TRANSCRIPT
What I'm calling today's word is predestination and grace and faith. I'Il read from Ephesians chapter one, verses five to eight,
which is the passage we read in our discussion groups a couple of weeks ago. Starting from verse five, having predestined us to adoption as sons by Jesus Christ to himself, according to the good pleasure or good purpose, Eudokia, of his will, according to the riches of his grace, which is made abundant toward us in all wisdom and understanding.
So recently in our group discussions, we began to discuss and explore the extravagance of God's love, and his powerful promises to us of what I've just read. Predestination and grace, and being adopted to belong to his family, partakers of his life through Jesus, partakers of the nature of God. The first chapter of Ephesians is a mighty trumpet blast of what God has done through Jesus Christ, and through the work of his unlimited atonement for humanity, never limit the atonement
work of God, for everybody.
If one died, all were dead. So I've got three questions today.
What is predestination?
Well, the short answer is, it's God's purpose for our life. What is grace? The divine energy that accomplishes our predestination.
What about faith? Predestination and grace only become our reality when we believe. So I've answered the three questions.
We can go home now. But really, I want to look at these three questions in greater depth. So we'll look at these three questions.
Predestination is purpose driven. It is God's foreordained plan for a person's life or role. It is not a statement about going to heaven or hell, as the Calvinists much later mistakenly interpreted.
You've got to search the scriptures to see this, and it's very clear. Through Christ's atoning work, when Jesus brought his divinity into all of humanity, we are also brought into adoption, becoming part of his family. We're then
transformed into Christ's likeness to become co-labours with
him in his work in the world.
There's our journey. Right smack in the middle of it is the grace of God. We try that journey on our own without the grace of God, and we can become very good citizens with a good conscience doing the best we can, but we need God's grace to be able to walk in his will for our lives, empowered by his life.
Grace is the divine energy that accomplishes this divine purpose, making this gospel of good news, that's what the gospel is, possible. That is then believed upon by us. And this displays God's wisdom and strategic brilliance.
And that was the last verse that we read when we did the discussion group. God thought that through and gave it to us.
He wants to express who he is through us.
That's his desire. So we'll look at the grace. The plan of being predestined is energized by grace from God's side.
All comes from him. The word grace is cardis, which means a gift. It's not primarily about emotionally feeling favored.
It is God's favor, but we don't often feel very favored going through tough times. But God's grace is still available. If it weren't, we wouldn't be able to go through them with him and being empowered by his Spirit in faith.
It's God's powerful and operative transforming presence that enables the purpose of our predestination to be achieved.
What does grace do? Is it like electricity?
No, it is a force. Is it just emotion? No, grace creates a relational bond in our hearts.
The Bible says, a new heart I will give you, in Ezekiel 36. That's the power of grace. It changes the disposition of our hearts.
We desire to do for God and with God. That's his gift, that's his covenant. And that works the transformative change of the new desires that God has willed for us.
Look at things relationally, then you're looking at God and what he does, why he does it, and how we can respond. But without faith, if we don't respond by faith and say, I believe that, that grace is there laying idle and fruitless. It's in vain.
Don't just think of it as something that may be available. He said, approach the throne of grace, receiving mercy, so that you'll find grace in times of need. We need the mercy because we don't do it very expertly.
We bumble our way through. And God says, I don't care how much you bumble your way through. I'm not looking at your human performance index.
I'm looking at your heart. Dispose to me, doing the best you can, and this grace is available. But tell yourself that I'm being merciful to you because you're not very merciful to yourself.
You're a bit hard on yourself. I've forgiven your sins, you know that. But you're worried about your performance, don't.
The work of atonement is operating on about eight and a half billion people on the planet right now. But the problem is that a scarce number of people, including many churchgoers, don't know that or believe it. That work can only become a reality for people who will hear it and believe it and respond to it by faith.
And today, we'll look at how we can respond to it by faith. Paul was saved from wasting his pre-destined future when he was struck down on the road to Damascus. He was pretty proud of his performance up till then, as a religious man, a Pharisee of the Pharisees.
But then, he was struck down by the Lord Jesus, and he believed, he was baptized, and he received the power of the Holy Spirit. In Galatians 1, Paul writes in verse 17, and here's the predestination part. It pleased God, who separated me from my mother's womb, and invited me through his grace to reveal his son in me, that I might preach him amongst the Gentiles, or the nations, the unbelievers.
Paul knew that this was given by God's grace, but not only given by God's grace, it was to be lived through God's grace.
Paul said, his grace towards me was not in vain. Wasn't futile, but it can lie wasted.
I've already said, the scripture actually, confidently enter, come to the throne of grace. So we can see that all of this is God's doing. If that's God's doing, what is our belief?
It is our doing. It's believing everything that God is doing, and believing that what he's doing is true, and real, and personal for each one of us. It's always doing, the doing.
Now, my faith, my personal level, sometimes involves getting out of my own way, and to stop worrying that I'm not fulfilling God's predestined purpose in the ordinary, daily doing of what I'm doing. Do I have enough faith and grace? Am I actually doing just exactly what you want me to do, Lord?
I better try and think through this harder. God says, my goodness, I wake up then. I wake up to myself and decide to trust that God knows what He's done.
He knows what He's done for me, and what He is now doing for me, and He just wants me to trust Him in that I'm doing for you, in all the things that are happening. And when I trust God, simply, come to my senses, faith floods in. Not faith that I'm going to get what I want, but faith that God can now get what He wants.
The moment we start telling ourselves that we don't have enough faith, we stop having faith. It's a bad conversation.
Our soul's outward, disordered mindset of what is real has taken over from our God-ordained spiritual reality, what He's ordained.
Now, let me explain how God's ordered spiritual reality can turn into a disordered soul reality. That's very important to me. Everything that is spirit desires to be expressed in some outward way.
Spirit cannot just exist, isolated, doing nothing. Spirit wants expression, no matter what kind of spirit it is. And you can name hundreds of them.
The human spirit, a spirit of fear, God's spirit, a political spirit, a religious spirit. They all want expression in some way, and they manifest themselves through whoever's available to give way to that spirit. But we have our predestined spirit in us.
God, as a pure spirit being, lovingly desired to express himself through us. God as spirit wants far more to express who he is than any other spirit would. He is spirit.
The Holy Spirit yearns jealously for us. Let us be manifested, expressed through you. So God desired to do that, to express himself through humanity.
And that occurred perfectly through the life of Jesus. That was the one, the only one. That happened perfectly.
And the atonement of Jesus on the cross allows that expression of the life of Jesus through us by the Holy Spirit in us. That's how it happens. God's predestined purpose for us in Christ is our reality.
That's what God and God's spirit wants to express through us.
His purpose for us, him, with us, in that. It is our I am reality.
God said, I am who I am. In Exodus chapter three, Jesus said, before Abraham was, I am. John eight, Paul said, I am what I am by the grace of God.
1 Corinthians 15. Now, this is the key. We can become the expression of who God wants us to be, by the grace of God, if we believe it.
We are who we are by the grace of God. God is the source of our true I am spiritual being. He created it before the foundation of the world.
But what do we do with that spiritual reality? Well, the Bible says, in 1 Corinthians 15, that we generate a soul, genomai. We create a soul, a faulty expression of our spiritual being, which becomes flawed and damaged throughout our lives because of survival mechanisms that we create, starting from a young age.
That's our doing. Our spirit wants to express itself. We are spirit, soul, and body.
And we express, through our soul, an I Am that has had to react to everything that's going on around us. We learn, from a young age, to strategise, to defend, or to advance ourselves, through the difficult circumstances of our lives. We create another I Am in our souls.
And that becomes the I Am that other people see. They see that as who we are. Oh, there's that cranky person again.
There's that angry one. There's that difficult one. There's that one that seems to be always feeling shameful and guilty all the time.
Why do they do that? So that soul becomes the expression of who we are, to other people, and absolutely to ourselves, with all the reactions and hard to get on with behaviours that we wish we didn't have as well. The reactive strategies have become the soul's unhelpful helpers in times of difficulty and stress.
So we have to discover the true I am, whose source is God's reality for us. That's the journey of the soul. 1 Corinthians 2, 11 tells us, gives us the clue on how to go on this journey.
And I'll be doing this in the course later this month, the healing salvation of the soul. It says this, For what man knows the things or the parts, the things of a man, except the spirit of the man which is in him. And even so, no one knows the things of God, except the spirit of God.
So we can get to know, because our spirit, Bible says in Proverbs, the spirit of a man is the lamp of the Lord that searches out all the inward parts. We can allow the Holy Spirit to help us search out and find out, what did I dump into my soul when I got into reaction at that time, when I was a little one, or when I was a teenager, or what I'm doing even now?
The Holy Spirit says, I'm gonna help you to stop trying to use your unhelpful helpers to help yourself.
We can be guided by the Holy Spirit who becomes the new helper. That Jesus promised, he said in John 14, I will pray the Father, and he will give you another helper, that he may abide with you forever. Jesus didn't have to make and create helpers.
He had the Holy Spirit full on, all the time, in the grace of God. He was the perfect expression of God in humanity, and he's saying to us, I'm giving you my life, and I'm going to get you back from that disordered soul into being able to express who you are, predestined to be in your spirit, by my grace. So the healing of the soul course, I'll be starting in our mid-week meetings, is based on this spiritual understanding of how to find our true I am, in a non-threatening way.
We don't go in there and say, oh, what a terrible sin. And we find a helper that we've created, and it's a helper that says, you're not matching up. You could do better than this.
It's called the, you can do better helper. You ever found one of them? Well, the you can do better helper is not a sin, but it does cause us to miss the mark, because we'll make errors of judgment, and we will start getting into things that become just us reacting, and our self-help, whatever other helper it could be, our anger helper, that will be the thing that wants to run things.
But there's the try harder helper. Just look at that for a sec.
We've all got one of them, but I've seen a try harder helper, when I was sharing with a person, I've seen that try harder helper cause that person to feel, when it was revealed that that's it, they felt, oh, well, that's a sinful helper.
I am angry, I'm gonna get rid of that. I say, no, no, no. That try harder helper has got you to where you are now, for your sake, trying to help you to get through the sense that you couldn't do things properly.
It was trying to help you get over the fear of failure. Don't get angry at it. It was doing the best it could.
You made it, you created it. But don't get angry, just say, you can move over now. I've got another helper.
You see, this course that I'm doing is not threatening. Oh, you'd better repent from that help. No, acknowledge it and say, thank you, bye.
And there's a process. We find the true I am. We get to know the things of the strategic helper parts in our soul.
We ask for wisdom from the Holy Spirit as our new helper that Jesus promised us. God's reality of who we are, not our concept of self that is lesser and smaller because of the awful things that have happened to us, the things that we wanted that haven't happened to us, all because of what? Certain people, our own mistakes, disappointing circumstances?
Well, suffering is part of life. But unnecessary suffering happens when we make these things that happened define who we are. They're not you, they've happened to you.
And that's, it's not God's purpose for your life to be defined by the things that happened to you, it's God's purpose for your life to be with him in the things that happened to you. So, the happenings, let's see these happenings as outside of us, and our soul reacting to them. But, what's inside of us?
That's the, who is inside of us? God is inside of us. The things are outside of us.
1 John 4, 4. Greater is he that is in you, than that which is in the world. So, I spoke about finding wisdom.
What wisdom do we need to get in order to understand our true reality? The fact that greater is he that is in you, than that which is in the world. Well, James tells us.
James 1, 5. If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask of God, who gives to all generously and without reprimanding, and it will be given to him. But let him ask in faith.
I tell people, you're gonna get the wisdom you need as you diligently apply yourself to what we're doing here. It will come, God will speak. I'm thinking, am I bold enough to say that?
I am, because I see it happen all the time, because the Bible says do it. But let him ask in faith, with no doubting, for he who doubts is like a wave of the sea, driven and tossed by the wind. For let not that man suppose that he will receive anything from the Lord.
He's a double-minded man, unstable in all his ways. Well here we are, the two mindsets. The mindset of the soul, or the mindset of the spirit.
Spiritually minded is life and peace. Carnally minded is death.
Bible says the carnal mind cannot please God.
It's hostile to God. Humanity. But the spiritual mind is in harmony with God.
And James here says, you're double-minded and you'll become unstable. Now double-minded is a good phrase because it's speaking about having a spiritual mind and a soul mind, the two I ams. But look, I want to open that word up to you.
Double-minded in the Greek doesn't have the word mind in it.
I still think it's a great phrase because the mind is in the soul.
And there is a mind in the spirit.
The mind that knows Jesus is in the spirit. The mind that bumbles around out here is in the soul. We'll talk about that later.
But the Greek word for double-minded is di-psychos. That means double-souled. It's soul.
It's a soul problem. It means a double-souled person. A soul in conflict with itself.
With a mind that is in conflict with the mind of the spirit. I continually see the Holy Spirit giving wisdom to people about their true being as they do the healing of the soul process. It's the grace of God doing that, and our faith receiving it, and believing it, and living it out.
So, what about faith? What is the goal of our faith? And here's a key scripture, 1 Peter 1.9, receiving the end.
The word there in Greek is telos, the purpose, the end of our faith. The salvation and healing of your soul. That's what your faith is for.
To get your soul back in shape, in alignment with your spiritual destiny. That's what the course is for. So, when I'm sitting in the presence of God, I want to come back, shake myself, wake myself up, and say, soul, move over.
I want to hear what God is saying about me, to be the l am that I know you say 1 am. And I bring scriptures to mind. I do a whole lots of, well, there are a whole lots of things I don't do.
I don't try and analyse myself. I just think about what God is doing and how great He is and He's wonderful at time. That's what I do.
But I bring scriptures to mind. I thank God I'm in His presence, even if I don't feel anything. I thank God that He's doing a mighty work in me and I don't even feel it's happening.
I can feel actually quite at odds with myself, but my spirit is saying, wake up, God's at work, give this time, be still, know that I'm God. You don't have to feel it. All right, thank you, Lord.
But here's some scriptures that I bring to mind, and I'll just leave it with this. Paul says in Ephesians 3.20, God is able to do exceedingly abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that works in us. That's the power of the Holy Spirit.
Take out the book of Philippians and have a look in Philippians chapter one, chapter two, and chapter three. In Philippians chapter one, you'll find this. He who has begun a good work in you will complete it until the day of Jesus Christ.
He's doing the work. Philippians 2.13. For it is God who works in you, both to will and to do what is his highest purpose for your life.
His good purpose. I mean, oh my Lord, you're at work in this, and I've been trying to do all the work. And he says, I told you, be still, know this.
And third, in Philippians chapter three, verse 21, according to the working by which he is able even to subdue all things to himself. You know, when I'm sitting there, I can feel restless, agitated. This is a waste of time.
And time goes by, and I start feeling subdued. I think I'm doing a pretty good job here of calming myself. I'm supposed to say, that's not you.
I'm subduing that restless heart of yours, that anxious, fidgety mind that wants to analyze. Give me some more time. Okay, Lord, thank you.
Ill be still and know you're God, and I'll leave the rest to God.
So, thank you, Lord. Help us to learn to let go of outward happenings, to let you happen within us at all times.
Amen.
