Unfathomable Riches of Christ - Introduction continued

We are continuing on with the introduction to the unfathomable riches of Christ, which began our study last week. Some are surprised that we have two sides of one sheet of paper. I'm trying to, in general, keep it to that, probably except for some supplement from time to time that might be something for you to look at. But what I found is we end up pushing our way through it but never completing it, so it's better to have what you can finish. So we'll take a look here.

Last Sunday, which is the first Sunday we met here, the title, The Unfathomable Riches of Christ, is from Ephesians 3, 1-8, and specifically that line, The Unfathomable Riches of Christ, is from Ephesians 3, 8. One of the things we pointed out here, several authors have assembled, or in some cases provided, edited prior collections of these unfathomable riches of Christ.

These include Schaeffer, Lewis Barry Schaeffer, the founder of Dallas Seminary. So he started one from there, Hampton Keithley, J. Hampton Keithley III, By the way, both Mike and I had contact with him, but he took Schaefer's material and edited it down. Nancy got permission to edit down further from Keithley. And then Bob Thieme has put together one, Arlo Pruchtenbaum, George Zeller.

These are different ones. In general, they've all been very well done. We're going to propose some further enhancements as we go through. Various titles have been applied, and we pointed these out last time, to this collection of teachings. Who You Are in Christ has been one of the titles that has been given to that. The Believer's Spiritual Position and Possessions. We'll talk later about what's the difference between a position and a possession.

It's not that complicated. So it's easy. So don't worry about it. It'll be okay. and God's spiritual accomplishments regarding the believer. So these are different titles that have been put to it. We're using the term the unfathomable riches of Christ from that Ephesians 1-8 passage.

And then finally, Romans 3.24, Ephesians 1.7, and Colossians 1.14, taken together, tell us that we have the redemption and forgiveness of sins in Christ. It's because of the belief of being in Christ that these are true and accomplished spiritual facts. It's by God's doing that we who believe are made to be in Christ. So, that's kind of a quick summary of what we touched on last week. Also, I noticed Pat isn't with us. Is she doing okay? Stan? Is Pat doing okay? Yeah, okay.

Because she also had some good questions last week when we kind of chased some purposeful rabbit trails. So we did that as well. So one of the questions shows up almost in the middle of the page here. How is it that we have the position and possessions of the unfathomable riches of Christ? Have any of us worked really hard to get those unfathomable riches? I see heads shaking. No. Why do you say no? Why not? Because they're yours at the moment you believe. They're yours at the moment you believe, and Christ did all the work.

So one of the questions is, what do you believe? Is the belief in you, or is the belief in who Christ is and what He's done? So that's really the key. There are people these days, and they've been around for a long time, who will put some kind of merit or credit to having faith. That somehow my faith accomplishes something, or my faith has some value, right? But really, if you think about it, true biblical faith puts all of our accomplishment and value in Christ. It's all His doing, right? That's why we sing the song, in Christ alone my hope is found, right? If we could get something from God based on our works, then God would be indebted to us. Yeah. Is that ever going to happen? No. As a matter of fact, is there anything that I can do that's going to put God over a barrel? No. You ever hear about people making a deal with God?

They get some kind of a tight spot? God, if you'll get me through this, or you'll get me out of here, and you'll hear about stories of somebody in a foxhole. So yeah, people will somehow think they've got something they can do that makes God obligated, something they can do that gets God over a barrel. One of them that we often think of is we get a lot of people praying. We get enough people praying, God's got to do something. How about the prayer of a righteous man availeth much? How many?

One. So yeah, we can sometimes get some mistaken ideas about what might obligate God or force God's hand or anything of the sort. Not necessarily the case. So here's 1 Corinthians chapter 1, 30 and 31. So here's one thing. The Corinthian church, who read about in 1 Corinthians, how are they doing? Not so well. They were having a mess, right? And if you have enough time, you can just be astounded at the mess that gets revealed.

So, right off, and right in the middle of the chapter where they're saying, well I'm of this guy, and I'm of that one, and following different people, And look, by God's doing, you're in Christ Jesus. He did it. It's not yours. And it's in Christ. It's not by God's doing, I'm in Louis Barry Schaefer. By God's doing, I'm in anybody else you can think of that's some public figurehead dead or alive. By God's doing, I'm in Christ Jesus. And that's it. Not in Paul. Not in Peter. We go through the book of Acts and there are certainly some great saints, if you will, but by God's doing and in Christ Jesus, not in Barnabas. Yes?

Is God making Christ the wisdom of God to us? Who became for us wisdom from God? Did God do that or are we doing that? That's my question. And what's the answer? I'm asking because it looks like in the text it's God's doing it. Notice, in Christ Jesus, who became? He did the becoming, right? And who made that true? Yes. It was God the Father that made Christ the wisdom of God, isn't it? Yes. And that's one of the things that becomes clear in Ephesians chapter 1, which is the next passage. It is God's accomplishment again and again and again.

Yeah, you're mic is far away from your mouth. Cutting out? Alright. My question is related to what you just got through saying, though. We can't do anything for God, and God makes Christ to us the wisdom of himself. We can't make him, to use MacArthur's words, Lord of our lives. God does that. Yeah, let's look at it. Can I make a deal with God? Can I do anything to force his hand? Can I even make him Lord of my life? I can't do those things.

He is by who he is, and growing in him is something that certainly we have a part in, but ultimately it's God's accomplishment. Okay? Let's talk about that. So your question is, doesn't prayer enter into that? So what do you mean by that? Well, I mean, we have the obligation to pray, to request things from God, and God can honor that, or He can tell us to wait or no, but we have the option to So here's an interesting thing.

Suppose God just said, okay, now that you believe, I've got the transmission locked in, you're in spiritual overdrive, and I've got control of the transmission, I've got control of the accelerator, and you're locked in and I'm doing it all. Is that the way God does things? No. He does not, right? He does not do things.

So in terms of, that's where we make a distinction between our position, which is entirely God's accomplishment, and our moment-by-moment condition, which is a reliance upon our position. And all that is not just hypothetical, as we'll talk about here, but personal to Christ. Personal to Christ. Let's look at Ephesians 1 through 8. Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ, just as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we would be holy and blameless before Him. In love He predestined us to adoption as sons through Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the kind intention of His will, to the praise of the glory of His grace, which He freely bestowed on us in the Beloved.

In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses according to the riches of his grace, and that's very much parallel to Colossians 1.14, which he lavished on us. Now, one thing, is it a rich of his grace or is it riches? Riches.

And what's the difference between the singular and the plural? Yes, more than one. Now, one way to think of riches, what if we were to substitute the word wealth? You know, I looked at a list of the billionaires around the world, some in the United States and some elsewhere, and we would say those people are very wealthy. Now, suppose instead of monetary value, Because we all know they can't take it with them, right? Let's suppose instead of monetary value, we think of wealth in spiritual value. God does not just simply have a wealth of grace, but riches. One way to express that is multiple magnitudes of grace. Multiple magnitudes, awesome magnitudes.

Suppose you were to go to a place like Fort Knox, and I hear various rumors, but they say it has lots of gold in it. And suppose you were to walk into one room and you go, wow, that is a pile of gold. And then they tell you, oh, but that's just one room. You haven't seen the others.

So this is in the spiritual equivalent, this is awesome, multiple magnitudes of grace. So is God going to send you an email and say, you know, I've been pouring out grace here for centuries and centuries and centuries, but you know, come midnight tonight, it's just going to run out. Sorry, we tried our best, we just plum run out of the stuff.

Yeah. One, God's magnitudes of grace, multiple magnitudes, are not limited in such a way. Remember, what's the word? The unfathomable riches of Christ. There is no bottom. There is no, oh, I've reached the end. It cannot be measured. You won't get there. You're not going to get an email that lets you know that Grace just ran out tonight at midnight. God's done and it's been nice, but He's through with Grace because He just doesn't have any more. Yes?

Riches seems to me to speak of different aspects of his grace, whereas wealth just speaks of what he's got. It's kind of one-dimensional, two-dimensional, whereas riches is multi-dimensional. And it doesn't speak of just one sort of rich. Riches is multiple. It's different aspects of it, and it works in different ways. That's kind of what it says to me. Yes. So we have that. Now, who gets blessed here? Blessed be the God and Father. Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. And so where did the blessings come from? It came from the Father, right?

So you've got the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, but the Father is the only one who really gets credit for the whole thing and is involved in it. Is that right? Now, what you find is this introduces it, giving credit to the Father for these things, but Essentially all three persons of the Trinity are involved. As a matter of fact, eight times in the book of Ephesians, you get to go through it in the elective downstairs, eight times the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit are mentioned together. So you have these immense blessings. As a matter of fact, one more thing, I've really only quoted part of the sentence, in Ephesians 1, 3-8, because I've stopped.

In the English, what happens, we break it up into sentences. In the Greek, verse 3-14 is all one sentence. If you were to grade Paul in an English class, they'd say that Paul, that is the worst run-on sentence I've ever seen. As a matter of fact, it is the longest sentence in all of Greek literature, verses 3 through 14.

Is that normal? Pardon? I mean, are long sentences normal in Greek? Not necessarily, but Paul did it. And you know what the second longest sentence is in all of Greek literature? Verse 15 to the end of the chapter. It's the second longest sentence in all of Greek literature. And you can imagine, here's Paul, and he is under house arrest.

But he's saying, blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ. And then he just gets carried away. Zing! Wow! It just goes on. So what you find is verse after verse after verse, and he doesn't put a period in there. until the end of verse 14. Verse after verse after verse after verse, just getting so excited about the unfathomable riches that we have in Christ. And, so then he gets to the end of verse 14, puts a period in there, and then starts verse 15, and then goes on to the end of the chapter, because he just gets so astounded and amazed about the unfathomable riches of Christ.

And what you find is, how did this all happen? God did it. And in the end, the Father is credited here, blessed be the God and Father of the Lord Jesus Christ, but the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit are all three involved in your position in Christ. It takes all of God for all of you. And by all of you, I say that you singular and you plural. It takes all of God for all of you. That's what the message of Scripture is.

And ultimately, if you look at At 1 Corinthians 1.30.31 and Ephesians 1.3-8, what did we do? It doesn't mean that passage really attributed anything to us. Our belief is entirely in what He has done and who He is. And so this is a critical insight because it's important to understand that this is all God's accomplishment. It's all what God has done, and as we looked at last year, the processes, and is doing.

So, God places in Christ Jesus. Ephesians 1-3 tells us that God the Father is credited with blessing us with every spiritual blessing. and the heavenly places in Christ. So where are you blessed with every spiritual blessing? In the heavenlies, in Christ. So it's both locational and personal. So that's pretty amazing.

So as we go through these unfathomable riches in Christ, we'll see that God does everything. All we did was believe and put our trust and confidence. By the way, when we first believed and were saved, did we know all these things? No. And it's only a matter as we, okay, you believe that Christ died for your sins, was buried and rose again, and now you just came through the front door. But like in a grand house, you're just in the entryway. You still have yet to discover what's in all the rooms. Yeah, Roy?

Where is the location in the heavenlies? Okay. Where is in the heavenlies? Does that mean it's not here? I'm sorry, what? Does that imply that it's not here? I don't know. So can somebody give us the latitude and longitude for the heavenlies? That's on a future cell phone? Yeah, future cell phone.

Where's our citizenship? Okay, yeah, here's this place where we've been blessed with every spiritual blessing, as we mentioned previously. We have our heavenly citizenship. It's for Philippians. By the way, Philippians three times, not just once. In Philippians, and we have in Colossians, set your mind on things above, where Christ is. So, where is that?

So one of the things we run into is that it is not another place that you send some kind of a space mission to. If the angels come from heaven to here, is that quite a journey for them? You don't think so? And why would you say it's not? Because they're in the spiritual realm and we're in the material realm. It is in fact difficult for us to say, okay, at this particular geosynchronous location, that's where heaven is.

Yeah, you know, it wasn't, it was not like Gabriel, you know, appeared to Mary and says, man, am I tired. I've been traveling for, you know, 257 years, you know, to try to get this message to you. So that didn't happen, right? So you don't get that impression. You don't get, you know, you didn't arrive in a spaceship. So you didn't hear that. The reality is that it's certainly not in the realm that we deal in, in common, but there are not the spatial limitations and the time limitations that we attribute to this world.

Hebrews 1.14 says I'm not only angels spiritual ministry spirits sent to serve those who are here in salvation. Well if they have to travel long distances to do that it would be kind of inconvenient.

You know, you say, where is heaven? It's not beyond the stars. It's beyond this world. It's beyond the material universe. Right next to us. Heaven is in the spiritual universe. It's not in the material universe. The angels, they go from the spiritual universe to the material universe. It's no distance, per se. It's a change of venue, I guess you could say. So you look at it, Who sent Christ? Christ was sent and then at the end of his earthly ministry, after his resurrection and appearances to the apostles, he ascended.

Did he have to schedule that? Was that on a Southwest ticket? No. It wasn't even beam me up Scotty. He did ascend into the sky. Maybe more of a something for the apostles to relate to. He could have just disappeared. Yeah, and the thing about did he also during that time post-resurrection simply appeared? Yes.

Was he limited by doors and walls? No. Yes, and so you start to think about, we have this physical world that you and I are very familiar with, and he deliberately entered into this physical world, and it wasn't a last minute thought, it was something that God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit all had a part in, right? But when he was resurrected and then ascended, what we see is that the physical realm was no limitation. He didn't travel some long distance to get to some place in outer space. Yeah.

I'm just wondering if we mentioned in crisis being our identity. Are we identified now in the heavens in the same way? I'm just asking. Yeah, so let's look at what it says. He blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ. So the heavenly places are literally the heavenlies, right? And it's not just somewhere way out in the Milky Way. It's not just more of this. Pardon? You can say that it is here. Yeah, and that's something else to ponder.

Time and distance are physical parameters. I know, you know, Claire and I both having taken a bunch of engineering courses, we went through things that have formulas with that. and both spent a career where time and distance were involved with a lot of what we studied. All of a sudden the time and distance thing goes away. There's no formula for in the heavenly places in Christ.

Right? You have to work on that. Yeah. Have you got an app? Right? So, yeah. So what we see is, we see the statement there, but we begin stepping outside of any physical understanding of what this is, and the usual limitations that we have in the physical realm simply do not apply. Think about it, before you believed, oh this is a really fun one, before you believed were you in Christ? Oh boy. I don't think so. Alright, so let's continue to read here in verse 4.

Just as He, who's He? God the Father, right? Chose us in Him, who's Him? Christ. Christ, okay. Before the foundation of the world, so before God said let there be light, He chose who? In Him. And by the way, outside of being in Christ, are we choosable? Would God say, man, that Vern guy is just so fantastic, I'm just going to pick him.

No, outside of being in Christ, I'm not choosable. That's a loaded question. But the bottom line is I did nothing to merit it, not from anything I was born with, not from anything that I developed or did over time. I was not choosable. He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world that we would be holy and blameless before Him. By the way, when are you going to be holy and blameless before Him? And who's Him? Christ. When we believe.

What's amazing, this holy and blameless set of words, it gets used one more time in Ephesians in chapter 5 on marriage. This holy and blameless words right here are Bride of Christ words. And by the way, the Jews, who chose the bride? The father of the groom chose the bride. He chose us in him.

When? Before the foundation of the world. So this is kind of, wow, blink, blink, blink. What exactly is that saying? Is that saying that he chose us before he even created the world? Yes. And he knew exactly who he was going to choose? Yes. And he knew exactly who he wasn't going to choose? Yes. Now, so here we have what is to us a logical paradox.

Here's the Apostle Paul. We're going to see this real quick in Acts. Here's the Apostle Paul, there's the Philippian jailer. The Philippian jailer is in a culture where if prisoners escape and you're responsible, it is more honorable to commit suicide than to have them do it for you. So he's got a sword out, what must I do to be saved? believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and you'll be saved.

Paul did not say, but you know, God has to choose you before the foundation of the world, and I don't know if he did or not. I can't tell you. This would be hardline Calvinism, where they jump to that conclusion. Scripture does not explain the paradox. How did I, as a believer, have an identity before he even said, let there be light. But that's what Scripture teaches. So we have an essential identity. He chose us in him.

He wanted to get this thing all settled before he said, let there be light. Before Adam is going to go and, you know, be made, created as an innocent being, not a perfect being, but an innocent being, and before Adam sinned and fell. He says, I'm going to get this all clear. I want every single believer there at Holly Hills, in all three electives, I want every single believer Choose them in Christ. Realize that none of us is choosable outside of Christ. But He chose us in Him, each of us having an essential identity at that point, before He said, let there be light. He said, all these things are going to be implemented in time.

Before I believed, I did not have the benefits of being in Christ. I was an unbeliever. To describe it before I believed, I was an Adam. But He chose me in Christ before the foundation of the world. I now can count on every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ as a believer in Christ, having been chosen. Because I have been known.

And where did that knowledge of us begin? Before he knew us in Christ, before the world began. And what he created, the praise that we've been talking about in the heavenlies, in the very first verses of the scripture, it says that God created the heavens and the earth. So those things came into existence at a point in time?

Yes. And the heavens, because ultimately the Bible describes three heavens. You hear the term seventh heaven? That's actually not biblical. That's according to Islamic tradition. But it's not biblical. The Bible describes three heavens. One is the atmospheric heaven. The next is the stellar heaven, which extends from the atmosphere on and to the end of the physical universe. And then the third heaven is the heaven that God dwells in. So what we have here So all we did is believe, just like a Philippian jailer. Here's a Philippian jailer, imagine he's pulled out his sword, he's ready to do himself in, because that's the honorable thing to do if your prisoners have escaped.

What must I do to be saved? Paul says, believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and you'll be saved. Do that before you put the sword down. Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and you'll be saved. And we believed And we believed in who Christ was and what he did on the cross and in the tomb and coming out of the tomb. And we believe that and God says, that's it.

I'll take it from there. And we spend the rest of our lives catching up to what he's already done. Here we are, here we are, you know, Going to an elective, we're looking at the year ahead, going through all the unfathomable riches we had in Christ. We're going to spend the year catching up to all the things he's already done. Okay, so let's take a look here.

On the top of page two, the last couple of lines, it says, that salvation was all of the fathomable riches was to all the unfathomable riches of Christ. Salvation is to and salvation is from. We are saved from and also saved to. See the distinction there? What were we saved from? The penalty of sin. We were saved from the penalty of sin with it, right?

And everything goes with it. And God says, okay, now that we've saved you, that's pretty good, you're saved from the penalty of sin, and when you're done here on planet Earth, it will have been nice knowing you. That's it. Is that what God does? Not at all. God has instead all these marvelous things that he has done that continue on into eternity, future. And they're so fantastic. I tell you, those folks in the Ephesians elective, they've really got it.

Ephesians 2.7, that in the ages to come, he will show, that is to demonstrate visibly, the riches, plural, of His grace.

So when we're done here having studied and taught about grace at Holly Hills for years and years and decades and decades, we will only have scratched the surface of grace. Essentially, God is going to have Christ come and take us to be with Him. And we're going to say, well, thank you, Lord, for your grace. He'll say, you haven't seen anything yet. Speaking in paraphrase, of course. But the bottom line is, I've got so much of grace to show you, riches of grace, that we're just going to be awestruck on into eternity, for rolling ages to come. When we've been there 10,000 years, He's going to say, you haven't seen anything yet.

Really? Yeah. Really. Yes. You were saying we're saved from the penalty of sin. Does that include the sin nature? And if it does, then do I no longer fall short of the glory of God? Yeah, so really when When God deals with sin, it's not just one thing, is it? It's not just my sins every day. Yeah, in other words, we talk about sin to the actions, and are those dealt with? They're dealt with on the cross.

How about the sin generator? The sin originator? Does God forgive the sin originator? The Bible tells us that the sin nature is condemned right where it is. So this is one thing, if we look at it, for the believer it's essential for us to get the idea that sin nature is terminal. Sin nature is terminal. It's not going anywhere. It's not getting out of here alive. Sin nature is terminal.

Why doesn't God, for the believers, for us who are Christian believers, why doesn't God just take the sin nature and just get rid of it once we believe? Why doesn't He just say, okay, you're done with that thing, just get rid of it so you don't have to mess with it. Yeah? Well, it says in John 17 where Jesus is making that last prayer, that he doesn't want to take the people out of the world. And sin and the sin nature is part of the world, according to 1 John.

So, as long as you're living in this world, you're going to be dealing with what's ugly. I understand that the sin nature is still attached to this body. It doesn't leave until this body dies. I would have to be detached from the sin nature. So the sin nature is terminal and already condemned. But it's still alive.

And it's not forgiven. The sin nature is not forgiven. That's the sin generator. Our sins that have been generated have been forgiven because Christ made the payment. The sin nature is not forgiven. As a matter of fact, one way to put it, people talk about the unforgivable sin, the sin nature is unforgivable. There's no forgiving it, there's no excusing it, and it is attached to this body, so how could God get rid of the sin nature?

He would have to kill you. So you imagine, okay, here's some guy who believes in Christ, and all of a sudden he just croaks right there. Ah, the guy must have become a believer in Christ. Just croaked right there, you know. And look, here's this gospel tract and a corpse, you know. Somebody sits down and they talk to this guy in the airplane, and the guy's in the airplane, Talking to people? Yeah, well that's part of the problem. There wouldn't be anybody to talk to. But if they left behind something for the guy to believe, then he would all of a sudden croak. And by the way, most certainly God uses other believers to reach people. But God can do anything he wants.

I'll very quickly tell the story of Russ Haupt. Russ Hofstra is a fellow that I worked with on my folks' farm when Nancy and I were engaged for a few months. Russ had just become a believer, just like months before, and he had been working on the Yosemite National Park Trail Crew. And every night they would sit down around a campfire and drink beer and smoke marijuana. And one night as he was getting ready to drink beer and smoke marijuana like all the guys that always did, he just all of a sudden felt gripped and he got let off until finally he found himself, and this was early in the season when the snow was just melting, here out of the melted snow on the ground was a gospel tract. He read it and became a believer. That's how he was saved. So, astounding. But see, what would happen if God said, okay, as soon as you become a believer, you're going to be rid of the sin nature, he would have to say, well, your life is over. Because that's how the sin nature is gotten rid of.

He doesn't do that, so instead he's made other provisions for dealing with the sin nature. other provisions for dealing with the sin nature, and we have the indwelling Holy Spirit. This is this class in Romans chapter 8. Oh, what a fantastic elective. So, Romans chapter 8, they have the Holy Spirit.

Also, it isn't a matter of just us zeroing in on fighting the sin nature. But we reckon ourselves dead to that sin nature. We're still attached to this thing. Nancy says that I go and pinch here, right? Like the sin atrium is attached right there. I doubt that. But anyway, that's the picture. If that were the case, I could just cut my right arm off and I'd be in great shape. So, as we go through this, we also have a little bit more.

Can the unfathomable riches of Christ be tainted, lost, improved upon, or enhanced? Can I mess it up? Can I mess up the unfathomable riches of Christ? You are blessed with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ except for Vern, because he really messed up when he was in third grade. You can't mess it up, but you can sin and not take advantage of it. Yes, so our position, everything that we have that is our fathomable riches of Christ, our position remains there. However, we can fall short of living in our condition according to our position.

And here's one other thing. Does God ask you to do anything on your own that He hasn't provided for in your position? No. God has not delegated anything to us. It's not like, OK, here you go this far and now you're on your own. Be a good boy. It's not that way, is it? Scripture doesn't say that. that everything that he asks and calls for us to do is already entirely provided for in our position. Everything. No exceptions.

Have you ever been disappointed in yourself? Guess what? Am I supposed to be disappointed in myself? Yeah, ultimately, that's not God's plan. It is not God's intent that we're disappointed in ourselves. Now, have you ever talked about people beating yourself up? Ever done that? Is that what God has in mind? Ah, so disappointed in myself means I was relying upon myself, right?

If I'm beating myself up, who am I beating up? Am I beating up Christ? Am I beating up the Holy Spirit? Yeah, in other words, I'm expecting the sin nature to do something different and better. Right? So, yeah, a lot of times we'll get our perspective.

If you want to beat up on yourself, I'm afraid Scripture just can't help you. I can't help you. If you want to feel condemned, there's nothing I can do to help you. That means you're on the self-improvement plane. Yes, yes. And God has nothing like that in mind. If you want to beat yourself up, I have nothing that I can offer for you. If you want to feel guilty, there's nothing I can do to encourage that or help that. Yes?

So saying that, though, does not negate the fact that along life we can make choices that are really poor, Oh yes. And then we live the rest of our life with the consequences of that. Yeah. But not beating ourselves up and yet recognizing at the same time. Yes. Yes.

So now, let's suppose something happens and I say, oh man, that was a real oops. Is the answer to beat myself up? Is the answer to go and condemn myself? Should I be disappointed in myself? What's the answer if I find myself in that place? It is a sign to look to Him, because He's the only one who's trustworthy. And trusting in myself is going to get me nowhere, ever, anytime.

Here on earth there may continue to be consequences, sometimes long-term consequences. But before God, you are instantly able to run into the throne room of grace and jump on the Father's lap and say, Papa. And we don't pull the garbage out and fondle it and meditate on it and take time for penance We just agree it's garbage. That's it.

That's what 1 John 1.9 is about. It's not going around and confessing, confessing, confessing, confessing. The word means to agree with God. I don't paw through the garbage and say, well, this was last week's trash, and this was eggshells from yesterday morning. Is this trash? Yeah, out it goes. And we're on to the next thing. In fellowship with the Lord. Okay, and believe it or not, we're out of time, and we didn't finish two pages, but I'll quickly try to address it.

So, are the unfathomable riches of Christ hypothetical or theoretical? No, because they are intended to be lived out. That's why we talk about our position, the unfathomable riches of Christ and our possessions, intended to be lived out in our condition. There is nothing in our condition that God desires that we do on our own. It is His intent that we do it entirely in dependence upon who He is and what He's done. Our position and possessions.

Let's pray. Thank you Lord for Just what you made clear in your word, thank you, as we venture forth into these unfathomable riches of Christ that you, Lord, have it laid out clearly for us. And we can see more and more just who you have made us to be. Thank you for choosing each of us in Christ before the foundation of the world. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen.