There are many rumors circulating about God, but one thing the Bible clearly teaches: If you know God, you will receive His grace. And that grace is nothing less than amazing.

June 26, 2008

Knowing God…As the God of Grace

It was a behind the scenes peek at a Presidential political campaign. Political handlers refused to allow 2 young Muslim women wearing head coverings to sit directly behind the candidate. Why? Because they were afraid it would feed the rumors circulating since the candidate’s presidential campaign began. In spite of his profession of faith in Christ, there are a lot of people who think he’s a Muslim. His staffers didn’t want anyone to feed on those false rumors. Well, I don’t take political stands but the incident reminded me that God has his false rumors too. There are all kinds of ideas floating around about his true identity, his character, what he’s really like. I’m Charles Morris and welcome to Haven Today telling the great story that’s all about Jesus. This is “Knowing God” week and this program is called “Knowing God…As the God of Grace”. We’re talking about knowing God as he really is. If you read the Bible you know that God wants to be known as he really is. He’s passionate about putting the rumors to rest. In a little bit we will be joined again by Dr. J.I. Packer, author of that famous book “Knowing God”. And if it’s been a while since you read it or perhaps you’ve never read it, or perhaps you’d like to give it to somebody who needs to read it, we have it here at haventoday.org or you can call us after the program at 1-800-654-2836. We ask for your gift to Haven Ministries to help us through this summer and we’ll get the book out to you right away. Haven, from the “Enter In” album opens the program now, leading us to “The Lord Alone”.

Song: In The Lord Alone
Performed by: Haven

From “A Haven Enter In” album that’s the musical group by the same name and the song is called “In the Lord Alone” here on a Haven Today called “Knowing God…As the God of Grace”. Last week I spent an afternoon with Dr. J.I. Packer author of that Christian classic book “Knowing God” next to the Bible a lot of people – over 3 million in fact – have been helped to know God through Dr. Packer’s book. To know God as he wants to be known as he’s made himself known in the scriptures. Ultimately, he’s made himself known through Jesus as a God of grace. When you hear the word grace what do you think of? Well, I asked Dr. Packer that question.
JP: Well, in the New Testament it’s the word “charis” which was never used in a Christian sense before anything like a Christian sense – before Christianity came along. The love of God for the unloved, who deserve rejection, not acceptance. It’s a word used for the power of God in our lives once we’re in fellowship with God. “By the grace of God,” says Paul, “I am what I am and his grace towards me was not in vain for I labored,” he’s talking about his evangelistic ministry, “I’ve labored more abundantly than them all. Yet not I,” he says, “but God that goes with.” Grace is the love that doesn’t change. Grace is the love that never weakens. Grace is the love that will see me through every day of my life. Grace is, it’s always connected with direct fellowship that I as a Christian have, that every Chrsitian has with the Father and the Son and Grace is the promise of the continuance of that fellowship when the time comes and I’m 88 too, it can’t be very long before it comes, when the time comes for me to leave this world. Grace in that sense is eternal, and I should be in the love of God, loved by the Father, the Son and the Spirit for all eternity. And without saying anything negative about life in this world which is fascinating in so many ways, I can honestly say I look forward to that.
CM: I’m a few years behind you but I do too and I pray our listeners do as well. Let’s get to the Gospel. What is the good news? And what has God done through Christ and how has it made God known to us? Good news?
JP: The Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the world. “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son that whoever believes in him should have eternal life.” That’s the very essence of the Gospel. God loves, that’s God the Father. God sends, this is Jesus Christ the same. God sends Jesus to the cross where he becomes the substitute for us, bearing the penalty for our sins. That’s the old and true way of understanding the cross. There are other aspects of it but this is the fundamental one. God raised his son from the dead so that he might become the Living Savior of all those who trust him, that’s faith, and accept him and serve him as their Lord and so live the new life under Christ, in Christ, through Christ, for Christ, all their days. Will that do for starters?
CM: Yes, I do.
JP: I’m not trying to be flip there.
Cm: No, no you’re not–
JP: because the Gospel is the wonderful, wonderful truth of redemption and one can spend a long, long time delving into its riches and laying them out.
CM: Yes, yes. You define, in your book Christians as people who have God for their Father and this is the greatest of all privileges I would think, isn’t it?
JP: Yes it is. And I think that we need to make more of this than we do and in this way we need constantly to be hammering away at the contrast between God – a perfect Father – and the very poor quality fathers that lots of folk in this world have endured
Cm: Right
JP: is the word we want there, the contrast is the thing to stress. Either you didn’t have a father at all or you didn’t have a father who was worth having, God is not a Father like that! God’s fatherhood means care. God’s fatherhood means love. God’s fatherhood means patience. God’s fatherhood means teaching. God’s fatherhood means rewarding. God’s fatherhood means that he enjoys you and he wants you to enjoy him. Again, that’s the formula.
CM: Yes
JP: And one could go on. I would like to go on for quite some time elaborating that.
CM: Dr. J.I. Packer here on a Haven Today that we’re calling “Knowing God…As the God of Grace”. I’m Charles Morris. If we want to know God he will pour himself out to us. He wants us to know him in a deeply personal way. You can’t read the Bible very long and not know that. And there’s only one way to know him like that, through his Son Jesus. God has brought us into an intimate and personal relationship with himself through his Son. He’s allowed us to know him as our Father and he’s made it possible for us to experience that relationship by giving us the Holy Spirit and we are brought into fellowship with the Living God. It’s something he’s promised to do and he’s a promise keeping God. He promised to do it long ago as part of his unfolding plan of redemption. Here’s when the promise came. When Israel had reached the end of God’s patience and was about to be sent into exile in Babylon, at that very dark moment in history God made a promise. He promised a new covenant. He knew the problem was distant. His people didn’t know him personally. They just heard about him through the prophets, kind of like getting the news out of a newspaper or over the internet. They might have known a lot of facts about him but they weren’t impacted by the reality of his being. The problem was the covenant. It wasn’t enough. It wasn’t adequate. It left too much up to the people so God promised a new covenant where he would change his people so that they would all know him personally. Jeremiah 31:33 and 34:
“This is the covenant I will make with the house of Israel
after that time,” declares the LORD.
“I will put my law in their minds
and write it on their hearts.
I will be their God,
and they will be my people.
No longer will a man teach his neighbor,
or a man his brother saying, ‘Know the LORD,’
because they will all know me,
from the least of them to the greatest,”
declares the LORD.
“For I will forgive their wickedness
and will remember their sins no more.”
That’s something you ought to underline in your Bible too like I have in mine. Jeremiah 31:33 and 34. Don’t let this be something that you just think of as theology. This is awesome truth. It’s teaching to drill deep down in you. You and I and all who’ve put their faith in the Lord Jesus have been included in this new covenant. God doesn’t just give us his laws, he writes them on our minds and hearts through his Spirit. Don’t think you’re excluded because you may not be Jewish, that you’re perhaps a Gentile. God has opened up the doors to all the nations. The scriptures are clear on that. God is doing this work in the hearts of all those who believe in Jesus. He’s making us alive through his Spirit. He’s bringing us close, he’s opening our eyes. How do I know that? Well, it’s there in the Bible, 2 Corinthians 3:6-13. The Apostle Paul, he was Jewish, wrote and said under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit:
He has made us competent as ministers of a new covenant—not of the letter but of the Spirit; for the letter (of the law)kills, but the Spirit gives life.
Now if the ministry that brought death, which was engraved in letters on stone, came with glory, so that the Israelites could not look steadily at the face of Moses because of its glory, fading though it was, will not the ministry of the Spirit be even more glorious? If the ministry that condemns us is glorious, how much more glorious is the ministry that brings righteousness! For what was glorious has no glory now in comparison with the surpassing glory. And if what was fading away came with glory, how much greater is the glory of that which lasts!
Therefore, since we have such a hope, we are very bold. We are not like Moses, who would put a veil over his face to keep the Israelites from gazing at it while the radiance was fading away. But their minds were made dull, for to this day the same veil remains when the old covenant is read. It has not been removed, because only in Christ is it taken away. Even to this day when Moses is read, a veil covers their hearts. But whenever anyone turns to the Lord, the veil is taken away. Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And we, who with unveiled faces all reflect the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his likeness with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit.
That’s a “capitol S” Spirit meaning Holy Spirit. Now this is good news! It’s the Word of the Lord and this is grace. God has made a new covenant and through faith in Jesus Christ we are included. We receive all its benefits. He writes his law on our hearts. He changes us as we gaze at Jesus. God promised in his new covenant that “They will all know me, from the least of them to the greatest for I will forgive their wickedness and will remember their sins no more.” There is no greater truth about God than this: that he has taken our sins away. It’s the most focused truth we can know about our God. He’s loved us so much that he’s taken away our sins by sending his Son to the cross in our place. He’s done it so we can know him, each one of us. Not so that someone can say to us, “This is what the Lord is like.” The Lord himself is saying to each of us personally, “This is what I am like. I am a giver of grace. This is how I’ve loved you. I’ve removed your sins. I’ve sent my son. I will make you know me and I will keep on doing that throughout your life.” We belong to him and just as important, he belongs to us.

Song: I Belong
Performed by: Catherine Scott

That is the title song from Catherine Scott’s album and it is called “I Belong”. Beautiful song, isn’t it? Here on a Haven Today. Well, one more thing about the great story that’s all about Jesus. I asked Dr. J.I. Packer last week how he has grown in the grace and knowledge of the Lord over the years and how do we grow in grace and what changes should we look for in ourselves?
JP: Right at the beginning of my Christian life the Lord Jesus broke in. I know that that’s rather dramatic language but that is what it felt like. There was somebody there. I knew who he was. He was impacting my spirit saying in effect, “Now what are you going to do about it?” And the only possible response was, “Yes Lord. I come to you. I repent. I believe. I will be yours for the rest of my life.” And the sense of personal fellowship with the Lord Jesus has been with me all through my Christian life which is now of course 64 years old. What has broadened, what indeed wasn’t there at the beginning and has had to develop really from scratch is the Christ-centeredness of the New Testament. The Christ-centeredness which is an aspect of it’s God-centeredness. Christ is the one who matters, not me! It isn’t as if I’m at the center and the Lord Jesus is there on the circumference of my life, sort of there to help or to guide or –
CM: A little hard for all of us to learn, yes.
JP: Well, yes because we are naturally self-centered. It is very hard for us to learn I would say and it certainly was very hard for me to learn. And I’m still, I suppose, learning it. I image it to myself by saying, “Oh wait a minute. Jesus isn’t like ‘Jeeves’ in the P.G. Woodhouse stories, always there to get the young master out of trouble–
CM: solve problems, that’s right, yes.
JP: yes. No, no, no! The Lord Jesus is the center. The Father has made him so. The Father is the center if you want to put it that way but the Father wants all honor and glory to go to the Son and the Son is the head of the body and the body, that is the community of believers is the focus of the Son’s concern. He is the head of the body. He is perfecting the body. That’s what’s going on and I am just a tiny bit of the body and I mustn’t think of myself as anything more than that, such gifts as I have, well they are there for the life of the body. Well, I slowly and I hope really, cease to be an individualist. That doesn’t mean that I cease to be an individual in my fellowship with the Lord.
CM: right
JP: There’s a big difference between being an individual and being an individualist. But I say, I had to unlearn my individualism which really amounted to feeling, right at the beginning of my Christian life, well there’s the Lord Jesus and there’s me and there isn’t really anyone else much. And so I became, I hope, more Christ-centered and more worship centered. As the decades have gone by I’ve come to appreciate more and more the power and the glory of worship, simple adoration, simple praise, simple celebration of all that the Lord is. In the ideal marriage time is spent with each saying to the other, “I love you the way you are. I love this and that and the other about you.” And in the fruitful Christian life it’s just the same, after all, they’re both of them love affairs.
CM: Dr. J.I. Packer author of “Knowing God” here on Haven Today, a Haven Today called “Knowing God…As the God of Grace”. Now I mentioned this when we began our time together. I’d like first of all to ask you to get in touch with us and when you do, let us know the station you’re listening to. We have copies of Dr. J.I. Packer’s classic book “Knowing God” and perhaps there’s someone you know in your sphere of influence who could be blessed by a copy of this book. And then in return may I ask for you to bless us here at Haven Today. We’re in the summer, first week of the summer in fact and we need to hear from you. We want to share the Gospel of Jesus Christ with other people, people in your hometown listening to your Christian radio station but also people all over the world like in China where we’re broadcasting to the entire country every night, to so many people, the world’s most populated nation. I want to ask for your help to help us to keep doing that, to keep telling the great story. So, if you’d like here’s how you can get in touch with us. You can get a copy of the book “Knowing God” and pass it on to someone else or just read it for yourself, maybe for the very first time. We’re haventoday.org. Our internet address again is h.a.v.e.n.t.o.d.a.y, haventoday.org. You can make a gift to help us through the summer. Or you can call us and here’s our toll free number in North America, 1-800-654-2836. “Knowing God” from Haven Today. Now we are still inviting you to help us send tents to China. The Chinese government is asking for 3 million tents. You know there are millions of people that are still displaced because of the serious earthquakes that took place. And through a Christian relief agency that the Chinese government is allowing to distribute tents, we have identified a minority group, a mountain tribe in China that is not receiving any help from the government so if you would like to help send part of a tent or buy all of a tent or buy more than one tent, we will send your gift on to China and make sure that it’s sent in the name of Jesus. You can find out more information online there at haventoday.org or by giving us a call at 1-800-65-HAVEN. And once again, we’re not taking out any money for ourselves, we’re passing it straight through. Thank you so much for everyone who has helped. So many people in so many different positions in life have sent us a little bit or a lot but it’s all used by the Lord for his grace, for his honor and for his kingdom.
Well, I’m Charles Morris. Thanks for being with me and Jim Packer. We’ll be back again tomorrow. It’s still “Knowing God” week and we’ll be telling the great story. It’s all about Jesus here on Haven Today.