Faith and Hope What about grace

Welcome to episode 110, In the Beginning Was the Word.

And the Word was with God, and the Word was God, and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. Spending time in the Word of God is the best way to spend time with God. Welcome to No Doubt, No Fear, Only Believe podcast, where we will encourage, inspire, and empower you to live your best life in Christ. Here's Greg.

Welcome to episode 110. If this is your first time here, we have been covering a lot of ground. This is Faith and Hope, and we started in episode 94 talking about all this, and we've added grace, and we've added the law, and we've added love. We've got all kinds of stuff going on. We got a lot of moving parts, but we're going to start talking about grace right now, and I want you to go back to episode 105 to see what grace looks like and to get an idea. I see it as a big treasure chest. And grace, I want to kind of get a definition. You know, it's God's unmerited favor. I've heard that is what people have used, and I'm— you probably have heard that if you're in the church community at all. So grace is God's unmerited favor, and I cannot argue with that. That is incredible. That sums up pretty much grace. But it's still, again, I go back to my wife telling me she's calling words, and I think that's just a wonderful analogy, is that we're just, we hear those words and you just kind of nod and go, oh yeah, it's God's unmerited favor. Yeah, that's what grace is. Well, what does that mean? So I want you to get a picture of grace is this treasure chest full of God's promises, and that the grace of God has already been done. God is not coming back. He's not sending his Son back for the second time to shake you, rattle and roll you, to make sure you understand this. He gave you the Holy Spirit and he gave you his word, and he says, here, read right here. And then you start reading some of these promises. And that's why I want you to internalize this. That's why we talked about planting the seed, and that's why we talked about the righteousness of God. And we're going to start talking about God's righteousness or his right standing. Because if you go back, way back to episode 32, where I talk about the kingdom of God and the power of the seed, but we talk about Matthew 6:33, but seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added unto you. So all of the things that you're going for, and I know we talked about this if you're a frequent flyer here, You, you fanatic, if you've, if you've listened to me and you have not turned me off, God bless you. But we, we talked about how God's way of doing things are different, and I'm not going to rehash all of those episodes, but we got to get into the place where we understand what grace is before we can then grab into— because we talked about the law in the last 3 or 4 episodes, about what the law, and then the purpose of the law was to show you and I that we can't live the life that God— the standard by which God set, which was perfection. There's no way we can live by it. I still can't live by it. I don't even know that I can go a day being perfect. In fact, my wife would argue that I can't go an hour. But I— all of that said, I mean, none of us are going to— perfection, all that does to me is it just locks me down. If I start trying to be perfect in anything then I get fearful and I just get shut down to where then I've got to make sure everything's all in line. That's one of the things with Peter, the Apostle Peter, is who I resonate with, is I don't think Peter ever worried about being perfect. I do. I've got to be honest. I kind of do worry a little bit about sounding like a schmo, and I hope that's not a curse word. I've used that multiple times on the episode. But I have that ready, fire, aim mentality, and I'm just gonna jump into it. And I've got the word relentless that I'm just staying with, and I am just gonna keep going until God tells me to stop. But I want you to kinda get a picture of the grace of God and how I have it. I don't know if it's right or not, but this is how I've got it pictured. I've got it a treasure chest, and each one, and we talked about the bridge, and you gotta go back to like 105, 104, 103, where it talks about what faith looks like, what hope looks like, and what grace looks like. And we're going to start using those images that we've painted so I can help explain this, so we got a handle to hook this thing on. But grace— God has already poured out his grace. And when, when we say the word grace, I want you to think about all of the promises of God, all of the wonderful things that God has done and Jesus did while he walked here on the earth. All of those promises in the Old Testament that the believers will have— and blessed are those— if you go to Deuteronomy, Deuteronomy 28, we're going to go to verse 1. And now it shall come to pass, if you diligently obey the voice of the Lord your God, to observe carefully all the commandments which I command you today, the Lord your God will set you on high above all nations of the earth. And all these blessings shall come upon you and overtake you because you obey the voice of the Lord your God. And then it says, blessed you shall be in the city, and blessed you shall be in the country. And I'm not gonna— but you can read all the blessings in Deuteronomy 28, and that is, that is just the beginning of what God says. That if you'll read Deuteronomy 28, the whole chapter, you will see the blessings. And the blessings are then followed by the cursed. If you don't follow his law. And we didn't even talk about that on the law. But if I want to talk about grace and all of these things that are— that, that you say you'll be blessed, and we are blessed if you've accepted Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior. You are blessed because he— if we— and I'm going to go read it in John, and we've already used this with the doubting Thomas, but where it says, you know, you, you believe because you saw me, Thomas. Blessed are those who have not seen but believe. Let me read that real quick in John 20:29. Jesus said to him, Thomas, because you have seen me, you have believed. Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed. So when you, when you start seeing this and you start putting the Bible together, again, I go to Proverbs 25:2. It's the glory of God to conceal a matter, but it's the glory of kings to search out a matter. And we are kings. If you are a follower of Jesus, he is the King of Kings and he is the Lord of Lords. You are a king, and it's to your glory to dig this thing in. And, and me, I'm just here to help you. I'm just a king that has dug in here and have read the word, and I'm trying to— what I'm here to do is help you get stronger and mightier in the Lord, because we all have a place in the body of Christ. And we all have something to do. God has created us for a purpose, and we are to jump into that purpose. And I think that if we can all rally around each other and lock arms and get after this thing and just kick Satan's teeth out, then I mean, I'm going to be fired up when I start hearing about people doing things and, and going and getting after this word. I'm telling you, that fires me up. And I know God gets— if me being imperfect and here wonderful things about people reading or people listening to the podcast and then saying, hey, thank you for doing that because it's helping me in my daily walk. I mean, that fires me up, and it's that thank you. Again, we're going to go back, way back to episode 5 where I talked about the prayers and that we are to enter his gates with thanksgiving and enter his courts with praise. I want to tell you the power of a thank you or the power of gratitude is unbelievable in encouraging somebody. And I think one of my giftings, and probably my superpower if I had to hold my, you know, my quotes up here, and one of the things that I'm really good at, I think it's encouraging. It comes very natural to me. I don't know why, you know, when I see something or if I hear something, I have— my first thing is to tell, man, that's so cool. And it doesn't cost me anything. It never cost me anything to encourage somebody. And I can tell that it lifts their spirit sometimes. I mean, if it's true and sincere. Flattery is a totally different animal. But if, you know, someone's wearing a good-looking shirt or a good-looking dress or something like that, and I just walk in and say, "Man, that looks good on you," or, "Man, that's a good-looking shirt," anything like that, and you can just see people smile because they chose that shirt or they chose that dress. When you encourage somebody, it lifts their spirits. And, and I want to— and the reason I'm saying that is because when we get into the presence of God, when God says, be anxious for nothing, but in all things through prayer and supplication with thanksgiving make your requests known to God— the thanksgiving part— and it says we enter his gates with thanksgiving and we enter his courts with praise. When you thank God for just giving you the day, or the roof over your head, or the AC, or the heater, or the water, the running water, or the anything. When you start thanking God for things that he's given you, I think it does two things. I think it elevates your faith because you're again acknowledging Father God and acknowledging that there's a spirit realm and acknowledging that it's not all about you. And the second thing is God is listening to everything we do and say, and when we use our free will to thank him, that is huge. And I've used this example before when my kids told me, Dad, I just thank you for doing this, or thank you for that. And it was, it was not anything like a, like this gift at Christmas or anything like that. We're riding in the car and, you know, my son would say, Dad, I really want to thank you for doing this or that. And it was just some random thank you that, if you've ever had that, that just comes out of nowhere, that it was not, it wasn't thought about, it was just sincere from the heart. That's a big deal. And God, if we will thank God sincerely from the heart— I'm not pretending to be God or anything like that, but if he's up there granting— and, and God don't grant wishes, and that's not how— and a lot, I think a lot of people think that God has this wand that when, if you're doing this right and we do enough of these, that he'll hit you with the wand and it opens up. No, you exercise faith. We're going to get into all of that. But the grace of God, and I want to go back, I want to circle around all this rabbit chasing I've been doing with gratitude and everything else. The grace of God is something God has already done, and we're going to talk about that on the next episode, that the grace of God has already been done. God didn't get caught off guard when you ask God for something. He don't have to go, oh yeah, just a minute, Greg, let me, let me get that. Let me, oh yeah, I didn't even think about that. I don't know if you've ever thought about this, but you're never gonna catch God off guard. You're never gonna surprise him with something. God sees the end from the beginning. That's another way the kingdom of God is like. One of the characteristics or one of the attributes is God sees everything from the end to the beginning, and we're gonna get into that. I just wanna finish up real quick. When you think of the word grace and the unmerited favor, it— I want you to see that treasure chest of things that have already happened. They're already sitting, waiting in the heavenly places for us to go and appropriate to our lives. But yeah, you got to exercise that with faith. We're going to talk about that, is grace and faith and hope, all of those things. They're all going to try to— I'm going to try to bring them all together. I don't know that I'm going to do a great job of that, but the Holy Spirit can. And if I put this out there and we put the word of God into it and then we ask the Holy Spirit to clear up our understanding and help us with the wisdom, then it's going to happen. You're going to get the understanding of it, you're going to have the wisdom, and you're going to have something to hold on to instead of just hearing the word grace or hearing the word faith or hearing the word hope or hearing the law. And you've— all of those things that you just, you know, arbitrarily we talk about as Christians, we will now have a better— and my whole goal is that you would have a better understanding as you walk through this Christian life. But let's pray. God, I thank you so much for the person listening to this episode, and I pray in the mighty name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth that you would open up their understanding. Lord, as we start talking about your grace, that is just hard to wrap our minds around, but that it is just sitting there. You have already done everything that we need to have to fulfill our calling in this life that you've given us. Lord, it is your kingdom that we're building. Lord, it is your grace and the faith that we will use to get that done. And God, I pray in Jesus' name that you would encourage, inspire, and empower this person to live the life that you've called them to live. God, I thank you, I love you, and we ask it all in Jesus' name. Amen. Well, thank you for being a part of this, and I look forward to visiting with you on the next episode.

Thanks for listening to the No Doubt, No Fear, Only Believe podcast at www.nodoubtonlybelieve.com.