Application to the nitnoids

“Have you noticed nobody can eat your lunch as good as you can?” says Jordan.

“You take the most boastful, prideful-appearing person, who seems to think they never make a mistake, and you sit and listen and read their mind as they lay their head on the pillow at night and you’ll find the person wracked with self-condemnation and self-questioning; fear that they’re not doing enough, running hard enough, pushing hard enough. You know how I know that? It’s true of all of us.

“The answer to that is peace with God. Being justified you have peace with God. Grace is all that God is free to do for you through the finished work of Jesus Christ.

“You need to appreciate the love of God. I John says, ‘We know and believe the love of God.’ Sometime we know it but we don’t believe it. Sometime we know God loves us but we don’t really apply it by faith to the nitnoids of our life.

“You want to know why Christian people live such lives of defeat, so far below the snake line? They don’t start right here. I tell you that because I’ve been pastoring over four decades, pastoring local churches, and as a pastor you sit with people with all kind of circumstances.

“The answer’s going to be in understanding and believing God’s grace. You got to get that and believe that. Don’t just know it, but understand the difference. I think Christian people need to preach the gospel to themselves every day because we forget it. We start thinking God treats us differently now that we’re saints than He did when we were sinners.

“When we were lost, He just said, ‘Come, trust me, I’ll forgive you all your sins,’ and now as a Believer you think He’s running around trying to whack you in the head every time you make a mistake?!

*****

“Romans 5:2 says, ‘By whom also we have access by faith into this grace wherein we stand, and rejoice in hope of the glory of God.’

“Don’t you want to have access to what God’s done for you? How do you do it? By faith. You want to bring His power into your life? You do it by faith. You trust, you believe in what God’s done for you at Calvary.

“You say, ‘But I don’t see it, I don’t feel it.’ Who cares, it’s still real!

“By the time you get to the end of Romans 8, you have been thoroughly grounded, your sins are taken care of, and your failures, disappointments and all the rest--when they rise in your mind, you say, ‘No, the Cross is the answer for that.’

"And you say, ‘O, love of God, how rich and pure,’ and you believe in that and rest in that. You don’t puff yourself up and try to defend yourself. You say, ‘Yes, that’s why Jesus Christ died for me.’

“You’re no longer a slave; you’re free. You’re no longer condemned; you’re righteous. You’re no longer dead; you have the spirit of life in Christ Jesus that has made us free from the law of sin and death.

*****

“Romans 7:7 says, ‘What shall we say then? Is the law sin? God forbid. Nay, I had not known sin, but by the law: for I had not known lust, except the law had said, Thou shalt not covet.
[8] But sin, taking occasion by the commandment, wrought in me all manner of concupiscence. For without the law sin was dead.

“Paul loves questions. You know why he asks questions? To get answers. To make you think.

“ ‘Is the law sin?’ 'But by the law.' So, when I sin, what does the law do? It says, ‘Sinner! Sinner!’ and it condemns you. The law will condemn anybody, saved or lost. That’s why Paul says in Galatians 2, ‘If I build again that which I destroy, I make myself a transgressor.’ The law’s not made for a righteous man, I Timothy 1 says. It’s not the standard of God’s operating today. The standard for God’s operating today is grace.

*****

“Is Paul really carnal, sold under sin? No, he’s a new man in Christ Jesus. What’s happened to Paul is he has lost confidence of his identity in Christ. He’s living in error. When you live as a Believer in condemnation like that, you’re not living as who you are in Christ. You’re living over here in your resources and you come up short.

“You wind up saying, ‘I can’t do it. I’m carnal, sold under sin.’ What Paul’s doing in verse 14 (‘For we know that the law is spiritual: but I am carnal, sold under sin’) is he’s thinking about himself like he’s still lost.

“The first thing that happens when you respond to sin on a performance-based system over here is it condemns you because you can’t do it! And you didn’t do it!

"When you look at the law and it says, ‘Thou shalt not,’ what does it do? It works death. So he says in verse 14, ‘I’m just worthless. I’m no good. I’m helpless. I have no value. I’m just a worthless, valueless failure.’

"Look down at verse 18: ‘For I know that in me (that is, in my flesh,) dwelleth no good thing: for to will is present with me; but how to perform that which is good I find not.’

“He’s saying, ‘I’m just no good.’ If you wanted one even better, verse 24: ‘O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death?’

“Does that sound like a happy, victorious Christian?! No, he’s conscious of his failure. And he says, ‘I’m wretched. I’m unloved. Nobody loves me. Look at the condition I’m in.’ That’s where thinking this way gets you. Is the law scriptural? Yes, but it’s not dispensational.

*****

“Before you got to the Book of Romans, you had to go through a whole lot of Scripture. Understand, if you don’t know who you are as a member of the church the Body of Christ; if you still think you’re Israel and your program’s in Israel’s scripture, you don’t understand there are 13 books in your Bible written specifically about you (Romans-Philemon), out of which service will come as a natural result of your understanding of what’s there and believing in it.

“Most people think if you just preach about Jesus, you’re preaching the gospel. That’s not the gospel. Romans 3:21. Notice He’s going to take you and justify you freely by His grace through the redemption that’s in Christ Jesus.

“Jesus Christ died at Calvary to pay for your sins, to redeem you; to buy you back from the hock shop of sin, the slave market of sin, and to redeem you by paying the price of your sin. The wages of sin is death and Jesus Christ died to pay for your sins.

“He died to pay for what’s wrong with you. All of those things that bring the guilt, shame, fear, rejection and all of the rest of the things. All of your failures, all of your shortcomings, all of the things people use to condemn you, all of the things you use to condemn yourself.

*****

“Before you met the Book of Romans, God’s people were called the nation Israel. If God has set Israel aside in order to accomplish this, what about Israel?

“The big question in Romans 9-11 you have to answer is ‘What happened to Israel?’ Because if you can’t answer that question you’re not going to be able to study the Bible at all!

“Because if you think God replaced Israel with the Body of Christ all the stuff in the Old Testament would belong to you! Have you ever tried to go back there, or in the Gospels, and try to do something you couldn’t do, and beat your head against the wall ’til you’re silly?!

“People say, ‘Well, we’re doing it because Jesus did it.’

“What?! He was perfect. You got a problem keeping up with Him! I mean, He couldn’t even see you in the dust that He made on an early morning stroll! If you’re going to do what He said, you couldn’t preach to anybody but the ‘lost sheep the house of Israel.’ ”