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: How many of us are sometimes consistently unhappy or discontented? This can come in waves during different periods of our life. We look back on our life and we always look for that greener pasture. We think, "If only this didn't happen," or "If only this would have happened"—the "if-onlys" and "only-ifs." It debilitates us and cripples us. We think of what could have been, should have been, or what I wished it was.

I asked myself a question: what was my expectation for? In other words, what was I really seeking? Fame, fortune, security, being noticed—what was it that I'm so dissatisfied with? Those are important questions. We'll see as we drill down a little bit deeper in the message.

Contentment, my friends, comes from within. It's never external. Jeremiah Burroughs, a great Puritan writer from five or six hundred years ago—he goes back a long way—he said this, and this is not an exact quote, "Contentment comes from subtraction, not through addition." In other words, it's never adding something to our life that makes us content; it's usually subtracting something from our life that makes us content. It's getting rid of things that we think we need to be content. That's when we find contentment.

Now, the book of Ephesians has laid out a marvelous road for us to follow. If I had rethought this, I might have even started in the first three chapters and plundered through that to give you some of the nuggets from there. The first three chapters of Ephesians tell us all that Jesus did for us on the cross. In Ephesians 1:3 and 1:6, he gave us all spiritual blessings. In Ephesians 1:7, he forgave us of all our sins.

We were dead in our trespasses and sins in Ephesians 2:1 and 2, but God, who is rich in mercy (Ephesians 2:5), seated us together in heavenly places (Ephesians 2:6). We are saved by grace, not of works (Ephesians 2:8), and we were created unto good works (Ephesians 2:10). Then Ephesians 3:20 says that unto him who can do exceedingly and abundantly above all that we ever ask or think, that work of the gospel is inside of us. He lays out in the first three chapters of Ephesians this incredible gospel and work of the cross.

Now he makes it practical. In Ephesians 4, he takes the gospel and says, "Now I want to make the gospel practical in your life. What does this look like every day as a Christian?" That's what we want to look at here. Ephesians 4:17 says, "Now this I say and testify in the Lord that you must no longer walk as Gentiles do in the futility of their mind." "Gentile" refers to unsaved people. "Futility" means someone who is devoid of truth or perverse. Their minds are devoid of truth and they are perverse; they're not saved people.

Verse 18 says, "They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, due to their hardness of heart." Their minds are blinded by sin; they don't even see that things are wrong. In 2 Corinthians 4:4, the light of the gospel is blinded towards them. They don't want to know or change. Verse 19 says, "They have become callous and have given themselves up to sensuality, greedy to every practice and kind of impurity. But that is not the way you learned Christ."

Now he switches. He's looking back at who we were before Christ. Now he goes forward and says, "But that's not us. That's not who we are. We're the church. We're the called-out ones. We're his people. There's a Holy Spirit living in us." If that is my testimony in verses 17, 18, and 19, if that is how I'm still living, there's a problem because that's not how we were made to live. Assuming that you've heard about him and were taught in him, as the truth is in Jesus, he says, "Put off your old self, which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful desires."

He says "put off," and that word is like changing clothes. I came here this morning and I had a shirt on, my Captain America shirt. Then before the first service, I put on another shirt. After the first service, I took those shirts off and put on this shirt. Before I go home, I'm going to take this shirt off and put on my Boston Celtics shirt. If I just took a shirt off and didn't put one back on, it would be pretty bad. You guys would say, "I'm not coming back to that church." I replaced my old shirt with a new shirt.

He says here, "Put off your old self," like an old, worn-out piece of clothing. In other words, stop living like you did before you met Christ. That's what Paul is saying. This is how you lived before you met Christ. You were not intended to live that way. When you were born again, your life was elevated. It was lifted above the fray of humanity. It was lifted above sin and the effects of sin. You can have a better life than that.

Paul says in verse 23, "And be renewed in the spirit of your minds." See that word "renew" there? It's a cool word. It means you have your minds renewed. You don't think the same way. Your priorities, values, and the things you pursue are different. What makes you happy is different. It's all different because you're different. You're a Christian, and Christ lives inside of you. When that happens, it's supposed to radically change everything, not just a little bit.

That is how you can have 12 disciples—average men, fishermen, and nutcases of guys like Peter and John—and they turned the world upside down because something happened to them. Something happened on the inside. Put on a new self, like that new shirt, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness. To paraphrase: be transformed. We love that word.

God has a plan to make us something that we cannot become ourselves. If I left you there, some of you would be pretty hopeless. You might think, "Okay, Pastor, but I still battle with that stuff. I still deal with it." Hopefully, in the rest of this message and over the next few weeks, I'm going to give you a framework where you can break free and start winning these battles against the impact of sin in your life. We all have to fight that battle.

Let me read Romans 12. We'll probably go back to these verses next week, too. "So, dear brothers and sisters," from the New Living Translation, "I plead with you to give your bodies to God because of all he's done for you. Let them be a living and holy sacrifice, the kind he will find acceptable. This is truly the way to worship him." He is talking here about the lordship of Christ. I want to present your bodies as a living sacrifice. I want you to give Christ control of your life with an act of your will, as you understand that. That's an ongoing illumination that we are given throughout our lives. There are areas in my life that I have retained and held back from God, and as the Spirit shows me these things, I want to give them to Christ.

Verse 2 says, "Don't copy the behavior and the customs of this world, but let God transform you into a new person by changing the way that you think. Then you will learn to know God's will for you, which is good, pleasing, and perfect." Principle one is understanding that victory is not "doing." You can't busy yourself out of the effects of sin. You can't willpower yourself out of it, and you can't nag someone else into it.

Spiritual transformation is the only thing that works. We need to grasp this important principle: victory is not doing; it's engaging in a relationship. It is you and Jesus Christ in a personal, intimate, daily walk—not just for an hour and a half on Sunday morning. If this is all you get all week, you have zero chance of victory. But if you get up tomorrow and engage in a relationship with God through the Holy Spirit, and you surround yourself with godly people, you'll start seeing victory after victory. You'll start seeing a spiritual transformation taking place inside of you.

We need to grasp the point that sin is caused by a void. Lewis Sperry Chafer, in his great work *He That Is Spiritual*, said, "I don't deal with men after their sin; I deal with men after the void in their soul that has brought them to sin." That is an important principle. I can wag my finger all day long at what people are doing wrong, especially if I'm not doing it. But what's causing them? What need are they trying to meet? What are they trying to fulfill on the inside that is not being fulfilled by Christ?

Maybe they need my input, or maybe they just need to submit themselves to God. That's going to be different for each one, but there's a void causing that. There's something—whether it's the need for being loved, affirmed, or secure—that's causing it. We need to address the void and not necessarily the sin. When I was a young man, I had certain things I was practicing. As I became aware of those things, I would relinquish them; I would just give them up. But I was living every day pouring the Word of God into me.

One of the most exciting things I could do as a young Christian was get on my knees and pray. I just loved to pray. I'd pray for hours and not even think twice about it. I thought it was a cool thing that I could pray to the Lord. One day, I was actually in Fenway Park—a great, spiritual place where you can oftentimes find God. I was sitting there, looking over my spiritual shoulder and thinking, "You know, I don't do this anymore. I don't swear anymore." I didn't remember giving up swearing. I realized I wasn't doing these things anymore and I didn't even remember giving them up.

I thought about all these practices that were part of my character and they were no longer there. I couldn't tell you when they left my life. What I'm getting at is that the void was filled. When the void got filled, the other stuff just went away. When I became so occupied with Christ and so filled with the Holy Spirit, the thought about living contrary to that was foreign to me. It wasn't even a hard decision or a hard choice. So, we go after the void. The first stage of victory in sin is going after the void. What's the void, and why is it there?

I don't give into sin; I sort of give up. I say, "God, I can't do this. I can't keep beating my head against the wall. I can't keep trying and failing. I can't beat it by my own power." If you try, it will just leave you frustrated. The greatest surrenders of my life—and I've had many—involved surrendering my will to Christ. That was a big step as a young Christian that I had to redo a dozen times. I would say, "God, I'm about you. Take my life and do what you will with it. I'm surrendering myself to you." That is actually an easier one.

Do you know what I've had to surrender to Christ more than my will? It's my self-effort. That's much more subtle and tricky, and it often goes unnoticed. As God shows me how my self-effort comes in and how I'm trying to do things in my own strength, I make it right with God. There is repentance and a change of mind. He shows me again, and I make it right with God. That's been the greatest surrender of my life: my self-effort, not my will. God got my will pretty early, but I still think he needs my help, and he doesn't.

Next thing we need, and I'll close with this, is a Psalm 139 prayer. It says, "Search me, O God, know my heart. Try me and know my thoughts." "Search" is a word that means to penetrate deeply or to investigate. So, "Search my heart, O God. Try me, know my thoughts." Intuitively and intimately, know my thoughts. "And see if there is any grievous way in me and lead me into the way everlasting." It all starts here, my friend, with a deep honesty and transparency with yourself and God.