The Character of God, Grace True and False

I've been asked to repeat a talk I gave to the pastors earlier this week about grace and I'm very happy to do so and I begin with a very unusual experience I was born in England the northeast corner the county of Northumberland we're also the friend who led us in singing was born and we've known each other many years I'm linked to him twice by marriage and we're both serving the Lord but in a very different area just off the coast of the county of Northumberland lies some beautiful islands called the farn Islands and the outer Farn islands are very dangerous rocks which stick out right into the main sailing route of ships and boats up and down the coast and on the MS built a large lighthouse painted red and white and it's called the long stone lighthouse and in that there lived a family who looked after the light called darling mr. darling was the lighthouse keeper and he had a teenaged daughter called grace and grace darling became the most famous woman in England in the Victorian era because a ship was wrecked on a rock about half a mile from the lighthouse and she saw it and she saw some of the people on board scramble onto a rock in the middle of the storm and she persuaded her father to take a rowing boat and the two of them rowed across to the rock and saved the people and rowed back to the lighthouse in the middle of it terrible storm and she became the hero of All England the Queen Victoria recognized her and so throughout England everybody was talking about being saved by grace and if you stopped anybody and said are you saved by grace they would say no I wasn't on the boat so I was brought up in a county where the words saved by grace meant Grace Darling but she was not famous around the world so that didn't happen elsewhere but that's a very important phrase in the Bible saved by grace and unfortunately that word has been widely discussed and misunderstood and misaligned and we'll come to that in a moment in English the word is quite freely used but in many different ways it is used of ballet dancers they dance with grace and the word then means beautiful movement and slow graceful movement if you get behind with payments you ask for more days grace to be able to pay a debt or if you've got a job that's not finished and the customer is demanding that the job be finished you ask for so many days grace to allow you to finish it's even become a title of human beings it's the title of the Dukes and duchesses you must address them as your grace I think the Royal Wedding recently has been known worldwide the prince and the princess who are now the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and therefore they are now entitled to be referred to as your grace Bishop's in the Church of England are always addressed as your grace in fact there was one pastoral vicar of a church who had invited the bishop to preach in his church and invited him to stay for lunch and he told his children including a little girl now you must remember that when you speak to the bishop you say your grace and his little girl when he met the bishop looked up of the bishop and said for what we were about to receive may the Lord make us truly thankful and so we use the word grace for a little prayer before a meal it is used in so many ways the ancient Greeks used it of the statues of beautiful women there's a famous Greece Greek statue of three-word and it's called a statue of the Three Graces so it's a very widely used word with many different meanings it is used in this scripture only 20 times which is not many and of those 16 of those times 4/5 of them are on Paul's lips and he's the one who's made the word grace common on Christian lips it's a divine word it's a description of something that is divine and it's applied to God the grace of God is supremely applied to Jesus most of the times it's used it's the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ that's even used as a benediction in many churches that when you reach the end of the service the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ the love of God and the faith ship of the Holy Spirit be with you all so we're all familiar with it but what does it mean and are we sure we've got the right meaning let me now tell you there are three meanings of the word grace which are used in churches around the world one is right and two are wrong and yet they are widespread you will be more familiar with one of those two wrong ways if you cross the water to Jakarta as I did on the weekend you come across the other wrong meaning of Greece and I'm going to go through all three meanings and frankly I'm here in Singapore because of one wrong meaning of that word because two years I was in South Africa and every church I went to was talking about grace but in a rather unusual way and a way that was dangerous a way that was mixing a lot of truth with some poisonous error and it's that mixture which can so easily deceive people and I said to them after a bit where did you all get this teaching from and the simple answer was Singapore and at that time I found a bird in my heart for Singapore and I began to ask the Lord do you want me to say anything about that and shortly after that someone was sitting in this audience this morning said to me David I think Singapore needs you and I thought well and then the way I opened for me fairly recently to come and share with you in response to a candid invitation from Philip Pillai who is has much to do with this building and so here I am and here is what I want to tell you about grace let's start with the right meaning of grace and the right meaning according to my Bible is undeserved favor undeserved favor a favor is something good that somebody does for you and I'll go back to England for this meaning because our queen is the richest lady in England and she's reputed to be the richest lady in the world but I don't know about that but she has a lot of riches a lot of property it includes well-known royal residences like Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle which I presume are known to many of you she has another residence called Sandringham I was actually in Sundaram just three weeks ago and she has a Castle in Scotland called Balmoral Castle but she has many other properties many other houses some of them big houses and these properties she gives to her relatives and some close friends free of charge they don't pay rent now all these houses one of which she's given to the recently married couple and you all know about that marriage I think it was televised worldwide and she's given them one of these houses and they are all called a very interesting title they are called Grace and favor residences and there's there are the two words put together so if our queen gives you a rent free house to live in for the rest of your life you will understand the word grace you are living in a Grace and favor residence I picked that meaning up that usage because that's very close to the Bible usage grace and favor it refers to something that is given to you freely that is done for you without charge which you could never earn which you could never buy but is given to you free of charge the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ he died for you free of charge some people have taken the word they would grace grac II and said it means God's riches at Christ's expense that's not a bad cliche but of course it's not the Bible actual meaning that's the English word the Bible word in the Greek language for the word belongs to the New Testament and the Bible would is Kerris CH AR I s from which we get charismatic from which we get charisma to which is the Greek name for the gifts of the Holy Spirit which are given freely no charge you cannot earn a gift of God you cannot merit a gift of God you cannot buy it it's free I keep saying it because I remind you it doesn't exist as a separate object it's an attribute of a person or three persons it's attributed to file the Sun and Holy Spirit in the New Testament but primarily grace points to Jesus Christ and the work he did for us which was absolutely free and always will be but there is another flavor of the word and this flavor is that it's a favor to the undeserved it's not only that we don't merit it we actually merit the opposite of grace it's not only something we don't deserve but we deserve the very opposite we are rebels to go to court with weapons in our hands as sinners we are against God we are enemies of God we are living our own way not his way and we are his enemies we are spoiling his world all of us and the world is in the mess it's in because of us not because of God he made it a good world and we've made it quite a bad world and yet God has freely given to us even though we were his enemies so grace is an undeserved favor actually people who deserved the opposite from God and that makes it an even more wonderful word that is why the word is mostly on the lips of really bad people who deserves the worst and that song we sang comes from the captain of a British ship who was a very bad man and spent his life shipping captive Africans from Africa to America and the West Indies and selling them as slaves and now we know what those ships were like the were packed belowdecks packed so he could get as many as possible in his ship and they were packed in head to toe side by side and given little water and little food on the voyage many of them died on the voyage but his sole aim was to get as many human beings across the Atlantic and sell them profitably then and then he would sail back to England with sugar and his life was spent sailing from Africa to the West with slaves and with sugar back to England and two ports in England Bristol and Liverpool became the richest towns in Britain really based on the slave trade it's part of our bad history that I'm not very proud of and that man whose name was Newton John Newton he was a bad man drunk on rum he would pack these slaves into his little shrimp and then he met Christ after being shipwrecked and he became a preacher of the gospel and to him the most wonderful thing about God was his amazing grace that he should actually get hold of a man like that that's why it's Paul who uses the word grace far more than Peter or James or John because Paul had been an anti-christian missionary prepared to leave his own land and travel to other countries to chase after Christians and put them in prison and even kill them that was his past and it was on one of those anti-christian missionary trips that he just got outside the northern border of the promised land below the Hill of Mount Hermon on the road to Damascus which is 40 miles ahead that he met the Lord Jesus and Jesus said to hit him why are you persecuting me and he could have said I'm not persecuting you I'm after your followers but in that moment he realized that in as much as you do it to the least of his brethren you do it to him and his concept of the body of Christ grew out of that realization that Christians are the body of Christ now that Christ is back in heaven and the head is in heaven we are his body on earth and what you do to a Christian you're doing to Christ to his body and so Paul with that awful record which stayed with his conscience of the rest of his life in his letters he would write I persecuted the church that stayed in his memory forever never forgot it and at the same moment God said I want you to be a pro Christian missionary I want you to go to the Gentile world and tell them about me and that call came immediately when he was blinded by that lorry of the Lord he was the first apostle to see the risen ascended Lord back in his glory and that blinded him because the Lord's glory was too much to be seen by human eyes and he felt his way and was led into Damascus and there a man called Ananias came to him and said the Lord had spoken to Ananias and prayer and Ananias was one of the Christians who were fearing the advent of poor in Damascus and God said I want you to go to him and baptize him and then Elias objected but Lord he's coming here to persecute the Christians you go and baptize him I've met him it's a real dramatic story and from that moment Paul became the greatest missionary there has ever been spending his life being shipwrecked skirt scourge whipped 40 times again and again he went through really bad times suffer degrading of all the scars in his body but he was a missionary to the Gentiles and brought the gospel to Europe and Europe brought it to Singapore and we all go back to that man it's a great story no wonder he spoke about the word grace more than anyone else the undeserved favor of God had been on him from that moment and stayed with him he suffered all his life from a physical complaint we're not sure what it was it was probably something to do with his eyes which gave him a rather bad appearance and he begged the Lord time and again please will you take that it's a handicap people stare at my eyes and and they're all funny and he said to the Galatians you so loved me you'd have given me your own eyes if you could and God said no I'm not going to heal you my grace is sufficient for you so he lived by grace by sheer undeserved favor one after another all his life and that's why he blessed people with the grace Lord Jesus Christ there's one other flavor of the word that I think we need to remember it's what I would call the initiative of grace grace not only reaches out to the totally undeserving but it takes the first step in the relationship takes the initiative John says in his letter we love because He first loved us God calls us before we call on him he takes the initiative because grace takes the first step to establish a relationship and that's yet another flavor of the word in its best sense I would call this saving grace but one thing I want to point out even though it's so wonderful to us it's a little mistake to add adjectives as if we can exaggerate it even the word Amazing Grace is not found in Scripture there are no adjectives in the Bible qualifying grace because adjectives limit they limit by definition you know the word amazing is no longer as amazing as it was so there's a new chorus come out which is going around the world called outrageous grace and even the word fantastic is now dying out we would call it cool grace but adjectives are limiting and so the Bible only uses the word noun the noun grace and that you can fill that out with all its wonderful meaning now I've said enough about the right meaning of the word grace so I want to move on to the two wrong meanings one of which may be new to you and so you don't need to bother about it but the other is very familiar to you and you do need to bother about that the first wrong understanding of grace is that it is an irresistible force an irresistible force a force in God that you can't say no to a force that overrides your will and your circumstances and everything else in a word grace forces you to be a Christian and grace forces you to stay a Christian now those who have adopted this wrong meaning of grace will not use the words I've just used they won't even publicly speak about force but it's one of their beliefs they will call it irresistible grace or more commonly they use the term Sovereign Grace and they have their own adjectives for it now how did all that come about grace is something you can't say no to something you can't refuse something that will force you to be God's person keep you to be God's person by the force of grace well I'm afraid I've got to give you quite a long bit of history because it arose fairly early in the fifth century I've written a book on church history I call it a beginner's history of the church because most Christians I meet have no idea what's happened to the church over the last 2,000 years and in our church I announced that I would give a series of weeknight talks on the history of the Christian Church for 2,000 years we had a great time it was totally new to the congregation they enjoyed it so thoroughly that the tapes were released and have been very popular and now I've released them in the form of a little book which is very easily read it would turn a true historians hair gray because it's through 2,000 years in a few hours you'll need your running shoes on to go through it but the book is entitled where has the body been for 2,000 years and Christians need to know church history because we've inherited it and our traditions and our prejudices have come from those 2000 years and this idea of grace as an irresistible force has come from the fifth century AD from a man who is very well known his name was Augustine and he was canonized by the Roman Church so he is known as st. Augustine he was eventually the bishop in a play called hippo in North Africa in what is now Tunisia and there he had a famous ministry and he became the father of Catholic theology and the father of Protestant theology surprisingly and is regarded as one of the greatest fathers of the church as a young man he was a bad lad particularly in physical areas he had a mistress by whom he had an illegitimate son he provided for him later but separated from the mistress and he was oversexed that had a big effect on his later thinking and ultimately led to the idea that the clergy of the church must not marry and therefore the celibate priesthood of the Roman Church was a child of his thinking he was brought up in a pagan philosophy called manake ISM which he thought he'd left had a very dramatic conversion which is published under the convention confessions of st. Augustine his most famous book it was the first published Christian testimony and has been read by many people and it is a remarkable testimony to the grace of God it was a famous preacher called Ambrose who had a blood church in Milan in Italy who was the means that God used for his conversion though actually at the moment of conversion he was sitting in a garden and heard a voice say pick up and read and there was a New Testament nearby and depicted up and read it and II read Paul's letter to the Romans and one verse in that became the means of his conversion and it was a real conversion and he turned his back on a quite indulgent youth for the first twenty or thirty years of his ministry he was sound as a bell on Scripture and he preached Scripture as I and many others preach it but then later in his life his many key ISM and his bad background began to catch up and he began to teach in a different way more philosophy than theology and he began to teach even that sex inside marriage is concupiscence another word for sin and above all he began to preach that force is a legitimate means to make others Christian he took one word out of a parable of Jesus the parable of the wedding feast that says when the people you invite to the feast don't come go out into the highways and byways and compel them to come in and he took a wrong meaning of the word compel it means to persuade people to come in but he took it to mean force them to come in and therefore he began to teach that force is a legitimate method of evangelism get them into the kingdom by whatever way you choose force them to come in and that led to the Inquisition where people were tortured physically to become Christians sounds unbelievable to us today but this happened and especially Jews were tortured until they acknowledged Jesus to be the Messiah he said it's legitimate for their sake to use force to bring them to the truth and of course he read this back into God we can use force because God uses force and he called it grace now this didn't please everybody of a long way and there was a British monk called Pelagius sorry to give you all these names and history but it's important to know Pelagius was a British monk who went to Rome and was horrified by the debauchery of the church in Rome if you know something about the medieval popes you know that the church had become immoral and Pelagius was so angry at this happening to the Church of Christ that he said this is your fault it is your responsibility and he began to teach a gospel that put the whole emphasis on human responsibility so much so that he said it's we who become Christians and it's we who become Saints and it's our fault if we don't and so he overemphasize the human will whereas Augustine was under emphasizing it hope I'm not confusing you but there were people in the middle mainly the bishops in France who steered a middle course between augustinianism and Pelagianism as they came to recall and they balance human free will with God's free will and they told them we are saved when we cooperate with grace when we respond to grace and freely accept grace and accept the gift and use it he taught that gift is not forced on anyone that humans are free to say yes or no to God and the reason why people are not saved he said is because they have refused the gift of grace and resisted the Holy Spirit Augustine said people are not saved because they God hasn't chosen to save them which blames God for not forcing them to be saved I hope you're with me so far it's an extraordinary conclusion Pelagius on their hands that is entirely their fault they can save themselves and he was quoting a verse from acts 2 where Peter pleaded with people save yourselves from this wicked generation Peter wasn't meaning that we can save ourselves he was meaning it was an appeal to get away from the current generation and turned to God but again it was misunderstood by Pelagius as we save ourselves it's our doing don't need grace we've we have the willpower to save ourselves I wonder if I could put all this in a very simple illustration you're standing on a pier or standing at the side of the sea where it's deep and there are under currents and you see a man being swept out to sea and unless he's saved he's gonna be lost now Pelagius would stand on the shore and shout to the men make more effort turn this Way's swim harder and you can save yourself Augustine would say he's already drowned somebody will have to jump in pull him out and give him the kiss of life and save him he doesn't need to do anything Palacios would say you've got to do everything swim harder Augustine would say he can't do a thing jump in and save him in the middle people would say the man is still alive he's struggling he needs help throw him a rope and say grab hold of this rope and I'll pull you to the shore that's the difference between the three positions trying to put it as simply as I can the middle position throws the gospel to be blunders get hold of this and grace will pull you to the shore and you'll be saved it assumes that the person is still able to respond to the gospel and if they respond they will be saved Augustine's way has to say that God decides who gets saved that it's his choice and if he doesn't elect someone to salvation they go to hell now that seems to me so contrary to the Bible which says in my New Testament he wills that all men should be saved then why aren't all men saved the answer is those are saved who respond to the gospel who have enough free will say yes to grace and find that they are saved now there are all kinds of implications of this but that's why this misunderstanding calls grace Sovereign Grace because it means that God is absolute sovereign he decides who goes to heaven and he decides who doesn't and therefore who goes to hell and he forces someone to repent and believe and he will use that same force of grace to keep them on the way of salvation and therefore once they're on that way they are certain to get to heaven it all goes as a package it is God's sovereign will and if you ask why does God do summon not others you will get no answer except that it's the inscrutable will of God or in simple English he hasn't told us why he chooses summon and others and those he chooses are not chosen for any reason in them and so it's the inscrutable will of God and therefore from a human point of view salvation is a lottery and you depend entirely on whether God chose you or didn't and it's nothing to do with you I find that an extraordinary distortion of the New Testament and I thank God that some of my friends who've believed this in grace leave it behind when they get into the pulpit they keep it in study when they get into the pulpit they preach the gospel like I do and they offer it freely to everybody and put the onus on the people to respond and accept it well now that began in the fifth century but it came right back up after the Inquisition and after the Crusades which were an attempt to use military force to get the places of pilgrimage in the Holy Land back from the Muslim and that scandal of the Crusades is still being thrown at Christians bothered Muslims and bothered Jews full of Christians who set off to conquer the Holy Land in the crusade killed Muslims and killed Jews on the way and when they got to Jerusalem killed both of them it's a scandal on the conscience of the Christian Church and very few Christians today would approve of that you know when President Bush announced a crusade against evil in the world primarily the Muslims there was an outcry internationally the word crusade to the Muslim brings straight back the memories of when Christians used force against them and so we're dealing with things that are very relevant here but the idea of sovereign grace came right back up at the time of the Protestant Reformation because Martin Luther was an Augustinian monk brought up on the teaching of Augustine and so was John Calvin in Geneva and his famous writings which has summed up in volumes under the title the Institute of the Christian religion which are what became Calvinism written in Geneva are just solidly based on Augustine's teaching if someone has said they are simply systematic augustinianism it's amazing that that man has so affected Catholic theology a celibate priesthood and the use of military force to establish the kingdom of God and also introduce in and what they're influenced Protestant theology profoundly Martin Luther was even more Augustinian and Calvin and he wrote a book called the bondage of the will in which he said nobody has any free will when it comes to God God chooses God elects now Calvin was succeeded by a man called theodore beza who is really responsible for what we call Calvinism today and he went much further than Calvin and he greatly influenced Holland and the Dutch Reformed Church is the most Calvinistic denomination of any and it's because Indonesia was colonized by the Dutch that in Jakarta I was encountering Calvinism it's not the case here because you were colonized by the British and by the Church of England and it's Gothic cathedral at the frontier that white building that really is medieval in its architecture with the Gothic window and with the Gothic architecture it actually the architecture of your Cathedral in Britain Singapore is Catholic and most churches in England are Roman Catholic architecture even though now they are Protestant Reformed there's still a lot of Catholicism hanging on but it's not nearly as dogmatic as the church that colonized Indonesia next door that means a huge difference because the Church of England is only mildly Catholic sorry mildly Calvinist its basic basic doctrine is found in thirty-nine articles of faith which every priest and bishop and Archbishop in the Anglican Church has to subscribe to before they can be obtained ordained and so there's a mild Calvinism in the Anglican churches which has come here but it's not the hard stuff it's not the dogmatic stuff the Dutch Reformed Church is and there was a man in Holland who's one of my heroes his name was Jacob Herman soon a name you've never heard of when he became a student in the university to study theology the students had a an unusual practice of changing their name to a Latin name and he changed his name to Arminius and has given his name to the title Armenian people have accused me many times of being an Armenian as over against a Calvinist but Jack of helmand soon went to Geneva and he studied under theodore beza and he found himself disagreeing profoundly with him and he came back to Holland and he became the pastor of the biggest Church in Amsterdam which is a very popular Church the royal family of holland attended it he was their favorite preacher and it was preaching against Calvinism now he lived such a holy life that nobody dared to criticize him while he was alive after he died the Dutch Church rose up and pronounced him a heretic and the Helder gathering in a place called dort called the Synod of dort which produced five statements condemning Arminius as a heretic and it's those statements which are still today the five points of Calvinism in churches that use the title reformed or the title Presbyterian these five points become the basis of their doctrine in England the Church of England was mildly cal Calvinist II but not strongly so but in Scotland where the National Church is the Presbyterian Church it is very strongly Calvinist now let me go through the five points of Calvinism Holland is as famous for tulips as Singapore is for orchids and they've exported millions of tulips around the world now what's that got to do with it the five points of Calvin coned to the five letters of the word tulip tul IP so let me give you the five points of Calvinism which are still widely taught certainly in Scotland Indonesia and many other places that were colonized by Scots and by the Dutch here are the five points number one total depravity T total depravity and that means that we are so far gone in seen not only that we can't save ourselves but we can't even respond to the gospel we can't repent and believe when we're told to or invited to we are totally depraved that means that we've got to be born again before we repent and believe or we can't repent and believe and were only born again because God picked our navel out of the Hat extraordinary teaching when you really think of it you unconditional election and that means that God chooses who will be saved utterly regardless of anything in the people even regardless of whether he knows they were later come to believe he doesn't choose them for that he chooses them entirely by his inscrutable will unconditional election of the saved third point l limited atonement and this is based on the logic that says if Christ was punished for the sins of the world God cannot send anybody to hell because that would be to punish sins crap twice therefore Christ only died for the elect he didn't die for the world he died for those who were going to be chosen by God and he was punished for their sins so they wouldn't be punished but everybody will be and if God laid on Christ the punishment of the whole world sins he ought to let the whole world go to heaven it's all very logical it appeals to human reason but it's not true next the wood iron here it comes irresistible grace and there it is at the heart of the five points and all of them depend on it and come back to it once you have said that God's grace is irresistible all the other ones follow that's the key to all five and there it is at the heart of the five points and finally P perseverance of the saints not meaning that the Saints will persevere but God will persevere and he will make absolutely sure that everybody he's called will finish up in heaven that everybody who started being saved will finish up safe in heaven now those five points of Calvinism are widely being preached and there's a revival of them in America and what happens in America spreads throughout the world I'm afraid while America is now the modern colonizer what happens theologically in the States sooner or later will find its way to you and there is a real revival of Calvinism I'm going to stop there because I've said enough about that second misinterpretation of Calvinism it's an attempt to let God be God and let him be totally sovereign against the human will let's now come on to the third view of grace which is the second misunderstanding of it and which is now being preached here and from here through the internet is going to every part of the world has particularly caught on in South Africa and in Canada but it's it didn't actually start here like most modern things is started in the States and there were a number of well-known television preachers in the States who started preaching free grace but that's not what I define it as this view treats grace as unconditional forgiveness try and just remember these three things grace as undeserved favor which are believed to be biblical grace as irresistible force which is the Calvinist view and thirdly grace as the unconditional forgiveness began in the States but it has been picked up here and really it is now from here that it's being widely spread through the internet to the world now what does it teach one of the difficulties of deception is that there's always a lot of truth in it it's a mixture of a lot of truth and a little error and it's the mixture that is so deceptive because of the truth there is and such people preach the gospel apparently and preach so much of the but not all of it if your faith is not based on the whole Bible but on bits of it you will certainly be deceived by this for the Bible is freely quoted and well quoted it's the mixture where this misunderstanding of Grace's unconditional forgiveness creeps in now one of the teachings in common between the second view of grace I gave you and this view is that both believe once saved always saved and I'll come back to that and say a little about that later but it's from these two that you've picked up this idea once saved always saved an idea which I believe is not biblical and if you want to study it properly I've got a book called once saved always saved question mark in which on the grounds of the whole Bible I seriously question whether it's true you won't even find those four words in your Bible once saved always saved but it is widely believed even among those who have the right view of grace but these both of these misunderstandings hold that truth very firmly one because of God's irresistible force and the other because of God's unconditional forgiveness among other things this means that when you come to Christ all your sins are forgiven not just all the sins you have forgiven but all the sins you are going to commit now that's a very serious difference from the Bible the Bible for limits forgiveness to your past sins it doesn't give you a blank check to go on sinning in fact it assumes Christians will sin from time to time it doesn't ever teach that you're so perfect that as soon as you were converted you've stopped sinning altogether every Christian knows that they are now in a battle between the old man and the new man and the old man is dead but he won't lie down and we have difficulties with what is scripture refers to as the flesh we want to be led by the spirit but the old flesh keeps rearing his head and rearing old habits and it's a battle the Christian life is a struggle those who believe this third misunderstanding of grace use the word effortless effortless Christianity effortless well I'm sorry but my Christian walk has not been effortless and I don't think yours has either in fact the scripture says make every effort to be holy because without holiness no one will see the Lord I'm quoting Hebrews chapter 12 that make every effort to be holy because without holiness no one will see the Lord that's the scripture teaching and this adjective effortless is an extraordinary adjective when you consider it effortless Christianity effortless salvation it even tips over into saying there's nothing you need to do to be saved and that's one of the reasons why repentance is not preached regularly it is downplayed it becomes a second-rate doctrine only believe that's all you need to do and faith is not defined in terms of what you do as it is in the New Testament it is defined as what you say faith becomes simply a matter of word name it and claim it blab it and grab it as someone has said that if you confess with your mouth faith as all you need you say it and claim it once you say it it's yours faith becomes a matter of word rather than a matter of deed I've just finished expounding the letter of James in England where he makes it quite clear that faith is something you do not something you think inside or say outside in words but something you do in practical deeds that's a very important insight into faith and James is the one to give it when you take the whole New Testament on any subject you get the truth you need for example everything in the New Testament about baptism to understand what it's like what it's about why we're told to be baptized there are 31 passages in the New Testament about baptism and when you put what all of the authors say together you've got a sound biblical doctrine baptism that's one passage a day for a month and I've got people whom I baptized to prepare for it by spending the previous month going through the 31 passages and then it got a whole understanding of baptism now with faith Paul didn't tell you all you need to know about faith you need James as well and James says this you see then that we are not saved by faith sorry we are saved through works and not through faith alone that word faith alone only occurs once in the New Testament in James and he says it's not by faith alone it's by faith works but people who take this free grace view feel that anything we do comes under the title of works and we are saved by grace not by works they've misunderstood the word works here let me try and bring that home in a simple way I was preaching in Hanover in Germany and I was preaching on faith and I said to the congregation how many of you believe in me let me ask you how many of you believe in me one two three four five that's not much how many of you believe that I exist how many of you believe that I exist put your hands right up let me see unanimous I must have worded the appeal wrongly no I didn't I wanted you to know the difference between believing that and believing in there were five people put up their hands in Hanover which is about the number here two and there was a well-dressed lady in the front row and she looked as if you could tease her a bit so I said you put your hand up to tell me you believed in me I said how do I know I don't I said you've professed to believe in me but I don't know if you do I said look I'll tell you what if you give me all your money to look after I'll know you believe in me and the congregation froze and nobody even smiled you smile but I said to the pastor afterwards what did I say he said that is the richest lady in Hanover her husband was a multi-millionaire because he owns so much property in the middle of Hanover and he died and left it all to her and you were speaking to the richest lady in this city I understood now why the whole congregation froze when I said that but I was trying to teach them you don't believe in Jesus until you show him that you do by doing something that shows you trust him faith must have works of faith to be saving faith that's what James is saying and he Ellis trait sit with Abraham who he said didn't have justifying faith until he sacrificed Isaac or nearly did and then when an angel stopped Abraham killing his own son God said to Abraham an amazing thing God said now I know that you fear me now I know God didn't know before he hoped he would but now God says now I know the implications of those three words are huge God knows every decision we could make and he knows all the consequences of what those decisions could be but he wants to know that we really mean it which he doesn't now that's an amazing thing to say about God whom people who are influenced by a Greek education thinks he knows everything but he doesn't know everything about you he wants to be sure of you and he wants you so to act in faith to do something to show him that you trust him and that usually involves a risk my three children one is in heaven now but the other two and that one had a favorite game which they called faith we would go to the stairs in the house and they would climb three or four stairs and they would all three stand and I would stand at the bottom with my hands behind my back and they would say daddy if we jump will you catch us and I used to say I might might not there's only one way for you to find out now even though we play this game many times they were never sure that I would catch them they took the risk and one would jump and I would catch them that would encourage the second one to jump at catch them and then the third and they played this again and again daddy can we play faith they loved it the uncertainty of it gave them all the thrills of a nasty video and they loved this game now we don't play now for health reasons health and safety reason my health and my safety was their way up here now but they learned what faith is it's jumping and letting the Lord catch you and you don't know whether he'll catch you but you launch out in faith and he catches you and then he knows that you're a believer you've taken the risk and he caught you until you've acted in faith James says you're not even justified by faith you may profess it you may think it in your mind you may confess it with your mouth that's as far as Paul's teaching on faith wind but James takes it further and says until you've acted in faith now that you know he knows that you're a believer that's an amazing word it's no wonder that I I know that those who teach free grace don't like the Epistle of James actually Martin Luther didn't like it either said it shouldn't be in the Bible but it's there in the Word of God it's part of his world it's part of his truth and we need all of the right of the New Testament to know the whole truth about any subject and we need James as well as Paul Paul said if you believe in your heart and confess with your mouth but that's not the whole truth about faith James says it's believe in your heart confess with your mouth and do it act on it and that makes faith certain so we need the whole truth on faith now what do teachers of unconditional forgiveness teach about all the demands in the New Testament here's a figure for you in the Old Testament the Jews had six hundred and thirteen different Commandments to keep an impossible task but that's what they had how many Commandments do you think there are in the New Testament for Christians the answer is over 1,100 nearly twice as many Commandments are in the law of Christ as are in the law of Moses and the New Testament lays those Commandments on us in the name of Christ over 1,100 imperative commands make up the law of Christ which is called the law of Liberty the Royal law and it's a really much better law than the Jews had now here is what Jesus said on the night before he died if you love me you will keep my Commandments even as I keep the commandments of my father and he loves me for the difference between the old covenant of Moses and the new covenant of Christ is not that there are no Commandments in the New Covenant there are twice as many the difference is that the new covenant gives you help to keep them through the Holy Spirit which the Mosaic law never did but these preachers will tell you there's no law only faith that's all you need do and you are now safe forever here is your ticket to heaven we're back to the once saved always saved so what do these preachers do with all the imperative commands of the New Testament they have a very neat way of separating the New Testament into two things salvation and discipleship and they put all the commands into the discipleship drawer and they only have faith in the salvation rule and so as soon as they find something of a command in the Bible yes you can do that as a disciple has nothing to do with you salvation you can be a disciple of Jesus but that doesn't get you to heaven salvation is limited to your faith obedience belongs to discipleship and for that there is a reward in heaven but that's all if you don't keep any of the commandments of the New Testament you might lose reward in heaven but you won't lose your place in heaven that came to you through salvation teaching and therefore they have completely separated salvation from following Jesus that's the basic error and it's a very serious one for salvation and following Jesus are all one on the same thing and when you follow Jesus you become one of his disciples Jesus gave us the mandate go and make disciples of all nations and you do that by baptizing them and teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you that's our task which Jesus gave us it's not a double task get them saved and teach them to observe what are commanded here as if these are two entirely different things salvation is to become a follower of Jesus holiness is part of salvation were saved to be a holy to be like Jesus were saved to be his disciples you can't separate those into two entirely different thing and so these teachers will teach the commandments of Christ but they will say they're nothing to do with your salvation there it so that you can be his disciple and have a reward in heaven and that's a different thing quite separate now our hope I've said enough so far how are we doing for time oh we've got ten minutes left let me just underline that since your future sins are forgiven and dealt with you don't need to bother when you sin again now there's one chapter in Paul sorry John's letter which tells Christians what to do when there's sin you can deal with it straight away and 1 John 1:9 says if we well it's visceral says if if you say you never sinned you're deceiving yourself and then he's talking to Christians and he says if you sin this is what to do about it if we confess our sins he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and he goes on in the blood of Jesus goes on cleansing us from all sin that's what Christians call sanctification dealing with the power of sin after he's dealt with the penalty of sin and now we know how to keep short accounts with God and every Christian finds themselves slipping from time to time back into things that they now know to be wrong and they hate themselves for doing it well get it dealt with confess it and he will cleanse you from that too and we'll go on cleansing you from all sin until you are perfect that's the gospel until you are restored to the person God meant you to be when he made you that's salvation and so what do these preachers do with those verses in 1 John they do an amazing bit of conjuring they say that verse was written for pagans for Gnostics they were the one of the first heresies and it's not written to Christians and yet the whole letter goes on to address Christians and they say well chapter one was not written to Christians for chapters two to five were what authority have they to say that there is nothing in the scripture itself and incidentally John when he wrote letters didn't write chapter one or chapter two he just wrote a letter e those chapters were introduced far later by an English arch measurement of Canterbury and so they say chapter one was written to this group who were not Christians and chapters two to five were written to Christians but John didn't write chapter one and chapter two in his letters have you ever received a letter that was divided into chapters it's a letter to Christians from beginning to end and it addresses all kinds of Christians old men young men and you'll find the address of the letter in Chapter two what we call chapter two but John didn't put it in Chapter two he put it in the letter well now you may be surprised at all this but that's just imposing on the Bible your own ideas why do they think chapter one is written not to Christians the answer is only to simple because it doesn't fit in with their teaching there is no reason in the Bible to separate quote what we call chapter one from the rest it's all one letter now I could have said much more about this third misunderstanding but I think the basic one is to separate discipleship from salvation and treat them as two totally separate things that's the basic one and that is very seriously and it makes you start cutting up the New Testament into this bidis for Christians in this bit isn't according to what you now teach but having said that let me go back to saying that they know a good bit of the gospel and they preach a good bit of it and that fools people into thinking that their whole teaching is Christian teaching it's very welcome teaching it means that your future sin as a Christian has all been settled you don't need to do anything about it you don't need to worry about it God's not bothered he's forgiven all your sins which includes all that you're going to commit I find no biblical basis for saying that to a Christian I find a biblical basis that admits that Christians are going to get it wrong and that they need to put it right and go on doing that as they mature and grow more like Christ every day as they learn how to be holy as he is holy they learn to get ready let me finish with the question because I don't know that I've dealt with the yet with you why does Christ save us why is grace given to us sinners what's the reason for it all the reason is very simple God wants to prepare us for the new heaven and the new earth and if we went to heaven as we are now we'd ruin it we'd pollute it it would all be just this world all over again until were changed totally change I don't know if I've told you about my wife's faith I think I did didn't I yes and she finds it very hard to believe that her husband will be perfect one day but if I'm not perfect one day then God won't let me into the new heaven and new earth and polluted salvation is a process it doesn't happen in a moment don't use the word saved always in the past tense the New Testament uses it in three tenses we have been saved we are being saved and we will be saved and the emphasis is on the future salvation which is why Paul writing to the Romans says our salvation is nearer than when we first believed and yet people when they first believed say I'm saved know you've begun to be saved you found the way of salvation and now you to walk along that way and as you walk in the way of salvation which is the same as walking in the spirit you are absolutely sure you're on the road to heaven and therefore you have assurance that you're on the right Road but if you turn off that road the first thing you will lose is your assurance because your assurance comes from the Holy Spirit and one you walk in the spirit you're sure you're on the road that will lead to heaven if you deviate from that road you lose the assurance of the Spirit until you get back on the road and that's why I believe they are wrong to teach once saved always saying what they really mean is once justified always safe and that is something the New Testament doesn't offer for us you

Channel: David Pawson - Official

Views: 107,781

Rating: 4.7115011 out of 5

Keywords: David Pawson, Christianity (Religion), The Bible (Religious Text), God (Deity), Divine Grace (Belief)

Id: CDCfJRFepj4

Length: 88min 25sec (5305 seconds)

Published: Tue May 26 2015