Grace - The Divine Operating System

Good morning. We're gonna continue our study on the doctrine of grace. Before we do that, quick recap. We'll get this drawn up. I know that these slides are a little bit experimental. So yes, this is very small, but up at the top, you've got God's love. And this is the circle that Mike talked about last week.

And then you have, moving to the right, you have, I love him back. At the bottom, I obey him. And then he rewards me. And it goes back to God loves me. Mike, you wanna talk about that for a second? and it motivates. I'll get you as a believer to function and respond to God's direction. It starts with His love, you know, and once you know and apprehend the intensity and degree in which He loves you, then because you have the same life, you respond and love Him back. You know, there isn't a question in your mind whether you would submit to whatever heaven will and the word and stuff.

And we do that, and it's not legal. It's gracious. You're responding to the grace. You're responding to something that's already mine, not responding from the viewpoint of, if I did respond, I would gain something. I already have it. And then, you wouldn't think that at the end of the day, that he would reward me for all of this, but he does. Because he started it, he implemented it.

And faith is in the center of it. So we've been talking about grace as an operating system, the reality that we live in. Let's dig into that a little bit more. We'll come back to the circle. We'll talk about what stalls the circle, what the circle is and what the circle is not. But in terms of talking about the doctrine of grace, we're going to go a little bit deeper.

One of the questions on your sheet says, how many people would come up with a grace system? And I would ask that question for salvation or for sanctification. So, let's start with a question. If you had to design a system to make people stop sinning, what would it look like? It would look legal. You think so? The only way to get people in line is to knock them in the head, right? Knock them in the head?

Would it have anything to do with do nothing and trust someone else to do it? Would that ever make your list? What other systems would you come up with? Again, your job, you and your team, whoever you want, choose the best team you can. Your job is to come up with a system that makes people stop sinning. What are some other ones? Yeah, we got the knock them in the head team. So what else would you do? Think about it. What do you do? I've got such a good example, so they think that that's a good idea too. Okay. And if they don't knock them in the head. Well, I think the first thing you have to do is decide What exactly do I want them to do?

Stop sinning. What do you do? Stop sinning. Okay. So that's rule number one, stop sinning. Yes. So then from there I go to rule number two, which is... What happens if you do it? Yeah. Or I start to delineate all the ways that you can sin. Get around it. And I don't allow it. Yeah, so you do the workaround thing.

If your system, whatever you're coming up with, isn't good enough, then, you know, it doesn't accomplish the complete capability to not sin. Nobody said grace. Nobody said a grace system. That's funny, right? Turns out we wouldn't come up with that. Every other answer that we just talked about even runs on the same engine. Let's look at what that engine is.

Our anchor scripture for today, this morning, 1 Corinthians 1.21, for since in the wisdom of God, the world through its wisdom did not come to know God. God was well pleased through the foolishness of the message preached to save those who believe. The world through its wisdom did not come to know God. Every system man has ever built, the world's best thinking could not arrive at God. Grace had to be revealed. Did Mike mention that last week? A number of times probably you've said that. Schaeffer calls it, calls grace itself a revelation.

We're gonna come back to the idea this morning, but Let's survey the idea of what human wisdom actually produced. So every system man has ever built, think about it, every system human beings have created to deal with the wrongdoing, you got law codes, courts, and Mike's favorite, punishment. You got reward systems, right? You've got moral scorecards. Let that one soak in for a moment. These are all human systems created to deal with wrongdoing. Moral scorecards. Rehabilitation. Therapy. Self-help. Nobody mentioned karma.

What about accountability structures? Every one of them runs on the exact same kinds of engine. The exact same kind of engine. Right? You perform and the outcome changes based on your performance. I'm not criticizing the fact that those systems are present in our lives. The question is, do law codes have their place? Yes, they do. And courts serve a purpose. a real purpose in the world, but the point is that they reveal the only thing the human mind can generate is performance-based outcomes. Every single one of the systems outside of what we're learning about with grace and the doctrine of grace has you performing and getting an outcome based on your performance.

Think about it, that's what the sin nature is wired to do. Sin nature is wired for I, me, mine. I call him the me monster. Because every attitude that he has is selfish towards himself. And every system feeds the me monster. Give me something to do, right? Every solution that man attempts to put in place in order to stop man from sinning puts I, me, you, right at the center of it. What do I gotta do? You could say like the idea of law, right? Performing is like the water that we swim in and performance is the air that we breathe. Just tell me where to go. I'll swim from here to there. And as I get there, I'll just know that my performance is dead center on exactly what I was set out to do. And they'll say, good job when I get over there.

Romans 3.20 says it, by the works of the law, no flesh. No flesh. will be justified in his sight. For through the law comes the knowledge of sin. Does everybody jive in with the man's attempt towards building a system for stopping wrongdoing?

That it's centered around I. So grace has to do something differently. If it doesn't fit in that category, it does something no human system would ever do. Grace removes the I. You think about grace in your life. This might be one of the things that comes to mind. Grace says the outcome is already settled. It was settled by someone else, which means something personal to you. Your performance didn't factor in. What does a mean monster do with that? your sin nature. What does it do with that? Okay, let me paint the picture for you.

You're grumpy. Monday started bad. You got a heart that's not set on the Lord. You're a believer, but you're not walking. What does grace do to the man that is self-centered? It removes the I. Think about it. No court operates this way. No employer, no school, no family. The guilty party does nothing and the innocent party does everything. Who's the guilty party? You are.

The one who failed receives the reward meant for the one who succeeded. I mean, that concept of what Christ did, not only for our salvation, but for our life as a believer, that offends the flesh. Well, maybe it's offending you right now, because grace is offensive. Why is grace so offensive to people? Because it takes them out of it. And that's why it has to be revealed because the sin nature will not comprehend it and cannot come up with it. Grace offends every instinct the flesh has because the flesh needs to contribute in order to feel secure.

Let that settle. When you get caught up in performance, and I'm gonna give you an example of one here in a minute. When you get caught up in performing to please God, you're doing it to make yourself feel secure. And that drives us in nature because it puts me back in the driver's seat. Now I can perform. Now I can do something. When somebody looks at me and says that, he did that. Marie, you know, she did those things. Schaeffer calls grace itself a revelation. Why do you think he said that? Itself a revelation, because it's so foreign, right?

A human heart left to itself will never comprehend this. Grace is incomprehensible. except on the ground of having been born again and being taught what this is. How do you come to salvation? By... Yeah, the guilty party doesn't get what they deserve, and the innocent does. It's your punishment. takes it upon himself. It's a complete reversal of how all of our systems work. The human heart, it left to itself, will never comprehend it. It has to be revealed. We have to be taught, and where do we learn that?

The Word. The Word. And the Spirit, the Holy Spirit. What does the Holy Spirit do? He, by indwelling us, He gives us the capacity He does. Big theological term, I guess, illumination, right? He illuminates, he makes known the scriptures to us, and then he brings them to mind in the day-to-day lessons of our life by convincing and convicting us of the truth about ourselves.

Well, you operate in a reality of grace. So we've learned that it doesn't run on the same, it doesn't run like the same engine that every other human system does. And that's why Mike talked about, you've got to be taught this. So the flesh doesn't just resist grace, it cannot conceive of it. Remove I from the equation, the flesh has nothing to do. And that's terrifying to the natural mind.

Ephesians 2.8.9, for by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of what? Not of yourselves. Just took the I right out of it. It is the gift of God, not as a result of works, so that no one may boast.

Schaeffer gets a little bit more specific in Ephesians. So open up your Bible and look at Ephesians chapter two, and we're gonna read together. There's three words here, chapter two, verses three through four. There's three words in this series of verses that Schaeffer calls out. And a lot of people use these three words interchangeably. And I want to challenge us to the fact that we shouldn't use them interchangeably. They mean different things. Can someone read Ephesians 2, 3 through 4? I'm sorry, 2, 4 through 5. I misspoke. 2, 4 through 5.

But God, being rich in mercy because of his great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our transgressions, made us alive together with Christ. By grace you have been saved. Okay, so do you see the three words? I've got them up on the screen so it's not a mystery to you. But a lot of folks will use these words, God's mercy, God's love, God's grace, and they'll use them interchangeably. And certainly that's understandable, especially when you're just learning about the character of God, right? But they mean something specific. So let's walk through them. First of all, mercy. Mercy is the compassion in God that moved him to provide a savior.

Here's the thing though, if mercy alone could save, would the cross be necessary? It wouldn't. If God only saved by mercy, He could have just pardoned everyone from His sovereign mercy. You're all pardoned. He didn't, and the reason He didn't is because of another characteristic that He has, and it's called His holiness. or His righteousness. Okay?

So, certainly God is merciful, but He's also loving. So, love is the infinite motivating purpose behind everything God does in salvation. But love alone couldn't save either. God's righteous demands against the sinner had to be satisfied first. I can love you when you come to me as I've asked you to come to me. And in this case, we're talking about salvation. You need a sufficient substitute. What is the consequence of sin? Death. A death had to be paid, and it had to be paid in order to satisfy righteousness.

So love alone is not enough. but you put mercy and you put love together, you start to build that characteristic of God, these characteristics of God. And thirdly, you've got grace. Grace is what God is free to do and what he does for the lost after Christ's death satisfied those righteous demands. You could say grace is love released, right? And it's love unobstructed by holiness. When the cross satisfied God's justice, His love was set free to do everything it always wanted to do. Now, we're talking in human terms, right?

God is sovereign. Obviously, He's omniscient. He knows all things. He's omnipotent. He's omnipresent. But grace is love released. Now he's free because the penalty has been paid. He's free to exercise his love by virtue of the operating system of grace. That's how he implements the system. When the cross satisfied God's justice, his love was set free to do everything it always wanted to do. And what did he want to do? What did he want to do? Yeah, I didn't put it on the screen. This is gonna maybe alarm you. What did God wanna do?

Because you have had a sufficient substitute in Christ, his death, burial, and resurrection, if you believe that he paid those personal sins of yours on that cross for you, what does the Bible say for you? If you trust that the Lord did that on your behalf, He says that He saves you. He gives you a new life, and that's what the physical baptism represents, right? Being put to death, buried with Him, and raised again to new life. What we see visually there is what spiritually happened, the moment you believed.

But what is God doing ultimately? Not only saving you, but conforming you to His image. God's love freed him to do anything according to his holiness so that the both could work in conjunction with one another, in synthesis with one another, right? And what he wanted to do is save you in order to conform you to the image of his Son. That's what it freed him to do, and that's what he's doing.

No human being would design this, not the mercy part, not the love part, and certainly not the grace part, where the guilty party receives everything and contributes nothing. And most believers believe this when it comes to salvation, but here's where it kind of gets a little uncomfortable. Most believers will nod along with grace for salvation. They're like, yeah. Salvation. Grace. They'll agree. I couldn't earn it. I couldn't earn my salvation. It was a gift. Fine. Yeah. I agree. Yeah. You know, I'm running around in my head.

Why did God do what He did? Why did God do what He did? In other words, why did He create? And I think He created because He wanted to share who He was with the creatures He created. So it created man in his image and likeness for the sole purpose that he could love them, and they would love him back.

And that's where he started. But in order to be like him, they had to be like him in the sense that they had to have a will. And a will means you choose. and so your will would... God chose to love you and at some point in the equation he puts a test on man so that man would demonstrate that he did love him back but he failed the test and so I became I, so to speak and so now his purpose hasn't changed even though His whole creation fell.

He's still doing the same thing. And the only kind of companion in His creation that He can have is in His Son. How does He make you His companion? How does He show you His love for you? His grace? His mercy? He does it by offering you His Son for the payment of your sin. That's the penalty. You still got the power and the presence of sin. What do you do for that? Well, He's conforming you to His image to work on those very things alongside with you, in you. He's conforming you. He's active. You're His workmanship. You're the poem that He is writing. And that poem is to the tune of Jesus Christ. You understand that?

How that works? Yeah, and I think what he did with us and the Lord Jesus Christ is way, way above what he did with Adam. Because Adam wasn't in Christ, didn't share the resurrected life of Christ, so the level on which a believer today has a capacity for intimacy with God is on his level. That's the only way that you can have fellowship with him. Yeah. And he does everything. When I start to think about this, you know, Salvation by grace is more acceptable in Christianity by and large. Still not as much as needed, right?

But when it comes to spiritual growth, we start to throw the system back in there. And we know what Monday mornings look like. You know, we get our mind, a lot of us as believers, we've been through this pattern before, where we come to church and we get, you know, get the feeding that we need. And then Monday morning, the slog hits you. And you switch operating systems. You literally unplug mentally. And when you unplug, you don't even have to plug in. It's just the unplugging enough leaves you to the default state. The natural man.

Right? You come up with your own operating system for life and daily living. And you think, oh, I don't do that. I mean, self-effort, rule-keeping, trying harder. Hey, how about feeling guilty? I'll add that to my list today. I feel really bad about that now. And then promising God you're gonna do better. Now, we're not talking about complete law-based systems here. We're talking about personal-based systems here. Do you have one of those? Have you ever had one of those? The contrast here, the flesh says, give me a task list, let me earn it. I need to try harder, do more, feel guilty enough and promise to do better. I want the job. Give me a job. Sin nature wants a job to do, just give it to him.

Grace says, I don't need your help. I need you out of the way. It calls for me no more than confidence and the only one who can save. Can you guys think back to a time after you were saved by grace that you fell back into performance? I have to reel back a little bit. Nobody's gonna admit that. Okay, well think about it. I'm gonna admit one of mine.

And the idea is how I started treating the daily walk like a different system than the one that saved me. So one of the things that I got caught up with as a young man, I didn't even know that it was happening, was Dealing with temptation, I came up with a method. I thought it was really clever. And so what I would do is, I knew that I had temptations in my life, and you have those too, and you can think back to when those certain things that the Lord allowed in your life as a believer to rattle you up, and what you did in order to stop it. That's what you kind of start thinking of. So what I did is these temptations were boom, boom, boom, and I really felt like I was being attacked.

So what I did is I took an index card, the smaller version of this one, and I started writing verses out. And I stuck them in my wallet back when people had real wallets. And then what I would do is I would walk through the day with my wallet in my pocket, knowing that at any point in time where I was tempted, I had ammunition. So I'd take that index card, and then in the name of Jesus, I'd slap it down on that temptation, and I would walk away.

Ever been there? Something similar? Well, here's the next part of the system. I did it once, and I was like, yeah, this is working. This thing worked. Then I did it a second time, and I was like, two, three. You see where this is going? Right? The flesh isn't improved, it's exchanged.

Not I, but Christ. Schaeffer writes that grace must function apart from all human work or cooperation. Man is that offensive to the sin nature. Grace must function apart from all human works or cooperation. It calls for no more than confidence in the only one who can save you, Titus 2, 11 through 12.

So here's one of the cool things. And somebody mentioned about being compelled last week. Anyway, grace doesn't just save, it instructs. It doesn't just save you, it instructs you. Titles 2, 11, and 12, for the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation to all men, instructing us to deny ungodliness and worldly desires and to live sensibly, righteously, and godly in this present age. Grace isn't passive. It's the most powerful operating system in existence. You believe that? but it doesn't run on your fuel. Doesn't run on your fuel.

So if grace handles both salvation and sanctification, the process of being conformed to Christ's image, what's the end game for us? What's grace actually driving us toward? The destiny of every believer is conformity to the image of Christ. You want to know your destiny? You don't need a tarot card. I can tell you right now. If you're a believer, then your destiny is to be conformed to the image of Christ so that you can have eternal fellowship with Him. Not only now, but for eternity. But also for now. Right? So go ahead, Mike. I was thinking about that the other day. And I got, you know, conformed to the image of Christ. Okay, now what?

And so what it comes down to, I think, is God does everything to glorify himself. And so that's what he's doing, really, as he conforms me to the image of Christ. What does Christ do? He's always glorifying the Father. That's all he does. And so I get to get in on that, so to speak. And so the one thing that God wants, and it's not self-centered, His glory is not self-centered, it's loving. And I was thinking about it from a stream of love back and forth between God and every one of His every one of his creatures, especially the members of the body of Christ, that they would function like the Lord Jesus functioned when he was here. He never did anything other than to glorify the Father. I mean, never. And, you know, I can't say that about the last 15 minutes.

So the conformity gets the believer moving in that direction so that Little by little by little you begin to glorify God just for who He is. We're going to talk about how that works even more so next week. What we're doing here in the Doctrine of Grace is explaining We're explaining the operating system of this vehicle, and what fuels it, and what makes it go round, to use the circle of grace that Mike has introduced us to. And so, how does this thing work? And one of the things is, it runs based on God's mercy, and the combination of His love, and His grace. And every believer is being conformed to the image of Christ, just like we started talking about there and like Mike just mentioned.

But that means that the means of getting there is not your effort. You don't try to get to be conformed to the image of Christ. You don't get to pull up the bootstraps and get through it and get conformed to the image of Christ. It's not your effort.

It's grace operating through, what's in the middle of the circle? Faith. It's grace by faith. Fueled by the love of God. Grace is fueled by the love of God. Well, I want to do something to fuel that system. He says, no, my love is sufficient. It works just fine the way it is. Schaeffer makes a statement that should really cause him to think a little bit. He says, the greatest thing God can do, reverently speaking, is to make someone like his son.

Such then is the destiny of everyone who believes. Do you believe that? If you ever wonder what God's up to, surely you can back that down, but if you back it all the way up, this is what He's up to. And everything in between has everything to do with that destiny. And that's your destiny. If you're a believer, your destiny is to be conformed into the image of Christ, to the image of Christ. Miles Stanford adds to it, he says, God does not expect them as a result of their own endeavors to be like the Lord Jesus. He's talking about you. God doesn't expect you in your own efforts to be like Jesus. Okay, what would Jesus do?

You can know the answer to that question, but can you do it? No. You need a new life. in order to accomplish that. You need a companion, a spirit, to walk alongside you and teach you day by day those lessons that you're feeding on from the Word of God. You can't come to it on your own.

Grace is revealed. So Stanford talks about that our own endeavors cannot contribute to being like the Lord Jesus, right? He expects them to realize the utter impossibility of such a thing. He expects them to know the Lord Jesus as their very life, disowning any other. So think about what that means for the Grace Circle.

The destination of the circle isn't behavior modification. What is it? The purpose of the grace circle is not behavior modification. What is it? Conformity to Christ. Right? And the fuel's never self-effort. That's not how grace works. It's always faith responding to love. Nobody would invent a system where the goal is the highest conceivable standard and the method is the complete removal of human effort. That's grace. And it's the only system on the table. Romans 8, 29, for those whom he foreknew, he also predestined to become conformed to the image of his son. So let's bring this home. Where does this land for you personally? Let's ask some tough questions. You don't have to answer them out loud, but think about it. Give yourself a chance to think this through.

Where in your daily life are you still running a performance-based operating system? Is it with your family, your friends, So the question is, where in my life am I not doing that? Okay. I mean, you could totally reverse it and say it that way, Mike. Where in your life are you still grading yourself? One, two, three. Man, I'm on a good track. I'm getting somewhere now. Where are you trying to earn something that's already been given to you?

So does the idea of grace, that grace calls for no more than confidence in what he did, make you relieved or uncomfortable? Not about salvation. Surely that's settled. But what about those other areas of spiritual growth that the Lord's working on with you? that your only responsibility is to have confidence in what he said is true. His love fuels it.

Do you really believe that? Or does it make you feel uncomfortable? Have you been treating salvation as grace, but sanctification as your department? I got that part. Certainly glad that I have fire insurance, so to speak. But from here on out, I've got it, right? I mean, isn't that just being a responsible person, doing your job, taking care of business?

What if both are his department and your department is faith? What would that do for your day today? Maybe I could ask you, can you sit with this? The greatest thing God can do is make you like his son. And he doesn't need your help to do it. What do you think about that, Donna? The moment you stop thinking that, you default back to the self. If you take a break from grace, what do you get?

Law. Systems. Our sin nature thrives on it. And when you see yourself in this mindset, recognize it for what it is. It is not God's program for you. It is not His plan for you. His plan for you is not a purpose-driven life, okay? His purpose for you is to conform you to the image of His Son, and it's His purpose.

2 Timothy 2.1 says, be strong in the grace that is in Christ Jesus. Be strong in the grace that is in Christ Jesus. It doesn't say, be strong in your discipline this week. Get after it, guys. Right? It doesn't say, get after it. It's not, be strong in your willpower. What is it in? Be strong in what? Grace. Be strong in grace. That's what Paul's telling Timothy in the midst of him definitely being tempted to probably earn a lot. He had to prove a lot to Paul. Can you imagine this in nature? I got to get this figured out so Paul doesn't get onto me today.

Be strong in grace. So before we close, there's, a comparison to make this really kind of more concrete. We've got one minute, but I just wanted to at least leave you with this, that you've got two operating systems, and we could break it down like this.

The law, self-effort, the grace is Christ's life, completely different. The goal or an acceptance, that's what the same nature wants to do. In a grace system, it's reckoning or believing, considering it so, on acceptance that's already been given. Failure, law wants to provide guilt in your mind. It wants to get you to try harder. Whereas grace brings about an agreeing with God about your sin and a resting in the truth that He has forgiven it and a believing in who you are in Him.

And the fuel, willpower versus faith. And we know those systems, you came up with a bunch of them on your own. Some of them included things that would put you in jail. Destination. We get exhausted in pride under the law, but we get intimacy with Christ because we're being conformed to His image.

The credit, I did it under the law. The credit, He did it under grace. And finally, we didn't come up with this. Every human culture comes up with law but not grace. That is a God alone system. and it satisfies every aspect of his character, every characteristic. All right, well, we're at time. Let's pray. Father, how we thank you for the fact that you've revealed to us something that we would never come up with on our own. You had to reveal it to us. You had to teach it to us. And it wasn't just words on paper.

It was the life of your son. and it was His death, and His burial, and His resurrection. It was your plan to deal with mankind in grace. As we took it upon ourselves to know better than you, you reached out and came to us with the gift of your Son, and grace, you satisfied your holiness. and the substitution of the Lord Jesus. And in the very life that we live today, the works that we think that we need to perform in order to please you are barriers to the understanding of how you're operating through grace. Lord, we need to exchange that life that wants to perform for the one that you've given us. And I just pray that we would be strong in grace. We would trust you. with your program, with your system, fueled by your love. It's your name we pray, amen.