Ten Truths For the New Millennium II, A Power to Live On I

I'm often asked, when those lights come on up there, what does that mean? And that's the number of minutes left in the service, and that's all you have to worry about. And it counts down, it'll come on there. That means you better get up soon if that's your number, because your kid has just about reached the very end of the line with the folks back in the children's ministry. How are we wired to think as Americans today? I mean, when it just comes to getting things done, see if you can complete any of these common phrases. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. We make money the old-fashioned way, we earn it. There's no such thing as a free lunch. I'll never forget, my fourth grade civics teacher taught me that one. No pain, no gain. And this non-scriptural phrase, even God helps those who... That's not in the Bible, but that's a common phrase in America. Everything about the American way is self-made, isn't it? Competitive, you get what you earn, you get what you pay for, you make your way. You do it, you earn it. Work, sweat, effort, putting forth your best. And you know what? It's the American work ethic. And you know, it's working very well when it comes to economics, as we head into the new millennium with a full head of steam, leading the world, economically speaking. But that same thought process doesn't work very well when it comes to our relationship to God. Because God is not impressed with how hard we work. God is not keeping a list of performance for each of us to see how well we're doing. The harder we work to please God does not necessarily translate into Him even noticing what we're doing. And many of us have discovered the frustration of thinking that we're doing a certain set of things and realizing that we're already closer to God than we were a few years ago when we weren't doing anything at all. I've had so many people march into my office sometimes and make appointments and say, you know, I've started going back to church and started doing this and started doing that and I just don't feel any closer to God. Fully missing the most important foundational truth, and that is that in the kingdom of God everything comes by grace. It's not earned, deserved, or worked for. It's the free gift of God. God saves us by grace. We're going to talk about that a little bit more in a few moments. But He also blesses us by grace, uses us by grace, and sustains us by grace. Look at your outline, the first scripture that I noted. Whatever I am now, the apostle Paul writes, it is all because God poured out such kindness and grace upon me. So wherever you are in your journey, if you're a great leader and teacher in the body of Christ today, it's by grace. If you're brand new to the things of searching about faith, God will guide you by grace. Look at the next verse. From the fullness of His grace, we have all received just salvation. Now what does it say? One blessing after another. Now, in this new series that I began last week, Ten Truths for the New Millennium, we established that first of all, it's important that we lay hold of the fact that there is absolute truth. There is a truth. And tolerance isn't the supreme virtue, even though in our culture it appears to be increasingly that which everyone promotes. And I want to thank many of you for your feedback on last week's message and the motivation that it was. I just want to remind you, if you're motivated, then for example, and you care about truth, then you should know what the people that you're going to put into office this Tuesday believe. And I want to exhort you as your pastor, get your head inside of what these people are thinking. The political system in this nation is designed to have you participate, and if you sit back and let it happen to you, we have no excuse if they take away our rights and freedoms and values. We can make a difference. So I exhort you, please, exercise the privilege of informed voting this Tuesday. Then we established last week, on the top of your outline, four essentials for effective living. And I said that every one of these isn't sort of an optional thing. If you don't have these friends, it's likely you're going to drift and be carried along by the weight of just trying to get stuff done. The busyness of life, the four essentials, we're a power to live on. You can see it up there, people to live with, principles to live by, and a purpose to live for. Now this morning I want to talk about essential number one, power for the new millennium. How many of you are just plain tired? I mean, even after an extra hour of sleep. I didn't get to catch you up for what you did. Some of you work 60, 70 hour weeks. Some of you have three, four, five children running around the house. Some of you hate leaves. I mean, life is consuming, it's busy. But the foundation for all power in the Christian life is the grace of God. The grace of God. I love that word. Charis in the Greek. C-H-A-R-I-S. Charis. The word for grace. And I have two concerns in this message. Number one, I have a concern that a whole lot of us think, hey, I already know a lot about grace. You say that quite a bit around here. In fact, if I'm not mistaken, Pastor Jay, last fall you did a ten-message series on grace. So haven't I heard everything you have to say about it? Probably. But you're going to hear a little bit more again. Because I don't think that we've gotten it all. I haven't. The second group of folks I'm concerned about are those who have a clear understanding of what grace is, but they've applied it only to their moment that they came into the kingdom. Their moment of understanding they couldn't save themselves, so they came to Christ and opened their heart to him and received the gift of salvation, but are now just sort of plunking along. And now I'm talking to a lot of you who think that I'm not talking to you. I love being in one place for a long time, because you can't escape who you really are. You're known. And the axiom that some people live by, that folks never change, isn't a biblical one. We can all continue to change by the grace of God at work in us. So I want you to understand this message. I'm not going through grace like some pre-flight, you know, hold the end of the belt buckle this way and insert it into this, like you get on an airplane and you don't pay any attention to it. This is about the most important source of power that any of us can access. And I want to say, I'm really concerned today, as we go into the new millennium, that many of us who have begun in grace are falling back into the old religious habits that we knew as a child or a young person. We start thinking legalistically. We start thinking judgmentally. We don't think biblically, and we don't think as people of grace. And a sure sign of that is a lack of joy. Friends, some of us are just like addicts who can't help ourselves. We just go back to the lesser power, to the old self. We become indulgent and indifferent, hedonists or fault-finding and critical judgmentalists or stressed-out, guilt-ridden legalists. And only a fraction of us really discover the peace-filled, joy-filled, grace-driven life that Jesus died on the cross to provide. He didn't just die so that we could get into heaven. He died that we might have life and have it to its fullness. And way too many of us have accepted a counterfeit. Having lost the battle for our salvation, the enemy has now targeted the rest of our life to try to make us think that we can somehow just sort of pound it out on our own. And if that doesn't work, we're going to pound on somebody else. And so I say, Lord, help us to become grace-filled people. Some folks say, you know, well, I was baptized 25 years ago. I know what I'm doing in this. Or, I'm going to have communion, as you can see. We're going to have communion this morning. And we go back to these symbols, as if somehow those symbols secure our place and our understanding. Here's a symbol for you. This is an old letter sweater from my college days. As you can see, there's more of me now than there was of this sweater back then. And wouldn't it be, I mean, if I went ahead and put this on and went back to my basketball coach in college and said, hey, I'm ready to play. What do you think he'd say? Yeah. But not in this league. This symbol has nothing to do with my life today. It's just a symbol of something happening in the past. And we need to lay some of the symbols that we think are driving us and put them in their proper perspective. They're great reminders, but they are not the source of life. And so I want us to look today at what grace really is. I don't have a definition down there. You can call it God's love in action, if you want to write it right above understanding grace. And this is going to go quickly. You could call it God's power to do His will. I love that one. That's what grace is. I've made it into a little acrostic. G-R-A-C-E. Grace. Reminds me of the guy that was speaking at the Yale University graduation and he used Yale as an acrostic. Y-youth, A-attitude, L-loyalty, E-endurance. But he took 30 minutes on every point of the acrostic. Afterward, he asked the student, what did you think of my message? He said, well, it was really good, but it was... By the end of it, I was glad I wasn't going to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. So, we're not going there. We're going to look, first of all, at G. The G of grace. God's gift to me. First outline, or blank on your outline, God's gift to me. Ask 10 people today, up at Cranberry Mall, how can I know that I'm going to heaven? And the majority, probably 8 or 9 out of 10, would say something like, well, I don't know if you could ever really know, but I kind of believe that if you do the best that you can do, and you don't hurt anyone, and you're really sincere, that all roads kind of lead to heaven, and that in the end, God will weigh out your good deeds and your bad deeds, and if your good ones sort of outweigh your bad ones, then you're going to make it, and God will say, hey, come on in. I mean, some variant of that description is what I get from most people that I have an encounter with that don't know that I'm a pastor. And what is that? What package is it? That's the package of works, isn't it? It's the package of the American way. That's what you'd expect people to say. But remember that heaven's a perfect place, and perfect places have no room for pretty good people. Did you hear that? Perfect places have no room for pretty good people. So that means you have to be perfect to go to heaven? That's what the Bible says. Well, then nobody's going to make it. And that's absolutely right. On our own effort, we are not going to make it. No matter how many times you go to church, no matter how many times you take communion, no matter how many times you say, I'm sorry, no matter how many good deeds you do, you'll never go. Simply based on your effort. You need to have a perfect record. And so God saw our dilemma, and he sent the only perfect being, even his son Jesus, who died not for the sin he committed, but for our sin. And that's why the doctrine of the atonement is so important. You have to believe that Jesus didn't sin, because had he sinned, that he would have been paying for his own sin. Rather, because he was sinless, he could pay for our sin as a substitute. And fundamentally, the starting point of grace is the conviction that on the cross, Jesus died, that we might receive forgiveness. Look what it says in Romans 11, 6. If it is by grace, it is no longer on the basis of works. Otherwise, grace is no longer grace. Now, look up just a moment at me, everybody. This is the fundamental difference between Christianity and all other religions of the world, and even variants of Christianity that you hear about. Listen. All other religions of the world, and I've studied many of them through seminary. Buddhism. The Muslim faith. And we just go on down the list. The New Age spirituality movements. All of them. They all base their doctrine of righteousness, of being acceptable before God, on doing certain things in certain ways at certain times in certain orders. It's when the certain bell rings, you'll see Muslims all over the world bow down and pray. And if they start missing that, then they're offending Allah, and they're slipping out of His favor. And on and on it goes. And in a word, all religions of the world, in a word, are do-religions. They're religions of works, they're religions of practices, lists, deeds, and behaviors. Meditate on this, burn that, go here, kneel there. And in those religions, the interesting thing is you're never really sure if you're acceptable. You never really know until your very last breath. And that's so dangerous. How'd you like to live your whole life not being sure if when you die, you know that you're going to go to heaven? But most of the world lives that way. This is in stark contrast to the Bible. It's the opposite of what the Bible teaches. The only way to know God, the only way to have your sins forgiven, and the only way to know that you're going to heaven is to accept Jesus Christ and what He did for you, and by so accepting Him, trust Him to be your perfect, there's the key, your perfect righteousness. It's as if God takes the sinless, clean slate of His Son Jesus and puts it where your name is. So that when God opens the great books in heaven and says, well, let's take a look here at Don or Chris or Roy or Gene or Sandy and look down and see what she or he did in this life, He doesn't see the long list of violations. He doesn't see the pride. He doesn't see the hurtful things that were said. He doesn't see the lustful thoughts and all that. He sees the perfect record of His Son Jesus. And friends, I don't know what that does to you, but that's a good place to say thank God because it makes room for me. I wouldn't want God to open my book and see my record. How about you? But He sees Jesus. And so Christianity in a word is not do, it's done. It's done. It's already been done. You can decide now, will you do it or you accept what's been done? A few years ago out here in the gym, after the second service, I went back for the coffee hour time and a new person came up to me and he'd been here a while and he said, Pastor, I'm not sure I know, what do I need to do to be saved? I said, you know, it's too late. I was just having a little fun with him. I thought I'd shock him a bit. I said, it's all been done. Two thousand years ago. And I'd like to share with you how you can receive what's been done for you. And I had an opportunity to pray with someone during the coffee hour to receive what was done. Romans 3.24 in your outline. All of us need to be made right with God by His grace, which is a free gift through Jesus Christ. And friends, that is the reason, for those of you who are new to us, that's the reason why we are prone to be a little exuberant, a little expressive. It's better than a touchdown to know that your life is securely in the arms of a loving God and that eternity has been determined by His sacrifice for your sin and for mine. Now, how do you receive that gift? Well, you have to receive it by faith. We apply this grace by faith. Look at the next verse. For it is by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not from ourselves or yourselves. It is a gift of God. Not by works, so that no one can boast. Now, this is very important because you can understand what grace is but not appropriate it to yourself. Not take it as your own. Not receive it in your own life. This scripture is saying that if you hear about grace and you know you need it in your life, then by faith you reach out and receive it. And this is a struggle for many of us. It's difficult. We're not sure how to do that. And I'm going to talk about it in just a moment. Aren't you glad that heaven isn't a place where, well, you know, we get there because we all did certain things kind of well and we get up there. Could you imagine if heaven was a place where we started comparing our accomplishments? How did you get in here? Well, I got in here because I prayed two hours a day. Well, I got in here because I led 20 people to Christ in my lifetime. Another person goes, hey, 20. No, I led 50. Or another person says, well, big deal. You know, I gave 20% of my income away. And I go, well, that's... And, you know, pretty soon, could you just imagine heaven as a place where, like, some are cool and some are like, well, they're the really super ones and there's, oh, well, you know, and then there's the place where you get in if you just kind of got by by the skin of your teeth and I've heard people say, well, if I just have a shack in the corner of heaven, that's all I care about. It doesn't work that way. We all come in on the righteousness of Christ by faith. Now, I want to quickly say, are there rewards in heaven? Absolutely. Will we be honored for things that we have done in response and obedience to Christ? You bet. And I want you to know something. This life is a great investment in eternity. But my sense is there's not going to be any sense of envy of someone that's up a little higher than you might be in the heavenly ranks. God will make us all mute in his presence when it comes to comparing. I remember years ago, I was invited to the president's prayer breakfast down in Washington, D.C. And I was just one of the gang of 4,000 in the basement of the Sheraton there. And maybe it was the Hilton Hotel. And when President Reagan walked in, I remember thinking, a room of 4,000 people. I mean, I was way in the back. But I didn't say, gee, I wish I was up there in the front or I was at the head table. I just knew I was in the presence of the president. And it was a great moment when I remember. That's the way it's going to be with the Lord. We're going to come into his presence. And all of the things we've done are going to seem so insignificant compared to his glory. Look at the next verse. People receive God's promise by having faith. And this happens so the promise can be a free gift. How do you know if you have enough faith? Well, friends, you begin to act on what you believe. Now, here's where you know if you have faith. And I know this is reviewed for some of you. But some of you don't know this. How do you know if you have enough faith? You start to act on the faith that you have. Abraham heard from God, you're supposed to go out and establish a country. And the Bible says that Abraham went out not knowing where he was going. He just started moving. And God said, now go here and now go there. And he led Abraham on a pilgrimage. Or, remember Peter in the New Testament? Matthew? Book of Matthew? Peter sees Jesus walking on the water and Peter says, I want to have... I want to come to you, Lord. Let me walk on the water. And Jesus said, go ahead. And so Peter steps out of the boat. And his eyes are on the Lord and he starts to walk on the water. And in that verse, I've said many times, it just so captivates me. It says, he began to sink. I have never begun to sink. I mean, I'm either on or under. How about you? You know, you don't gradually sink. You just go right down. And what happened? Well, the Bible says he put his eyes on the raging waves and the wind and he began to sink. But, I think Peter was still a hero there. He was still acting on his faith. I want to say to you, if you don't know if you have enough faith, just begin to act on what you believe God wants you to be. Start acting like a godly person. Start reading His Word just as your own exercise of discipline. Start praying even to the God that you may not know is even listening to you yet, but you will begin to know because as you pray, you release the power of Heaven back to you. Start to share with others what God's done in your life. Start to serve when called upon. Start to love when given the opportunity. Keep your eyes on Jesus and you will begin to change. You see, faith begins to be released as you take the actions consistent with it. Don't do this. Don't just sit there. Say, God, give me enough faith. Give me enough faith to believe. Give me enough faith. Please give me enough faith. And wait for this bolt to come down because it's not coming. But take a step and just start acting the way you believe God wants you to act and guess what? It will happen. Things will start to make sense. Now, how many know what I'm talking about? You've done that very thing. It starts to make sense because you're doing it and God infuses it with life and your life begins to change and it's powerful. Your habits lose their power. Your desires start to change. The things that used to have you let you go and a whole new world that you didn't know existed starts to open up and you get it because you've received it by faith. Letter A. It's available. Turn your outline over. It's available to everyone. This is very important. Regardless of your background and your past. Regardless of the status that you have or don't have. Whether your life is marked with failure or great successes. Things that you're proud of or aren't proud of. No matter who you are, what you've done, Jesus makes His grace available to you. Everyone. Look what it says. Everyone, Romans 10, 13, who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved. I want you to circle everyone. That means addicted people, abused people, wealthy people, highly educated people, fat people, thin people, uneducated, intellectual, even people who've done some bad things but most things pretty good. Everyone who calls upon the name of the Lord will be saved. If you're here today for the first time, I want to say congratulations. You've come to this church on a great day. And God's grace is as available to you today, right now, at 10 o'clock in the morning, on the 31st of October, 1999, as it is to the person that's been sitting in this congregation for the last 18 and a half years. That's the amazing part about it. It's available to you. Everyone who calls upon the name of the Lord with a sincere heart will be saved. So why put it off? I'm wondering why would you put it off? Take this step of faith and receive Him. And if you've known this, and some of you have known this, but you've slipped back into a works mentality and started just going back to the old way of thinking, I just want to remind you of what it says. Let's put up that Galatians passage, please. Look at this with me up here on the screen. Let me put this question to you. How did your new life begin? Was it working with your heads off, working your heads off whether to please God? Or was it responding to God's message to you? Are you going to continue this craziness? For only crazy people would think that they could complete by their own efforts what was begun by God. If you weren't smart enough or strong enough to begin it, how do you suppose you could perfect it? Did you go through this whole painful learning process for nothing? It is not yet a total loss, but it certainly will be if you keep this up. Galatians 3, 3-5 in the message paraphrased. I love that. Stop this craziness. Get out of legalism and judgmentalism and hedonism and get on with grace. It's available to you today. And how does it come? Let us see. It comes through Christ. Acts 15, 12. We believe it is through the grace of our Lord Jesus that we are saved. Grace comes through Christ. Why? Well, because He's the one who paid for it. Nobody else paid for our sins. Nobody else purchased our salvation. Nobody else provided the blessings that we need. And friends, never, ever, ever forget, please, that though grace is free, it is not cheap. Every time I see the cross, I'm reminded that the blessings I'm talking about, the salvation I'm proclaiming, the joy-filled, peace-filled life that I'm offering today comes because someone paid a price. Your gift of salvation and holiness, of purpose and of eternity was paid for. And that's why the only acceptable response of a people who were once dead in their sins, lost and hopeless, is to fall down in obedience and worship and say, God, thank you. I have a light. It's always going to shine. It shines in the day and it shines in the night. When the dark days come. And the next line? And the sun isn't bright. I knew that. I'm going to keep on shining. Because I have a light. That's why we worship. There's a phrase for people who've received this grace by faith and are living in it. It's the phrase, In Christ. In Christ. You want to jot that down underneath that, with the blank space under the letter C? In Christ. It appears 120 times in the Bible. Like Colossians 1.28. We proclaim him, admonishing and teaching everyone with all wisdom, so that we may present everyone perfect in Christ. Now friends, I want you to look up here one more time. Let's just say this card represents your life. And maybe you started out in a wonderful family and things were great. But you made some choices that kind of tore up your life a little bit. And then you made a bad decision about some friends you hung out with. And then you got involved in some substances that kind of messed you up. And then maybe you got just a little bit critical of others and started picking on them, putting them down. And maybe you started spending wildly because you couldn't satisfy your desires and you got way, way, way underneath it all in debt. I don't know. Whatever it is. Maybe your relationships got all messed up. And now your life looks like this. It's just all torn up. It's a mess. Now let's just say that this Bible represents Christ. God says, I take your broken life and I, when you come by grace, through faith, I put you in Christ. Now, when God looks at you, what does He see? He sees you in Christ. He doesn't see all the brokenness. He doesn't see all the failures. But I still feel them. Yeah, but you see, the more that you're in Christ, the more God works His healing. And He may shake things up and He may allow some things to sift out in your life. But even when it gets tough, you say you stay in Christ. Even when the storms come, even things rock your life, you stay in Christ. And He renews your wholeness. He stores you. And it's your choice. You can be in Christ or you can remain broken in thousands of little pieces. In some incredible way, when I continue in Him, the Lord gives that righteousness to me and makes me all that He wants me to be. Now, friends, you may have been a Christian a long time and brokenness can still come into your life. And when it does, do you respond in grace or do you find yourself trying to work your way out of it? I want you to hear a testimony this morning of a couple that had lots of experience in the Lord, walked a long way with Him, and they hit some tough times in the latter part of their life. And God's used it. Give a warm welcome today to Greg and Joy Young as they come to share their testimony. Whoops. Good morning. That's all right. You can leave that right there. Hi, Greg. Thanks, Jay. Eight years ago, I started a software development business that I was sure was going to take off and be a great success. Eighteen months ago, I had to shut down my business. And although we've been able to avoid bankruptcy, our credit rating really couldn't be worse if we had declared bankruptcy, even though we're trying to pay people back. That's kind of our situation. It's been a tough road, but if I had to choose between being a millionaire versus learning what I have about myself and growing in my relationship with the Lord, I wouldn't take the million bucks. As a Type A personality, I believe the Lord saved me from the potential ravages of success. If I had been successful, it would have been me and my efforts, not the Lord's. Now I know a little bit more, I hope, about trusting Him, trusting the Lord. I even learned that it's about trusting my wife. Men are not complete without their wives. Just as God made us incomplete by taking a rib to make woman, we as men are incomplete without our wives' input. There were two things my wife kept insisting that I do in my business that because I thought I knew better, I didn't do. Well, in the final analysis, if I had done either one of them, the business probably would not have failed. How many of you realize that financial problems can cause problems in your marriage, even if you're an elder? Well, when your business fails and you nearly declare bankruptcy, it adds a special kind of stress that challenged our 33 years of marriage. Fortunately, God has been able to use the adversity in our marriage for His good by allowing us to have a testimony with those who have also had problems in marriage menders to see how they can also have victory. At one point, about two years ago, the Lord showed me how motivated I was by fear. Even though I didn't see myself as a fearful person, in the midst of extreme fear about losing my business and fear of failure, with the help of some teaching from Pastor John, I was able to see how my Type A drive was to a large extent driven by a fear that I might fail. I was driven to think that if I just did more and better, I would be able to avoid failure. What I wasn't doing was trusting in the Lord for my success. By studying David and Goliath, I began to put my fear in perspective. It was sin, and I needed to turn those giants in my life that I feared over to God, humble myself, and trust in Him for victory. Because Joy and I worked closely with Pastor John as part of my role as an elder, I was privileged to be a part of a training course last June based upon the premise that the enemy, Satan, uses lies in our lives to control us. These lies, even when we recognize them, can still control us unless we find the source of them, which is almost always a childhood experience from before the age of six. We need to then have the Lord shine His light of truth into that situation. As we practiced the training that we had among the group that went to the training, the Lord showed me how much He loved me and dealt with lies that crept in even when I was very little. I might add that my parents are here today, and they're great parents. The experience that I had resulted in the lies that had nothing to do with poor parenting. Through the Lord revealing Himself, I've been able to deal with feelings of lack of acceptance and even feelings of feeling stupid. And I would say on a scale of one to ten, my problem is hardly registered compared to others' experiences, but the solution has been very freeing. And here's where it's led me. Recently I had two job offers to choose from a month ago. One as a president of a company at Ohio, and the other with a company in Silicon Valley, California. When I prayed about what the Lord wanted me to do, He asked me, Would you like to know what I would like to do? I said, Yes, of course. What am I going to say? He said, I like to go with you when you go where you can't make it without me. I knew that the greater risk was in California, and that's where He wants us. During our interview trip to California, we visited Emanuel Canestresi's church, some of you older folks may remember that, where his nephew was preaching on Nehemiah chapter four about rebuilding the walls. Well, it was as if he had been riding to church with us that morning and listening in on our conversation. And at the end of the service, he said he had not planned to preach on that subject, but the day before, the Lord instructed him to. He said, I therefore know that there are people here today that need this message. I want all of you to now stand up, raise your hands, and receive God's power for rebuilding. And as he finished that sentence, he walked back to the fourth row where Joy and I were, and he put his hand on my chest, and he says, This couple is in the midst of rebuilding. And I have to tell you, it was like God reached out and just touched me with His grace at that point. So it was a needed refreshing time. But now I want you to hear from the ribs side of things. There are worse things than business failure, like standing up here and trying to tell you all about it. The greatest challenge for me during the experience of having our own business and having to close it down has been realizing that God's goal for our business was not success and money and security for the future, but how we moved through the journey and understood our Father's love. Our faith has been stretched, and everything we thought we understood about walking in it has been