Welcome back, everybody. We're on week 15 together in our journey with Jesus. I hope that you are growing. I hope that God is meeting you in fresh, new, exciting ways. And hey, if you have testimonies about things that God's doing in your life, I love testimonies. I like feed off of those things. My favorite thing in life is watching Jesus change people's lives. It's been fun to have a front row seat to my own life's transformation, but I love hearing stories about what others are experiencing in Christ too. So by all means, email me, contact me somehow.
Let me know what God's doing in your life, whether it has anything to do with this discipleship series or not. But I hope you're growing. I hope you're enjoying it. And I hope you're excited to learn about some grace today. We're going to dive in on that. Last week, we looked at how on the inside of us, since coming to Christ, is now like a war going on on the inside. It's the old desires and passions of our heart and the way we used to live life contending against the life of the Spirit that we've now got opportunity to live.
And we want to live that way. We want to live in the way that heaven lives, where there's nothing but righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit. And to do that, though, we have to learn some tools and we have to learn how to really overcome. Typically, when believers, when Christians especially, every religion does this, has an encounter with the living God, we then try to take control of it. And we try to live by our discipline. We try to live by some rules and regulations. That's that religious spirit again, if we're not careful.
And so we have this thing called grace. Probably the most well-known and beloved of all the Christian songs of all time is Amazing Grace. Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me. I once was lost, but now I'm found. Was blind, but now I see. Amazing Grace. It really is amazing when we experience the actual grace of God. It not only saves in the first place by opening our eyes to the reality of God, the reality of his love toward us, the reality of the life that he has in store for us, but grace does so much more in the days following that first day.
It's like the sunrise, like the scripture that we started this course with. The path of the righteous is like the morning sun, which grows brighter and brighter until the fullness of day. Grace is like that. That first encounter we had with the grace God. It's like God was just getting warmed up. Wait till you see what it's like when the sun's in full bloom, shining over your life. And the way to encounter that is to experience God's grace, which we typically narrow down when we use the word grace. Like we mess up, right?
And we come in and say, boy, I hope grace is home today because I'm really in need of it. And grace sometimes means mercy. And that's one of the words that we use as part of grace. But it's not all of what grace is. Mercy is an important part of grace. Don't get me wrong. Mercy opens the door to live in the grace of God. But grace is not then for a believer an excuse to continue to live like we used to live, fall back into things and do things that we know are wrong.
And there's a cycle that some of us can get caught into where we sin so that we could be forgiven. And then we have that ecstatic experience of the mercy of God and the forgiveness of God. You see what's happening there is that we end up in this manipulation of the grace of God. What grace really is about is not just to be forgiven and to receive God's mercy, but it's actually his power, his enabling to do his will, to live his way. Jesus, when he described himself and he described what would follow after, he said, I am the way, the truth, and the life. He didn't say that I've come to show you the way, I've come to give you life, and I've come to speak to you the truth. He said, I am the way, the truth, and the life.
And in fact, the believers in Jesus, they weren't called Christians at first. They were called followers of the way. In other words, Jesus came to show us a new way to live. What is that way to live? Well, it's completely tapped into the power of God, the grace of God, which means his ability in us. We have an ability now that we didn't have before we invited Jesus in to live holy, to live in a way that's upright all the time. Now, what we have to be careful about is not to fall into religious striving, and we'll dig in on that in just a few moments here.
But the first thing to know is that when we say God's grace is amazing, it doesn't mean that it gives us an excuse to just continue on in sinful things. Paul was actually accused of this. You may have noticed, I'm going to ask you to open up your Bible right now to Romans chapter 6. And you may have noticed in our first, what are we on, lesson 15 right now, that we've talked a lot about the grace of God, more about the grace of God than really any other subject, how he's like a father, how he's, you know, just merciful like that, how he's the best one to run to when we blow it.
And what can happen when we lean toward that in teaching and in our emphasis in what the gospel is all about, that some could take that and cynically use that as an excuse to continue living the same old way that they used to. In fact, Paul was accused of the same thing. And in his letter to the Romans, twice over in one chapter, he says, what should we say then? Should we continue in sin so that grace may increase? That was just after he said, for where sin abounds, grace abounds all the more. And people were actually accusing Paul of preaching a gospel that said, ah, just go ahead and sin. It's a new covenant now.
God's in a merciful mood these days. So just go ahead, live like you used to live. God's going to forgive you anyway. He goes on in chapter six of Romans, which by the way, let me pause for a moment here and say, the book of Romans, especially the first eight chapters, you may have noticed we've been in this book quite a bit because it is the first eight chapters of Romans is the case for grace. And Paul lays it out in a way as only an apostle in touch with Jesus could do that really describes the fullness of the balance of what the grace of God's about. But notice that he has to defend himself and defend his teaching here.
So what should we say that we should sin so the grace will abound? He goes on after that and he says, no, of course not. That's absolutely ridiculous. Why would I, who have died to sin, continue in it? And here's how we now walk when it comes to issues of sin and grace and mercy. See, we, we view sin in a way that says, I am a new creation. And those old desires are going to be fading away. That old way that I used to live my life that did harm to me.
When it comes down to it, the only reason why sin is called sin is because God created us to live and move and have our being in a certain way. And when we don't live that way, it brings harm to us and harm to those around us that we love or those that we don't even know. And we don't want to live that way. We've been called now into the higher way of love, which means I'm going to love myself in a way and take care of this life that God's entrusted me with. And because of that, the people around me are going to be benefited because I'm now living a different way.
That's really what sin's all about. I hope by now we've painted an accurate picture of the father where he's not this righteous judge sitting on a throne, just waiting to throw the book at us every time we make a mistake. He's not like that. We're like that because we have a religious spirit inside of us. But God's not like that at all. So instead, he pours out grace. He pours out freedom and liberty to choose our lives. But that doesn't mean that he's not saying, well, sin's not sin any longer.
All of chapter six, when you read it, we looked at this when we looked at baptism. Remember that we died to sin. We buried our sinful ways, our sinful nature, our old life in a watery grave. And Paul goes on and then he says this, for sin shall not be master over you. I'm in verse 14 now of chapter six. Sin shall not be master over you because you are not under law, but under grace. What then? Shall we sin because we're not under law, but under grace? May it never be.
Isn't that an interesting statement to make? Sin will no longer master us because we're not under the law, but under grace. Boy, does that sound a little counterintuitive, like a little odd? I always thought rules were like guidelines and parameters for my life, that the law was like a fence at the edge of a cliff keeping me from falling off the edge. We need the law. Of course we need rules, I used to think. And the reality of it is we've made a choice. We're either going to stay in the old world where we tried through discipline, through self-control, through effort, through striving, even religious striving, to live an upright, good, godly life.
And we tried that, whether we knew Christ, whether we knew some other religious system, or whether we were just plain raised with good morals, we tried our best to be a good boy, to be a good girl, and we just kept falling short. And so we threw ourselves at God's mercy and pleaded with him, give us grace. I want grace. I want to live that way. So the choice to live by grace is to live by a power now at work on the inside of us. It changes our desires, or rather changes our way of satisfying our desires from old ways that used to bring harm to our lives to the new heavenly ways, which bring nothing but blessing, nothing but grace, nothing but joy and peace to our lives. It changes us from the inside.
We're no longer, are we striving not to do certain things. In fact, the new striving is we have to shut down this internal voice now that we have that says, don't do that. We have to shut that off and plow ahead when we're doing things that we know are not right and good and godly. So living according to the grace of God, we're not under law, but we're under grace. Remember we looked at the law of lift, how the law of grace, the law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus is more powerful than the law's power to condemn us. So I want to back up a chapter and look at the war, another war that goes on on the inside of us that tries to draw us back in to this belief that it's our sinful nature that's more powerful than the grace of God, that our old desires.
And look, I know that some days it feels like that. The desire for sin is real. The desire for sin is strong, especially the longer we've given ourselves to it. I get it. Believe me. That power is really, really convincing to our minds that that nature in us seems to be stronger than the grace of God at work. And I hope to show you at least first biblically, and then as we walk it out, you'll find it in your life experience that no, the grace of God is far stronger, far much more powerful than the old desires and the old nature that used to rule us.
So the best way to master the sinful ways and addictions of our life is by believing in, trusting in the power of God's grace and learning how to live according to that grace because of that. See, if we still believe that this sinful nature and this old way is strong, we actually enable that to rule our lives and we get stuck in these cycles of sin, repentance, sin, repentance, sin, repentance, resist, resist, resist, fail, fail, fail. And it gets really, really defeating after a while and we want to give up. Martin Luther, who wrote a classic commentary on the book of Romans, was a monk. He was like a really intense Catholic monk and priest.
And he used to drive his abbot, the head of a monastery, crazy. Because every day, Martin Luther would come in. He was so zealous for God. He would come in every day and spend hours confessing his sin. You know, the Catholics have a confessional. And every day, he'd come in and confess every impure thought he had, every single deed he did, like he took an extra piece of bread at dinner or something like that. And he drove his abbot crazy. And finally, his abbot said, you just really need to have an encounter with God.
And actually, Martin Luther did. And he became the father of the Reformation as a result of this. And it was reading the book of Romans and really digging in and understanding that he'd been living a religious life of self-discipline and self-judgment as a result of that. And instead, he should be leaning on the grace of God. And he has one of my favorite quotes about how this is done. And he said, when I look at myself, I don't see how I can be saved. But when I look at Jesus, I don't see how I cannot be saved.
And it really is a change of focus. It's a change of emphasis from me and my self-righteous religious works to focusing on the grace of God that's now available to me in Christ. And Romans 5, Paul really lays it out and hopefully puts to death this faith that we have. It really is like a faith in believing that greater is that sinful desire in me than the power of the grace of God to forgive, show mercy, and transform me into the likeness of Christ. So I'm going to start in verse 8 and break this down for you a little bit here. For God demonstrates his own love toward us in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.
So when we were helpless, when we were caught up, that's when Jesus said, I'm going to die for you whether you respond to this or not. That's the beauty of the grace of God. He extends it to us whether we ever receive it and live in it or not. It's always available to us. He doesn't withdraw it. This is not, I'm going to give it, but only if you take it. It's an offer that's always on the table. It's the beauty of repentance like we looked at. It's the beauty that every time we finally turn around after running away from God, there's this hand of grace extended to us and his divine enablement to walk and live a different way from that day forward.
So while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us much more than, if you have a Bible and you're comfortable writing in it, which I hope you are, it's, the text is sacred, but the words on the page, they're for you to learn and study and really go over. So my Bible's all marked up with things that I've emphasized and circled so I never forget that truth. And if you're circling in your Bible, every time we read much more, circle that because it's going to change your faith from faith in your ability to fail to God's ability to empower you by his grace to overcome and be more than a conqueror through Christ. Much more than, having now been justified by his blood, we'll be saved from the wrath of God through him.
For if while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of his son, much more, having been reconciled, we shall be saved by his life. So if you ever hear the lie in your head after you fail again, you fall short, you sin, you do the thing you didn't want to do, you don't do the thing you should have done, anytime you do that, the lie of the enemy wants to come in and say, see, nothing changed, you're the same old person you used to be, you're not even maybe a son, maybe it didn't work all those lies, by the way, every single one of us hears them, you're not unique if you hear those lies, I hear the same lies, everybody hears those same lies. Next time you hear it, you read this verse of scripture and say, you know what, while I was an enemy of God, Jesus extended his grace and mercy to me, how much more than now that I'm reconciled, now that I'm called a son, now that I've been adopted into the family of God, much more than he's eager to rescue me from myself and from the things that I've done again to be saved by his life.
So it's actually the opposite of what the devil wants us to believe, that it's worse now to sin, now that we're a son of God, the lie is, it's much worse for you now if you blow it because you're a son of God and you know better and you have the Holy Spirit to enable you to overcome, so now your sin's much worse than it was before you came to know Christ, no actually, it's the exact opposite. Now you have a conviction about that sin which is evidence that you have Christ alive on the inside of you, you feel a remorse about the things that you do, you're trying to resist doing the things that you never used to resist doing, that's proof that much more than you're being saved every day which doesn't mean having a born again experience every day where you need to be baptized every time you fail and fall short, being saved means rescued out from the trap, you're sliding back into that pit that he pulled you out of and he's going to pull you right back out again, that's what saved means in this context, not only this but we also exult in God through our Lord Jesus Christ through whom we've now received the reconciliation, so now he's going to get into something and I'm going to go over this quickly because it's, I think it's pretty simple, in Adam all sinned, right, the first man and woman, Adam and Eve, they sinned in the garden and they passed on that habit, they passed on that way and that desire to all the children who followed suit ever since all of us have had a propensity now the door opened towards sin, it's not like we can blame Adam for our own personal sins because each of us individually chooses it whenever we're old enough to begin to decide things like that and that's what he says here, let me read it, therefore, just as through one man sin entered into the world and death through sin, so death spread to all men because all sinned, right, so all of us did it, we can't just say I inherited death from my father's father's father, I also engaged in it when I had choices to make, I chose sin, for until the law sin was in the world but sin wasn't imputed where there's no law, in other words, you can't be guilty of a crime until it's on the book so the law came, now we know we're guilty even though we were guilty already, death reigned from Adam until Moses, and go on, Adam was a type of the one who was to come, verse 15, the free gift is not like the transgression, so now we're talking about good news, the transgression that Adam made when he ate from that tree along with his wife Eve, they brought sin into the world for if by the transgression of the one man he died, much more, all right, much more did the grace of God and the gift by the grace of the one man Jesus Christ abound to the many, so if you've been putting your faith and your ability to mess up the grace of God and spoil the good thing that God's given you, this scripture right here trumps what you believe in your heart and what the enemy has been lying to you about, you think that the power of that draw toward evil that you feel the draw toward sin, you think that's powerful, no, no, no, the grace of God is much more powerful and the gift of grace is much more powerful than that ability, so in other words, when we come, we can actually empower the sinful desires of our heart by having faith in them, so we sin by faith if we think that that nature is more powerful than God's grace which includes God's mercy and it includes God's empowerment to overcome that thing, we can actually sin by faith, not about you, but I chose a while ago, I don't want to sin by faith, I want to live by faith, I want to overcome by faith, I want to live my life in such a way where even though it feels like I'm never going to be free of this habit or this addiction or this thing that I keep falling into, it may feel that way but don't believe your lying heart for a minute because greater is he who lives in you, much more did the grace of God and the gift of the grace by the one man abound to you personally in Christ, so here's a thing to do and put into practice, how you say, alright, how do I do this then?
In everyday life, right, there come those moments of decision where we're about to stumble, we're about to open our mouth and sin with our tongue, we're about to engage in something and sin with our body, we're about to go down a road where we know that we're going to end up in sin, what do we do then to stop? And there's a beautiful verse at the end and the beginning of the book of Hebrews at the end of chapter 4, this is verse 16 and it's a go-to verse that I use and I encourage everybody who's new in Christ to use this and make this a new habit. We've already looked at, instead of running away from God, run to God, right?
When we're feeling tempted, bring Him in to that place, even if it's a shameful, filthy, dirty place of sin. You really think He hasn't been there and doesn't know, not because He's sinning, but because you can't hide from Him on the highest mountain or the lowest depths of Sheol, the grave itself. There's nowhere to hide from His presence. He's already been there. He's not ashamed of it. He wants to meet you in that place and pull you right out of that miry clay, but it comes when we extend the invitation. One of my favorite pictures an artist did a while back, I have it on my computer, is a muddy, dirty hand reaching up out of a pit and it looks like it's really stuck in some mire and there's Jesus' hand grabbing hold of it and pulling him out.
We have a picture in our office of Jesus doing that with Peter after He was walking on water and He began to sink and Jesus reaching in and pulling him right out. That's the Jesus that we worship. That's the Jesus that we have who is our brother, the God who we have who is our Father and the one who is in us desiring to set us free. So here it is. Here's that verse. Hebrews 4 verse 16. Let us therefore draw near with confidence to the throne of grace and that, you know, I think I've told you the Bible was written in New Testament was written in Greek so the translation of that word is a little, it's hard to render in the English.
What that literally says is let's go boldly, confidently into the place of transparent frankness of speech where everything's laid bare, where we're not trying to hide our heart, we're not trying to cover ourselves and hide from God but we're actually moving toward Him now asking Him to extend His grace and His mercy toward us. We're actually going into that place and where are we going? To the throne of grace. To the throne of grace. Let us therefore draw near with confidence to the throne of grace. The throne of God is not, I know that, you know, in Revelation there's the Lord God Almighty is what we see and He's depicted and rightly so as the all-powerful, all-knowing, eternal, wise God who is to be feared. He's no one to be trifled with.
He is every powerful thing that we've ever experienced. God's the author of that and He's infinitely more powerful than anything that we'd be afraid of in life but at the same time is a merciful, gentle God of grace. He's the good shepherd who loves His people and His throne is a throne of grace. For anyone who is bold enough and confident enough in God's promise to us to come near we're going to find what's waiting for us there is grace. So we may receive mercy so that we may receive mercy and maybe that's the first thing we need is a confidence that God's forgiving us, that God's extending the hand, that God's welcoming us back with open arms, that He's not waiting to reject us and cast us into the abyss because of what we did and when we come to the throne of grace the first thing we're in need of is mercy.
We receive His mercy, we extend that mercy to ourselves. I mean, you may have experienced this and you know like I know that we are our own worst critic, our own worst judge. We're harshest on ourselves. That's where shame comes from. It's where condemnation comes from. We rarely actually need an outside voice to make us feel ashamed of what we've done. Our own internal voice does the job for us. It's almost like the devil can wash his hands as the accuser of the brethren and walk away and say, my job here is finished.
So long as you feel ashamed of what you did, I don't have to keep reminding you of it, our own heart reminds us of it. Remember we looked at 1 John, when our heart condemns us, God is greater than our hearts. Never forget that. So we may receive mercy and find grace to help when in our time of need. What we're going to find from God is grace to help when we need grace the most. So instead of running back to God every time after we fall, after we've blown it, instead when we're right in the thick of it, we say, God, I need your grace right now. I need divine enablement right now.
I need your help. I can't do this by myself. Every time I take the reins back and exert self-discipline, I fall short in this area. Give me grace. And that's when we find out amazing grace it is. Amazing grace it is. He can save a wretch like anybody, whatever a wretch you thought you were, and he can extend grace to live day by day. That's what's so amazing about it is that it wasn't a once-and-done experience. It's for every moment of every day. If we keep our heart aware, keep our mind focused, fix our eyes on Jesus, and remember, he's always there and the grace of God is always available.
I pray that you have a week full of the grace of God, full of experiencing not just the mercy of God, but the power of God to live the way that you want to, to live the way of holiness, to live the way of righteousness, to live in a way where you can look back at the end of the day and say, you know what? That was an awesome day. That was an awesome day. I have no regrets, no sorrow about it. Me and Jesus, we just had the best day ever. I pray that that's the kind of week that your week will be this week. I love you.
God bless you. I'll see you again next week where we'll go even deeper into the grace of God and how to live in it day by day.