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: I want to requote you Lewis Sperry Chafer's thing we've talked about numerous times. I think it's an important quote and it gives you a little bit of a background into where we've been talking about. Sperry Chafer was a disciple and a contemporary with C.I. Scofield. He started Dallas Theological Seminary and wrote this wonderful seven-volume (depending on what version you have of it; mine's seven volumes) set of systematic theology books. It is my favorite systematic theology that I use.

He said this: "Next to the study of the cross, the work of the cross and the person of Christ, there is no more important study for the Christian than the study of spiritual warfare." That's quite a statement coming from a theologian such as him. Now what happens in culture today and in Christian culture today is we take spiritual warfare and we sort of glamorize it a little bit sometimes.

We either ignore it and pretend like it doesn't exist or doesn't happen or is just something for somebody else, or we glamorize it. We look for demons everywhere. Flip Wilson: "The devil made me do it." Remember that one? Some of you don't; you're too young. But we take usually one of those two extremes. So we need to take a biblical look at spiritual warfare, and we already have been doing that. Now we want to just continue with that theme a little bit today and see what the Word of God has to say about this.

Now, this is a quote by a guy named Pedro Okoro. Let's just call him Pedro. "Spiritual warfare is very real. There is a furious, fierce, and ferocious battle raging in the realm of the spirit between the forces of God and the forces of evil. Warfare happens every day all the time. Whether you believe it or not, you are in a battlefield. You are in warfare." Now what I would say is that is absolutely true, but what I would say to that to maybe add to that just a little bit: not only are you in a battle or in a battlefield, you are the battlefield.

It's more than just being on the battlefield. You are the battlefield. Now don't get me wrong. I think about me. Why's Satan worry about me? I'm not that worrisome to him. I'm a pretty low-key guy and I'm not really leading the charge. I don't know why he would be so interested in me or you for that matter. And the simple answer to that is he's not.

He's interested in God. He's interested in replacing and supplanting God, Jesus Christ, off His throne. You just happen to be the recipient of God's love, affection, approval, and justification. So because our relationship with Jesus Christ is as intimate and close as it is, he's after you. But you individually—God loves you, I want him. God's for you, I have a target. And the moment you became part of God's family, my friend, the target went on your back. You are Battlefield Church.

We call this series Subversive. It's the process by which the values and principles of a system in place are contradicted or reversed. The thing about being subversive is it's usually not something that's overt. It's not something that's noticed. It's something very quiet. You're being subverted very quietly. I'm going to date some people here. Jay was telling me, brought up a point after the first service. Who remembers the show back from, I guess the 60s or 70s, It Takes a Thief?

Some of you remember that. Al Mundy. Now if you don't remember that, you're not even that young. You're still sort of old. But Al Mundy. Me and my brother used to play—my brother especially because he's much older than me—we used to play It Takes a Thief all the time. I forget what we'd be stealing, but we'd be playing it. Now today there's a show out there, some of you might know this show. It's on currently called White Collar. Ever see White Collar?

One person in the first service, a couple other—okay, four or five people saw White Collar. Jeanette watches it in between scratching lottery tickets. White Collar. Now I watched White Collar. In fact, I watched all the back episodes on Netflix. It's sort of a more clean show. It's about a thief. His name is Neal Caffrey, who wears a really cool hat. And he's a master thief. There's one FBI guy that could catch him. His name was Peter. And Peter caught Neal one time and Neal went to prison.

And then Neal made a deal with Peter. He says, "Look at, Peter, if you bust me out of here, if you get me out of prison, I'll work for the FBI and I'll tell you how thieves operate and I'll help you solve these crimes that you have a hard time solving because I know how a thief works. I'm a thief." So they put an ankle bracelet on, and now Neal has a desk in the FBI in New York's office and he works solving crimes of thieves.

Now when you look at Neal, Neal's an interesting character. That's why it's a cute show. He works for the FBI but he's never really quite out of trouble. He's always looking for another angle, another piece of art to steal or partake of. He's always looking for one more big score. But he doesn't want to get in trouble. He still works for the FBI and he does a good job for the FBI. He likes Peter, but he's still a thief. The thief part of him never really quite leaves Neal in the course of the show.

Now if you look at Neal, if you bump into him, he'll pick your pocket. He's an amazing pickpocket. Pull anything out of your pockets and you won't even know it's missing. He uses disguise. He'll disguise himself to walk through a crowd of people and not be noticed. He's a thief. He uses distraction. He'll have a big boom over here so he can steal something over there. Everyone's running over to the big boom, but he's over here where nobody's noticing. He uses distraction.

He looks and—this is important—he studies security systems. Look at the parallels here. He looks and studies security systems, looking for areas of weakness and vulnerability which he can exploit. Sounds a little bit like a devil, doesn't it? He uses counterfeits. He's a master painter. He'll paint a beautiful counterfeit of an original painting and replace them, where only a very, very trained eye will be able to see.

And probably one of the biggest cool things in the show is Neal always is one step, a half a step ahead of everyone else. He's about to get caught and somehow he always gets away with it every time, because if he didn't, the show would be over. He'd go back to jail and we'd be watching reruns of Full House. And so he's always one step ahead in anticipating the next move.

Now in one of the shows, Peter, who was a smart guy himself, looked at Neal and said, "Look at Neal, I know all your tricks." And Neal looked at him and said, "Not all of them." My friends, you can think that you know all the devil's tricks, but you don't know all of them. They're custom-made for you. John 10:1-10 says this: "Truly, truly, I say unto you, he who does not enter into the sheepfold by the door but climbs in by another way, that man is a thief and a robber.

But he who enters the door is the shepherd of the sheep. To him the gatekeeper opens. The sheep hear his voice and he calls his own sheep by name and leads them out." There's a lot to say here, but I'm just really reading these verses because it really isn't what I want to get at in this morning's message. "When he has brought out of his own, he goes out before them and the sheep follow him for they know his voice. A stranger they will not follow, but they will flee from him for they do not know the voice of strangers."

The sheep recognize the shepherd's voice. The figure of speech Jesus used with them—they did not understand what he was saying to them. So Jesus said again to them, "Truly, truly, I say unto you, I am the door of the sheep. And all who come before me are thieves and robbers, but the sheep did not listen to them. I am the door. If anyone enters by me, he will be saved and go in and out of pasture. Verse 10: The thief comes only to steal."

Stop there for a moment. That word steal there is the word klepto, where we get our kleptomaniac, maybe, in our English. Klepto. And it means to steal by stealth. It means to steal without being known that you're stealing it. There's a couple of ways to steal things. If I want to steal money from a bank, I can drive a tank into the side of the bank, grab the money, and drive my tank home. Everyone knows I've been there. Everyone realizes, "Hey, we were just robbed. The tank came through the window and stole all our money."

Another way to do it is to take it when no one can recognize me or even find out that the money's missing for a long period of time. Not that I'm trying to give anyone any ideas. Jeanette, sit down. So the thief comes only to steal and to kill and destroy. "I come that they might have life and have it more abundantly." We love that verse, don't we? So I want to look here at this thief. Satan here is depicted as a robber or a thief and false teachers for that matter too, who want to take something that is not his.

And this is important. We understand that a thief's trying to get something that's not his, but not be blamed for it. It's one thing to steal something. It's another thing to steal something and not get blamed for it. Now how does this play in real life? Isn't that what the enemy wants to do? He loves to steal from the Christian but never get blamed for it. This thing came into my life, whatever it is, and you know who's to blame? That person is to blame. The lack of money is to blame. The health is to blame.

Somebody's picked our pocket and they don't realize it's really not a person who's picked our pocket. It's an entity, a being. I want to attack a person because I understand that. It's easier to blame somebody instead of going to the source of who really picked our pocket. A few things that the robber loves to rob: first of all, he loves to rob our quiet Christian life. And what do I mean by a quiet Christian life? It's simply a life that rests in the person of Christ, who rests in the work of Christ, and rest in who we are in Christ.

The quiet Christian life. When you get to that place, my friends, where you rest in the person of Christ and you rest in the work of Christ and you rest in who you are in Christ, your life gets quiet. It gets quiet in here. It settles down up there pretty good too. He wants to rob that. He does it in numerous ways. He does it by making us activity-based and not grace/rest-based. I know this because this is me. I got saved in a grace-based ministry a long while ago.

But I was 19 years old and you know what? And I meant business with God. I did. Shortly after I got saved, somebody says, "What do you want to do with your life?" "I want to be a preacher. I want to be a pastor. I want to impact the world for Christ." And I meant it. 30 plus years later, that's what I'm doing. I read my Bible from beginning to end. I prayed endlessly, sometimes endless hours. Don't even know how many hours I prayed. I learned to evangelize. I started equipping myself in the Word.

I started hiding the Word in my heart, memorizing scripture, sometimes dozens a week, memorizing the Word of God, hiding it in there, reciting it. Always thought God was angry with me. Never thought he was actually content with my life. I couldn't pray enough, couldn't read enough, couldn't do something enough. God wasn't happy with me, so I wasn't happy with me. If I was so unhappy with me, then obviously God had to be unhappy with me too, right?

I was a jittery Christian, never resting in the finished work of Christ. It took me years, after even knowing the finished work theologically, it took me years to actually rest. Who do you think was behind my little agitation? "Tim, you read the Bible more yesterday than today. Tim, you overslept again. Tim, you're not as on the ball as this guy over here. Tim, I know you're not that happy with yourself; just imagine what God thinks of you."

And so you grub about, as Oswald Chambers says, and you work harder and you grit down and I'm going to do better and better and better, only to fail and fail and fail again. Know when I learned how to really pray? It's when I stopped trying. When I stopped reading books about prayer and how everyone had this incredible prayer life and I could never add up to it. And I finally quit. And then I found myself praying. It was actually pretty easy. I just talked to God. Just walking, talking, laying down, kneeling down, however, wherever, whenever. And it became sweet.