Abounding Grace

Pastor Ed Taylor: Maybe as you reflect on your life, you feel as though nobody cares. Pastor Ed says, "God sure cares about you." I don't want you to miss in chapter three now, looking back at Peter and John, that what began as a possible interruption was yielded to the Holy Spirit as a divine appointment.

That divine appointment, as he seized the opportunity, led to an open door to share the gospel. A guy got healed that was lame his entire life. He's jumping and leaping and clinging to them, and a whole group of people come because they know this guy. They walked by him all the time, too. God has everybody's attention. Why? Because he cares about the lame man, but he also cares about everyone else. He cares for everyone on the earth today. He cares for you.

Guest (Male): So you preach a sermon that's well-received and people are lined up to tell you how great it was, or you're involved in a ministry at church that's flourishing. Do you take credit for what's happened or do you give all the glory to God?

When we've been greatly used by God, we want to be careful to give all the glory to the Lord, just as Peter and John did in Acts 3. Today on Abounding Grace, we'll see that right after a mighty miracle, there were people wanting to give the glory to the apostles. How did they handle this, and how should we handle that sort of thing? Let's turn to Pastor Ed Taylor and find out.

Pastor Ed Taylor: You want to be careful whether you're a Sunday school teacher, a small group leader, whether you're a worship leader, you have a little prayer meeting, or you’ve got a Bible study in your house. Let me tell you something: the first way out of ministry is to take the glory to yourself. That's the first step. It could be the only step that will take you out of ministry completely, because God won't share His glory with anyone.

We're just instruments. We don't want to dwell on it. "Look at us, we're the healers." People will rent out the Pepsi Center and invite everybody in town. "Come on out to heal, we'll heal you." You heal nobody. It's only God that heals, and He does that sovereignly.

He doesn't do what you might see or hear today where charlatans come around and draw attention to themselves. Even during these last couple years, there's this big emphasis on prophets and prophetesses, and you can follow them. Don't you be following prophetesses or prophets. You follow the Lord. You follow the Lord and you test all things, and you hold fast to what is good.

You don't follow some pastor, some pastor and his wife. You've got to learn to follow the Lord. Anything a pastor says, anyone that teaches, anything that's taught, you test it and you hold fast to what is good because Jesus Himself is the embodiment of sound doctrine. He is good.

You don't want to follow man, and you also don't want people to follow you. Peter takes the way of escape. Do you know anytime there's a temptation in your life, according to 1 Corinthians 10:13, there's always a way of escape? You are never stuck with temptation. God will always make a way for you to escape it.

You can always say no. You can always side-step in the power of the Spirit. You're not overwhelmed to the point where, "I just can't get out of this." You can get out of it right now. There is a way of escape available to you right now. You do not have to follow through with the sin you've planned. You don't have to sign those documents. You don't have to go through with whatever you've plotted and planned.

I think of where we're going to get later on in the book of Acts. We're going to look at Ananias and Sapphira. Do you know that chapter could have been written differently? They didn't have to lie to the Holy Spirit. After Ananias is wiped out for his lies, it says that Sapphira comes later. She didn't have to lie either.

They could have changed their mind. I say that as a word from the Lord to someone today: you can change your mind right now and choose not to sin. You don't have to go through with it. You can choose to follow the Lord, and He will honor you.

Back in Acts 3, here he is. He says, "Don't look at us, it's not about us." Then in verse 13, he says, "The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God of our fathers, glorified His servant Jesus, whom you delivered up and denied in the presence of Pilate, when he was determined to let Him go. But you denied the Holy One and the Just, and you asked for a murderer to be granted to you, and you killed the Prince of life, whom God raised from the dead, of which we are witnesses."

You've got to understand something. These are heavy words. He says, "You guys are looking at us like we're something special." Again, this was a momentous time in his ministry. He could have taken all their glory. He could have asked them to follow him. He could have built on that, but he did the exact opposite. He spoke the truth in love and said three very hard things.

Number one, he said, "You delivered up Messiah." Number two, in verse 14, he said, "You denied." That's the second time he said that. "You denied the Holy One and the Just." Then finally in verse 15, he said, "You guys killed Him."

Now, they didn't literally kill Him. Many of them weren't there. The authorities were the ones that handed Him over to Rome. So it's not like by their hands they did. So how is it that they denied Him? How is it that they turned on Him? How is it that they killed Him? Their sin.

As we prepare our hearts for communion, you could say today that it was your sin that put Jesus on the cross. It was mine. These are the very same things that could be said of us because of our sinful ways. Surely some of them might have said, "Crucify Him! Crucify Him!" Perhaps some of them listening could be some of the religious rulers there, and they were literally the ones that did this.

You see, we're all guilty because of sin. It's not a select few. Peter knows this is what needs to be shared because he's walking in the Spirit. You ignored the Bible. You ignored and denied and killed the Savior. Peter uses all these paradoxes here to prove a point.

He says Jesus was a servant, but God exalted Him. Jesus was a deliverer, but the nation delivered Him to Pilate. They rejected the Holy and Righteous One, and they received a murderer, an unholy, unjust murderer. They put to death the Prince of life but asked for one who literally took life. What is he doing but leading them down the road to repentance?

Notice with me, he says in verse 16, "His name, through faith in His name, has made this man strong, whom you see and know. Yes, the faith that comes through Him has given him this perfect soundness in the presence of you all. Yet now, brethren, I know that you did it in ignorance, as did your rulers."

He's leading them down this path, and in order to bring someone to a place of repentance, you have to tell them the truth. The truth about life. We have all sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. All of us. There isn't an innocent one among us here, online, or listening on the radio. You're not innocent.

Many of us could have sinned in ignorance, and that's where he releases the pressure a little bit. He says, "But you did it in ignorance." There can be a little bit of relief there, like, "Okay, I did it in ignorance." But that doesn't make you innocent. It just makes you ignorant. Ignorance doesn't make you innocent. It doesn't mean you didn't do the deed. You did.

But God knows you. He cares. He acknowledges your humanity. He recognizes that we have all failed. The Psalmist would put it this way in Psalm 103, that God cares for us, He has compassion on us like a dad to his child. In the New King James, it says, "Like a father he has pity on us." It doesn't mean He feels sorry for us. He has a compassion over what we've done to ourselves through sin.

It's like He had so much more for us, but we chose the route that destroyed us. He cares about us. He knows that you're just dust. He knows you're human. It doesn't excuse you, but He does relate to you.

So much so, He sent His own Son, Jesus Christ, to take on a human body—fully man, fully God—to die on your behalf. He says in verse 18, "But those things which God foretold by the mouth of all His prophets, that the Christ would suffer, He has fulfilled." Even though you were involved in it, this was the plan of God all along.

God's plan from the foundations of the earth was to send a Savior. With that in mind, he gives the turning point in verse 19. He says, "Repent therefore and be converted." That's the only answer to your sinful condition. That's it. There's no second or third alternative. The only alternative to your condition in life is to repent.

This word is so important in the Bible that we're going to spend a whole Bible study on it so I can explain to you from the Scriptures what repentance means. It's so important. There will be no one in heaven, no one born again without repentance. The word literally means in the original language to change. It speaks of changing your mind. If you will change your mind, your behavior will change.

We have it all backwards. Everybody's trying to change their behavior, and they keep going back to it. Why? Because you haven't changed your mind. Maybe you're upset with the consequences—"I'm always in trouble, my wife's always mad at me, my husband's always mad"—and so you're like, "Okay, I'll just stop this behavior." No, you have to change your mind, or biblically, you have to repent.

The pathway of repentance deals with truth, and the conclusion of truth is a godly sorrow. Not a sorrow and sadness, "Oh, I got caught," but a godly sorrow that I've sinned against a holy and a righteous God, that I'm far from Him, that my life doesn't honor Him. I say I'm a Christian, but I live this way. Or I don't want anything to do with Christianity.

I think of some that might even be here today. Here's the day. This is the day that finally you visited this church. You've been putting it off, you don't want to come, don't want anything to do with church. I get it. That's how I walked into a church. I totally get it.

Your deal has always been, "I don't go to church because it's filled with hypocrites." And what does the pastor talk about? The hypocrisy in the room. Then you're sitting there going, "Yeah, yeah, a bunch of hypocrites. He agrees with me." I actually do. The biggest hypocrite is a few feet off the ground right now. Yeah, there are always inconsistencies in our lives. It keeps us humble and dependent upon the Lord, and they get less and less as we get closer to the Lord.

But can I ask you a question? If you're unwilling to acknowledge that you're a sinner, but you continue to live in sin saying that you're a good person, who's the bigger hypocrite? If the room is filled with hypocrites—which there are inconsistencies among us and we readily admit that—have you ever considered your life? "Oh, I'm a good person." Yeah, but look at your life. You call that good? And on what scale? Doesn't good keep changing depending on your behavior? Who's the bigger hypocrite?

"Oh man, that wasn't nice. That's low." But you need to hear the truth. You've been living behind this excuse for so long, overlooking the inconsistencies in your life. Why would God even have you here today except to hear how much He loves you and cares for you even with those inconsistencies?

Those believers that are hypocritical, many of them actually are not wanting that. They don't wake up in the morning and go, "I want to be the biggest hypocrite today." Rather, there's a battle in their lives between living for God and living their old way of life. Unfortunately, the old ways can overtake us very quickly and we readily agree to them, which you interpret as hypocrisy.

But you have to ask yourself: who's the bigger hypocrite? Because the truth is, with believer and unbeliever alike, the room is filled with all of us that have hypocrisies in our lives. All of us. And the way the Bible says that is that we have all sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. There isn't an innocent one in that room. There isn't anyone innocent. We all must repent and be converted so that your sins may be blotted out and that times of refreshing may come from the presence of the Lord.

That He might send Jesus Christ, who was preached to you before, whom heaven must receive until the time of restoration of all things, which God has spoken by the mouth of His holy prophets since the world began.

The times of refreshing. I find no more refreshing thought than to think my sins have been forgiven by the blood of Jesus Christ, that He has wiped away the guilt and shame from my life. Because there is a lot of regret in our lives. We look back and we wish we would have. But if our sins have been blotted out, then we can't live in regret. We need to press on.

We need to live a life that's not in the past. There's nothing we can do about the past. Can't change one part of it. But we can certainly deal with today. We can make new decisions today. Times of refreshing means now as you're converted and you're born again, you can make different decisions for your life.

Yes, I know we've all got a past, some better than others. But our past is our past. Now we're living for the Lord. We're pressing on. We're moving forward. You're living with the freedom—that word "blotted out" from the Greek talks about erasure. The idea is in the ancient world, the ink that was used didn't have the kind of acids that we have in ink today. So when you write with a ballpoint pen or with a marker, you can't just wipe it off.

The erasers they used to give us just destroyed the paper but didn't take the ink off. But in the ancient day, the inks were much more simple without all these acids, so when they would write on the vellum or they'd write on the papyrus, it would be very easy for them to wipe the ink away. Just to wipe it away. That's the idea behind this word "blotted out." Just wipe it away. It's not that it didn't happen, it did, but by the blood of Jesus Christ, it's not held against you anymore.

That's pretty refreshing. God has given you a new start. A lifetime, a legacy into the presence of Jesus, delivered from the difficulties of this world. That's what he tells them. He's going to send Jesus. Times of refreshing.

But not only that, verse 21 also points to the times of restoration. For you Bible students, you know that this is a reference to the time when King Jesus will rule and reign on the earth for a thousand years. We call that the millennial period. So not only will you be enjoying the refreshing times of now, but there's coming a day where kings and kingdoms pass away, presidents and cabinets all pass away—they come and go—but King Jesus?

Can you imagine just in your holy imagination what it will be like to live on the earth under the rulership of Jesus Christ? To rule and reign with Jesus forever, all eternity. This stuff is going to pass away. It's all temporary. But God is going to restore what has been broken to what He desires. That's all wrapped up here.

Then he goes on to say about Moses in verse 22, "Moses talked about this. He prophesied it. The Lord your God will raise up for you a Prophet from among your brethren. Him you shall hear in all things, whatever He says to you. And it shall come to pass that every soul who will not hear that Prophet shall be utterly destroyed."

So there's a danger. Repent or be destroyed. Then he says, "And all the prophets, from Samuel and those who follow, as many as have spoken, have foretold these days too." This isn't a surprise. These are men that knew the Bible, studied the Bible, were in the synagogue all the time. Peter's taking advantage of that. "You guys like Moses? He said this. You like all the prophets? They said this."

"You are sons of the prophets," verse 25. You don't just revere them, you are related to them. He says, "You are sons of the covenant which God made with our fathers, and in your seed all the families of the earth shall be blessed. So to you first, God, having raised up His servant Jesus, sent Him to bless you in turning away every one of you from your iniquities."

Again, if you like to write in your Bibles, would you just note that? It would be easy to pass it over, but I don't want to. Jesus was sent to bless you. That's His purpose in life. He's sent to bless you. Yes, He's going to tell you the truth. Yes, He's going to reveal sin. Yes, it's going to be a battle. Yes, there's a flesh. Yes. But Jesus was sent to bless you. To revolutionize your life.

Not for you to give a little piece here and a little piece there and maybe I'll do this. No, He came to bless you by taking over your life, by giving you times of refreshing, by restoring what the years have eaten up, by restoring what has been lost through sin. Jesus came to bless you.

Would you just let that soak in as we come to the communion table? One of the things to remember is Jesus came to bless you. He came to bless you. Why? Because God loves you. There's no way around it. God's love for you is so immense that it's even hard to conceive of the greatness of His love for us, His care and concern for us.

I don't want you to miss in chapter three now, looking back at Peter and John, that what began as a possible interruption was yielded to the Holy Spirit as a divine appointment. That divine appointment, as he seized the opportunity, led to an open door to share the gospel. A guy got healed that was lame his entire life. He's jumping and leaping and clinging to them, and a whole group of people come because they know this guy. They walked by him all the time, too. God has everybody's attention. Why? Because he cares about the lame man, but he also cares about everyone else. He cares for everyone on the earth today. He cares for you.

Our lives are a lot like that. If we will just embrace the opportunities—not be so mad about them, so frustrated about them, "this is my time, my schedule, my life"—but yield our lives, our time, our schedule, our life to the One who has open door after open door available to us. God is opening doors all around us to share the gospel, to love people in Jesus' name, to practically serve them. Even as we are walking into more difficult times, the Lord is with us. We're not alone.

Guest (Male): Isn't that great? No matter what we may go through, the Lord is with us. You're listening to Abounding Grace and Pastor Ed Taylor is our Bible teacher. Would you like to hear this again? If so, just visit us online at aboundinggraceradio.com or oneplace.com. You can also download the Calvary Church app as well.

Today we'd like to tell you about a book from Ron Rhodes titled The End Times in Chronological Order. Think of it as a complete overview to understanding Bible prophecy. You've probably heard about the rapture, the Great Tribulation, the Second Coming, the mark of the beast, but how do they all fit together? This chronological tour through the Bible's most important predictions will help you connect the dots. We'll gladly send you a copy for a gift of $25 or more to Abounding Grace. Call toll-free at 877-30-GRACE. That's 877-304-7223, or order it online at calvaryco.store.

Please remember this ministry is made possible through the support of our listeners, and we are grateful for whatever the Lord leads you to do. It would be great to hear from you. Call toll-free at 877-30-GRACE. Donations can also be made online at aboundinggraceradio.com.

Pastor Ed Taylor: Hey, Abounding Grace family, I don't know if you know this, but we have a podcast here that's called Lead to Serve. You can go to my website edtaylor.org and up there at the podcast link you can see all the podcasts. Lead to Serve is a podcast I started years ago to help you learn how to serve well, lead well, whether it's in the church or in the business world.

I have a corporate business background, so we talk about philosophies and thoughts and biblical foundations for good servanthood. It's called Lead to Serve. We want you to subscribe to it, listen to it, share it, forward it on your social media, let people know. Of course, leave us a good review.

The Lead to Serve podcast—some radio stations are even playing it in their off hours. That's what we do here at Grace FM, in our radio station here in Aurora. We play it in our off hours and the feedback has been amazing. It's a very popular podcast and we are encouraged. So be sure to subscribe to it, Lead to Serve podcast. We'd love to connect with you and we'd love to encourage you in all that God is doing in your life. Look for it wherever you get your podcasts or at edtaylor.org. Thanks again.

Guest (Male): This has been Abounding Grace with Pastor Ed. We'll look for you next time as we open the Word together in search of God's abounding grace. Abounding Grace is brought to you by Calvary Church Colorado, here in Aurora.