Here are outtakes from a powerful study he gave soon
afterward at the Great Lakes Bible Conference (find audio at www.ohiograceministries.org)
outside Berlin, Ohio:
“What the Book of Galatians tells you is that the core
problem every grace Believer has, or one of the core problems, is you can start
by grace and get removed from it and go back under the law. So if we don’t
consciously decide, ‘I’m going to daily walk by grace,’ we’ll go back under the
law system, and not only that, we’ll be under that same mentality of how we
think of our lives.
“When Adam, instead of answering God’s question, said, ‘The
woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat’ .
. . It’s not me; it’s her!’
“That’s exactly the way the law system works. He’s
justifying his behavior. My point I want you to get is, because it’s a performance
system, it leads to self-justification.
“If you go back to that way of thinking you will get into
the self-justification business and you will not be honest about what’s really
going on.”
*****
“In grace I would say you need to do two things. The first
is you need to get completely comfortable with the absolute, unforfeitable,
eternal standing you have in Jesus Christ. So when He saved you, He made you
complete in Him. Colossians 2:10.
“Ephesians 1:6 says He made you ‘accepted in the beloved.’
Doesn’t that phrase just amaze you? So when I feel like a jerk, which is often,
and I feel inadequate, God views me in Christ and accepts me because He accepts
His Son, and that fundamentally changes my relationship with God. I can’t ever
be changed, right?
“Romans 5:1 says I have peace with God. I’m not waiting for
it, I’m not hoping for it, I have it! Not because of me but because of Him. I
have been blessed, past tense. Eph. 1:3 says we have ‘all spiritual blessings
in heavenly places.’
“There’s more and more to list but my point is this, write
it down, submit it in your mind. Your position in Christ can never ever be lost;
it can never change. You’re complete; you’re exactly the way He wants you to be
and in that CONFIDENCE, in that CERTAINTY, you can now tell the honest truth
about where you come short.
“You see, the law system is excuses and rationalization. But
if you get in grace, this is now who I am and it can’t change!
*****
“The key to this is we have to redeem the rest of our lives,
and to do that we have to have the courage to do that honest, brutal
soul-searching.
“Maybe it’s just me, but I’ve become convinced of this. I’ve
been too lax, there’s too much sugar-coating, there’s too much rationalization
and there needs to be more brutal honesty about, ‘This is what I need to do
with the rest of my life.’
“I ask that you ask of yourself this question: 'What is
the single most important thing that you could accomplish in this life for the
Lord Jesus Christ?' I think that’s the question. Whatever it is, do THAT!
Whatever it is that’s not THAT, don’t waste time on it!
“I understand you have to work and pay bills, but the bottom
line of our lives is we have a lot of discretionary time and we often use it to
do, like Martha, good things.
"But what I’ll tell you is this: I think we have
multiple priorities and there’s multiple good things, and then what we do is, as
long as we check a bunch of things off our list so we accomplished a lot of
things, we feel good because we were productive and we evaluate ourselves by
how MANY things we got done, not whether we got the most important things done.
That’s all the difference in the world because the most important thing
matters.
“There’s a lot of stuff you can do that’s a lot of activity
but it’s not the most important thing. I think what happens is we want multiple
priorities because then we can pick the ones that are not as hard.
“The very most important one may well be the hardest, but
it’s the one that’s going to impact eternity the most. But we want to have the
liberty to pick the other ones. In my opinion, what I need to do is say ‘no’ to a lot of
things.
*****
“I’ll give you an example, and if I’m meddling you can
ignore this too. One of the things we come up against all the time is what’s
called ‘stranded grace Believers.’ They’re grace Believers who don’t have a
church in their area so what are they to do?
“I’ll just tell you honestly, sometimes you just have to do
it. Sometimes you just have to say, ‘I’m going to start this Bible study for
the community. I’m going to start this church. I’m going to start this family
Bible study.’ Whatever it is, you just have to decide to be the difference.
“As a personal example, I was once in a grace church and we
were told to get out. At that point in my life I had all kinds of things to do
otherwise and I had no interest in starting a grace church in some ways. In
other words, I hadn’t started one before; do I want to start one now?
“The thing that’s daunting about that is you bump into all
the most basic things. Where are you going to meet? Where do you find a pulpit?
My point is, you get pushed into this thing and you’re like, Okay, what do I do
here?’
“I became convinced that it was necessary to do that, and it
was something where if we didn’t, I don’t know that anyone else would have done
it.
*****
“I’ll give you a different example: When we relocated from
Beaver Creek to Columbus, I spent time on the web trying to find the grace
churches in the area. You know how many grace churches there are in the
Columbus area that believe what you believe? Yeah, there’s one now. There’s ONE
now.
“But I reached out to all of them. The closest thing I found
was a church that had a statement of faith that they were affirmatively against
‘hyper-dispensationalism.’ That was my other option. I thought, ‘Well, I’m
gonna last long there.’
“Here’s the point. You just got to choose to do it. You just
got to say, ‘Look, I’m going to purpose to make this happen because this is the
most important thing I can do. Because this community needs a witness to the
truth.’
*****
“Don’t leave here without thinking about that and writing it
down. If you put off and say, ‘I’m going to think about that in a month,’
things like that often don’t happen. I say this only as someone who cares and
wants what’s best. Decide it this weekend, purpose in your heart, write it down
and decide to do it.
“You’re going to end up in the next life and the question
will be, ‘Did you accomplish for the Lord Jesus Christ what He wanted you to
do?’
“I want to hear Him go down the line and say, ‘Well done, my
good and faithful servant.’ That’s it! That’s the ONLY unknown in your life!
There’s no unknown in your life about your being blessed in Christ. The only
unknown is what happens at the judgment seat of Christ. So let’s get it
resolved.
*****
“Feeling sorry for yourself is the greatest lie there is. God saved me, this utter wretch who deserved hell, so what am I sad
about? That I got a little medical thing? I have ‘all spiritual blessings in
heavenly places.’ What are you going to do to me? Torture me? Do you think that
would hurt me? Shoot me? You can’t do anything to me, right?
“That, in and of itself, I’ve got nothing to complain about,
but you know what God did? God gave us opportunity to preach the gospel. You
can sit down next to someone and point them to eternal life.
“How exciting is it going to be when, as you traverse
through eternity and bump into people in the Body of Christ, there’s
someone there that every time they see you, ‘It’s good to see Pete! Pete’s the
guy who told me about the Savior!’ And every time you see Pete, you're going to
think the same thing! Isn’t that unbelievable?
“That’s just it! That’s just unbelievable! That person
throughout eternity will rejoice over you!
*****
“I used to think that after I learned right division and the
King James Bible issue, ‘You know what, there’s about four people on the
universe who agree with me.’ Right? ‘What are the odds that any of them live in
North America?’ Right?
“As that was going on, I used to think, ‘Man, I’m just like
painting myself into the strangest corner there is.’ You know what I found? I
found I got narrower and narrower and narrower. I was in the place where I
found people who were the same as me and were real.
“We didn’t operate on a superficial level; we had the same
understanding of what’s going on in the universe and we had a connection that, even if I don’t see you for a year, the next time I see you, are we going to
have that same fundamental unity we always had?
“And you had this depth that, honestly, I don’t have with
people I talk to on a daily basis. Right? So God did that for all of us. My
point is, we don’t have anything to complain about.
*****
“As part of (my illness), one of the things we ended up
doing is taking a trip out to Arizona to get some medical advice and it just
struck me on that trip more than it has in a while . . . we’re sitting down
having a number of conversations with folks about what’s going on in their
life, just things that happen as you go through your life, and the misery of
the ‘lost’ is something we occasionally lose sight of.
“I’d hear people tell me things about drug addiction,
problems with their children and grandchildren, and they tell you this tale of
woe and you think, ‘Well, I don’t know what to do with that. I don’t know how
to process that heartbreak.’ And that is exactly the world we live in. In other
words, what Thoreau said he’s right about: ‘Most men lead lives of quiet
desperation.’
“When someone at work asks you how you’re doing, what’s the
correct answer? ‘Fine.’ You know what that answer is? ‘I’m not going to tell
you what’s really going on. What’s really going on is I’m in inner turmoil.
What’s really going is I don’t have any peace. What’s really going on is my
family relationships are strained and I’m worried about this, and that and my
wife is a wreck, but you don’t want to hear that so what I say is, fine.’
*****
“II Timothy 4:2 says, ‘Preach the word; be instant in
season, out of season; reprove, rebuke, exhort with all longsuffering and
doctrine.’
“What we need to be doing is preaching the Word more. I’ll
tell you, too many times we have fear of men. I’ll confess this about myself.
We care too much about what people will think and so we choose to be quiet, and
what’s really going on is they are suffering and they’re hopeless and they have
no idea what to do, but we don’t want to be thought weird. We just got to get
over that.
“One of the things people think about personal witness is
they can’t answer questions. Here’s the bottom line. All you got to do is
remember Ephesians 2: 8-9, which you already know. Give them the gospel from I
Corinthians 15 that you already know. Give them Acts 16: 30-31, which you
already know.
“The bottom line is we already know that; we just don’t want
to do it. Let’s just be honest about it. The need is great. Not only do I
believe in personal witness, there’s the tracts.
“Years ago in junior high someone gave me a gospel tract and
I read it and rejected it. I didn’t believe it but I kept the tract. You know
how you have that experience where you know you just interacted with something
true and you also know you didn’t do what you should have done?
“Years later I understood the gospel and got saved.
Hallelujah. I don’t know if you have questions you want to ask when you get to
heaven but one of mine is, ‘Whatever happened to that tract?’ Because I went
back and tried to find it and I don’t know what I did with it.
“My point is, God’s Word has such a spiritual power that
when you give it to someone they understand they are not interacting with your
opinions. They are interacting with the Holy God, and when they reject that
tract they’re rejecting Him. There’s a spiritual power there. His Word is that
way.
“In pre-internet days, when we did a tract ministry, one of
things that kept happening is we’d get tract orders from places in the world we couldn’t figure
out how they got there. You know already that the ‘Word of God is not bound,’
but the beauty of a tract ministry is that when you give someone a tract
they’ll give it to other people who give it to other people and it just takes
on a life of its own."
(new article tomorrow)
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