Grace - Restoring Fellowship

Let me walk us through the questions and listen quite a bit more. We'll see. So I called this lesson this morning, Health, Safe, Called Higher. It's a continuation of the questions that Mike started last week. This morning we're going to look at lesson seven, the documentary series. Okay, so last week, We looked at the fact that grace cannot be repaid. So Mike covered three questions. Why is repayment out of harmony with grace? He said that grace is uncompensed. Excuse me, it's, my definition, I'm reading from his, is grace is by definition un-recompensed. If you try to repay it, you destroy it.

Remember learning that with Mike last week? Yeah. What question is that? We don't have the questions written, I apologize for that. Yeah, you're working from a teacher's list. But that first question 19 that Mike covered, why is repayment out of harmony with grace? So a benefit paid for before, during, or after isn't a gift. So he said that any attempt to repay lowers grace to barter and trade.

And that's how Mike described it. Question 20 was, what would human merit do to grace? And Mike mentioned, it kills it, right? If found the slightest merit in us, he would be obligated to acknowledge it, right? It puts it on the cross. Well, it's paid for on the cross, that's right. So the debt has been satisfied there. Grace is not a debt, it's a gift, right?

Romans 4.4. To him who works, the wages are not counted as grace, but as debt.

And then question 21, then what is the motive for serving? And we got into a conversation around the fact that the motive is love, and love is a person. And our service, the way that we respond to grace is an expression of that love, but it's by grace. We love in a in an equally gracious way that the Lord loves us because it's his love, right?

We serve faithfully, but it's never to repay. That would actually insult the giver. So that was questions 19, 20, and 21. And the common theme running through that, grace cannot be earned, grace cannot be repaid, and grace is received and returned as a gift to others. So this is our question for this morning, and I'll open it up for discussion here.

What are the four vital elements in the restoration of a sinning saint, and why doesn't that system produce carelessness? Do you know what one element is in the restoration of a sinning saint? What are the four vital elements in the restoration of a sinning saint?

You're in the grace system that God has brought you into through the death, burial, and resurrection of his son. You are in union with him. You are in an operating system of grace. When you sin, we're looking at what Schaeffer talks about are the four vital elements in the restoration of a sinner. So you need restoration. You're imperfect. Where do you go in the scripture? Romans 4, 5. Okay, you wanna read it for us?

But to him who does not work but believes on him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is accounted for righteousness. Okay, let's talk about the mindset. Let's move forward here. So the idea here is that When we're talking about grace, and when you find yourself in need of restoration, you think, well, what do I need to do to get right with the Lord? Is grace really free, or do I need to do something to earn it? We said that grace cannot be paid back. But look at this question.

There's really two parts that Schaeffer puts together for us, and I think he does it for a reason. You know, every generation of Christian hears the same pushback. If I told you right now, if I was to tell you as a class, you cannot lose your salvation. Christ has already borne your sins. God deals with your failure on the ground of the cross, not your performance.

Somebody in the room is going to think about, well, that's a little dangerous, don't you think? But that's grace. But grace sounds dangerous. The objection to free grace as it is often referred to as That that entire rejection So it it creates the question of if God always forgives why should I fight the sin? You know that morning that that's the Roman six one What should we say that are we to continue in sin so that grace may increase may it never be? That's exactly it.

So the idea of objecting to why fight it, why pursue holiness, why bother at all if the cross has already paid for it, that's Romans 6.1. But also, isn't it acknowledging your sin and just agreeing with God? Okay, that is one of the vital elements. That's exactly what we're going to get into, the 1 John 1-9 confession. Courtney, you brought up Romans 6-1, and it's written at the bottom of the screen. I don't know if you guys can see it, but you're exactly right.

So, are we to continue in sin so that grace may increase? And then he goes on to say, may it never be. And that combination of words is one of the strongest negations that Paul ever uses in the scripture. So how you would actually say it, if you were to get the emphasis that Paul is getting across here with Grace, is that it's may it never be. Absolutely not. Don't even consider it. It can't even be applied to.

So Paul doesn't soften grace to answer the objection, does he? He doesn't say, well, grace is mostly free, but also a little bit earned, so don't go out there and get crazy. You know, he doubles down on grace. And he spends all of Romans 6, 7, and 8 explaining why the objection doesn't understand how grace works. Why fight sin? God forgave me if I've got an advocate Why do I need to plead for holiness? Why do I need to pursue it? Why would I do that? If the cross is already paid for, why bother? And Paul says thunderously, may it never be. Absolutely not. Don't even consider it. So grace doesn't lower the standard. Grace changes the mechanism.

And that's what we're going to get into in the next slide here. So we've got four different elements that Schaeffer mentions. One of them is on the human side. The other three are on the divine side. So one commonality amongst all of these vital elements is that every one of them is rooted in the cross. Okay, so there's that first one that you mentioned, Mike. Confession. Is that on the human side or the divine side? Both. Human. Yeah, that's the human side.

That's your responsibility, Mike. And we think about that quite often. As I was looking at this, this confession is paired with a knowledge of what God's doing on the divine side. Isn't that 1 John 8, 9, and 10? Yeah. Actually, let's anchor ourselves. And while you're in 1 John, Mike, why don't you read 1 John 1, 9 through 2, 2. So 1, 9 through chapter 2, verse 2. Well, I'll go to 8, because it explains. OK. Lesson on how to handle, Mike.

If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say that we have not sinned, we make Him a liar and His word is not in us. My little children, these things have I wrote to you so that you may not sin. And if anyone sins, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous. And he himself is the propitiation for our sins and not for ours only, but also for the whole world. Okay, let's look at the first one here.

What does confession mean? Agreeing with God. Agreeing with God. What does the rest of the class think? The word is homologeo, so homo means the same, and logeo meaning to say, so same to say, saying the same thing. Right? So confession means saying the same thing about your sin that God says about it. That's 1 John 1, 9. Right? If we confess our sins, He is faithful and righteous. So if we do something, then He does something. And that Word, the thing that you're doing is you're agreeing with God, like Mike put it. Or more literally, saying the same thing.

How does that work in your mind? Right? Well, it's not rationalizing. That's one of the things that we do when we find ourselves, well, you know, it's not as bad as what it could have been. No, that's not saying the same thing. It's not comparing. Well, it's not as bad as that guy. Right? So it's not comparing. It's not rationalize.

It's saying to the Father, you're right. That was sin, and I agree with you. That's the human side. Well, what comes as a result of that in 1 John 1, 9? Forgiveness and cleansing. Whose side is that on? Right? That's the divine side. And it's not partial, and it's not conditional on how sorry you seem. This is God's side. It's agreeing with God about a point of origin. It's agreeing with God about how he views your sin. This isn't a moment of confession. Yeah, but that's a finished work. So we gotta go by which man, Adam or Christ, and where your point of origin is.

Okay, so the question is how are we viewing this as a positional or a conditional reality? So, when you confess, is that positional or conditional? Conditional. It's conditional. And what are the results? Are they positional or conditional? Positional. Forgiveness and cleansing. Does your positional person need forgiveness and cleansing? It's conditional, I think.

Where, you know, God is now, you know, He's just kind of reminding you of who you are in Christ. And it's bringing you back to the fact that your life is hid with Him. I always think of 1 John 1, 9 as, I'm confessing, I'm not acting as who you say I am, God. And so, you know, now that that's he's now reminding us of our position by, you know, forgiving us or what it says, just reminding us that he's already paid for all those sins. And I think it's to me, it's it seems more conditional than positional, maybe position of God, but it's conditional in our lives. You always got to go by your position.

Well, read the language. So we're talking about forgiveness and cleansing. The language is, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. I think the word here that we need to come back to is that he is faithful. It means that God's keeping his word here.

And let's look at the word just. Just means he would actually be unjust not to forgive, because who's already paid? Yeah, that thought kind of struck me. He's faithful and just. Faithful, okay, God keeps his word. Just means he would be unjust to not forgive, so he does forgive because of the basis of the payment.

It's already been done. That's right. Go ahead, Mike. That's why he's blessed us with all spiritual blessings in heavenly places. That's right. And the other thing that he's done is, element three that Schaeffer mentions here, is advocate. He says, read with me again there in 1 John 1, 9, if anyone sins, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous. So, Hola, when you sin, do you just go to God and say, I don't have to worry about it because it's already taken care of? No, that's foolishness.

Explain what you mean. He's already paid the price. I know that, but what about you? Because he paid, I don't have to. OK, but what do you have to do? You have to confess. And what does that mean? That's sins. So if I've got 11 sins to confess and I forget one, I get favor for the 10 and the 11th one I'm still stuck with? No. No, because he's paid for all sins. What I'm trying to get my point across is that confession is a really important aspect of that verse, and it means you go before God about your sins. He doesn't expect you to give him a litany, but the point is that As I go, I begin to, I already understand, but as I go, the fog lifts and I realize for the millionth time that all of these sins have been paid for by the cross of Christ and my confessing them just gets in line with what God's view of the cross and my personal sins are.

In other words, When he came down from the cross, he didn't leave a couple of them up there. That's the problem I have with the Catholics. They think that he got most of them, but he left some for them to finish up and fix for the rest of their lives.

Yeah, so then why confess as a Catholic? I'm sorry? Yeah, then why confess as a Catholic? Well, why confess if you have kind of a fair attitude about God's grace? This is serious stuff. Yeah. Because if you have been sinning, you're cut off from walking in fellowship with the Lord Jesus. But the Spirit always leads to Christ. Say that again? The Spirit always leads to Christ. What if you don't want to go? Well, then you're stuck on a cross. Go ahead, Courtney. No, you're out of fellowship. You're hung on the cross again. It's fellowship.

And again, what I've always interpreted this one is, I'm agreeing with God, I'm not acting as who I am in Christ and who God tells me I am in Christ. That's the confession. The confession is agreement, as you pointed out. It's agreeing with God that I'm not acting as who I am in Christ.

But that's so he can bless us. It's for us to restore fellowship. He's always there. It's we're turning our back on Him in sin and not acting who we are. It's our responsibility to restore the fellowship. He's always there. It's not His act, it's us. The fact that you have the opportunity to confess is blessing in itself. It is. That's grace. Amen. Yeah. Well, let's look at these four.

I want to put this one together because I think that where we're going is we're talking about we're in a moment of sin, and that sin has produced a fellowship problem. And God says, you know, much like a father and a son, if a son sins against his father, he doesn't cease to be the son of his father, he ceases to have fellowship with them. And the father is always open and willing, and that's how the Lord allows us to gain fellowship with him and he desires it and he draws us to that. So what the Spirit is doing is drawing you to Christ. Yes, Mike. However, when you're in sin, the Holy Spirit is drawing you to a point of confession.

What does that do? Why confession? I know that there's a lot of a lot of, you know, misunderstanding about what that is. But for the Scripture, it just means saying the same thing. Lord, I'm agreeing. I'm going the wrong direction. You're right. This is not right. And to Courtney's point, this is not, I'm not operating in who you created me to be in Christ.

Element two comes in, that happens. You say the same thing. And the Lord says, I'm faithful and just, and I can do this in both capacities of my character, to forgive you of sins and to cleanse you from all unrighteousness. So God's faithful, He's just, and He's just because of Christ's payment already having been made.

But here's element three, and maybe some of you haven't ever thought of this one before, the advocate side of it. He says, if anyone sins, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ, the righteous. So your lawyer is pleading for you while you're sinning. It's not after, it's during.

Have you ever thought of that? Romans 3. 25, whom God set forth as a propitiation by his blood through faith to demonstrate his righteousness, because in his forbearance, God had passed over the sins that were previously committed. We're going to get to that one here in just a second, but step back with me to the advocate. Why is it important?

Why did this truth need to be included in the same breath as confession, forgiveness, and cleansing? Having a representative plead on your behalf, that's what the advocacy means. And maybe you in the class, what does advocate mean to you in this situation? And I don't mean, what does it mean? An advocate makes the case for you.

That's, thank you. Okay. And do you think about the Lord Jesus making the case for you during your sinning? Have you ever thought of that? That's the best time to confess. That's an interesting point, JD. I don't know if that's in the midst of it or when I come to it. I've always thought of advocate meaning, okay, when I confess, he's going to then go present the case for me.

But that changes the perspective on how we don't take sin for granted in a free grace environment. I have an advocate literally going before the father saying this is not who he is. And then at a point of conviction through the ministry of the Holy Spirit in my life, usually through the word of God or being reminded of the word of God, I find myself in agreement again with God. It teaches us the agreement not to sin, or to sin but not to sin. Well, think about it. The moment you sin, Christ doesn't step back. He steps forward. He's the righteous one, and so he pleads from his righteousness, not from any improvement in you. He's pleading based on his righteousness.

Because that's what satisfied the justice of God. And that's the context of this verse here. And then finally we get to the fact that He Himself is the propitiation for us. And so it goes back to the Lord Jesus again, and it reminds us that He is the propitiation for us. Now you mentioned that word, but it's a big word. It just means God's satisfaction of His justice. His justice has been satisfied. What's the ground of that satisfaction? Where does it get satisfied? At His justice. At the cross. At the cross. That's right. It's not God's mood. It's not your performance. It's the cross.

It's interesting when you're putting it together like this. It's interesting thinking about that. He's the advocate, and then the last is that propitiation gives Him the status to be an advocate. The judicial status. Yeah. That's interesting to put it that, you know, in this kind of sequence, but he's the advocate and he's saying the basis for me to be able to, you know, be an advocate for the center is I paid the price. People forgot. People forget that he's not only, uh, uh, priest profit, but, um, Advocate. Advocate, yeah. Yeah, they skip that.

They do, and I find myself needing this reminder this morning about his active role throughout my conditional experience on this earth with sin. And this is a, while we're trying to get the mechanics down, I think it's very important because if you don't have these mechanics, I'm not saying the mechanics of the Christian life, but what's going on in this courtroom when sin is noticed or made known to the believer, what's going on?

Well, this is comforting because if it was just God's mood, Or if it was your performance, well, then you wouldn't have a just God and you would have a law-based system. So this is a grace perspective on what's going on with a believer under grace who finds themself in sin.

So that first, saying the same thing, we're agreeing, we're changing our mind about ourselves based on the truths that the Lord has told us that we are in Christ, who we are in Christ. I'm behaving differently than who I am in Christ. I'm sinning. Forgiveness. God's faithful, He keeps His word, He's just, right? So we've got confession, forgiveness, then we get to the advocacy side of it.

He's not stepping back, He's stepping forward based on His righteousness, and it's judicial, because He's the one that paid the price. And the judge says, I'm satisfied. It's paid in full for this believer. It's paid in full for Mike. It's paid in full for Gary. Because I did it. And he's advocating for you in that way.

And so on the human side, you've got confession. On the divine side, you've got forgiveness, advocacy, and propitiation. And it's based on the groundwork of the cross. So, you think about this, and maybe just reel back to your last week or month or whatever. Was there a moment that you sinned? Okay. Raise your hand. I'm just kidding. The point is, you have a moment where this verse and these vital elements, as Schaeffer calls them, come into play for you.

In order for fellowship to be restored, you don't have to understand every aspect of this, but confession is necessary. Saying the same thing as God about your sin, that restores fellowship. We know that. But was there a time during a moment where you maybe got caught up in something that was not your character in Christ, that you understood the advocate was pleading while you were sinning?

Yeah, that's a great point. I hadn't thought about that. You know, I keep thinking, you know, we may have sinned and we're not going to confess for three weeks later. Yeah. At the time of our sin, he's already, he's already advocated. We're just catching up with what he's already done. Yes. I hadn't thought about that. I always think he's got a racked list of all the things I've done. Now when I come to him, he'll pull that one down and, yeah, you're right. We'll take care of that.

No, he's advocating. It's a great point. He's advocating at the time. That's interesting. that, you know, a different perspective than I thought. He's already advocating at the time I sinned before the Father. And it's just us delaying and coming and saying, yeah, that was a sin and I agree with you. And he's already done the advocacy. But that's to prevent sin. No, not necessarily. It's before, during, and after. He is perfectly an advocate on your behalf. So I'm not saying no, it's not before, but he's advocating on your behalf, and he is the propitiation for those sins, so he can make that case.

And Courtney, I think it struck me very much the same way that I think it's striking you, and maybe others here thinking about this, but to think about, at the moment you understand that you're walking in sin, to realize that your savior, your representative in heaven is pleading while you're sinning. And then I think, okay, well, how does that reframe the way I approach confession in my mind? You know, to think of it as, oh, it's not just this moment that you're making me You're bringing me back into fellowship. You've been pleading for this all throughout, whatever kind of fit I was throwing in sin, you know? And I think that this is a surprising, it's personal to him. You realize that? Your sin is personal in the sense that, what is his desire to do with you? It's to conform you.

Fellowship. That's right, and that happens in fellowship. So I realize we're at time here, but I think it's good because we're trying to answer the question of, you know, does grace just mean that we can go off and sin and do what we want to do and we just know that God's got it and he's going to take care of it? Well, the whole time you're sinning, there's a process of the Son representing you to the Father based on His righteousness for your fellowship with Him. That's what's happening on your behalf. Is that fair to say? Does that close here? Yes. Yeah, you know, that's a great point on this, JJ. It really does make me rethink things.

It also goes back on the confession side, you know, just agreeing with him. But it goes back to, I think, from our grace class a long time ago, was what's the only response you can do to grace? Thank you. is to say thank you. And I think the same thing is right here in the confession. It's, you know, I'm agreeing with you, God, and the only thing I can say is thank you in grace.

But even at that, that can turn to lawlessness or that can turn legal. Is that legal? Because you can say thank you, but you forgot to Thank Him for another thing, another sin. Well, I think it's the spirit of gratitude, right? So it doesn't need to be broken down into legalism. I guess if you wanted to, you could. You can do that with anything, right? But no, I mean, when Paul recognized this in Romans 7, what was that pivot from wretched man to the very next verse? What was it? Thanks. I thank God. Thank God. Thanks be to God. Thanks be to God. Let's pray.

Father, how we do thank you for the fact that you did save us judicially. At the moment of our trust in you for salvation, you justified us, and you made us a part of the family. You called us children of the family of God, and you placed us within a body that is your bride. Lord, You are at work within each individual believer to reveal Your grace and Your love, and the judicial side of it doesn't change. It's revealed through the fact that You allow us to confess, to say the same thing, and to recognize and to be thankful for the advocacy that You make on our behalf. because your son is perfectly righteous and can make that plea for us. And so we thank you for that, that in the deepest of moments of sin, Lord, that you're pulling us to a place of fellowship with yourself, because that's where we're hidden with Christ in God. And we're so thankful that we can spend time understanding the mechanisms of how to come before you in these moments where our flesh needs to be reckoned as dead. And so I pray that we would reckon on these things this week. And it's in your name we pray. Amen.