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 the clear gospel of grace for over 20 years. Here is Pastor Kelley.

Tim Kelley: Genesis Chapter 4, we see this fork in the road starting there. I'm going to use a few different examples, I'll be ending up with Mary and Martha in the New Testament soon. In Genesis Chapter 4, you find this story in the account of Cain and Abel. They went to do a sacrifice for the Lord. Abel took a blood sacrifice, brought it to the Lord, and that was acceptable. Cain presented a fruit basket, or what I call the sweat offering. In other words, I'm going to work really hard for you, God. I'm going to plant these vegetables and these fruits, and I'm going to make this beautiful basket. I'm going to present it to you, and so when I present it to you, you will be impressed with my sweat and how hard I worked.

While Abel just said, "I want to sacrifice to the Lord, I'll just go get a lamb and I'll shed its blood," which is what they did then. Jude Chapter—well, one chapter—verse 11 says, "Woe to them, for they have walked in the way of Cain." Obviously, that's referring to him being a murderer and such, this group of people, but I think it goes beyond that. It goes into this way that Cain approached life. And here's the fork in the road: I'm either going to approach life through the road of human effort, the road of religion, the road of my own righteousness, or I'm going to approach life and walk down the road of grace. And that's what we want to look at.

There's a difference. Organized religion through the centuries has morphed into a law-based belief system which I would say impacts more Christians than it doesn't impact. Influences more Christians than it doesn't. Something I call churchianity, and some we call Christianity. Sometimes there's a dramatic difference. We're doing churchianity here. Nothing wrong with that, this is good, this is healthy, but sometimes churchianity can get pretty messy. I talk with folks for many years who go, "The church life, this church hurt me, that church hurt me, this church blew me out."

And again, maybe they did, maybe they didn't. Each case is so different and so sovereign, but the point is there's churchianity and there's Christianity. I tell folks all the time, don't let your churchianity ruin your Christianity. Because all churchianity is supposed to do is help our Christianity. It's supposed to deliver us to our faith, encourage us in our faith, not replace our faith. We have a policy... let me just read these verses for you in a little bit. I'm going to read Galatians Chapter 2, rather wordy. This is in the Message Bible. I don't use this very much; it's not a word-for-word translation from the Greek, but it's interesting how it reads.

It reads in a way I want you to understand it. So in Galatians 2:18, Paul speaking—and again, let me give a background, I'm getting ahead of myself. Paul had preached the gospel and taught the gospel in Galatia and that whole Lycus Valley area. There's six or seven churches represented there. And he taught them the grace of God. Now what happened is this group came in after Paul, they call the Judaizers, and they came and basically said to the group that Paul had just converted and taught the grace of God, they said, "Paul, he's a good guy, but he really wasn't that balanced here. We just can't throw out the law. We just can't pretend like the law doesn't exist. Paul's good, Jesus, He's cool, but listen, God gave us the Mosaic Law. We just can't throw that out the window. We can't throw out the baby with the bathwater, right?" If there were such a Hebrew idiom. Probably not.

So with that said, now he's talking to the church at Galatia. He goes, "If I was trying to be good, I'd be rebuilding the same old barn that I tore down. I'd be acting as a charlatan or a hypocrite." Because I'm not trying to be good, because what am I trying to do? I'm trying to make my own righteousness acceptable before God. That's not going to work. If I was trying to be good, I'd be rebuilding the old barn that I tore down. Jesus didn't renovate anything; He replaced. Big difference. Galatians 2:19: "What actually took place was this: I tried keeping rules and working my head off to please God, and it didn't work. So I quit being a law man so I could be God's man."

Verse 20: "Christ's life showed me how and enabled me to do it. I identified myself completely with Him. Indeed, I have been crucified with Christ. My ego, my I, that is no longer central. It is no longer important that I appear righteous before you or have your good opinion. I'm no longer driven to impress God. Christ lives in me. The life you see me living is not mine; it is lived by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave Himself for me. I am not going back on that. Is it not clear to you that to go back to that old rule-keeping, peer-pleasing religion would be an abandonment of everything personal and free in my relationship with God? Preach it, Paul. Come on."

I refuse to do that. I refuse to repudiate God's grace. If a living relationship with God could only come from rule-keeping, then Christ died unnecessarily. I'm going to ratchet up to Galatians 3:24, to the King James Bible. "Therefore, the law was our schoolmaster to bring us to Christ, that we might be justified by faith. But after that faith is come, we are no longer under the schoolmaster." So the purpose of the law is to bring us to a place where we realize we need grace. The law couldn't validate us; keeping it couldn't validate us. Most of us live in this—and let me, some of you know these terms from over the years, but it's been a while since I've taught it.

Most of you live with some different types of righteousness. There's comparative righteousness. That's when I compare myself with somebody else. Maybe Jason. Jason's a pretty righteous guy. He's married to Diane, and he needs to be righteous to be married to Diane. She wouldn't deal with any unrighteousness at all. So he's a pretty righteous guy. So I'm looking at Jason walk his life. This guy's pretty focused. I mean, he's in the Bible, he quotes things, he has a Bible shirt on, says "His pain, your gain" shirt. That's pretty spiritual. And his car has a bumper sticker that says, "In case of rapture, this car will be unmanned."

So that's amazing. I mean, he's a pretty spiritual guy. Goes to church every week, goes to Wednesday night service. He's a Wednesday-nighter. Goes to Wednesday night service, and he wasn't there this week, but just messing with you. So I look at Jason's life and I say, "I'm just not that spiritual." See, he's my goal. I want to be like Jason. So I'm going to work, I'm going to get more spiritual than him. I'm going to go Wednesday nights and a men's meeting. I'm going to memorize more verses than him. I'm going to make sure I'm in every church service, I'm going to come in and I'm going to volunteer to do work around the church.

So in a few months from now, I can look at myself and say, "I am now more spiritual or as spiritual as Jason." That's called comparative righteousness. Now my goal of comparative righteousness is to get more spiritual than him so I can become self-righteous. Because that's the next stage up. I earn my self-righteousness. Then there's something even more infective, I know to me and probably to you than that, because most of us won't use that as our criteria. But something we call, or has been called, relative righteousness. Relative righteousness means I'm as righteous as I'm performing in any moment.

If I'm doing really good, if I'm performing really well, then I feel really good about my righteousness. God must be so pleased with me because I'm pretty pleased with me. I've done well. I haven't really fallen into that besetting sin for a while, I haven't fallen flat on my face, I've been pretty faithful to church, I've done this right, I've done that right. So, hey, I'm doing good. And my righteousness is relative to my performance at any given moment. I actually think in the subtleties of my mind and my thoughts that God thinks like that.

That somehow He's up with a clipboard or a clicker saying, "Let's see how many good things we do and based upon how many good things we do depends on His thoughts towards us." Again, we probably would never define it that clearly, but we find that we are absolutely captured by churchianity. My friend, the law does not validate my relationship with God. All it does is validate my need for Him. He gave us a cross. This cross is my answer for the law. I don't have any way to keep it. My righteousness at my best state is filthy rags, Isaiah 64:6.

All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. There are none righteous, no not one, Romans 3:10, 3:23. And we can go on and on. There's nothing I can produce which impresses God. It's what we receive. Now Mary and Martha, another good example. New Testament, they represent this fork in the road. There's a Martha fork and a Mary fork. This isn't Mary Keller. This is Mary of Bethany. And this is how two models in how people relate to Christ, sort of like Cain and Abel. Let's read it, King James, Luke Chapter 10: "Now it came to pass as they went, they entered into a certain village and a certain woman named Martha received Him into her house."

Now if you come from the Boston area, that's Martha. Just so you know. And that's how you say it. So if I say "Martha," you know exactly what I'm talking about and that's how you probably want to teach yourself how to say it also. She also had a sister named Mary, which also sat at Jesus' feet and heard His word. But Martha was cumbered about much serving and came to Him and said, "Lord, do You not care that my sister has left me to serve alone? Bid her that she come and help me." So what's going on here? Jesus comes, goes to Mary and Martha's house and they go into dinner.

Martha's really busy: cooking dinner, cleaning. And there's Mary sitting at Jesus' feet, not helping. So Martha, instead of going to Mary, she actually goes right to Jesus. Went right to the top. "Jesus, make her help me." She was a little taken back, I think, at the Lord's response to her. Jesus answered and said to her, "Martha, Martha." Now let me stop. That's—He said her name twice. Didn't necessarily say it in an endearing way, like "Martha, Martha." Not like that. It was like "Martha, Martha. Listen to Me, Martha. Listen to Me." Martha's like, "Lord, You have my attention."

"Martha, I want to tell you something now that is exceptionally important. You have chosen the wrong road in your life. Your relationship with Me is distorted. It's about what you do and not who I am. I'm about to show you what's really important and put you on the right path so you can know Me like you need to know Me. Thou art careful and troubled about many things. You're stressed out, over-worried. Your mind is sort of busy. I'll get back to that in a moment. But one thing is needful. One thing. Mary has chosen that good part which shall not be taken away from her."

So Martha took a road we'll call the law life, and Mary took a road that we'll call the grace life. Martha was cumbered about. The Greek word there means to be driven about mentally, to be distracted, to be over-occupied, to be too busy or have a busy mind. Anyone? Little busy-minded, maybe? Mind doesn't shut down? Maybe you've been around somebody who has a busy mind and they're just rapid fire and you wonder how they got here, to get over here. How did this conversation end here then it went over here? I had somebody knock on my door one time, I think it was 10:30 at night, from the church.

I let them in and there was a conflict between them and another person in the church. They sit down on the couch, my wife was with me, and they're just bellowing out this whole thing about this scenario with another family in the church going back 20-plus years ago. I'm listening to them, I'm just listening, and I was a relatively young pastor and I just didn't really know what to say anyway. I'm sitting there and I watch their mind. All of a sudden the man stops and said, "I bet they're poisoning my cat as we speak." "What?" "I bet they're poisoning my cat."

"Who?" The people they were complaining about. "Why are they poisoning your cat?" "Because they're like that. They're probably poisoning my cat." Well, I was very diplomatic because I'm a pastor. But my wife, she has no gate at all. She looked at him and just started laughing. So I had to start doing damage control right after that. But she just got the biggest kick out of that. "They're poisoning your cat? Why would they poison your cat?" See, this mind was busy. He was making this stuff up in his mind. The cat lived a long, healthy life. No one poisoned the cat. But the mind was busy; they were cumbered about. This is Martha; her mind is busy. And the Lord is saying, "Mary, slow it down."