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: X-ray questions. Why do you pray for? Whoa, that's a big one. That one got me because my prayer life starts with me and sometimes ends with me. And that's okay because we cast our cares on Jesus, First Peter 5:7. But if my prayer life never elevates out of my own world and never sees the kingdom at hand and the bigger things that are facing us as God's people, what do we pray for?

X-ray question number six, what do we see as our rights? What do we feel entitled to? Ever feel like you got the raw end of the deal? I get like that all the time. I battle with this one. God, I have the white hat on. They have the black hat on. How come they seem to be winning this battle? How come people are affirming those people when they did what they did to me? How come my friends are liking them? I don't want anyone to like them because of what they did to me. And my friends like them, that's not right. I'm entitled to this, right? Haven't I been faithful? Boy, that's a trap.

X-ray questions. Last question, on your deathbed, what would you sum up your life as worthwhile? What has given you meaning? On your deathbed, how will you summarize your life? X-ray questions. These questions and others are a peek behind the curtain of what really drives our engine. They can give us an indication of what we are slaves to or, as we said in the sake of the message, who's your daddy?

When we answer some of those questions and others and have a really stark view or look in the mirror to see who we really are, we can find out what controls us, what dominates us, who is our master, who's our daddy. So, then it says we can be a slave to sin, those things that want to dominate us, or we can be a slave to God. Or what in this passage, you can't separate being a slave to God, it appears two or three times from this word, obey.

I want to look at that word for a little bit because we have a tendency to have a harsh austerity to that word. But the word "obey", hupakouo, really means that you listen, you hear. You hear what God's saying. It means you subordinate yourself to what God is saying. The root word for this Greek word means it's somebody if you're a butler or a porter, your job is to answer the door. Someone rings the doorbell, ding-dong, and you open the door. Yes, that's your job. If I didn't answer the door, I'd be fired because that's my job.

So, from that sense, the connotation of what it means to obey, the obedient person is listening to what God has said and is saying with the intent to obey it. Now, the first place that we know He's going to speak to us is through this. That's the first place. This is the easy place. And I have to say this, I'm more an objective than a subjective guy. I don't like the subjective things. I see so many people calling things from God, which is really not from God, but from themselves. Their little minds make it up sometimes. So I'm a little bit nervous about ever doing that myself.

But in my life, when God has spoken to me the greatest, it's always been with the Word of God wrapped around it. Recently, three and a half years ago when we lost our daughter and I was seeking fervently for God to speak to me, and I was asking questions about why and why this happened, why He let it happen. Those answers never came. But He spoke to me very clearly about what He wanted from me, and He did it through the Word of God, Hebrews 10:34 and 35, Hebrews 12:1, Isaiah 57:1, Second Corinthians 12:9 and 10.

He spoke to me. He gave me direction, courage in some ways and strength, but every time it was attached to the Word of God. So the first thing that we see is we have the Word of God, and it's easy to see that and read it. If we don't read it, then we don't know what's in it. But it tells us how to live. It tells us how to have a family. It tells us our value system, priority system. It tells us how to be husbands and wives and children and how to manage our money and what to eat, what not to. It really tells us everything we need to know about life.

So the slave of God, the first thing he does is submit himself to God and endeavors to obey that. Now then there's the subjective aspect of that too. In other words, when God speaks to me, God may lead certain people to do certain things that's not necessarily in the scriptures, but He may direct people into a certain direction and to respond to that and to obey that. I know when I had my confrontation with the Lord back three and a half years ago, I was faced with a decision. I could obey what the Lord showed me to do or I could retreat. My inclination because of my own personal devastation was to retreat.

So you're faced with that decision of hearing God knocking at the door. Let me just say a little bit more about this and move on. Be ready to hear. When you open the scriptures, be ready to hear. Be ready to listen. Be ready to hear what the Lord may want to speak to you, encourage you, convict you, challenge you, inspire you, whatever it is for you that given day or that given moment of your life, be ready to hear.

Number two, show up to hear. If I never open it, it can't speak to me. If I don't give myself over to reading it and learning it and letting it invade my life, invade my mind, then I can never probably grab the wisdom I need to grab out of it. I never will. So give yourselves over to it. You don't have to become a preacher, but you open up opportunity for God to speak to you. Being a slave to God, a doulos to God, would create a new value system. We talked with Pastor Burns a little bit before church about this. The things important to God become important to us.

His desires become my desires, or at least they're on my radar screen. The Kingdom of God becomes on my radar screen. If the Kingdom of God is never on my radar screen, maybe it's just business or it's just this over here or a hobby or whatever it is, but the Kingdom of God and the things of God never come on my radar screen, then there's something amiss, spiritually speaking, in my heart. I'm a slave to something. I'm not a slave to God, but I'm a slave to something else. You'll have to figure out what that is. But if I'm not a slave to God, I'm a slave to something else.

Something else has dominance over me, controls me, runs my life, dictates my life, dictates its values to me. I think it's just normal, but the scriptures say it's coming under being a slave to sin. That's what the scriptures are saying. God not only becomes our value system, He becomes our source. He becomes our go-to destination when life happens, when we hurt. I'm not against going to other human beings because we will. I will, and you will. God gave us each other in the body of Christ. But very honestly, though, we might do ourselves well by going to God first.

Start there and work your way out. He may bring people into your life. We start there, and He becomes my source. I may be loved and comforted and accepted by people and my friends and that's just as much God as anything else. But when life happens, I want Him to be my go-to place. Now let me say this, and I'm going to get on the last point and we'll close and go into dedicating babies. This doesn't mean you're not human and you become a scripture-quoting machine. God, as I said earlier, made us human.

Stuff happens in life, some of it's devastating. And people face things and people have problems that we don't have problems with. How come he has a problem with that? I don't have a problem with that. How come that person struggles with that? I don't know why they don't just stop it. That's what they've got to do. Because we have this little almost cocky legalistic authority type of thing and we become this. Just be very careful that it's okay to be human. I've been whacked up the side of the head so many times with this thing. People, and not with actual Bible, say, "You know, all things work together for good," smack. What was that? A bruise from a King James.

We're human beings. We hurt. We feel. We struggle. We battle. We lose those battles. We get up, we dust ourselves off, we move on because of the grace of God. We get up again, we fall again, we get up again, we fall again, we get up again. We lose some more battles. We win some battles. We lose some battles. It's called life. The key is we're in the battle. I'm aware of it. I'm aware of the race. I know I'm in the race. And sometimes I run really well. Sometimes I stagger, sometimes I limp, sometimes I run on my stubs. But we stay in the race.

And we know that at some point this race will end and it'll be worth running it. It doesn't mean again we become this scripture-quoting robot. I know I'm weak, wounded, and sometimes very wimpy. But I also know where my ultimate answer is. Now, with this said, I'm going to close with this because what I've left you with so far here is God is good, you are bad, try harder. That's not where we want to be because God doesn't leave us to our own devices on this. He empowers us to live this life. He gives us a life to live this life.

Let me show you what I mean. First John 3:9 says this, "No one born of God makes a practice of sinning, for God's seed abides in him." That word "seed" is the Greek word sperma where we get the English word "sperm", God's life, God's seed. He cannot keep on sinning because he has been born, a brand new life, born again if you want to use that term, John 3:3, born of God. First John 5:4, "For everyone who has been born of God overcomes the world and this is the victory that has overcome the world, even our faith."

So there's this mystery of redemption when we become born again, we're born again with a new life. This life doesn't share power with the old life. This life supplants the power of the old life. Let me show you what I mean. Romans 8:1 and 2, "There is therefore no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus." Verse two of Romans 8, "For the law of the spirit of life," that's the new life, "the law of the spirit of life has set you free from the law in Jesus Christ from the law of sin and death."

So the law of the spirit of life has set me free from the law of sin and death. That's saying that we're under the law of sin and death, then I meet Christ and His new seed, His new life comes in me. So now the law, and let me slow myself down, that word "law" there can be translated different ways, nomos, but in this particular verse and other places in Romans, it means you could translate it "governing principle". The governing principle of sin and death has been supplanted by the governing principle of life.

So, yes, I was a mess. Yes, I am depraved. Yes, I am a slave under sin, but now I have a new life inside of me. Now I have a new person, a new entity inside of me. And I'm no longer subject to the dictates of my old man. I have all the authority and all the ability to gain victory in every area, my friends, of my life. The Christian in the mystery of redemption, we're born again of a new life and it's available to anyone.

Let me read you a quote by Dodson then we'll close in a few moments. "Paul's thundering negative is followed by gospel logic," he's commenting on this Romans passage. "If we have died to sin with Christ and received His new life, we've died to sin singular, the whole prevailing nature of sin, with Christ and received His new life, then as new men, sin will bother us to the point of repentance. That's what sin will do, bring us to a point where we say, 'God, I don't want this.' For disciples, sin is a theological absurdity. New men don't live like old men, hobbling around on canes when they can be running marathons."

So who's your daddy? Who are you going to give dominion to your life to? Whose control will you be under? Whose dominance will dominate you? God's best will always be better than our attempts to find meaning outside of Him. He goes, "I want to be your daddy. Be a slave to God," as Paul said in Romans chapter six. "Be my slave. Come under my dominion because my burden is easy and my yoke is light. Being a slave to me will not be difficult. It'll be transformational. Being a slave to me will not be burdensome. It'll be life-giving. It will not make you heavy-hearted, it'll make you lighthearted."

Being a slave to me, God says, will not take meaning out of your life. It'll put meaning in your life. Being a slave to me won't rob you of anything. It's just going to impart more to you because I love my slaves and I'm for my slaves. And just as I'm the master and you're the slave, I'm the daddy and you're my child. And I love you and I'm for you and I'm behind you and I want to give you the very, very best that I have for you. And my friends, that isn't what sin has. That's not the best. That's make-believe. That's the world's best. That's the devil's best. That's not the best.

God says, "I want to give you the best that I have. It won't be what you think it is. It won't be what comes natural to you sometimes. But I promise you, if you'll just hear what I have to say and come under my covering, listen to what I have to say and obey and come under my covering, I'll give you a quality of life that you can get no other place."