Wait. There is a world of articles, books, and information out there when it comes to Christianity, but we are mostly stuck with rhetoric and double talk when it comes to our relationship with the Lord, our new identity as believers, and the security and finality of the work of Christ. Are you getting everything you need spiritually from your church? Or do you find yourself feeling hungry for more? Join Lenny as he unpacks what Scripture really taught about our Lord Jesus Christ in context and why this matters to you. Wake up, wake up, wake up to grace.

Welcome back, everyone. I hope that you guys are doing well out there and have some things to look forward to in the new year. It's my hope that new episodes of the Waking Up to Grace podcast are among those things. I know for me it's at the top of the list. I truly love waking up to grace in the mornings by just meditating on the grace and peace that we have in our Lord Jesus. Sometimes it's just as enjoyable to break down legalistic doctrines so we can free our minds and walk in a way that pleases our Father from a pure heart. It's amazing how these errors can trickle into our minds if we let down our guard while taking in Christian media. In his book The Saving Life of Christ, Major Ian Thomas wrote, I know of no gospel in the Bible that offers you salvation from the condemnation of your sin that does not at the same time demand a radical change of walk, a walk under entirely new management, revolutionized according to an entirely new principle of life. When we begin to understand the concept of Christ Jesus working in and through us in our lives, a radical change of mind takes place. It's not just that God is all around us. Jesus is working in us and through us, and God is all around us. Most Christians are being taught to stop sinning and make God happy. Please the Lord and you won't get the punishment or the relational time out. This is not walking by grace. This is not the change of heart that saved us. If you believe the gospel from a fear of punishment, you've missed the entire point. Just the same if you're pleasing the Lord out of fear, you're missing the genuine love of Christ. Of course today we get both. We get the fear gospel and the love gospel from the same teacher and in the same message oftentimes. That's what you call double talk. Teachers and leaders today just can't hold on to the gospel. They have to go back to legalism, punishment, and broken fellowship to scare you and apparently themselves back into what they call grace. When they attempt to teach grace, they almost never leave these parts out. They're afraid someone might take it and run with it. They're in bondage to legalism and cannot free themselves or those who listen. It becomes a guiding force in their walk, which leads us to wonder, how can they be so confident? Have they lowered the bar for themselves, or are they just that good? Do they have peace on earth or are they merely pushing on in hope of the real thing in heaven? We don't see these fears or doctrines of exhausting self effort coming from the authors of our New Testament. Mankind has once again deceived themselves by stringing together doctrines that were never intended to be taught to Christians. They're destructive and damaging. The most damaging part is that those who follow it don't even see the problem. They continue their Christian walk by their own strength and effort because that's just what you do. They set aside what they have been given by grace and strive for what they already have. You can say that's just what you do about all kinds of things. This whole concept simply causes you to conform to the ways of the world. No matter what we face in our lives as Christians, we can know that Christ is able to handle it. Did Jesus not bear the weight of all of our sin while hanging on the cross? Did Jesus not suffer separation from the Father so we wouldn't ever have to experience that for ourselves? If the Lord Jesus is living in us and promises to live his life through us, can we not also rise above all suffering? Did Jesus not feel pain? We know he did. But he was also encouraged by the Father during his trial. One of the thieves hanging on the cross next to him believed in him and was saved. This was a love gift from the Lord. And did Jesus still have the strength in his dying human body to cry out the most important words ever said in human history? It is finished, he cried out, as his life force was leaving him, and he was literally enduring suffocation. In the end it was finished, wasn't it? Indeed it was. We might have to suffer like this too. We'll certainly suffer in this life. It's a promise as certain as the gospel. But Jesus can and will counsel us through. He will get us to the other side. He's always with us. We only need to depend on that. Imagine not being able to say this. What would life look like? What would suffering look like? Christ endured all things, so we can know that we can endure all things in him, who is our strength and our life force. This is grace and peace. I don't know where I'd be today were it not for Jesus. I watched the Father comfort my father-in-law before he went to be with the Lord. It was what he called the long goodbye. I heard of his faith from those in his close circles and saw it for myself. In his time he touched the lives of many. In his passing, he bore fruit that will remain forever. I see the Lord strengthening my wife in this trial. I never thought she could be so strong, mostly because she didn't think she would be herself. Her dad meant the world to her. She's battling ridiculous health problems and lost her dad, but her faith is unchanged. It's nothing short of a miracle. I'm certain many of you have your own experience like this. We should never doubt the power of the indwelling spirit of God. I'm thankful and blessed to see the work of our Lord in Melissa's life as she faces suffering. It's beyond words how we can look back on better times and yet never want to let go of what the Lord has done to build us up. We may inch closer to craving that next life, but we remain thankful for how the Lord can create good from all the terrible things we encounter in this world. Until we take our last breath, Christ has work to do in our lives, if we can only just stop trying to do it all on our own. Grace and peace comes when we want our Lord to work in our lives, when we give what we have to him so that he can exchange that for something greater. If we stop holding back and desire for him to be our guiding force no matter what, we receive an abundance of peace. We often wait until things get bad to call on the Lord, but we were created to depend on him for all things. We must let go of the wheel. God is a much better driver than us. On that note, I should probably address the reason I'll be calling our Lord Christ Yeshua Jesus from now on. At least most of the time. It started with my experience talking to Jehovah's Witness. I'd been using the name Yeshua for some time and wanted to try it out in the real world a bit. So in going back and forth with these friendly ladies arguing truth, the one thing that stopped the leader in her tracks was when she said, Who is Yeshua? Of course I had to at least briefly explain this was Jesus' Hebrew name, but it just threw off her focus entirely. I knew this would be the case, this was the reason I had to really consider whether or not I should use Jesus' real name in my ministry. Sometimes I think I change my mind too much. It kind of annoys me at times. Maybe you could call it a blessing and a curse. But in my ministry, I want to help others to experience an abundant walk with Christ. I want you guys to be with me as I'm waking up to grace a little more every day. I can't accept the possibility that someone might turn off my podcast because they think I'm preaching another Messiah. Unfortunately, we're just out of touch with the Hebrew name that Christ Yeshua was given. It was made Greek in our scriptures, and we turned that into the nickname Jesus. This is what we all call him. This is what we know him by. Jesus isn't going to shame you for calling him by his nickname. This isn't a battle that I can place above grace teaching. I don't want to cause even one person to stumble. I also believe this is what the authors of Scripture would probably have done as well. This kind of seals the deal for me. Why is the name Yahweh changed to simply God? There are many opinions if we look it up, but we do know that hundreds of years before Christ, Jews stopped using the holy name Yahweh. This was an error. But do you think Jesus or the apostles rebelled against this error? Personally, I don't think so. I think they had bigger fish to fry, so to speak. Why would they want to get kicked out of the synagogues for that? How would that help anything? I think they respected the error to the extent that they didn't make a big deal of it. Full Grace teaching is very radical for those who have not heard it. I don't want to make someone's head spin any more than it needs to while they learn the teachings of Jesus. So moving forward I'll be using the name Jesus to describe our Lord and Savior, not Yeshua. This brings me to the next part of what I wanted to tell you guys. Through life challenges, the Lord has brought to my attention just how important the message of full grace is. The hook always brings me back. There's nothing out there that brings us the grace and peace of our Lord like the message of full grace. And there might well be nothing more lacking in our world. As I dig deeper into scripture and theology, listening to those who really bring it to the table with overall biblical knowledge, I find myself often feeling empty after a little while. When I dive deep, those who teach facts so well never seem to understand grace. Their intellect just pushes it out. They can say we're saved by grace and guaranteed salvation in heaven, but on earth they teach a message of burden and condemnation. A message that trains us to walk by self-effort with the perfection of Jesus as the example to follow, the scale of our success. This theology is a total mess, and it makes a mess of the Christian walk. This is what caused me to start this ministry. I love diving deep into some theology and don't plan to stop, but I want you to know that my focus will remain on full grace. When we look at hard passages, Christ does the heavy lifting. When I dive back into our Roman study, it's going to be all about breaking down and exposing legalism and bringing full grace into the light for us to live and learn by. I want to extract all of the grace and peace that Paul's letter to the Romans has to offer. I want you guys to see that we don't read our Bible just to become smarter and know more facts. Biblical knowledge has never saved anyone. Look at ancient Israel. Those people knew the Bible better than you ever will. This knowledge was passed down and meditated on extensively. Yet so many never knew the Lord. This is a sad reality. And as Christians we can gain so much knowledge and never come to understand that it is Christ living through us that brings us grace and peace in our lives. Let's pick up our Bibles and extract all the truth that will bring us grace and peace. Let's break down and destroy doctrines that hold us back in our walk. I hope you guys don't mind doing this with me. In fact, I hope you're as excited as I am. I think the Lord has renewed my focus heading into this new year and I really look forward to it. I do have some topics I have to cover before we go back into our Roman study, so bear with me. In preparing for next season, I've done a lot of work on the back end of things as far as podcasting goes. I put countless hours into preparing for this coming year. I'm ready to go and I hope that the Lord will be bringing it to the table in fruit production. But I don't want it to go without saying that I'm already blessed, those who I've come to know through Waking Up to Grace. Relationships have been strengthened, and very meaningful and cherished new relationships have come to be thanks to the Lord calling me to do this. Oh, and don't forget to check out my new post pages at waking up to grace dot com. They're short summaries of many of the past episodes of our podcasts. The post pages will be a great way to get a solid handle on topics very quickly, and they're all linked to the full blogcast pages. These pages would serve well for sharing with others who might need some grace in their lives without overwhelming them too much at once. Biblical knowledge is good, and I highly recommend learning all about the Bible. But if you start to get exhausted or run into a time of suffering, grace and peace will be what you need the most. Learn these things and cling to them now. You'll be able to endure anything. Not only this, but you'll understand Scripture more than you ever imagined once you become established in the message of full grace. You might be like me and come to find the more you seek, the more you find. The depth of God's love in Scripture is endless. It's bigger than our human comprehension. Don't set aside grace in your studies. Don't stop learning more and keep my podcast in your favorites. God willing, I think I've overcome the hurdle of getting you guys a message every week. Some of you guys are probably thinking, boy, it's about time. This has been quite an undertaking. It changed my life and my lifestyle. This is a huge part of my Christian walk, and I love to know that you're walking with me. Let's walk the walk and talk the talk. Let's give ourselves to the Lord as a canvas for him to create a masterpiece for his glory. Make this new year a year for a new you, the you that is guided by the supernatural strength of the indwelling spirit of Jesus. Adam and Eve turned away from God. The Holy Spirit was taken from them. Mankind was created to depend on the Lord and not themselves. The choice to have the knowledge that God had, to be like God, was a rejection of their loving Lord, who provided them with everything they would ever need. Christ Jesus restored life to those who believed and promised not to take it back. All he calls you to do in return is to abide in his peace and grace, and to let him produce fruit in your life. We're called back into a life of full dependence on the Lord. That doesn't sound like much of a burden, does it? Are we to look the other way and do it all on our own? That would be silly, wouldn't it? Christ did it all for you for salvation in the heavenly realms, but he didn't stop there. You being in Christ is salvation for heaven. Christ living in you is salvation on earth. Abide in the salvation of the Lord Jesus now. Don't wait for heaven to enjoy unbroken fellowship with the Lord. This is the peace on earth that Jesus brought us. Tune in next week to get some more grace teaching. Until then, grace and peace to you all and happy New Year. The content of this message can be found on my blog post at wakingup to grace.com. My writings include linked references and visual aids, which will give even more valuable insight, and it's always free of charge. The comment section below each message is a place where we can share mutual encouragement and insight with one another outside of the social media net. My blog post is always a click away.