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: We've been working a series called "The Graceful Life" and inside the Graceful Life there's four messages, actually it's going to be five now. It was Grace 101 and that was two weeks ago and then I didn't really finish that message so I did Grace 101.5 and I'm on a radio station but then we finished that. Now we're graduating. We've got done with our freshman year in Grace University and we're going into our sophomore year. This is Grace 201 now.

The Graceful Life, we've had that on the screen, but I don't have it but it's in your program. It's been in your program for months. It's something we wrote to define our church. That's the Graceful Life. You can read that on your own. We're not going to go over it today. But we want to look today and just sort of begin to see things again up the way that we view this incredible gospel.

Now before I do that, if you are 45 years or older, then you might recognize some of these things. If you're under 45 years, then I'll wait for Diane to go by. Okay, now I can start again. Then just bear with us or go to the men's or ladies' room because we'll be over this pretty quick.

Now see what you remember. Remember this? "Aye-aye-aye, I am the Frito Bandito!" Frito chips! That was 1965, I think, that came out. So you remembered that. How many remember something that happened in 1965? I wasn't really born yet, but just kidding.

How about this one? "Plop, plop, fizz, fizz, oh what a relief it is!" What are we talking about there? Alka-Seltzer. See, you guys watch way too much TV. Way too much TV.

"Let's get Mikey to try it. He doesn't like anything. Hey, Mikey, he likes it!" Life Cereal. Way too much TV you guys are watching. "I'm cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs!" That's right. Great nutritious breakfast that built our bones and rotted our teeth.

What did Mr. Whipple squeeze? Charmin. You guys have steel traps of memories. It's amazing what you recall here. Okay, "Two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions on a sesame seed bun." Big Mac. Did you know what that was? You didn't know what that was, did you? No, she didn't. Little kids, commercials today, probably if it's on Facebook you'd know it but no.

So with that said, it's amazing. I forget everything. I really do, worse now than ever in my life. I forget things, important things that happened, important things I forget. Things that happened a few weeks ago and they say, "Pastor Kelley, I told you this," and I'm looking at them. "You did? Really? I don't remember that." I don't honestly remember that.

But I remember "Plop, plop, fizz, fizz, oh what a relief it is." I remember that. Something about that got into my brain. "Two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions on a sesame seed bun." Forty-five years later, I'm still saying it. And I got it down. It's sick. It just really is. It's sick.

So we have defined grace again over the past two weeks and I've tried hard these past few weeks to encourage you to look upon the surface of what you think we know, the theology of grace, the 130 odd verses of grace and see grace for something much more than a theology, much more than a doctrine, but something that actually impacts your day-to-day walk with God and your day-to-day walk in this thing called life.

This great gospel is packed with eternal objective truths. We preach about them all the time because you have to paint the picture before you can understand what you're embracing. So we paint the picture of the word of God and everything the cross did for you and I and for the whole world. Whether it's true or not, those truths are still true.

But now the challenge is to take this objective truth and make it our subjective truth. To take this positional truth that we have and make it our experiential truth. How does it impact my life? I've studied the scriptures for 30 years, plus 30 years, and I can honestly say that I'm still learning some of these truths I've been teaching experientially and sometimes I think I'm way behind the curve on them.

See my experience in life will always work from the inside out, while religion or Churchianity tries to work from the outside in. You change the outside then nobody will know what's really going on on the inside. And however, the outside is never a doorway to the inside. But the inside will birth the outside.

When it's outside in, that's religion. When it's inside out, that's transformation. And there's a big difference. One lasts, one brings life, one brings spiritual freedom, and the other puts you in a box. Doing the word needs to be preceded by thinking the word. Allowing this pretty picture of theology and this pretty picture of doctrine to become more than just a pretty picture and have it something that impacts our lives.

Dr. Jack Haskins, he is a professor at the University of Tennessee. He spent 12 years researching the effects of media on how people think. One of his studies attempted to determine the impact of a five-minute radio program that was filled with negative news stories. Seventeen children die, an earthquake that killed thousands, riots of a large city, so on. Five minutes of Fox News.

One group listened to the negative programs like this daily, while a control group listened to more positive and uplifting news. After evaluating the listeners who were daily exposed to five minutes of bad news, Haskins discovered four discernible effects between the two groups. Number one, the people who listened to the negative news were more depressed than before. That's hard to believe, isn't it? Think of that.

I watch news every day. I read the headlines, usually I'll read Fox and CNN and the New York Times or something like that every morning. I never watch much TV anymore. I never feel that uplifted. Maybe you've watched Bill O'Reilly's show or one of these guys, and I don't have anything against them, and they're screaming at one another and they're yelling at one another and they're contradicting and cutting each other off from the verbal knees. Don't you feel better after that? Doesn't that just make you feel really good?

Second thing, they believed the world was a negative place, the people who watched these news. Number three, they were less likely to help others, sort of were in a "circle the wagon" mentality. Then they began to believe what they heard would soon happen to them. Fear.

Five minutes a day, that's all it took. And then after a five or six year period of time, the people that listened to positive news had just the exact opposite response. Simply by receiving and reflecting on the information from the radio program, their perceptions of the world and their outlook on life was adversely affected. Their concept of reality was shaped by their thoughts. In other words, if I want to bring it to another term we all know, we are what we eat.

Now I weigh about 184 pounds, 183 pounds give or take a pound here or there. I want to weigh 172 to 173. So I go into this elaborate workout regime that I do every day, six days a week. The name of the program I do is called "Insanity." It's borderline insanity when you do it. And I do it religiously. I work every program, every workout. I do everything.

After doing it for a month, you know what I weigh? 182. Haven't lost an ounce. You know why? Because I work out, I take my pomegranate cranberry juice, lemon juice, and water and my nutritional drink, drink that down and eat the pizza I had from the night before. That's why I weigh 182. It's no rocket scientist there. It's I am what I eat. And I can work and that's my excuse for working out so I can eat last night's pizza again.

As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he. What I put before my eyes and what I embrace, and I'm not just talking about quickly but something deeper than the surface, is what I become. Paul writing from prison said in Philippians Chapter 4, "Finally brethren, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think on these things."

The word "think" there means to make a subject and careful reflection and contemplation. To meditate on something so it'll be fully understood, to make a habit of thought. These are just different tidbit definitions from different resources. To make a habit of thought. And this thinking needs to be intentional. That's very important. In other words, I intend to think this way. I practice to think this way. I rehearse, as we've said recently, to think this particular way.

The Amplified Bible translates it this way, "Think continually on these things, center your mind on them and implant them in your heart." So we think continually on these things. What things? These truths. Some of the truths we had the last two weeks and some of the truths that whatever you read in the scriptures in the morning or whatever we feed ourselves with, these truths.

Right now in my life, I'm studying the love of God. This has nothing to do with what we do here, just for my life. I'm memorizing a verse a day on the love of God. And I'll get these verses down pat, I'll recite them for 30 days and forget them 30 days after that and start the whole process over again. But it's the process. I want to think, I want to meditate on these things.

Let me read you these verses. This is a pretty amazing principle here because we have this thing in our human lives that we call familiarity. We get used to stuff. We get used to people, situations, certain things. It loses its glamour after a while. Just look at marriage. Do I have to say more? You met that Prince Charming and he was gleaming. Yeah, he was whoa. But now after 30 years, 25 years of marriage, he's I'm not sure what he's doing but it ain't gleaming anymore unless it's his bald head. Maybe that's what you're talking about gleaming. He doesn't have any hair anymore. Whatever. It changes. There's something called familiarity.

It's doubtful we would ever get married if we treated our spouses like we treat them now when we were dating. There'd be no marriages. We'd be dumping each other like wholesale, just like that. I say that because we get familiar with this gospel. We get familiar with the word, the name of grace, the finished work of Christ, mercy, justification, these great truths of the faith. We can rattle them off sometimes and we can talk about them, we can even define them in some good case scenarios, but do they really probe my inner man and become something more than knowledge to me? They become experiential knowledge.

There's a couple different words in the Greek New Testament. 1 Peter 1:10, "This salvation was something that even the prophets wanted to know more about when they prophesied about this gracious salvation prepared for you." So look at what he's saying here. The prophets wanted to know more about what they prophesied. This generous, gracious salvation prepared for you.

Peter is saying to the recipients of this letter, what you're living in now, the prophets of old talked about and prophesied about. You're living in their prophecies. You're living in their dream, if you could use that term. They wondered what time or situation the Spirit of Christ within them was talking about when he told them in advance about Christ's suffering and his great glory afterward.

They were told that their message was not for themselves, the prophets, but for you. And we could say this to us. Their message was for us. And now this good news, the gospel, has been announced to us by those who preached in the power of the Holy Spirit sent from heaven. It is all so wonderful, watch what Peter says here, that even the angels are eagerly watching these things happen.

Understand what he just said. Think of this. The gospel that rocked the earth, turned the world upside down, rocked heaven too. The angels, unredeemed beings, looking into the human race, looks into you, the church. Because living inside of you is the Holy Spirit.

And the angels who do not sin, the ones that did are no longer on the good side, and they look at us who sin on a regular basis, who live in a squalor of man's depravity, they look and see, "I want to watch redemption alive in these people called the church, these called-out ones." When the God of grace, the God that we worship, the God that we say holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty, He lives inside of those people. Does He know what He's doing?