Grace Thoughts

Guest (Male): God loves you. 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: As God speaks to us today, don't you see the real trouble in my life may not be the scope of my gifts, but I am not really living in the capacity where I am at. In more real terms, Satan and the flesh are still sharing land with me. I was driving in the office yesterday, and I saw this little dog. I don't know what type it was; it was not as nice as my dog. This dog was walking, and it was not a real big dog that could pull you, but the dog was just straining. The person was pulling back, and the dog was just hacking and wheezing.

The collar was strangling it, but it wasn't the owner's fault. The dog wouldn't walk at a normal pace; it just kept pushing and pulling at the leash. I am thinking, "What a stupid dog." The thing cannot even breathe. If it would just walk a half a step slower, it could breathe, but this dog wanted to sniff something so bad that it is hacking and wheezing all the way down the street because it is strangling itself. That is how we are sometimes with God. We are just pulling on the leash all the time.

We say, "I want, I need. How come I didn't get it?" And God says, "Just slow down. I will get you home, don't worry. Just slow down and let me do in your life what I want you to do. I don't want you to do that yet because you haven't done this yet. You haven't resolved these issues in your life. How can I want to use you this way to resolve these issues over here? Quit pulling on my leash because I don't let go. You can pull and pull, and you can hack and wheeze and choke and cough. You can almost strangle yourself all you want; I ain't letting go of the leash until you resolve these issues back here."

Resolve these things. Get these parasites and these Sidenites and these Canaanites out of your land. Take what I have given you already and own that. I want to refresh your mind on some of these things. We have been drawing consistently a parallel between the book of Joshua and the book of Ephesians throughout the beginning of this series. The Ephesians life is the Promised Land being our finished work, exchanged-life walk that we have with God—the newness of the Gospel. That is how we look at the Promised Land in the book of Ephesians.

We are paralleling that with the Jordan River being the cross. Going across the Jordan into the Promised Land, we go through the cross into this new, elevated life—this new place of spiritual blessings that the Gospel has given every one of us believers. We understand that, so I want to encompass or conquer this land of blessing that God has given me, whatever that is. By the way, some of that is proportional grace. He is going to give me grace for the gifts that He wants me to perform in my life, but some of that is preventive grace He wants to give me so I can live my life in a manner pleasing to Him.

Some of us want proportional grace before we get the preventive grace down. we need preventive grace before we can really enter into the depths of the proportional grace that God wants us to have. I have these gifts, but God needs these gifts to come under His control. Many mature believers who live moral, outwardly godly lives have never owned the deep things of their souls, so they never achieve total victory. I don't know about you, but I never go long without a battle. I spoke one time years ago about Jacob wrestling with God.

I had this very sweet lady come by me—very sweet, I don't think she has sinned in three or four decades—and she came by me and said, "I've never wrestled with the Father," and walked away. I thought, "Wow, you should be the pastor." I told that to her, and she would have accepted it, I think. But I wrestle with Him all the time. Paul wrestled with Him, Jacob wrestled with Him, and Moses wrestled with Him. Everyone who has walked the walk and fought the fight has wrestled with God because things happen you don't understand.

God wants areas of your life you don't want to give up, and you wrestle with Him. He wins, but you wrestle with Him. You pull on the leash and then finally say, "Okay, I'll just walk slower so I don't choke all the time." Things happen in your life and you don't know why they happen. God doesn't tell you the reason, and He doesn't plan to tell you the reason. If the battle has stopped for you, I would guess there are foreigners living in your land that God is going to wait until you resolve them.

You can go home to be with Jesus and never resolve them. You don't necessarily always win these fights; you might not even know there is a fight. I tell folks if you have never been convicted by the Spirit, moved by the Word, or prompted to go deeper to resolve attitudes and issues in your life, then there is spiritual declension going on in you. God is always beckoning us deeper, purer, more holy, and more disciplined. No matter if you have ordination or you don't, He wants us to always probe and go deeper and deeper.

What about those trees in our lives? Cut them down. Hack those suckers down. Something is keeping you from knowing God or possessing the land. Hack the trees down. If there are chariots, drive them out. It is like that owner and that dog, or like that little kid where they are trying to hit you and you just have your hand on their forehead and they are swinging away. They can't get you because they are little and you've got the reach on them. That is a bit like us and God. God just lets us swing away.

We say, "I want, I need, I have to have." God says, "Just let me know when you are tired, because I have stuff I want to resolve in your life. I want more meekness here. I want more humility here. I want you to own stuff in your soul that you've never owned. I want you to come to grips and be honest with yourself in areas you've never been honest with yourself. I want you to fix things in relationships that you could fix. I have a lot of things I want you to do before I can bring you to the next place."

Before I can really set you free, I need you to own some stuff that you are just ignoring. You are pretending like those parasites and those Sidenites aren't even in your land, but they are there. They are entrenched and they live there; you need to drive them out, whatever that means for you. I know what it means for me, and I will know more what it means for me in the coming years as I walk with God. Our capacity—and this is a quote from Redpath—our capacity for the indwelling Christ is elastic. It increases as the years go by.

In other words, my Ephesians chapter one, two, and three experience has no ceiling on it. It is limitless. The expansion of the Gospel in my heart has no limitation. A Christian cannot ever finally arrive at a place and say, "Okay, I'm all grown up now. There's nothing else for me to achieve. There's no more enemies to drive out, no more battles to fight, and no more trees to cut down." You never arrive. You just find new levels and new places to go. The battles I fight now were not even on my radar screen ten or twenty years ago.

The things I battled back then are not on my radar screen today, and I have a funny feeling there are a lot more things coming to my radar screen in the next ten years. That, my friends, is health. That is how we grow and how we battle. God has given us the land; we just need to cut down the trees and drive out the things that are keeping us from getting to know Him. Maybe it is more discipline in our life, or maybe I need a new resurgence. Maybe I have to rally myself and say, "I've become settled on my lees."

I have sat on my hands and let the fire go out. I have rested in my own man-made morality and don't really have anything stirring me up in my heart anymore. I am not moving towards the things of God anymore; I am just sort of motionless, going through the motions. God, stir me up. Don't let me go to sleep or be hypnotized into nothingness. Keep this heart on fire. Keep this battle going every day of my life this side of heaven. How does my heart expand to meet more and more of Christ?

The capacity to receive the grace of God and the indwelling of His Holy Spirit is measured by the character of our obedience and our faith. In other words, when God calls me or reveals something to me, what do I do with it? The tribe of Benjamin could look at Joshua and say, "Joshua, we need more land." Well, I need you to be obedient to the original call. The original call was for you to go out and drive these people out of your land. That hasn't changed. My original instructions are still in place.

It is only seven or eight years later, but it is still in place: go drive the people out of your land and cut down the trees. Yes, you can possess the land. You can have all of it. But drive these enemies out, and I will be with you if you do that. There is a beautiful quote by Redpath: "For the greater the obedience, the greater the discipline. The greater the faith, the fuller and more complete the allegiance to our precious Lord. The more does the heart expand to receive more and more of Jesus. That capacity life has no limit."

You will grow in it until sometimes you feel ready to burst, but that won't happen. For as you go on and on with the Lord Jesus and obey Him today up to the hilt, then tomorrow there will be an enlargement of heart and a further call to fresh obedience. That is Christian living. Always the soul of the Christian either grows or shrinks. It never remains the same. Either it increases in capacity for life because it obeys and is determined to lay the axe to the root of sin, or it shrivels until the Christian experience is lost.

If we don't notice Him so much or if we are not moved, we should probably take an evaluation of where we stand. If I haven't wrestled, if I've been going to church and I leave unmoved, unchallenged, and unconvicted, or if I read my Bible and never sense the Spirit stirring in me, I have a feeling there are probably still people in the land that I have given up on. I don't even notice them anymore. I live with them, but I don't even notice them. If God hasn't done surgery in your soul in recent history, you might need Him to.

We never finish this side of heaven. We are always reaching for more of Christ, more of this promise, more of this grace, more of this mercy, and more of this love. I want to get out of the way. I want to get out the parasites and the Sidenites and the Jebusites of my sin, my past, my fears, my insecurities, my wounds, my pain, and my self-centeredness. I want to drive those things out of my land. I will find more tomorrow, but I am going to drive today's out.

I just want to keep clearing the land that God has given me to possess. Then someday we go to heaven and He says, "Well done." We have run this race, we have fought the fight, and we've won the course. We cleared the land that He intended us to clear in our life on our proportion of grace, and He has given us His preventive grace to do it along the path.