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: Psalm 51. We'll probably finish this Psalm; we may spend one more week on it. I'm not sure yet. When you look at the focus of the heavenly hosts and the demonic host, I would say it's those, first of all, who reject Jesus Christ on a personal basis, to keep them rejecting Jesus Christ on a personal basis. That's the idea of the devil. The more people that he can bring to inhabit hell with him, the better.

What more applies to us tonight in this local assembly is to leave the church—and I'm not talking Grace Connection Church, but it would apply to Grace Connection Church—to leave the church in ineffective ruin. In other words, we live our lives far below the intentions that God and His Holy Spirit has for us to live our lives. Because we live our lives far below the intentions of God's best for us, the church does not make the impact individually and corporately like it was intended to be. One of the reasons why, in light of that video, was that closet. There's a lot of pain in the church. There is a lot of stuff in Christians' lives. Everyone here has a past, correct?

Guest (Male): Yeah.

Tim Kelley: And it's been perfect, right? I remember asking a question years ago in our church, "Who here has made a mistake?" and every hand went up. "Who here has made a mistake that changed and altered their life?" Every hand went up. Then some people put up legs and other arms and everything like that. When you look out over God's people, there's literally everyone in my church felt as though there were decisions made or things that they've done in their life, allowed to creep into their life, that have changed the course of their life and brought ramifications into their life which they were still dealing with or had to deal with up until that day. That's with God's people.

Where do we go from here? What does Satan use against the church? This quickly: number one, he uses apathy. Probably the number one thing he uses is apathy. Apathy in our faith towards God leaves us void of divine provisions. God gives us the word of God, the living word of God, Hebrews 4:12. But if we're apathetic towards the word of God, if we're apathetic towards the gathering of the saints, if we're apathetic towards the things of God, then the work of God and the transforming power of God's going to be hindered in our life. If we're not giving Christ proper attention in our life, then He spends all His time trying to get our attention instead of cleaning out the closet.

He wants to get into the closet and clean out the closet for you and for me, and that's a lifelong process, by the way. Let's make no mistake about it. Just when you think that you've got that closet cleaned out, you realize there's another closet. You clean that one out and you'll find closets and stuff in that closet the rest of your life. I understand that. But I'm talking about folks that don't even know there's a closet. They weren't following Jesus up the stairs and they're not even really in tune with what He's looking at. Apathy is one. Sin and the effects of sin, number two, he uses against the church.

Sin, present tense, things that tempt us and draw us into its snare today, and the effects of sin that linger in our lives, sometimes for years and decades and half a lifetime later. The effects of others' sin on us is another thing he uses. Victims of abuse, neglect, psychological disorders. We become legitimate victims, and other people's sin impacted us. When my wife and I ran the Christian school many years ago in the 80s, I forget how many children we had in our middle school, but in the process of the year, we found out that 60% of our girls in our middle school had been molested.

60%. Not one or two, 60%. We're talking about 10 or 12 girls that carry that probably to this day if the Lord has not been able to clean out that closet. Heartache, guilt, poor self-image, fear, depression, oppression, defeat. All of these are all the things the devil does to impact and suppress and oppress the church of Jesus Christ. He gets us so occupied looking at our needs and what we don't have and the pain that we never really quite see our potential and the majesty of His plan for our lives.

Tonight, we want to talk about what I want to call the product of mercy, and that's this great theme of restoration because we have a restoring God. I'm going to define that for you in a moment, but before I get into Psalm 51, I want to go to Exodus 34. David, as he is penning Psalm 51, fell with Bathsheba. We've chronicled that sin a lot in this miniseries on Psalm 51. He fell with Bathsheba; we understand that. But David also knew how to fall. He knew that the God that he violated—and he didn't just violate Him with the sin, he departed from God for a long time. It was a year before the sin and the repentance came, and we don't know how long his heart was gone before that.

He had been departing from fellowship with God for a long time. But he understood when Nathan came with his parable and he saw his sin and the Spirit of God illuminated it to him, he knew that there was a merciful God because he read the Scriptures he had at that day and he read Exodus 34:5 and 6. The Lord descended in the cloud—this is Moses on the mount, second time up—stood with him there, and proclaimed the name of the Lord. Anytime you see the word 'name' in the Hebrew, and really in the Greek too, it talks about God's character and nature. Or, as one of the rabbis said on that verse, it was God's reputation. God's saying, "This is how I want to be known."

Whenever you think of Me, this is what I want you to think. So when God's saying this here in Exodus 34, the Lord descended in the cloud and stood with him and proclaimed the name of the Lord. The Lord passed before him and proclaimed, "The Lord, the Lord, a God, Moses, this is how I want you to know Me." David knew these verses: "My God, merciful and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness." That's what I want you to know about Me. If you want to know how to translate verse 7 of Exodus 34, which I didn't put up there, come to the pizza thing after. We'll talk about that.

He knew that He was not a God who only forgave, but embedded in this God of mercy was a God that also restored. He brought back things that were lost. He had fallen far, but not just in his sin. David had fallen in self-deception, and it was this self-deception that allowed him to sin so flagrantly without even a thought of repentance until Nathan's parable. Psalm 51, verse 5, I'll just read through these: "Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me. Behold, You delight in truth and in inward being, and You teach me wisdom in the secret heart. Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean; wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow."

"Let me hear joy and gladness; let the bones that You have broken rejoice. Hide Your face from my sins; blot out all my iniquities." Beautiful verse here, we sang it last week: "Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me. Cast me not away from Your presence and take not Your Holy Spirit from me." He says this: "Restore to me the joy of Your salvation and uphold me with a willing spirit." The word "restore" there is shub, and it means to bring back that which was lost or damaged, or to bring back to the place of departure or the starting place, going back to the starting line again.

It has two applications. It talks about having rights restored and it talks about having possessions restored. With that in mind, I want you to go over to Nehemiah chapter 5. You don't have to turn there; I'll have the verses for you. But there's a great illustration of how this word applies that we'll find in Nehemiah chapter 5. In this particular portion, as you know, Nehemiah came back to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem. One of the things that had taken place there is there was a lot of people that sold their children and their family into slavery. The Jewish businessmen who had loaned them this money were charging them incredible usury and interest on their loans.

Some of the people had to mortgage their lands just so they could buy food and feed their families. They were paying on these lands they had at these incredible rates of interest. Nehemiah came and said, "What are we doing?" First of all, it violated the law of God. God never wanted the Israelites to make that much profit off other Israelites. It was okay to charge interest, but not the type of interest they were charging. One commentator estimated it to be about 20% or more interest. They had mortgaged their lands to richer brethren and even sold their children to pay the royal taxes just so they could live.

These were, first of all, legitimate debts. Illegitimate interest rates, but legitimate debts. They borrowed money so they could survive. They borrowed money to buy food. They borrowed money on these assets they had. These men weren't doing anything criminal per se outside of the fact that they violated the Lord and the different rates that God gave them. When Nehemiah came back and he saw this, this is what he said: "Return to them this very day their fields and their vineyards and their olive orchards and their homes and the percentage of money, grain, wine, and oil that you have been exacting from them."

We got together the rich people and the business people and the landowners, and I said, "This is what I want you to do. I want you to return everything that these people gave to you and you've been exacting from them." They responded and said, "We will restore these." Not only that, "We'll require nothing from them. We'll give it back to them." Satan hates grace. He hates this. He hates the fact that one can labor in the field for an hour and one can labor all day and get the same pay. He hates it when we don't have to pay like he would charge us to pay.

First Peter 5:10 says, "After you have suffered a little while, the God of all grace who has called you to His eternal glory will Himself restore, confirm, strengthen, and establish you." He'll rebuild you. When you've been in a bad place, He says, "I'm going to rebuild you." This particular church in 1 Peter chapter 5 was undergoing demonic persecution. They were ravaging them with physical attacks, attacking the church, killing people, and beating people. God says, "After you've suffered a while, I will restore him, confirm, strengthen, and establish you."