Grace Thoughts

Tim Kelley: How many of us sometimes are consistently unhappy or discontented? This can come in waves or different periods of our lives. We look back on our life and we always look for that greener pasture. If only this didn't happen, only if this would have happened—the if onlys and only ifs. It debilitates us, it cripples us. We think of what could have been, should have been, what I wished that it was, and how I maybe am disheartened over how my life has turned out. But I ask myself a question: what was my expectation for? In other words, what was I really seeking? Fame, fortune, security, being noticed—what was it that I'm so dissatisfied with? Those are important questions. We'll see as we drill down a little bit deeper in the message.

Contentment, my friends, comes from within. It's never external. Jeremiah Burroughs, a great Puritan writer from five, six hundred years ago—I guess now, wow, he goes back a long way—he said this, and this is not an exact quote: "Contentment comes from subtraction, not through addition." In other words, it's never adding something to our life that makes us content. It's usually subtracting something from our life that makes us content. It's getting rid of things that we think we need to be content. That's when we find contentment.

Now, the book of Ephesians has laid out a marvelous road for us to follow. If I had re-thought this, I might have even started in the first three chapters and plundered through that and gave you some of the nuggets from that. Because the first three chapters of Ephesians tell us all that Jesus did for us on the cross. In Ephesians 1:6 and 1:3, He gave us all spiritual blessings. He forgave us in 1:7, forgave us of all our sins. We were dead in our trespasses and sins in Ephesians 2:1 and 2, but God, who was rich in mercy in Ephesians 2:5, seated us together in heavenly places in Ephesians 2:6, saved by grace, not of works in Ephesians 2:8, but we were created unto good works in Ephesians 2:10. Then Ephesians 3, beginning in Ephesians 3:20, says that unto Him who can do exceedingly and abundantly above all that we ever ask or think inside of us, that work of the gospel inside of us.

So he lays out in the first three chapters of Ephesians this incredible gospel that He's given us, the incredible work of the cross. But now he makes it practical. He takes it in Ephesians 4:5 and 6, he takes the gospel and says, "Now I want to make the gospel practical in your life. How does this look like every day as a Christian?" That's what we want to look at a little bit here. Ephesians 4, verse 17: "Now this I say and testify in the Lord, that you must no longer walk as Gentiles do, in the futility of their mind." Gentile refers to unsaved people. Futility means somebody who's devoid of truth or perverse. So their minds are devoid of truth and they're perverse. They're not saved people.

Verse 18: "They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, due to their hardness of heart." Their minds are blinded by sin. They don't even see things are wrong. 2 Corinthians 4:4, the light of the gospel is blinded towards them. They don't want to know or change. Verse 19: "They have become callous and have given themselves up to sensuality, greedy to every practice and kind of impurity. But that is not the way you learned Christ." Now he switches. He's looking back at people who we were before Christ. Now he goes forward and says, "But that's not us. That's not who we are."

We're the church. We're the called-out ones. We're His people. There's a Holy Spirit living in us. If that's my testimony—verse 17, 18, 19—if that's how I'm still living, there's a problem because that's not how we were made to live. That's not us. "Assuming that you've heard about Him and were taught in Him as the truth is in Jesus." Look what he says here: "Put off your old self, which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful desires." So he says "put off," and that word is like changing clothes. I came here this morning, I had a shirt on, my Captain America shirt. And then before church went in the first service, I put on another shirt. And after the first service, I took those shirts off, they're laying on the floor back there. I put on this shirt. Before I go home, I'm going to take this shirt off and put on my Boston Celtics shirt. If I just put off, it'd be pretty bad if I didn't put back on. You guys would be like, "Whoa, I'm not coming back to that church."

I put something back on. I replaced it. I replaced my old shirt with a new shirt. So he says here, "Put off your old self," like an old worn-out piece of clothing. In other words, stop living like you did before you met Christ. That's what Paul is saying. This is how you lived before you met Christ. You were not intended to live that way. When you were born again, your life was elevated. It was lifted above the fray of humanity. It was lifted above sin. It was lifted above the effects of sin. You can have a better life than that. That's what Paul is saying.

Verse 23: "And be renewed in the spirit of your minds." That word "renew" there is a cool word. It just means that you have your minds renewed. You don't think the same way. Your priorities are different. Your values are different. What makes you happy is different. The things you pursue is different. It's all different. Why is it different? Because you're different. You're a Christian, and Christ lives inside of you. And when that happens, it's supposed to change everything, not just a little bit, either. Radically change everything. That's how you come to have twelve disciples, average men and fishermen and nutcases of guys, Peters and Johns and these, and they turned the world upside down because something happened to them. Something happened on the inside.

"And put on a new self," there's that new shirt, "created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness." Or I could paraphrase: be transformed. We love that word. God has a plan to make us something, my friends, that we cannot become ourselves. Now, if I left you there, some of you would be pretty hopeless. In other words, "Okay, Pastor, but I still battle with that stuff. I still deal with that stuff." Well, hopefully in the rest of this message and in the next few, in the next few minutes next week, I'm hopefully going to give you a framework where you can break through and start winning these battles against the impact of sin in your life. And you have an impact of sin in your life and I have an impact of sin in my life and we all have to fight that battle.

Let me read you Romans 12—we'll probably go back to these verses next week, too. "So, dear brothers and sisters," New Living Translation, "I plead with you to give your bodies to God because of all He's done for you. Let them be a living and holy sacrifice, the kind He will find acceptable. This is truly the way to worship Him." Now, I would just say this about Romans 12, verse 1, and this is something we'll see probably next week, but he's talking here about the lordship of Christ. I want to present your bodies as a living sacrifice. In other words, I want you to give with an act of your will Christ control of your life as you understand that. Now, that includes that's an ongoing illumination that we are given throughout our lives. There's areas in my life I'm sure I have retained and held back from God, and I understand that. As the spirit shows me these things, I want to give them to Christ.

Verse 2: "Don't copy the behavior and the customs of this world, but let God transform you into a new person." Look how He does this: "by changing the way that you think. Then you'll learn to know God's will for you, which is good, pleasing, and perfect." Wow. "So you'll know God's will for you, which is good, pleasing, and perfect." Principle one: understanding that victory, my friends, is not doing. First thing we want to settle. It's not doing anything. You can't busy yourself out of the effects of sin. You can't willpower yourself out of the effects of sin. You can't nag somebody else into being out of the effects of sin. Transformation, spiritual transformation, is the only thing that works.

We need to grasp, my friends, this important principle. Victory is not doing. It's engaging in a relationship: you and Jesus Christ in a personal, intimate, daily walk with Him. Not a Sunday morning for an hour and a half—personal, intimate, and daily. If this is all you're going to get all week, you have no chance of victory. None. Zero. But if you get up tomorrow and you meet God and you engage through the Holy Spirit in a relationship with God, and Tuesday and Wednesday, and surround yourself with godly people, you'll start seeing victory after victory after victory. You'll start seeing a spiritual transformation taking place inside of you.

We need to grasp the point, my friend, that sin is caused by a void. According to Lewis Sperry Chafer in his—one of his great works, *He That Is Spiritual*, a book on the Holy Spirit—said that I don't deal with men after their sin; I deal with men after the void in their soul that has brought them to sin. Important principle. I can wag my finger all day long at what people are doing wrong, especially if I'm not doing it wrong. But what's causing them? What need are they trying to meet? What are they trying to fulfill on the inside that's not being fulfilled by Christ? Now, maybe they need my input, maybe they need to just submit themselves to God. That's going to be different for each one, but there's a void causing that. There's something, whether the need for being loved, affirmed, secure, whatever that is, is causing it.

We need to address the void and not necessarily the sin. When I was, again, a young man, I had certain things I was practicing and as I became aware of those things, I would relinquish them. I was actually in—I'd just give them up. But I was living every day, pouring the word of God into me, and I was—one of the most exciting things I could do as a young Christian was get on my knees and pray. I just loved to pray. I'd pray for hours and not even think twice about it. It was just a cool thing, I thought. I can pray and I'd be on my knees and just praying to the Lord.

And then one day, I was actually in Fenway Park. Great place to be, spiritual place to be. It's a place where you can often times find God there if you go there. I was in Fenway Park and I was—I forget who I was with—I remember sitting there looking over my spiritual shoulder and thinking, "You know, I don't do this anymore. I don't swear anymore. I don't remember giving up swearing. I didn't do this anymore. I don't even remember giving that up." And I thought about all these practices that were part of my personality and my character, and they were no longer there. When did those get out of my life? I couldn't tell you.

So what I'm getting at: the void was filled. When the void got filled, the other stuff just went away. When I became so occupied with Christ and so filled with the Holy Spirit, the thought about grieving that or thought about living contrary outside of that was just foreign to me. It wasn't even a hard decision or a hard choice. So we go after the void. First stage of victory in sin, I go after the void. What's the void? And why is it there? So I don't give in to sin, I sort of give up. God, I can't do this. I can't keep beating my head against the wall. I can't keep trying and failing. I just can't do this. I can't beat it by my own power. Try it, it'll just leave you frustrated.

The greatest surrenders of my life, and I've had many of them—surrendering my will to Christ, that was a big step as a young Christian, something I had to redo a dozen times in my Christian life when I give God my will. God, I'm about You. You take my life, do what You will with it. God, I just give my—I'm surrendering myself to You. And that's, my friend, that's an easier one. Know what I've had to surrender more to Christ than my will? It's my self-effort. That's much more subtle, much more tricky, and goes a long way of being unnoticed. And as God shows me how my self-effort comes in and how I'm trying to do this myself in my own strength, I make it right with God. There's repentance, there's a change of mind, and I make it right with God. And he shows me again, I make it right with God. God, I can't. But that's been the greatest surrender of my life is my self-effort, not my will. God got that pretty early, but I still think He needs my help, and He doesn't.

Next thing we need, my friend, I'll close with this, is a Psalm 139 prayer: "Search me, O God, know my heart. Try me, and know my thoughts." Search is a word that means to penetrate deeply, to investigate. So, "Search my heart, O God. Try me, know my thoughts." Intuitively, intimately, know my thoughts. "And see if there's any grievous way in me, and lead me into the way everlasting." It all starts here, my friend, with a deep honesty and transparency with yourself and God.