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 Kelly.

Tim Kelley: I'll be in Luke chapter 15 and somewhere in the middle of the message. Won't speak long today. We trimmed it down because of different events. Very excited about this series, "Discovering God". A.W. Tozer said something like this—I don't have the exact quote here—but he said there will be no more important thought that a man thinks than his thoughts about God, who God is, knowing who God is. That's why he wrote his book, *Knowledge of the Holy*.

Who is God? What do you think? As we said yesterday, when you think of God, do you think he's indifferent, judgmental, cruel, mean, doesn't really know what's going on in your life? What are your impressions when you think about God? Now last week, we saw how God self-described himself. Remember Exodus 33 and 34? If you weren't here, you can get that online. All these messages fit together like a piece of a puzzle, so it's important that you can hear them all.

When Moses asked, when God said he was going to follow Israel and Moses had God at a bargaining table, Moses asked this question: "God, will you show me your glory?" What a statement. "God, show me your glory. I want to see something in you. I want to know who you are. I don't want to be more than just the God of the burning bush, the God of the seven plagues, the God who parted the Red Sea. I've seen your power, but I want to know who are you. Show me what makes up your glory."

And God said, "Moses, I've heard your prayer and I'll do that. When you go up on Sinai, I'll stick your face in a rock because if you look on me, you'll die. You can't see me, but I'll pass before you and I will self-describe myself. I'll tell you who I am so you'll know who I am." And in a sense, he's saying, this is how I want you to know me. This is how I want you to think of me.

His glory was being described as merciful. Remember last week? Gracious—we went through all the words—long-suffering, the God with the big nose. Remember that? Committed to a steadfast *hesed*, an unchangeable love, loving kindness. That's how he described himself. He gave us a clear picture of how he wants himself to be known by his people.

Now I was thinking today, I just scribbled it down on my notes. I could actually write on this. I'm going to tell you a little story about this because I usually use my iPad. I usually don't have notes. That's so archaic—paper, pens. Where do you even find a pen? Who needs pens anymore? My goodness. So I use my iPad. I just need to type one finger at a time.

I used to work in the restaurant business, I told this story earlier, and I worked with this very eccentric chef down at Innisbrook years ago. Every time we did a wedding, he'd make two cakes. Which was great because at the end of the wedding, one cake would be in the employee's dining room and they'd cut that baby up and we'd have cake for dinner that night. It was wonderful.

This one particular time we're wheeling the cake out to the floor where the wedding was to set it up. There was a cable on the floor with one of those little rubber sleeves over it, and the little wire cart we're wheeling the cake out hit that cable and—bam!—four levels of wedding cake on the floor. Immediately claimed a five-second rule, picked it up off the floor and started eating it. And the chef, "Oh, no problem," because he always made a second cake. He had one in the background.

This past week, this is how sensitive I am to the God. I finished my notes. I send them up to the OneDrive, which is a Microsoft version of the iCloud. I send them up there because what happens, I send them up there, then I take my iPad and I suck them back down and I have them on my iPad. That's how I do it every Sunday. For some reason the servers—I didn't know this—they were down.

So when I sent it up there, it never reached. Or if it reached, it never came back down. And so I'm thinking as I'm leaving the office Friday, "You know, just in case we don't have a technological glitch here, I'm going to print my notes off. Backup." See? I was on it. I figured it out. So with that said, I'm just so proud of myself, that's why I brought that up. If not, I'd be really up here winging it because I would have no notes at all. My computer's not here, anything like that.

So we defined grace for you last week. That's in your program. We came to the same definitions we put on the screen, and that's in your program. We won't go through those, but those are something I want you to read and familiarize yourself with. So we ended up in Exodus 33 and 34 last week. Now I want to find the same God that self-described himself in Exodus 33 and 34. Let's find him in the New Testament: Titus chapter 2.

I have the single verses on the screen: "For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation for all men." So the grace of God has appeared. That word appeared there is *epiphaino* and it's a cool word. I use the illustration: if I had created a masterpiece—I'm a pretty good artist—and if I created a masterpiece on the table here and I put a sheet over it and you've come here to see my masterpiece and I take the sheet and I go "ta-da!" and I whip the sheet off and then you go, "Ah," you look at my masterpiece.

That's the word *epiphaino*. It means it's an unveiling to see something that wasn't seen prior to that. That's what that word means. So the grace of God has appeared. God has given us a whole new revelation of grace the world has not seen. Way beyond Exodus 33 and 34, God has shown us a whole another level of grace that up to this point Titus is speaking about has never been seen by humankind.

The grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation to all people. And we know that appearing of grace simply to be Jesus Christ. That appearing was Christmas morning when he was a child in Bethlehem in a manger. That little baby represented the grace of God in human form. So if we want to see what God looks like—every little kid has ever asked you, "What does God look like?"—we want to see what he looks like.

If we want to see what his values are, if we want to see what his priorities are, we want to see what's really important to the God, how he deals with people, how he thinks of people, how he reacts to people, what he thinks of human weakness, if we want to see all those things about God, then we simply look into the person of Jesus Christ. You want to see what God really deems important? We read Matthew 5, 6, and 7, the Sermon on the Mount, and we'll see what God deems as really important.

So we look at Jesus, how he lived his life, how he dealt with people, what he taught. And that's what we want to do in the rest of this series in "Discovering God". John 1:1: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." John denotes the essential—this is Thayer's, a lexicon guy—the word Word there is *logos*, and I'll just cut out the technical stuff. It means he was an expression of God, the essence of God.

So in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was God, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He points to Jesus the Messiah, the second person of the Godhead, who shone forth conspicuously from his words and his deeds. So according to John 1:1, God and Jesus are the same. If I want to see God and I can't—even Moses didn't see him, remember, he stuck his head in a rock—he said, "If you look on me, you'll die."

But now, God sent Jesus in human form so we could look at Jesus, especially in that generation, and learn about who God is through watching how Jesus Christ lived. Verse 14: "And the Word became flesh"—Jesus—"and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory"—remember, "show me your glory," his prayer—"glory as the only Son of the Father, full of grace and truth."

John 1:16: "For from his fullness we have received grace upon grace." I'm going to stop there. I have verse 17 and 18 for you in the same passage. But wave after wave—this word fullness here is an incredible word, *pleroma*. It's as rich as any word in the New Testament. It means the very essence, the fullness, all that God is. From his fullness we have received grace and grace.

Here's Jesus, the fullness of God. From him, we have received grace upon grace. Now the beautiful word picture there, I think it was Lenski, the old Greek guy, Lutheran Greek guy, brings this up. If you were to go to the beach now—some of you like to go to the beach and watch the sunset—when you're at the beach, you see these beautiful little waves just come up on the seashore and the seashore. And those waves are there, they're going on right now as we're in here. They're going on all day today and they might be big waves, little waves, but there will always be waves.

And if you traveled, you never go to the beach—I very rarely go to the beach—the waves don't stop. The waves just keep coming and coming and coming. Well, that's the same principle with God's grace. There's wave after wave after wave of God's grace. It just keeps coming and coming and coming. It never stops. So he's full of grace and truth and a few verses later, we receive grace upon grace, wave after wave of grace with no limit and no end.

When we are gone, the waves are still coming. When we are attentive and busy at work, the waves are still coming. There's always grace extended towards the human race. Verse 17: "For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God, but only the only God who is at the Father's side has made him known."

Again, just a little bit of insight into this. That word "made him known" is one word. It's the word *exegeomai* where we get the English word exegesis. When you, if you studied the Bible at any level beyond the surface level, you know that term, what that term means. That you go in, like I've done already, and I've shown you what certain words mean and you go into the original setting, the original languages, the historical setting, the different tenses and the moods of the word, the context of the passage that is being discussed or looked at.

This is exegesis, you're exegeting the scriptures. It means to make fully known. It actually sort of comes out right here in the translation. Thus, the God of Exodus 33 and 34 is the same as our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. He is God fully known. He's Jesus, I think it's Kenneth Wuest said this, is the exegesis of God. You want to see God? Look at Jesus. You want to see how God thinks? Look at Jesus. You want to see his value system? You look at Jesus.

For the rest of the series, we're going to look at some of the things that Jesus taught, maybe a few of his miracles, maybe at the end of the series, and things he did in light of the culture he was in. Some of these things you've heard many times if you've been walking with God for a long time, but I want to frame these into a New Testament culture that maybe you haven't quite seen the same yet.

So with that said, in Luke 9:51, we see that Jesus was on his way to Jerusalem. He said he set his face like flint in whatever translation you want to use. Now he was always being pursued by the Pharisees, looking for anything that they could accuse him of. If you work in the secular world, most of you do—and hopefully this doesn't happen in churches, doesn't happen here—but maybe you've worked with people in the office that are just waiting for you to make a mistake.

They would love to expose your mistake. They'd love to show the people that they're a little smarter than you, that they're not as good as you, you're not as good as them, or whatever. And they're just mean, self-centered people, but they pursue you. They're just waiting for you to step up or mix up so they can go, "Aha, caught you!" Or maybe tell on you, or maybe reveal something to you, maybe not cover you. They could just lift a finger just to help you a little bit, but they won't do it.

It's the way of the world, unfortunately. Not everyone's like that, but you know what I'm talking about. That's the Pharisees. They're looking at Jesus: "We want this guy to screw up. We want him to say something so we can get him. We want him to contradict himself. We want to prove that he's a hypocrite. We want to test him in the scriptures to see if he really knows what he's talking about. We're going to follow him around. We're going to ask him questions, hard questions, wait for life situations to ask these questions because we're going to, at some point, we're going to find something that we can get this guy and kill him for it." This is his audience for Luke chapter 15.