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: What I'm telling you now is so true. If you've walked with God, especially in Christian ministry, you know what I'm talking about. I've seen good men and good women that walk with God. I've seen them on the mission field. I watched preachers and teachers and Bible college professors fall into sin, fall into traps, and make bad decisions and now not even reflect anything close to what they used to be spiritually. Why do you think that was? You think that was an accident, or do you think that was a trap?

Maybe there was a place of advancement in their life they never conquered. It could have been just honesty with themselves and God. It could be an enemy of addiction. We've seen that ugly head. The enemy of anger, the enemy of laziness, loneliness, lust, gossip, worry, et cetera, et cetera. And this enemy has captured us again and again in a stronghold stand against all attempts we make to pull them down.

So with that said, we should just roll over and die. No, but thanks be to God for the victory Jesus Christ has given us. How do we possess these possessions? Now, I'm going to just stop there before I go into the last couple points of the message. I have these enemies in my life. Some of these enemies I'm fighting now are enemies I didn't even know existed 10 years ago and 15 years ago.

The enemies I faced 20 years ago and 30 years ago, they've been long gone. They've already been buried over, new cities built on top of them. They're just ruin. They don't even come on my radar screen anymore. Now I'm facing other things. And you know what? I'm going to conquer these enemies too. I'm taking down these cities too. And as soon as I take down that last city, I'm going to go, "Oh man, there's more cities."

That's going to go on the rest of my life this side of glory. Because until we go to see Jesus, we're going to be battling. We're going to be fighting. We're going to be conquering. We're going to be possessing the land that God has promised us. The key is to not do what happened to Israel. This is what Israel did. We took down Jericho. We took down all these cities. We waged war for 20, 30 years. Hey, you know what, Joshua? We've been fighting a long time. I've conquered some land. I have more land here than I ever even need. I don't see why I should bother fighting for any more.

So I'm just going to rest. I'm going to rest and enjoy this land. But Joshua said there's more people to push out of the land, more people to drive out. Why should I fight? I'm comfortable. Why should I fight? I've got everything I need. I've got peace, security, consistency, resources. I don't think I should keep battling here. I've got everything I need. But God says there's still enemies in your land.

My friends, when you track these people they didn't drive out of their land, a few generations later every one of those people poisoned the Israeli people. Intermingling their Canaanite gods, their idol worship, taking away the purity of Jewish worship within the next generation or two after that. That's why Jesus said we can never take our hand off the plow. How do we overcome this? Let's read this quote: "Oh beloved, think of the ideal that God has expressed to us in His Word." It looks like Redpath. Redpath seems to give me the best quotes. This might be Redpath.

"That we might be conformed to the image of the Son. Consider for a moment His strength and His sweetness. His holiness, His hatred of sin. His love for you and for me. His devotion for the will of God. His life of self-sacrifice. That is God's idea. That is the ideal our souls must possess. If the life of our precious Lord is not being reproduced in us every day, our Christianity is not vital, it is not effective, it is not revolutionary. For the sole purpose of our faith and the substance of our doctrine is that we be conformed to the image of God's Son."

Beautiful quote. That's the ideal our souls must possess. If the life of our precious Lord is not being reproduced in us every day, our Christianity is not vital. It's not alive. Remember that then with this. Ephesians 3:12 and 13. Not that I have already obtained this or am already perfect, but I press on to make it my own. Apprehend is the word in your King James. Katalambano, it's to make it my own, take ownership of it. That's why I like the ESV. I thought it very good on this translation.

Because Christ Jesus has made me His own. I'm going to possess Him. I realize He possesses me and I possess Him. Brother, I do not consider that I have made it my own, but one thing I do, forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead. So Paul's saying here, "I made Him my own." I haven't arrived. I haven't figured it all out. I haven't won every battle. I haven't driven all out of the land yet, but I'm making it my own. I'm going to own whatever it is God brings in my path. I'm going to own this Christian experience, this Christian walk I have with Jesus Christ.

Now listen to three great words of Christian experience that I believe are essential if I'm going to drive these foreign nations out of my life, out of my soul. Number one is surrender. Number two is consecration and appropriation to the Holy Spirit. First, there must be utter surrender or utter submission to the Lord. Let me just reemphasize this. There is no conversion without the absolute surrender of the will to the Lord Jesus Christ. I mean of being conformed into the image of Jesus, to become more like Jesus.

If I'm going to become more like Jesus, He's got to own me. He's got to own my will. I've got to want what He wants. I want to go to where He wants me to go. I want to experience what He wants me to experience. He needs to own my life. If He'll take possession of my life, of my will, if I can surrender myself and submit to His plan for my life, whatever that is, that's the first step to spiritual transformation. Next, there must be a consecration of life. In other words, the talents and everything we have in every department of our life becomes His.

I have this gift, my gift is yours. I have these resources, my resources are yours, Lord. I understand that my life is holy, my life is sacred, my life is consecrated. I'm owned by you, I'm possessed by you. You own me. I don't have my own agenda, I have your agenda. I don't have my own purpose, I have your purpose. I want what you want in the world, in my family, in me. I want what you want. So I surrender my life, then I consecrate my life, then I appropriate to the Holy Spirit the life that God sends us by His Spirit.

I put myself in a place where the Spirit has access to me. There is a divine order. We can't possess the Lord Jesus in fullness, my friends, until He possesses us. I can't conquer more territory until I've been conquered. I can't drive out the enemies until I finally lay myself at His feet and say, "Lord, drive them out through me." Our will needs to be conquered and then we become altogether His. Don't look for victory in your lives until you've surrendered your life. You won't find it.

You'll find temporary reprieves of the battle, but you won't find victory. You'll still be looking for the human element: this person, this husband, this wife, this boyfriend, this girlfriend, this something is going to ease my pain, ease my confusion. I'm going to do whatever I can to make them fill in that gap, but they're not going to do a very good job at that either. You really won't find power until you give up. When you give up, then you find power. When you give up and say, "God, take my life."

Sometimes that decision's really easy because you don't have anything to really give. Sometimes you're so stripped so bare and you're stripped so weak that you just don't have anything else to offer up anyway. It's actually not a hard decision at that point. It's harder when you think you're really giving something up, when you're really relinquishing something. We expect the Lord Jesus to lead us to a higher ground. We want Him to give us a victory. We expect to possess our possessions. It's only when in our hearts we have accepted the authority of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit in every part of our body is yielded in unconditional surrender that we may count on victory and seek to possess our possessions in Christ.

Remember what we said a week or two ago. Joshua did all that Moses was commanded him to do at that point. In other words, Joshua didn't have to come up with anything fancy. He just had to do exactly what he was instructed to do. Now as we close, you'll discover this word "lot" occurs 22 times in the second half of the book of Joshua. Possession of the land was by lot. God gave each tribe a piece of territory. That difficult mountain, the piece of land by the river, whatever it was, He gave them that territory and they had to possess that territory.

My friend, you and I have been given a lot too. It's going to be different. My lot of land is going to be different than your lot of land. The enemies in your lot of land are going to be different than the enemies in my lot of land. What you have to battle with and drive out of your life, I may never face that enemy my whole Christian walk. And you may never face the enemies that I face in my Christian walk. We're not comparing enemies. We're cheering each other on. But we've been given this lot. And on that lot, this spiritual lot that God has given us, you have enemies that He says, "Drive them out. Keep driving them out and keep driving them out."

You'll win most battles. And the battles that you lose, they'll set you up for greater victory later. Do we choose our own path? Do we plan our own career? Do we trust to our own ingenuity? Do we pursue temporal security subduing our pursuit of eternal things like so many of us do? We've all been given a spiritual lot, my friends, in Christ. Those two great, wonderful, awesome, magnificent, powerful, mind-blowing words: in Christ. We've been given a lot in Christ.

We haven't apprehended it all. Philippians 3:13 and 14. We haven't apprehended it all, but we've been given a lot. Eye has not seen nor ear heard, neither has it entered into the heart of man what God has prepared for them. My friend, we've been given a spiritual lot in Christ that is fathomless, it is indescribable, it is bottomless and without boundaries. Let's just go possess it. Most of the battles you fight will be right here. They won't be out here. You won't be clanging swords with other Christians. You won't be clanging swords with people in the world. Most of your battles you're going to fight are right between the two earlobes and maybe a little bit in here too. That's where you're going to fight, but it's worth the fight. Because what you are fighting for and what you possess when you win victory is not even close to what God wants to give you.