Grace Thoughts

Tim Kelley: If you think that when you get saved, you remain the same, unchanged, untransformed, you might not understand God's grace. If it would be easier for you to love people if they were just more like you, you might not understand the grace of God. If you pick and choose who you'll forgive and who you won't, you might not understand the grace of God. If you are not gracious, you might not understand the grace of God. Someone said yesterday, the first thing grace should do is make you gracious and kind.

In a nutshell, what does the grace-full life look like? Jesus came to impart the fullness and abundance of the life of grace to every believer. We are saved by grace and grow in grace. Grace teaches, encourages, and comforts us. The grace-full life is a life that liberates us from the chains of a performance-based or guilt-ridden spiritual experience. Pure grace ushers the believer into a relationship with God as it wonderfully establishes, sustains, and satisfies our souls to the fullest for the duration of our journey with him.

Knowing grace and owning it sometimes is different. In Ezekiel chapter 33, Ezekiel is preaching to Israel, but they're not hearing him. Unlike Jeremiah, whom they were always throwing in jail, or Isaiah, they liked Ezekiel. God's talking to Ezekiel here, explaining Israel to him. He says, "You are very entertaining to them. Ezekiel, they like you. You're very entertaining to them, like someone who sings love songs with a beautiful voice or plays fine music on an instrument. They hear you, Ezekiel, but that's all they do. They don't ever act on what you say."

I hope, my friends, that this series will start a whole new chapter in my life and in your life, where we act on the grace of God in areas where we've never done it before. I won't define it with all different definitions; we'll see some. After reading it so many times, this particular word changed my relationship with God. I study a lot and use different translations. One of the ones I like to use is the Amplified Bible. The Amplified Bible takes the original languages and the tenses of the original languages and tries to extend the meaning of the verses.

For example, in Luke chapter 11, it says, "Knock and the door shall be opened to you, seek and you shall find, ask and you shall receive." In the Greek, that's in a present participle tense, which means a repeated action. So, in the Amplified, it actually translates it out as: ask and keep asking, seek and keep seeking, knock and keep knocking. It takes some of the work out of interpreting some of the verses, even though it's just an English translation from a foreign language.

When you read about grace, it appears about 130 times in the scriptures. Every time in the Amplified Bible, it says, "God's unmerited favor and mercy." I had been preaching the Gospel for almost a decade by this point. I had done a lot of messages on grace and talked a lot about grace. It's been my overriding theme throughout my ministry and my personal life. This particular time, whatever I'm studying—I don't remember the verse, but I'm reading the Amplified Bible—it says, "Grace: God's unmerited favor and mercy."

I think it was Romans chapter 5, verse 20 I was reading. It kept saying it: "Grace: God's unmerited favor and mercy." I kept reading it and reading it, and finally, God gave a little knock on my head. I had hair back then, so it wasn't quite as loud. It said, "Tim, unmerited." Then I began seeing things about my life where I thought I merited things. I thought, "I've earned this because I've earned that blessing. I've done well here. I've done well there. I've certainly done better than some of these other people, God."

I began to see where I wrestled in my heart of hearts, where I had this balance system with God. My good and the bad determined how God's blessings would come towards me based on how I performed for him. Let me back up; I was teaching the grace of God by now. But this one word, "unmerited," leaped off a page to me that day. God began to show me all the areas of my life where I thought things were merited or demerited.

I looked at relationships that way. I filtered myself that way, and more importantly, I saw my relationship with God that way. I realized at that point, even though I knew the theology of God's grace, I didn't really know God's grace. I could teach the theology of God's grace, but it wasn't really impacting my life at the core level. I still had a Pharisaical, works-based relationship with God. It's been a journey. That wasn't the only illumination going on inside my head; it's a journey that goes on to this day, as it does with all of us.

I still thought my good works or my consistent life made the Lord more pleased with me, and my inconsistencies made him disappointed with me. I think how often we judge ourselves spiritually based on our day-to-day performance and not really through the work of the Cross. Grace means this: that we have no ability to live a life pleasing to God without divine help. I was so blessed by Pastor Gower's message speaking on the *hesed* of God. I've been thinking about it every morning and meditating on it.

Then he preached Wednesday night on Philippians 1:1-6. We talked about *epiteleō*, God carrying us to completion and being in Christ. If you take the old Webster's Dictionary and you look up the word "justification," which we're going to see in a moment, the first sentence in that definition in that 1828 dictionary was "an act of God's grace." We know that; justification is an act of God's grace. But then look up the word "sanctification." It starts the same way: "the act of God's grace."

My justification is an act of God's grace, and so is my sanctification. Becoming more like Christ and Christ's work in me on a day-to-day, moment-by-moment basis is also a work of God's grace. J.I. Packer, in his great book *Knowing God*, defined it this way: "What is grace? In the New Testament, grace means God's love in action towards men who merited the opposite of love. Grace means God moving heaven and earth to save sinners who could not lift a finger to save themselves."

Grace means God sending his only Son to descend into hell on the Cross so that we guilty ones might be reconciled to God and received in heaven. With that said, the Christian standing before God is one of God's grace. We stand in God's grace. Romans 5:1 says, "Therefore, since we have been justified by faith," this is the English Standard Bible, "we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ." I have "justified" emboldened in my notes because I want to spend a moment on that word.

The word "justified" there simply means to be declared righteous. It's a legal term, not a moral term. This is why I believe the believer has eternal security. There are a couple of different camps out there. There's the Arminian camp; they believe you can lose your salvation. Then there's the Calvinist camp; they believe that you cannot lose your salvation. I don't believe you can lose your salvation, but I don't believe it exactly as some other Calvinists might believe it.

A five-point Calvinist looks at God and the human race in eternity past and says, "Here's the whole human race. Eeny, meeny, miny, moe. Andre, you get to go to heaven. Eeny, meeny, miny, moe, you get to go to heaven. Eeny, meeny, miny, moe." But because the road to heaven is narrow and the road to destruction is broad, they think some just didn't win the divine lottery. The people who got chosen think, "What did you do to be chosen?" Grace chose them.

I don't really believe that way. What I believe is that we are justified. Our eternal security is based in this word "justification." If this word "justification" was a moral term, we might be in trouble. But it's a legal term. In an American jurisprudence system, if I go to trial for a crime and I'm found not guilty, can the police come to me the next week and say, "Hey, we want to do a do-over and retry you"? No, because I've been decreed not guilty.

I may commit more crimes, I may be arrested for other things, but for that one crime, when I have been decreed by the legal system as not guilty, it stands. It's a standing decree. I stand in being not guilty. Even if I did the crime, the court said I'm not guilty. My friends, this is justification. We come before God, and we're guilty. The Bible says there are none righteous, no, not one. God's standard in Romans 3:10 is that all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.

Psalm 39:4-5 says man at his best state is vanity. It doesn't even talk about his worst state there. When it says that man's righteousness—all the very best that man can produce—is filthy rags in Isaiah 64:6, that's the best that I have to offer. God's standard is absolute perfection, absolute holiness, and absolute righteousness. I have no hope of ever approaching who God is or ever being accepted by God without an outside act on my behalf.