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: That’s not a work through you or for you. That’s a work in you, and it’s all in you. It’s talking about in you. The Apostle Paul is saying this gospel can do something in you you never thought it could do. This gospel can set a captive free. This gospel can heal the wounded. This gospel can buy back lost years. It’s a work in you that makes the gospel glorious.

Yes, you’re redeemed. Yes, you’re bought back. Yes, your name is written on the Lamb’s Book of Life. Yes, the wrath of God has been satisfied by the blood of Christ. And yes, you’ll live forever in eternity in heaven. But that doesn’t mean we’re stuck in the mire of life now or the mire of sin now. That doesn’t mean that we have to live with the pain that this life afflicts upon us now. God’s given us an option. He says, "No, I have a different gospel. This gospel goes on the inside, not just the outside." It goes on the inside. We’ll dress the inner stuff that sin has left residue in your life about.

He says to preach the acceptable year of the Lord. Many of you know what that means. It’s the year of Jubilee. Some of you are familiar with the year of Jubilee in Jewish history and festivals. Every 50 years would be the year of Jubilee. They’d blow a trumpet, and three or four things would happen. Going back to the culture back then, if I couldn’t pay my bills, I would take my child, sister, or brother, and I’d mortgage them. I’ll let my child be your slave if you give me this money. I’d mortgage a family member, like my daughter, to somebody if it meant economic gain. It wasn’t preferred, but it’s what they had for equity or capital.

So, they would mortgage them out. Every 50 years was Jubilee. Let me go through it and explain it to you. There would be the liberty of Hebrew slaves, which we just discussed. There would be the remission of all debts. And number three, the restoration of possessions to the original families. Leviticus 25:8-13. You can look that up. So, they basically say on the year of Jubilee, he is setting all Hebrew slaves free. Those who were mortgaged into slavery because of the need to do that and because of life, they’d be bought back. They’d be free from that point. Any monies borrowed or land rented would go back to the original owner on the year of Jubilee.

There probably wasn’t a lot of business done in year 45. This would go beyond generations. So, on the year of Jubilee, if I owned a piece of land and I had to sell it just to make ends meet, that land comes back to me. It becomes my land again because it was given to me initially in an inheritance. Then the restoration of possessions—whatever I had to mortgage, whatever I had to give away, whatever I had to sell—is given back to me. Jesus said this is the acceptable year. It means the time when it would be acceptable to God to proclaim such a message, or agreeable to Him. In other words, it’s the gospel.

This is the acceptable year. I’m the one. I’m here proclaiming that I am Isaiah 61:1 and 2. I’m proclaiming a Jubilee, but not a Jubilee for the nation of Israel. This is a Jubilee for your soul, a Jubilee for your inner man where stuff that you had to mortgage will be given back to you. If you’ve mortgaged your purity because of the need for love and affirmation, your purity is given back to you because of my blood. If I mortgaged my self-image as payment for my past sins, you are no longer your sin. You’re somebody that lives above your sin. You’re no longer the thing that you think defines you. It doesn’t define you anymore. I define you. My cross defines you. So, it’s Jubilee in your soul.

There is a mortgage of peace and hope for the great heartache and loss of your life. Yes, this loss, and yes, it’s real. But I’ve bought it. I’m the Messiah not only of the world but of your soul. And I want to change the way you think about me. I want to change the way you think about the Father, because I’ll never reject you. I’ll never turn my back on you. I’ll never lie to you. I’ll never let you down. You’ll never be anything but perfect and precious and loved in my sight.

So, he proclaims his mission: poor, brokenhearted, bruised, blind, captive. Apply to anyone? Do you fit into any of those categories? Maybe you’re a young person and you say, "No, I'm really pretty good." Don't worry. A couple more birthdays, a decade or so, and you’ll say, "Where’s that CD? Let me listen to that message again." You don’t look for pain, it’ll find you. Don’t bring it on yourself. It will find you just fine.

I value Achor, Hosea 2:14 and 15. Achor meaning a place of trouble, a place of pain. I love what the prophet says will become a door of hope. The very place which I thought was lost, God can bring back. This pain, this confusion, this loss, this hopelessness, this life of unmet desires—fill in the blank for you—is never wasted. Jesus will never waste any of your pain. He’ll never waste any of your loss. If you had the most horrific childhood of all childhoods, he won’t waste that pain in your life.

If you have grown up and raised yourself, lonely, don't know where you belong, he’ll take that and make you part of his family. Whatever it is that sin has done to your soul—and I’m talking about the nature of sin in the world, not your individual sin—whatever sin has done in your soul, there is nothing beyond the reach of his gospel. There is nothing that’s gone on in your life, nothing that you have endured, nothing that you face, nothing that you have a hard time processing that he can’t turn into an asset.

Philippians 1:6. I won’t preach much longer. I’m sure of this, that he who has begun a good work in you—that’s the day we get saved—will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ. He’s begun a good work. That good work starts the moment you’re born again, and he says, "I'm going to bring it to completion the day of Jesus Christ." What’s the day of Jesus Christ? When you die, or prayerfully he comes back and gets us. I’ll take when he comes back and gets us, but in case we don’t make it that long, when I die, that’s the day of Jesus Christ.

I heard a Christian tell me recently—I shared this at the men’s breakfast—"I don’t know how God puts up with me." In his particular case, I didn’t either. His name will be in next week’s program just for the fun of it. It's really interesting. God puts up with us because he sees an end product. You see, he sees us as justified while we’re being sanctified. God sees me in a finished work, not an incomplete work. It’s amazing how he does it. He sees us in his Son, Jesus Christ. It has to be that way, or we couldn’t be saved unless that was the case. We stand inside his Son’s perfect righteousness, so we stand in unabashed favor of God. Romans 5:2, we stand in grace.

But then this process of life comes into our souls, and we come to our Christian faith in Joel 2:25 with all these wasted years and the palmworm and the cankerworm eaten up the years of our life. There’s pain, areas I’m not even sure where there’s pain, there’s loss, there’s grief, there’s deep needs, unmet needs, because we’re human. We’re body, soul, and spirit. We’re not robots. We’re human. He made us this way. He made us to be loved. He made us to be affirmed. He made us to be appreciated. He wired us that way. And that’s how it was prior to Adam and Eve and the apple. Those needs didn't go away. The core body, soul, and spirit of humanity is still the same. He says, "Now I want to bring it back."

How do we get here? A practical part and we’ll close. I had a lot more to say but I’ll close with this: self-honesty. Probably the biggest thing that keeps us from getting healed, my friends, is self-deception. We ignore the wound. We ignore the need. Maybe there's something deep in my heart that I grieve with and all I do is look on the horizontal of my life. I have this problem because of that person or that person or that person or that person, all these people, whatever it is. It doesn't matter how the wound got there. It really doesn't. It matters what the solution is, and that's with you and Jesus Christ.

You understand when I allow God through his word to investigate me, Hebrews 4:12. I examine myself. Let me see if I use that word "examine." It means to direct them to self-examination, to look within themselves, to try, prove, and this is what I like, to recognize their own souls. One other put it this way, the word "examine," this is in 2 Corinthians 13:5, by the way, if I didn’t give that to you, that they should take a survey in their own soul with the Holy Spirit’s help. "God, why am I this way? Why am I skeptical? Please, Father, take this. I give it to you. Why am I bitter? God, take my bitterness. Take my resentment."

"I don’t want to know myself after the pre-cross. I want to know myself after the cross. God, I don’t have the ability. There’s not people in my life that maybe affirms me or loves me like I would love to be affirmed and loved, but I know that you do. Heal this area of my life. Heal the place where I'm captive. Heal the place where I'm poor. Heal the place where I'm bruised. Heal the place where I'm brokenhearted. Heal the place where I'm blind. I can't heal myself. And I understand, Father, that’s your ministry."

"You came so I could have what? Life." That’s not bios life, B-I-O-S in the Greek. That’s zoe life, Z-O-E. It’s totally different words, totally different significance. Bios is physical life. The physical life is wounded, but zoe life comes from heaven. You’ve come to give me life. Not to keep me from pain, because pain will find me in life. Not to keep me from wounding, because I’ve been wounded and I’ll probably be wounded again. Not to keep me from loss, because I’ve suffered loss and I’ll probably, as the time ticks by, suffer more loss.

But you have come to heal the brokenhearted, to set me free on the inside, to take the deep sigh of grief and understand that someday I’ll be forever with you and these things will be gone. You will give me hope when I have none. You’ll give me courage when I am a coward. You’ll make me fearless when I have been fearful. You’ll give me the sense of love and approval when I sense rejection and loneliness. You’ll take everything that the world has stolen from me and replace it with what you have given me.