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The Riches of His Grace

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……By Jeff Foerster

In this week’s sermon on the book of Ephesians, Brian Sharpe laid out for us three precepts for living as a redeemed people. They are as follows:

These are good; these are great. But there is a problem: me. I want to make these powerful guidelines simply checklist items to perform and then put away. I might even take out the list daily, but only to make sure I’ve “accomplished” each item. These three points are spot on; the problem is the depth of sin’s corruption in me. I am not as bad as I could be, but every area of my being has been tainted by sin.

Wow, how depressing, right? Stay with me for just a little longer—the solution is lovely.

The other day, while watching a Seahawks game on the tele, I heard a rapping at my door. What should appear before my eyes, but two messengers of slavery. I engaged them in conversation, during which one suggested as a precept that “We are all God’s children, right?” Uh, no—sorry dude. If all people begin as God’s children and then I am promised the right to become a child of God, the foundation of Scripture becomes a wee bit uninspiring, and Jesus’s sacrifice becomes merely symbolic nicety. In truth, we have a default position, judged guilty, and a default destination, everlasting separation from God in Hell.

Okay, I promised “lovely,” but I gave you “Hell”—not without purpose, however. Only the propitiation and expiation of the cross and the resurrection can establish right relationship with God, rescuing us from the penalty of sin. We receive this not by being born in the flesh, but by being born of the Spirit. Only in understanding the depth of our depravity, our foundation in darkness, can we truly appreciate what Christ has done for us in redeeming us from the grave, from death itself! From this perspective, we begin to desire to know of God and to know God, to spend time with this God who becomes our Father, not the One we deserve, but the One we need. We needed saving, and in His abundant generosity, He also gave us a home and a future.

From this position building into desire, longing, we can recognize that sin and Satan have no hold on us, the Bible teaching us that we are born again, into life, and not into the ways of death. When we “walk” by spending time with our God in silence and in speaking, in prayer and petition, while working and while planning, while driving and while shopping, we will have neither time nor inclination to go down the “path of the prostitute.” When in close relationship with our Father, the Lord of all glory, we will clearly see our sin for what it is, our hearts will be broken for it, and we will, in repentance, fall on His mercy and purpose to walk, nay, RUN in the other direction. Simply, success is found in an ongoing relationship with the living God.

I end with Brian’s question: How should knowing we have an inheritance affect the way we live? His answer: take your eyes off the present and place them on the future. Our future is Christ—FOREVER!

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Pgo

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By Dan Amos

I had an idea to write about Pgo and Pwin. I even spent pretty much a whole sermon thinking it all through, writing it out in my head. It’s not that my mind was wandering, but it was engaged in a different direction … but when it came time to put the words into Notepad, it just didn’t flow.

Pgo and Pwin are terms I’ve learned to use in my job in business development to quantify the probability of an opportunity happening, and of winning it. For the purpose of this note, the opportunity is what we’re all about as children of God.

We exist to be in relationship with God. That is the opportunity. In this existence, we must choose whether we live in relationship with Him or in opposition to Him. We are already eternal beings, and we’ll take the results of this relationship with us into eternity. Either we will be in eternal relationship with Him or we will be eternally separated from Him.

With Him, we will be surrounded by His perfect love, enveloped by His glory. Our hearts will burst out in songs of praise, and I will finally be able to clap AND sing simultaneously. (For now, it’s one or the other, not both.) We will have purpose and fulfillment, but sorrow will be gone forever.

Without Him, our eternal existence will be unending misery. We will have a void that can never be filled. The torment and pain will be like nothing ever known, and it will not end. Eternity is real, and it is for everyone. How we spend it is the most important choice we make in this life.

These two options for eternity are the 10th point of our Statement of Faith. For those keeping track, this would be the Opportunity. Within the first eight points of the statement are the basics of who God is and what He has done for us. Understanding who He is is all part of Pgo. Because He did all the work (Point 5), our response to “God’s grace through faith alone in Christ alone” (Point 7) is our Pwin. And, just to complete the analogy, Point 9, on Christ’s return, is part of the award process.

The point is, we must know who it is we serve and know what it is He wants of us. If we have that wrong, we are chasing a false opportunity, and we risk losing everything. We already have eternal life; it’s where we spend it that’s the opportunity. A win is spending it with Him. A loss is complete isolated desolation without Him. Make sure you understand the Pgo and go all in for Pwin and make your Paward 100%.

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Risk with Immeasurable Reward

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By Bill Naron

In the Gospel of Luke, chapter 18, we come upon a scene where Jesus is approached by a rich ruler. This man is interested in inheriting eternal life, and he wants Jesus to tell him how to do so. Jesus lists out the commands, and the ruler quickly responds that he has kept them since his youth. But then the unexpected response from Jesus comes, and we pick it up there in verse 22:

Now when Jesus heard these things, he said unto him, Yet lackest thou one thing: sell all that thou hast, and distribute unto the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come, follow me. And when he had heard this, he was very sorrowful: for he was very rich. (Luke 18:22-23, KJV)

Sorrowful — this is how the ruler responded. Jesus presented him with the answer to his question, and it saddened him. At the surface, we see that it saddened him because he was very rich. But I would add that it challenged his status quo. It presented a challenge to him, to sell everything he had and follow Jesus.

Is this not the same challenge that we are presented with still, to give of all we have to follow after Jesus? On Sunday, Martin was presenting to us about the culmination of being a guide. Being a guide takes risk; it takes moving beyond what is comfortable to what is uncomfortable. To accomplish the task that is set before of reaching the unbelieving community around us, it takes us setting ourselves and our comforts off to the side. One may even say that it takes us losing our lives, just like Jesus talks about in Luke 9:23-24.

The ruler was not sorrowful simply over the loss of riches that he had gained. It was a challenge that was loaded with risk; he was also sorrowful because it was calling him to engage outside of his comfort zone, where he may encounter people whom he would not normally engage, where he would be stretched to do things he would not normally do.

I wrote a Last Word back in November of last year, entitled “Called to Be Sheep!” As I have reflected on the state of the community around me, I have been reminded of this article. When I wrote this blog post last year, I was talking about reaching out to help the community around you to be like the sheep in Matthew 25:31-46. In the last couple weeks, my wife and I have been presented with situations that have really brought this back to the forefront for us.

Jesus says that if we lose our life, we will find it. He has called us out of the world to follow Him and to reach into the darkness that surrounds us and offer hope. When we decide to be the Church and we begin to go and shine a light in the darkness, it is going to get uncomfortable. Engaging with people in our community will be messy.

There is great risk in taking up our cross to follow Jesus. There is risk when we begin to be sheep, engage the community around us, and work to meet needs. There was risk in the challenge that Jesus presented to the rich ruler. We must not be like the rich ruler, though, clinging to our possessions and comfort so much that Jesus’s presentation saddens us and causes us to walk away.

We should hold loosely to everything we have, because we only have what God has given. Our possessions, our finances, our homes, were all given to us by the Lord. These things should be used to do His work. It may be risky in the sense that it challenges our status quo, and maybe it could even cause us a lot of hardship.

Jesus said that we should not be surprised when the world hates us, because they first hated Him. Jesus came to reach those who were broken and calls us to be His sheep and to do the same. This challenge is risky and uncomfortable, but the reward is great and immeasurable.

 

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