This
week, we continued the “Be Like Abe” series. We want to learn to be like
Abraham, in that we are righteous only because we believe in God. Our own works
and relying on law and rules for justification are dead and cursed, but life by
faith in grace is blessed! (Galatians 3:9-10)
Normal
thinking (which should NOT be normal) is that the way to be blessed by God is through
lots of obedience (and no disobedience), lots of prayer (loud and lengthy prayer),
lots of fasting, and a whole lot of “do, do, do, do , do…” Law living is a lot of do-do J That same thinking says that if you are
experiencing curse, it is because you sin openly or perhaps have some sort of
hidden sin. That is how we explain the circumstance when someone who seems to
be very faithful to God deals with the fruit of curse. We believe it must be some sort of hidden
sin. But Jesus said in John 9, when the
disciples asked if it was a man’s sin or his parents’ sin that caused him to be
born blind, that it was not sin at all. The world is pretty messed up and
terrible things happen – babies are born with defects and diseases. This is not due to specific sin but the
sinful nature of the world as a whole. A
note, the Greek language does not have punctuation….so if we add a period after
the part about the sin not being from the man or his parents, then the meaning
changes significantly and clears up a lot of misconceptions about this verse
(of course this only holds because that change holds up against other
scripture).
The
enemy uses law thinking against us by convincing us to receive curses when we
mess up, believing it is what is due us because of what we’ve done. Many believers can agree that God wants
blessing in their life, but they have that old, “normal” viewpoint on how to
get it. The first thing to understand is that blessing is not stuff. Blessing
CAN produce nice things in your life, but they are not the blessing. They are merely fruit of living in blessing.
Boiled down to its simplest form, blessing IS grace. You have a relationship
with the God of this universe that you do not deserve and cannot earn. That is
blessing!
We
are a vessel that God wants to pour His blessing into and see overflow into the
lives of those around us, but law thinking sees our actions or inactions as the
lever turning on and off the blessing faucet. We think sin turns off God’s
blessing. So, when we know we’ve failed, we believe we are back under curse,
and we accept curse “fruit” that comes our way.
Sin
DOES have a place in how and to what extent we experience blessing, but it is
not at the faucet. Instead, sin or disobedience puts holes in our vessel. The
grace of God ensures that the blessing continues to pour out, but if our vessel
is full of holes, that blessing disappears, and we never experience it. We react
by trying by our own actions to turn the faucet on – wasting time and energy doing
something that has already been done.
What
we need to do is to get hold of grace and allow it to transform us – driving
sin out at the heart level and sealing up the holes. When we do that, we become
a finite vessel under an infinite faucet of blessing. Then, blessing overflows
out of us and to those around us. Law living never even gets off the starting
block because all of its energy goes to justifying self. Romans 5:13 and forward emphasizes that we
received salvation and thus God’s blessing is a gift. A gift does not have strings attached and is
something you can not and never could earn, but something you need to receive
and open in order to actually benefit from.
Picture
yourself as a rose bush. If the whole plant becomes diseased, we will see ugly
branches and leaves. We can continue to cut off all the ugly, dead parts, but
the plant is still diseased – so the ugliness comes back. So, then, we could
become even more aggressive with our trimming. But, guess what? The plant is
still diseased and will continue to produce those ugly leaves and branches.
That is the law / behavior modification approach.
A
more effective approach is the grace and life transformation approach. Grace
heals the diseased plant at the root. It may still look a little ugly, but it
is in fact far healthier than the diseased plant we keep trimming. Over time,
the plant will become healthy and will thrive. We must have patience as grace
does its work. If we (or law-minded people around us) become impatient, we will
assume that grace does not work, it was just a license to sin, or that it needs
a little law to really work. Law gets immediate
and visible results; however, those results are temporary, and the law work
never ends. Grace changes hearts and lives and has everlasting results!
To listen to the entire sermon go to http://ahwatukeechurch.com/media.php. To learn more about Living Word Ahwatukee,
visit http://ahwatukeechurch.com/.
