapter five. I just want to end with this scripture. It's going to be to the left of Galatians. Such a great passage, but Paul just summarizes the beauty of following Him in grace in chapter five, verse 14. Paul writes to the Corinthians, he says, "For the love of Christ constrains us."

Next to that word "constrain," you could write "motivates," "moves us." That's what that word means. The love of Christ constrains us because we judge thus: that if one died for all, then all died; and He died for all, that those who live should no longer live for themselves, but for Him who died for them and rose again. Love will cause you and me not to live for ourselves anymore, but to live for Him, to trust Him, to hear His voice clearly, to respond with a willingness.

I know it's hard. Bible study is not going to solve every problem, but I'll tell you what Bible study does: it's going to get your eyes on the Lord, the word of God in your heart, and that will change you. It'll change you every single time. Faith comes by hearing, and what hearing by the word of God. When God's word gets in you, it works every single time. It works deep as you allow the Holy Spirit to do it among you and within you. Amen?

Guest (Male): Stand strong in grace. That's the encouragement ahead of us next time on Abounding Grace as Pastor Ed enters Galatians chapter five. Abounding Grace is brought to you by Calvary Church Colorado here in Aurora.