Grace Thoughts

Guest (Male): Hello friends, welcome to Grace Thoughts, the radio ministry of Grace Connection Church with Pastor Tim Kelley. Grace Thoughts has been dedicated to preaching a clear gospel of grace for over 20 years. Here is Pastor Kelley.

Tim Kelley: I think one of the purest understandings of grace is by somebody who can't do anything for God yet enjoys His presence. You can't perform, you can't act, you can't reach out for one reason or another reason, yet you know who you are in Jesus Christ and you know you stand and you lie in His imputed righteousness.

And Jesus Christ is fiercely in love with you as the person preaching to thousands from a pulpit. And He's just as pleased with your life as He is with that life, even though no one notices you. That person understands grace. They're walking. They've taken the right choice. They're walking in Mary's path.

Mary's at the feet of Jesus. Mary represents the other road, the grace life. The grace life does not say, "I can do it." The grace life says, "Yet not I, but Christ can do it through me." The grace life judges themselves by what Jesus did for them on the cross, not their performance.

I could never, my friends, work up enough righteousness. My righteousness is as filthy rags. I need an intervention. If God looked into the human race and saw any inkling that man could have done this by themselves, there wouldn't have been a cross. He never would have come.

If there was one man that ever would have been born into the human race that could have lived a perfect life without God, then the cross never would have happened. But it was impossible. And so in the counsels of God, the love of God, which loved man, the power of God, and the wisdom of God came up with a plan to redeem man and not to renovate their righteousness but eliminate their righteousness.

Paid with one grand act, once and for all, Hebrews 10:10, 10:14. And give that race His own righteousness. That was the cross of Jesus Christ. So whosoever believes on Him, now my friends, and salvation takes place and the spirit seals us, what happens is He gives us His righteousness, not ours.

It's not renovated righteousness. It's not religious righteousness. It's not comparative righteousness. It's not relative righteousness. It's imputed righteousness. As the King James wants to call it, God takes His righteousness and imputes it to you. We call that good news.

Because only righteousness can come in the presence of God. Unrighteousness cannot. God is holy, He's right, He's pure, He's sacred. There's nothing impure that can come into His presence and ever be around Him. So He gave us the only pure thing there was: Himself. For whosoever believes.

The grace life judges themselves by what Jesus did for them on the cross, not their performance. The grace life serves God out of a heart of love and gratitude, not out of duty and obligation. That's so big. The grace life understands that God's thoughts towards them are constant and independent of our service and even obedience.

Whether we're serving or we're sitting, the grace life has no lists, no how-tos, no formulas. It is not made a system out of the Christian life. They're easily captured by Christ in their heart. They seek His presence every day. It's a life that's marked by victory, self-discipline.

Christian service becomes a product of fellowship with Christ, not a duty. But meeting Christ, I shared a little bit of my own story. I talk a lot. I forget where I share stuff. But I remember as a young man, you know some of my story, I got saved in an un-Christian home.

And I had no mentor, I had no church, I had no pastor. It was just sort of me and some of my buddies. We all got saved at the right time. We were all clueless. So I got a little good news Bible, you know the one with the little pictures in it? I loved the pictures.

And that thing was tearing up on me. I remember duct-taping the back of it. Just reading this New Testament, just reading it from page to page. Start all over again. Couldn't figure out why Mark, Luke, and John were copying Matthew. Couldn't figure that out.

Couple things I couldn't figure out. Couldn't figure out why Psalms wasn't p-salms. Couldn't figure that out either. But starting to get over those strongholds, I remember reading that thing. Then I remember actually looking back on my life a few months later, about six months later, looking over my shoulder and saying, "You know what? I don't do this anymore. I don't do this anymore. I don't do this anymore. I don't do that anymore."

I remember six things that used to be part of my common practice weren't part of my life anymore. I don't ever remember the struggle. I don't ever remember thinking, "I can't do this, I shouldn't do this, oh that's so wrong, how come I did that?" I didn't even remember that.

I just sort of ignored myself and became so captured with Christ that those things disappeared. That's what happens when you sit in the presence of God. Things of earth grow strangely dim. I can't sing. If I couldn't preach, I'd starve.

Let me read you these verses. It's a long passage here, but bear with me. I'm going to bring—I was just going to read you Galatians 5:1, but I have to read you all the verses leading up to that. And then we'll close shortly after that.

The scripture says that Abraham had two sons. One from a slave, that would be Hagar, and one from his free-born wife, that would be Sarah. The son of the slave's wife was born in a human attempt to bring the fulfillment about the fulfillment of God's promise.

You remember the story. Abraham, by Sarah's imploration, said, "Go sleep with Hagar, because that's customary they could do that with their handmaids, and she'll give you the son that God promised you." God promised him the son 20 years before, but it wasn't happening.

God was running out of time. Their bodies were getting a little bit old, and so they went, "Hey, we better help God out with this." And that's what religion does. It tries to help God out. That's what the law life does. It tries to help God out. That's what Martha's road does. It tries to help God out.

God would have nothing to do with it. Verse 24: "These two women serve as an illustration of God's two covenants. The first woman, Hagar, represents Mount Sinai, that's where the law was given in Arabia, because she and her children live in slavery to the law."

But the other woman, Sarah—remember this is Galatians, same background with those guys that came in—he's undoing the teaching of the Judaizers here. "But the other woman, Sarah, represents the heavenly Jerusalem. She is a free woman and she is our mother."

And Isaiah said, "Rejoice, O childless woman, you who have never given birth. Break into a joyful shout, you who have never been in labor. For the desolate woman now has more children than the woman who lives with her husband."

And you, dear brothers, are children of the promise, just like Isaac. I could take verse 28 and put it right to Grace Connection and everyone sitting in a church right now. And you, dear brothers, are children of the promise, just like Isaac, representing all of God's children.

But you who are being persecuted by those who want you to keep the law, the Judaizers, just as Ishmael, the child born by human effort, persecuted Isaac, the child born by the power of the Spirit. For what do the scriptures say about get rid of the slave and her son?

For the son of the slave woman will not share the inheritance of the free woman's son. It is oil and water. There's two roads. They don't share the same road. There's a law road and there's a grace road. There's Martha's road, there's Mary's road.

There's Cain's road, there's Abel's road. There's two roads. You can't have it both ways. Now it says this, verse 1: "And I read those verses—stand fast therefore." Now, the "therefore" always looks back. When you're interpreting the Bible, you see "wherefore" or "therefore", it's always sort of a look over the shoulder what they were talking about before.

So what they were talking about before was what we just read: the comparison of Hagar and Sarah. So he says, "Stand fast therefore, in light of what we just said." There are two women. There's the line of Hagar, the line of Sarah. The woman of promise and the woman of the law.

"Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free, and be not entangled again in the yoke of bondage." Choose the right road, he's saying. I showed you the right road. There's a grace road. There's a Mary road. There's an Abel road. Choose that road.

Don't walk the road of the law, because there's no life there. There's bondage there, there's striving there, there's fear there, there is contempt there, there's pride there. Don't get on that road. Get on this road. A road where you receive life, and it doesn't depend on you.

This is an indicative mood. It's an assertion of fact. He says Christ has made us free. It's an indicative. So it says that's fact. It's not maybe a fact. It could be a fact if... it's just the fact. Christ has made you free. Fact. Okay?

You may not choose that freedom. You may walk down another road, but Christ has made you fact. And it has an imperative command: stand fast. In other words, you could put it this way: stand fast (imperative) in the indicative. Christ has made you free. Fact.

So I stand fast (imperative) in the indicative. Christ has made you free. I stand fast there. I plant my feet down, I put the roots down, I put my stakes down. That's where I'm living, that's where I'm walking. I'm going to walk down Mary's road, not Martha's road.

Christ and the ministry of His cross has untangled the bondage of legal religion. Don't re-entangle yourself. I maybe made this easy this morning. I know this isn't this easy. Because I'll find myself going down the road of relative righteousness, probably, maybe by the end of the day.

But I know the truth. I'm going to walk this road. I'm going to just enjoy the presence of God. I'm going to know that God loves me, period. Nothing to do with how I perform for Him or what I do or don't do for Him. He just loves me, period.

God sees me as perfect, my friends, not because I am—I'll close with this—He has to. It's the only way He could have relationship with us is to see me as perfect as the Son. If He didn't see me that way, He couldn't have relationship with them because He is holy, He is righteous, He is perfect.

So He had to make me the same way, and He did that through the blood of His Son on the cross for whosoever will. So now I live and I walk in the liberty. All the things that I know I'm supposed to read my Bible and I'm supposed to pray now, I'm supposed to do this now.

Yeah, those things are all okay, my friends, but understand they don't make you any more spiritual before God. All they do is help your relationship. I married my wife. We're legally married. I could ignore her for 10 years, but we're still legally married.

Or I can sit down with her and have relationship with her and talk to her and get to know her, learn about her. But I'm still married whether I do that or not, because it's a legal document. That's what justification is: a legal declaration that we belong to Jesus Christ.

And so all these spiritual disciplines we like to put ourselves under, it's really just about me knowing Him and sitting in His presence. It's not that complicated. If it was that complicated, we'd all be lost. He made it so easy.

So I know today, tomorrow, next day, I'll wake up and I'll stand like Tom Hanks in that little crossroads. And I'm going to start thinking. My thought life kicks in for the day. What road am I going to choose?

God help me to choose the grace life. Help me to choose the road that leads me to liberty, that deposits me in freedom, not the one that brings me back to bondage.