Living on the Edge

Dave Druey: Today on Living on the Edge with Chip Ingram.

Chip Ingram: Fear is a paralyzing emotion. Let me ask you, do you find yourself feeling afraid for your health and the health of your family? Afraid for your physical safety? Are you afraid of losing your job or having enough money to live on? How do we find security in fearful times? That is today. Stay with me.

Dave Druey: You’re listening to Living on the Edge with Chip Ingram. Throughout our series called The New You, Chip has been walking us through what God says about who you really are in Christ: chosen, adopted, redeemed, and valued. Today we come to the next fundamental truth about your identity, that in Christ, you are secure.

No circumstance, no failure, no fear can take that away. Remember, if you ever miss a message in this study, just visit our website at livingontheedge.org. Now here is Chip Ingram with today’s message titled, "You Are Secure".

Chip Ingram: When we look at our life under pressure and we think about what makes us feel secure, what makes us feel safe, what makes us feel like we're in control, how do we learn that? We're going to talk today about something that's at the root of our being. God is going to tell you and me that you're secure. On the front of your notes, pull it out if you will. I want you to get a deeper understanding of even the word security.

It means you're safe. There is a firm foundation. It means that there is no outside force that can come in and remove you, in this case, from God. Yet we all struggle. I do not need a psychologist to tell me that I'm insecure. It just takes a few circumstances and it just pops up. We tend to have very genuine fears about different things, but I put four categories in your notes.

The first one is the fear of physical harm or death, or the fear of being alone, of being rejected, of thinking I'll never get married, or this marriage is never going to get better. There is the sense that something's happened for those of us that have kids. Our basic insecurities can produce guilt and condemnation and struggles. Here is the question I have for you. Where do you tend to feel insecure or afraid?

Over 80 times the Bible says "fear not". Over 30 times it says "don't be afraid". Jesus' last words to the disciples were, "I am with you always. I will never ever leave you or forsake you," the writer of Hebrews says from God's voice. Yet we struggle. At the bottom of your notes, there's a question I'd like you to do some real pondering. In what or whom do you seek to find security apart from Christ?

We all do this, but identify it. In a fallen world, God is going to allow some storms to come into your life. The goal of the storms will be like Joseph. I think Joseph, when he was betrayed, in prison, lost a reputation, when people forgot him, each and every time if you read that carefully, it says, "And the Lord was with him. And the Lord was with him."

If you can identify where you tend to put security, because a test is coming and God wants you to pass the test. He wants you to know, "I'll be with you. I'll never leave you. I'll never let you down. I am for you." Down deep in your psyche, a lot of us don't believe that. Is your security in yourself? I've certainly had that one. Your brains, your ability, you'll figure it out, you can make it happen.

Is it in money? Is it family? You know what really makes everything okay is your family, your wife, your kids, your husband, all that stuff. When that's okay, you're okay, but boy, if that gets challenged. Here is a test. Whatever would get taken away or challenged to the level it devastates you, that will tell you where your security is. Your security is like a rug, and if it gets pulled out from under you, it might hurt a little bit.

If it devastates you, you know my security's in that job, my security's in me, my security is not in Christ. I want you to identify that and now turn your notes with me if you will. I want to talk about God's plan to give you a security that can't change by circumstances or terrorism or death or abandonment or cancer or rejection or any fear of punishment.

God's answer is in 1 Peter 3:18. It's a summary of the work of Jesus. For Christ also died for sins. Put a circle around the word "for" and I'll tell you why. Once for all. Who is he? The just or the righteous for the unrighteous or the unjust. What was his purpose? So that he, Jesus, might bring us to God. How did he do it? Having been put to death in the flesh on the cross, but made alive in the spirit, the resurrection.

God so loved the world that he sent his one and only Son, God the Son, that whoever would believe in him shouldn't perish but have everlasting life. God's solution to your security is that you're valuable. He wants to choose you. He cares about you. He has redeemed you and he wants to reconnect you close to him so that no one at any time ever, now or in eternity, can separate you from him.

The question is, what must I do to experience that security? The gospel writer John would say, "As many as received him, Jesus, to them he gave the right or the authority to become children of God, even to those who believe in his name." That little word "for" means "in the place of". Jesus came and he died in the place of you. All that you deserve and I deserve because of my sin and rebellion or passive indifference, God took all of that and he placed that on Christ.

Now he says you are forgiven, but you must respond. As many as not just intellectually believe, as many as receive him personally, to them he gives the right not to be religious, but to become an actual child of the living God. Jesus said, "Behold, I stand at the door and knock of your heart, my heart." This is the verse I heard when I trusted Christ in 1972.

If any man, if any woman hears my voice and will open the door of your heart, the promise is, "I will come into him." The old translation says, "I will sup with him" or eat with him and he with me. Jesus is saying, "I want a relationship. The cross has paid for your sin. It is a free gift. Now turn from your sin and with empty hands of faith, say Lord Jesus, forgive me. Come into my life. Be my Lord, be my Savior."

The Spirit of God enters your human body and you start a new life. In the old days, people called that being saved or receiving Christ or trusting Christ. Now what I want to talk to you about is, I'm guessing a great majority of you sort of have down what I just talked about. I'm guessing that those that are watching and those of us that have been around for a while, it's like, okay, Chip, thanks, this is very helpful, like I've known this since fourth grade.

In 1972, knowing very little, having no idea that there was a personal relationship with God and I invited Christ into my life. I want you to go back when you did that. I don't think the average Christian has any idea what actually happened. What actually happened that actually is at the source of all the security and every challenge that you'll face of all the fears that we talked about?

I want to walk through these. I'll do them quickly. The moment you receive Christ, if indeed you have, this happened: you were justified. The word means it's a legal declaration that all my sins are forgiven, past, present, and future. This is God as the judge. Legally the gavel comes down. You're before him. Christ's righteousness, your sin, he looks at the work of Christ.

He says all of your sins are forgiven and the righteousness of Christ is placed in your account. You are granted the righteousness of Jesus. You have a new position as his dearly loved child. Romans 5:1 says, "Therefore having been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ." This peace is not just an emotional peace.

It means we were hostile to God. The word is we have the shalom of God. We have the wholeness of God. We have the favor of God. We are now in God's family. In the space below, I want you to write this down. God is my Father. You might write down, "I am his child." What if you started to believe that? What do good fathers do? What do good parents do? They protect and they provide.

Dave Druey: You’re listening to Living on the Edge with Chip Ingram. Stay with us. We’re halfway through today’s message and there’s still more ahead. Today’s teaching comes from Chip’s powerful series, "The New You: Claiming Your Birthright as a Child of God".

Want to go deeper? Each of these lessons is available online at livingontheedge.org, along with additional resources and discussion guides to take you further. Find it all at livingontheedge.org. Now let’s get back to Chip’s message.

Chip Ingram: The second thing that happened to you the moment you received Christ is regeneration. That means that I'm a new creation in Christ. I've been given a new nature fully pleasing to God. It's different from religion. It's different from morality. It's you becoming an actual new person.

Nicodemus was a very religious rabbi, squeaky clean morally, and he came at night because he saw that Jesus was from God. The miracles attested to it. In this night meeting, Jesus says to him in John chapter three, "Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again, he cannot enter the kingdom of God." Nicodemus said to him, "How can a man be born again when he's old?"

He's taking it pretty literally here. He cannot enter again into his mother's womb a second time, can he? Jesus answered, "Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water, physical birth, and spirit, spiritual birth, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh, physical, is flesh. That which is born of the spirit is spirit."

Jesus taught the most religious, moral man we have cited in scripture that when you pray to receive Jesus and he enters your life, it's a spiritual birth. You're regenerated. You receive a new nature. Jot in your notes 2 Corinthians 5:17. It says if any man, any woman is in Christ, you're a new creation. The old things pass away. Behold, all things are becoming new.

Ninth grade biology, the little green caterpillar creates a cocoon and out comes a butterfly. We call it metamorphosis. That's what it's called. The DNA in that green caterpillar and the DNA in that butterfly are exactly the same. A metamorphosis occurs where that butterfly is no longer ugly and green and crawls. It is beautiful. It gets a new nature, it gets a new capacity.

That's the physical picture in nature of what happens when you pray to receive Christ. Write this down. God gave me a new nature. God made you a new person. Do you believe that? How many Christians are living with, "Well, this is how I grew up, and you know my dad was an alcoholic, and I've been through this, and then this happened." I'm not saying there aren't consequences.

I am saying what if you believed in the cocoon of metamorphosis and life change that is the Word of God and time in community and time in his word and your openness and steps of faith? You have a brand new nature. You can fly. Stop crawling. We have Christians everywhere that are still crawling and you're butterflies because you don't believe you have a new nature. You've been regenerated.

It's a journey and a process. God is my Father, number one. Number two, God made me a new person. As a result, guess what? You might jot down, "Jesus lives in me." If something's born, that's what it says. Jesus actually lives inside of you in the person of the Holy Spirit. The third thing that happens is reconciliation. That means that although I was once hostile to God and alienated from him, I am now his friend.

Paul would write, inspired by the Holy Spirit in Colossians chapter one, verses 21 and 22, "Although you, speaking to these new Christians, were formerly alienated and hostile in mind, engaged in evil deeds, yet he, Jesus, has reconciled you in his fleshly body through his death." Do you see how all these keep coming back to what happened at the cross?

When what happens at the cross gets received by faith, then this journey from your head to your heart where you actually not just know about it, but you know it, you digest it, you absorb it, you believe it. It becomes a part of your life focus and how you see God, see the world, and see yourself. In order to present you, this is how he presented you: holy and blameless beyond reproach.

Some of you have been through the very painful experience of irreconcilable differences, either in business, in a marriage. You know what the word reconcile means? It means two people that weren't getting along. In our case, we were enemies of God. We were hostile to God. The one who made us, it was either passive indifference, "I don't care about God," or actual rebellion, "Don't any of you tell me what to do even though you made me."

And you become friends. Would you write this down? God is my friend. What if this started itching its way, maybe at least got down to the collarbone? God is my Father. God made me a new person. God is my friend. What do friends do? This is not a trick question. What do you do with your friends? You hang out. You enjoy each other. You get to know each other.

You do things you both enjoy. Real friends, you can share the good stuff and they're not jealous, they're happy for you. You can share the bad stuff and they'll even help you. You can even share the deep, ugly stuff and they don't judge you, but they also don't let you stay the same. What if you actually could believe that God is not down on you? He's your friend.

He can take whatever you want to share. He wants to hang out. This isn't about being religious. "I'm going to church regularly. I need to read the Bible. I need to pray, probably need to pray longer. I need to give some money. Am I okay now?" That is how some people live. How about this? "Come unto me all of you that are stressed out and heavy laden and labor and just overwhelmed with life and I will give you rest. Take my yoke. Let's do life together. I'm meek, power under control, lowly of heart, and I want to help you get through this life and I will never leave you or forsake you."

You have been justified, you have been regenerated, you have been reconciled. Then I love this next one, it's a big word: propitiation. It means that Jesus satisfied the just wrath of God by his death on the cross and therefore Jesus took all my punishment forever. Let me say that again. Jesus took all your punishment forever. Jesus took all of my punishment forever.

1 John chapter four, verses nine through 11: "By this the love of God was manifested or made known to us, that God sent his only begotten Son into the world." Why? "So that we might live." How? "Through him. In this is love, not that we love God, but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another."

You need to understand that God has emotions. He's a person. One essence, three distinct persons. He has feelings and emotions and a mind and a will, and we're made in his image. There's something that makes him very, very angry: it's called evil. But his anger isn't like our kind of anger that flies off the handle or just is capricious and he's going to blow up one day.

John Stott writes about propitiation and he says the reason why propitiation is necessary is that sin arouses God's wrath or anger. This doesn't mean that he's likely to fly off the handle at the most trivial provocation. Still less that he ever loses his temper for no apparent reason at all. There is nothing capricious or arbitrary about the holy God, nor is he ever malicious or spiteful or vindictive.

His anger is neither mysterious nor irrational. It is never unpredictable, but always predictable because it is provoked by evil and evil alone. The wrath of God is his steady, unrelenting, unremitting, uncompromising antagonism to evil in all of its forms and all of its manifestations. I'm listening to the life of Bonhoeffer by Eric Metaxas right now and I'm in the section where the most horrific things were done to the Poles and the Jews that it's even hard to hear of gassing people and going into villages and just indiscriminately lining everyone up and killing them and then dancing on their bodies.

The human heart in the right circumstances is desperately wicked. What you need to understand when Jesus was hanging on the cross and crying out, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" It's in that moment that the just wrath of God took the punishment you deserve and I deserve and all people of all time deserve and he placed it on Christ. He who knew no sin became sin for us that we might become the righteousness of God. In that single moment, all the punishment of all time was on Christ.

Dave Druey: You’re listening to Living on the Edge and a message titled, "You Are Secure", part of our series called The New You: Claiming Your Birthright as a Child of God. This series is just getting started, but already the truths are stacking up: chosen, adopted, redeemed, valuable, and now secure.

These are the unshakable realities of what happened the moment you placed your faith in Christ. If you want to keep building on that foundation, Chip’s brand new devotional, "Growing Deeper in Christ: A 365-Day Journey to True Discipleship", was designed to walk alongside you every step of the way.

It follows Jesus' own pattern of discipleship drawn from 10 books Chip has written over the years. Each day, just a few minutes in scripture and one simple step of obedience, letting these truths move from the pages of your Bible into the fabric of your everyday life.

If you've never given to this ministry before, or if you'd like to join us as a monthly partner, we'd love to send you a copy as our thank you gift for getting started. Make your first gift or sign up as a monthly partner today online at livingontheedge.org or call us at 888-333-6003.

You can also mail your gift to Living on the Edge, PO Box 3007, Atlanta, Georgia 303024. If you want to go even deeper into Chip's teaching, check out the Living on the Edge podcast where you can find full-length sermons from Chip anytime, anywhere. Just search for Living on the Edge wherever you listen to podcasts and subscribe today. Now here's Chip.

Chip Ingram: As we wrap up today's program, I have to tell you, I love the conversation that Jesus had with Nicodemus. Jesus didn't shame him for not asking his questions in public. He had a quiet, personal, profound conversation. He loved Nicodemus. What I also like about this is Nicodemus knew—I mean, he was a theologian. He had major portions of the Old Testament memorized.

He knew his theology, and yet he didn't get how that theology connected to real life and real relationship with God. I find that really encouraging because that's often the case with me, and I think with many Christians. As I taught today, I taught about justification. Some of the words I used might be kind of heavy: justification, regeneration, propitiation.

Man, this guy's using a lot of theological words. But here's what I want to tell you: it is the meaning of those words that if you're a follower of Christ and you prayed to receive him, these things are true of you. Here's what I want you to get. Justification is a legal term where God the Father has declared you righteous in his sight forever, not because of anything you've done or I've done, but because of Christ's work in your place applied to you.

That means God is your Father. You're a part of the family. I talked about regeneration as I talked about Nicodemus and you have to be born again. That's a big word, but all it means is that you're a new creation. The old you, the person you were before you trusted Christ, died and Christ now lives in you. Your personality is the same, your body looks the same, but you're a completely new creation.

Do you believe that? Are you experiencing that? In our next program, I'm going to walk through five very specific things that happened to you when you trusted Christ. I will tell you, when you begin to believe these, you talk about security. You talk about feeling safe. You talk about being the kind of person that can walk into a room and walk through life without fear.

It's because you know you're a son, you're a daughter of the Lord of Lords and King of Kings who has promised to protect you and love you and keep you for himself, no matter what. I hope you'll join me.

Dave Druey: I’m Dave Druey, inviting you back next time when Chip Ingram continues our study on "The New You" here on Living on the Edge. Today's program is produced and sponsored by Living on the Edge.