Grace Thoughts

Narrator: 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: The word "justified" there is a word I can't ever pronounce, the Greek word, but it simply means to be declared righteous. It's a legal term, not a moral term. It's a legal 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. I'm not picking on anyone. They believe you can lose your salvation. Then there's the Calvinists. They believe that you cannot lose your salvation.

I don't believe you can lose your salvation, but I don't believe it as some other Calvinists might believe it. I'll give you an example. A five-point Calvinist—I'm not picking sides, I'm just trying to show you where I come to my conclusion—they look at God and the human race in eternity past. This is really oversimplified. He says, "Hmm, here's all the human race. Eeny, meeny, miny, moe. Andre, you get to go to heaven."

It's hard to believe, I know, Cheryl. Then, "Eeny, meeny, miny, moe. You get to go to heaven. Then eeny, meeny, miny, moe." But because the road to heaven is narrow and the road to destruction is broad, "Eeny, meeny, miny, moe. Torrance, I'm sorry. It's the divine lottery. You just didn't win this time." It was sort of a hit-or-miss. The people who got chosen say, "What did you do to be chosen?" Grace. Grace chose.

They're absolutely right. Grace. 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 the 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, whatever. But that one crime, when I have been decreed by the legal system not guilty, it stands. It's a standing decree. I stand in being not guilty. Watch this. Even if I was, 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. When the Bible says there are none righteous, no, not one, God's standard, Romans 3:10. All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, 3:23. Psalm 39:4-5 says man at his best state is vain. His best state. Didn't talk about his worst there.

When it says that man's righteousness, all the very best that man can produce, is filthy rags in Isaiah 64:6. If that's the best that I have to offer and God's standard is absolute perfection, absolute holiness, absolute righteousness, I have no hope of ever approaching who God is. I never approach being accepted by God without an outside act on my behalf.

So Jesus said, "This is what I'm going to do. It's called the Gospel. I'm going to come and be a man. I'm going to live amongst them perfectly. The only perfect human being to ever walk the earth. And then at the hands of my own creation, I'm going to allow myself to be nailed to a cross and shed my human blood and die." Without the shedding of blood, there can be no remission of sins. Hebrews 9:22.

"And then on the third day, I'll resurrect and ascend and sit back down on the right hand of my Father, where I came from in the first place. I will take on the responsibility of making men holy." That's justification. He declares us legally right. If this was a moral term, "Tim, you're declared morally right." Okay, that may last a half-hour or a day.

But if I have to maintain it somehow in my thought life or anywhere? But because it's legal, it's not a continual thing. It's a decree in which he declared me not guilty. He took my guilt, took my punishment on his cross, and he paid for it. So now I stand—I love this—I stand legally unblamable and unaccusable before God.

While there are things in all our lives that God could hold to our account, when God looks at me and sees Tim Kelley and the craziness of the mind and some of the things I may do and some of the things you may do, he doesn't count them to our account because he sees Christ. We've been placed in Christ. I haven't been placed in my own righteousness. I've been placed in Christ's righteousness.

I haven't been placed in my holiness. I've been placed in his holiness, because I didn't have any. That's what it means, my friends, to have our standing with Christ. He says then we are at peace with God. This is not necessarily a subjective peace which we get, this little emotional thing where we feel the cares and concerns flutter away.

This is a more important peace than that. That means the enmity between me and God has been eliminated. I'm at peace with him. If you go home today and you have a really bad afternoon, you scream at each other, maybe you do something you shouldn't do, you root for the wrong football team, something almost unforgivable like that, you still have peace with God.

You fall flat on your face, you doubt, you don't believe for a season, your faith is shaken, you've taken a couple of body blows, you still have peace with God. If you have a consistent spiritual life where you meet God every day, you're at peace with God. If you have an inconsistent spiritual life, you are at peace with God. You know why? It's not about you.

It's about him and what he did. If it was about us, we wouldn't have any hope. It's about him and what he did. Now Pastor, what about our accountability? I'll get there, don't worry. It won't be today, but I'll get there. Two weeks from now, we'll be talking about that. Colossians 1:21, don't know the translation, says this includes you.

This is the actual reading of the verse. I think it's a New Living Translation. "This includes you who were once far away from God. You were his enemies, separated from him by your evil thoughts and actions. Yet now he has reconciled you to himself through the death of Christ in his physical body." So he's reconciled you and I to him. That's our peace with God through the death of Christ in his physical body.

As a result, he has brought you into his own presence and you are holy and blameless as you stand before him without a single fault. Look at that. It says you are holy and blameless before you stand before him without a single fault. So there it is. We were separated from him, but now because of what he's done, he's reconciled us. Now he's brought us into his presence, continual presence. Hebrews 4:16.

And you are holy. Are you holy? Positionally, yeah, you are. Experientially, not always. Are you blameless? That word blameless, it just means without moral stain. You are blameless before him as you stand. There's that standing before him without a single fault. You know why it says that? Because if you had a single fault, you couldn't stand before him. You had to be perfect and that was impossible.

That's why we have a cross. Now in this Romans 5:2, these are a wonderful two verses I want to give you, just a little word picture here. Then we'll close right after. Five, six more minutes here, we'll have you singing and giving the offering and getting home. Kenneth Wuest, an old scholar from Moody Bible, says this about this word "obtain access by faith into his grace."

We get the French word *entrée* from it. It's an interesting word picture here. It's a picture of a peasant. In this day, what would happen if I wanted to see the king? Not like it would be in America where we want to see the president. Back then, if you wanted to see the king, you were a peasant, a common person, and you had an appointment with the king.

They would take on a responsibility. You would go in for your appointment with the king. The king's people would take you, especially if I was a common person. They would take you to the baths. They would bathe you. They'd give you a good bath, they'd scrub you down, wash your feet, make sure you smelled appropriately, because nobody was allowed to come into the king's courts without being dressed with royal dignity and being like royal dignity.

I don't care who you were, you didn't come into the presence of the king as a common person. So once they bathed you, they'd go into the royal closet, whatever that was, and they'd get you a robe that was a robe of dignity and a robe of importance and a robe of royalty, and they'd dress you in that robe. We've heard about the robe of righteousness before, haven't we?

And they'd dress you in that robe and they would do whatever they needed to do, slick your hair back, and then you'd be able to go stand before the king. It was a peasant. He didn't have the means to take a bath by himself, certainly didn't have the means to buy a robe by himself. He was a peasant. Everything was given to him, yet he had a standing before the king.

That's us. That's grace. It says in the end of Romans 5:2, "and we rejoice in the hope of the glory of God." Last few things I'll say, I love that word hope and you know it. I talked to Janette yesterday. She's not here. She had a hope that the lottery was $900 million. Janette had a hope. For those who don't know Janette, we're as a church helping her through her lottery addiction that she has.

So I talked to her on the phone. She goes, "Pastor, it's $900 million." "How many are you going to buy?" She goes, "Five." It's 1.3 billion now, so she'll buy five more this week. But in my English, I think, I hope Janette wins. I really do. I don't expect Janette to win. I just hope she wins. That's how we look at hope in English. That's not the Bible word for hope.

*Elpis*. The word for hope is, "Oh yeah, I'm going to win. I haven't won yet, but I will. It's as good as mine. I have a title deed to it." Hebrews 11:1. So when Paul says, "and we rejoice, we rejoice in the hope," I fully expect to realize and understand and experience and live the hope of the glory of God.

As much as I'm standing in the dust and the squalor of Planet Earth, because of God's grace, he has placed me in a hope that someday when this ends, I'll instantly be in the presence of the glory of God. My friends, that's God's grace. I have a whole bunch more stuff to say. I'm not going to say it. I'll just leave you with that and we'll come back next week.

I'll finish this stuff and even make it a little bit longer for next week. But think on these things. Don't take something that you think you know and say, "I know it, I know it." Ask God to show you how you can be more grace-full in your relationships, in your relationship with him, in your relationship with yourself, relationship with others, your horizontal relationships.

Ask God to teach you in your inner man through the Holy Spirit how deeply profound this Gospel is, because there's no other path, my friends, to spiritual transformation without understanding the Gospel of Jesus Christ and how magnificent it is for everyone who names his name.