Lenny 0:02

Welcome to Waking Up to Grace, where we cut through religious noise, look honestly at scripture, and return to the simplicity of Christ. I'm Lenny. Let's get into it. What is grace teaching?

SPEAKER_00 0:20

Jack defined grace earlier. That was a good definition. I'll let you say it again, Jack, if you like. I liked how you defined it.

Jack 0:28

Grace is Jesus, his reflection, and his workings in our life. That's grace. Grace is a limitless approach and a limitless relationship with a limitless God, eternal God. If we look at it any other way, we diminish we diminish that aspect of it.

Lenny 0:47

You hear the commonplace view, and you know it's bigger than that, but the commonplace definition and it's an unmerited gift. It's not wrong, but I don't know if it fully defines it either. I think what you said is more definitive.

Jack 1:02

You know, the picture of grace, I don't know if you're familiar with it, what the picture of grace is in the wording and in the language. Uh I learned this was quite a few years ago. I learned this, but so I'm you can check me out on it, please. But the word picture for grace is really isn't this this is awesome. This is gonna blow you away. It's a picture of someone kneeling down to a child. That's the picture of grace. An adult kneeling down to a child. Nice. Isn't that amazing? When we think about that, what God has done for us.

Lenny 1:35

I like that. And then you picture Paul's openings of his letters grace and peace to peace to you, yeah. And I've always just been fascinated by that because they had grace and peace, but he always wanted them to have that in the forefront of their mind right at the beginning of the letter. Before I address anything, grace and peace to you.

Jack 1:53

All I like that you do that, Lenny. I like that how that you close, you usually close with that.

Lenny 1:58

I kind of stole it from Paul, but it really just I like it.

Jack 2:02

Yeah. No, I don't I think he'd approve he'd approved. I think he'd approve. Yeah, yeah. You don't have to write for permission or anything. I mean, that's part of the Grace Transformation. It's like, what do you say? Yeah. Some things you can't have a nice day. That's right. That's right. You know. One thing I've learned, and this is me again. Remember, the thing about grace is that it's not a comparison game. It's not like what I share, you have to absorb. That's not how it is. You may absorb it, it may become part of you, but it's not a demand that it become part of you. So when I experience something and share it, it's because it's happening in my life. That's the beauty of the whole thing, is that we don't have to infer what God is doing in us into someone else.

Lenny 2:50

That's a good definition of grace teaching. I was gonna put out there what grace teaching isn't. I don't know if it's as easy for some people to understand as it should be. So when I think of three things that grace teaching isn't, because this was all stirred by a conversation that's probably taken place a hundred times where somebody will say something like, My church teaches grace, right? And I know what the church teaches, let's just say that. I already know. There's a 99% chance that they teach everything that everybody else teaches around here. When we were reflecting back on the times that we wanted to go to church, I did a deep search, you know, what's out there. I may not be able to speak for every place, but when I did my search, it was like, I know what's out there. And anytime if somebody were to say my church teaches grace, it would be like me tongue in cheek, like, okay, and then I could go on their website, and you know, there's some simple things I could search right away to find out if that's true from my vantage point. Let's start with number one of three would be the tithe. What does your church teach about the tithe? If your church teaches the tithe, they're drawing from the law of Moses, and they're actually imposing a tax on you that the temples would have done in national Israel. Some arguments go back to, well, Abraham tithed to Melchizedek. Well, back in the days of Melchizedek, that was before the law. You had circumcision, Abraham was circumcised before the law of Moses, and then you had animal sacrifices going on from Genesis all the way up to the law. There was some way God was dealing with people, and sin was being dealt with in some sense, because if you go back to Job, one of the earliest books ever written, he was making sacrifices for his whole family almost obsessively it would seem. Like just to make sure that their sins were covered, he would make a sacrifice, he was doing that. So we might as well impose that too, then, if we're going to go back pre-law. There's no basis for it. Case in point, there's I don't see any argument where you can say that the tithe is not coming from the law of Moses. Would you guys agree? That's a law-based thing. Without a question.

Jack 5:08

Yeah.

Lenny 5:09

So it's completely undebatable, in my opinion. The worst damage in that isn't just the pocketbook. It's the fact that we are learning how to mix law with grace. And that would circle back to what was foolish about the Galatians, so we'll save that. But mixing law and grace was not something that Paul was at all okay with. He wouldn't have swept that under the rug as, oh, you know, this is grace, we gotta accept this, right? They're just learning grace. Now he would have been like red flag. What are you guys doing? You're mixing law and grace. You're saying that these people are gonna be blessed if they follow the law, and they're not gonna be blessed in some way if they don't. That's not grace teaching. For me, that's big bomb number one. I don't see how you can say that your church teaches grace if they're teaching from the law of Moses in that way and imposing those things. So that kind of rolls out like 99% of the churches out there. And sadly. Sadly. And then you take the second one, the fellowship issue, where, you know, I don't know if this is even that heavily sought after or searched, but it affects a lot of people silently. The in and out of fellowship thing, and that's also tied into the tithe, because if you don't behave properly, which would be in accordance with whatever they see as pleasing to the Lord, and some of those things may or may not be true that it's pleasing to the Lord, but if you're not pleasing to the Lord, you're out of fellowship. Your relationship with God needs repair. You probably need to ask for forgiveness and repent and go through the motions to get back in. That is contrary to grace teaching. And then the third one is the pastor-centered model. I'm starting to see that as also contrary to grace teaching. If you have one pastor that speaks every week, how is that grace? With what Jack just described as what grace teaching is, what grace teaching isn't is a top-down suppression of people expressing what they see in Scripture or what they know about Jesus. I don't ever hear anybody have any kind of problem with those things when they say my church teaches grace, but I think that we should be looking at those before we call grace grace, because Paul would have never mixed law and grace. I think we should be careful with that. Do you think that the Galatians would have been commended for mixing law with grace? Do you think that they didn't also say, Oh, our church teaches grace? Come and join us.

Jack 7:49

Yeah.

Lenny 7:50

You know, there's a dangerous thing there when we water down grace to that extent and don't recognize the things that Paul would have said are leaven that work their way through the whole batch of dough.

Jack 7:59

I think sometimes the best way to approach well, I'm not gonna say generalize, I'm just gonna say for me, the best way to approach that type of thing is to ask that new definition. Many times people's definition of grace is nothing. Nothing compared. I find most times people believe that God has just given them enough grace to save them. That's grace. And then anything after that, that's uh what do I do now in my life? You know, like me saying, What am I supposed to do? Everything's been taken away now, what am I supposed to do? So they try to impose grace as oh my my church receives grace because uh Ephesians 2, 8, 9 says that's through grace, through faith, that I've been saved. So there's grace there. But good point. You know, grace is it's it's really amazing because you know the term we've used over the years, like I'm all in and all that type of stuff. Well, God is all in on grace. There's only one grace, there's not levels of grace, and that grace is overwhelming. Anything less than that is not grace. That's what Paul was trying to instill in the Galatian church. He was trying to let them know that they were trying to define levels of grace. We will tolerate this, we won't tolerate that, we'll do this, we won't do that, but we still believe in God's grace. The bottom line is God's grace is all enough. And when we share that, when I share that, a lot of times the response that I get is this well, we all can believe what we need to believe. I believe this and you believe that.

Lenny 9:33

Yes, isn't that the worst?

Jack 9:35

That's always the response.

Lenny 9:36

But that response is just makes you cringe.

Jack 9:39

Yeah, but the bottom line is that if you define grace based on the biblical description and relationships revealed in God's word, not just the word is written down, but the relationship revealed. If you define grace on those terms, it's all enough. And I challenge you, look through it and remember now God's grace is given to us as a pattern of who our creator is. And as we delve into the pattern of who he is, that's why he gave us the Old Testament so we can look at the relationships that he had with people during those times and see the character of our Father. And the New Testament says, okay, now you've learned all those things, let's grow in them. What my grace to you really is. And it's all in nothing. He's all in. He was all in at the cross, he was all in at the resurrection, and he's all in in your life and my life as well.

Lenny 10:32

Yeah, I think the biggest passage that would lead somebody to think that there's a measure of grace is probably was said by Paul, where he said the grace given to me to preach to the Gentiles, they saw that and gave us the right hand of fellowship to preach to the Gentiles. The right hand was a big deal in that culture. It wasn't just because you know left-handed people were a minority. So you think, wow, you know, he must have had a lot of grace. But whatever measure you can impose on that in somebody, it's not up to us to gauge. God gave Paul the grace that Paul needed, and you said it really well in our last message that he gives us exactly what we need for what we are called to do.

Jack 11:19

Exactly.

Lenny 11:20

Paul was called to preach to the Gentiles. That took a different mindset, you know, than maybe was initially had by Peter and some of those guys.

Jack 11:30

Definitely.

Lenny 11:31

There was something different. He seemed to really be able to differentiate the dangers of um falling into the mindset that Judaism was making them righteous, and be able to differentiate and actually initiate that Jerusalem council meeting where they had to decide. You have this thing going on where you had Jews and Gentiles sharing table together, meeting together, you had people meeting in synagogues, you had people meeting at the temple, you had people meeting in houses, you had Jews who whatever you see going on in those times, you see that they were observing the law to some extent in order to be included in those cultures still. What was their mindset? It's hard to know fully. Melissa and I were talking about that. Like, did they actually like bring an animal sacrifice forward? How far did they go? Paul shaved his head for a vow. There was a lot of this going on, and it's not as if they needed to at all. But you had this experience where Paul kind of lashed out at the high priest who smacked him in the face at one point, and then they said, Do you know who you just said that to? And he's like, Oh, if I would have known that, I would have never done that, and he quotes scripture saying that you never dishonor a leader.

Jack 12:51

Right.

Lenny 12:52

And he never really stopped talking about that. The one thing I did wrong, his gospel was law respecting, is something that I came to realize, and that you don't see a Paul that went around going into a synagogue and saying, You guys, this law observance thing is all wrong. Stop what you're doing and listen to me, and you guys gotta stop this. He never would have been able to hang out around Jewish people with that kind of rhetoric. What we see is that they were very respectful of the synagogues, the temple, the leaders, and all that stuff. Even Peter, when they took their lashings, he just said, I can't a good conscience not do that. He didn't start yelling at them or disrespect. Everything they did was we are not at fault for anything. Paul even said, I've done nothing against the commandments of the laws. I've done nothing to make the Jewish people upset. So he had to have been very courteous and very obedient to whatever he had to be in order to not be seen as an outcast. But they still blamed him for stuff he didn't do. Oh, he must have brought that Gentile into the courts. He didn't.

Jack 14:00

Yeah.

Lenny 14:00

But they blamed him. You see this great respect in the cultures in that day, and I might be drifting again. That's fine. I I just always find that to be interesting because I think the general idea I had at one point was that Paul was like a rebel. He was going around saying, Stop this stuff. But to me in his letters, I see him addressing Jewish people and Gentile people carefully, and that Jewish people, it was okay for them to be Jewish, but it wasn't okay to see it as their means of becoming righteous.

Jack 14:31

Yeah.

Lenny 14:32

Whatever they were doing, they could be eating the way they wanted, they could go to a thing and attend or observe, but if when that turned into this is what we do to be righteous, and it and in Peter's case, sitting at the table with those Jewish people was imposing the idea that they were some kind of inner circle people, special people, because they had the law was completely off limits in Paul's mind and had to rebuke him. Like, no, no, no, no, no. Just because you guys are doing the stuff does not make you any better than these people. And the Jerusalem Council makes the judgment that no, the Gentiles to compose themselves around Jewish people just have to do this. But you notice that they never addressed the Jews at that council. They never said Jewish people need to stop observing the law. You're affecting these Gentiles. They never even talked about them. It's kind of interesting. They just said, Gentiles just do this to be respectful. Right? It's it's fascinating to me.

SPEAKER_00 15:30

We talked about that. They likely didn't want to cause any of the remnant to stumble.

Lenny 15:36

Yep.

Jack 15:37

Yeah. And Paul said that. All men that I might win a few.

Lenny 15:40

Yeah, so what was the motive to not cause people to stumble, right? So to the Gentiles in the Book of Romans, I see him addressing Gentile superiority because you had Jewish superiority and then you had the Gentiles who kind of became superior, like we believe in Jesus, you guys, you know, are dirt now. And I think there were elements of self-righteousness on both sides that needed to be addressed. Because, let's face it, you're a Gentile believer and you're getting persecuted and ridiculed because you're not good enough by the Jews, there would have been equality needed there, you know.

Jack 16:16

I think a lot of that was in fact that think of me, like us, when we left traditional religion, um, how long it took that effect to wear off from us. And I think God had imposed that grace in Paul's life for him to recognize how long it took him to realize and how that mere words cannot change a heart. And I think many times I find in my life that I'm not so much going out and finding going out and telling people about God's grace as I am finding those who are right for his grace. And whatever situation they're in, because of where I I have been and you have been, we can be comfortable in the situation that they're in because of that. And that's the effect of grace in individuals' lives. The ability for us to be all things to all men that we may win a few, knowing that what's going on in that man's heart or that one's heart, I've already maybe experienced part of it in my life. And God is calling him and drawing him into this wonderful world of grace. And I am privileged to be able to share my portion of that with him. I mean, I think that's the new um evangelism for grace. Absolutely. His sharing what he's done with us to those who are hunting for this grace, but have yet to have it defined in their own life.

Lenny 17:44

Yeah, and that would fall perfectly in line with Paul's journeys. He'd go to the synagogues, and if they rejected him, he'd go to the Gentiles. And he was looking for people because he loved his Jewish brothers. It would be like loving people that you went to church with. Maybe you go in there and you know try to help him out. That time period was interesting because you see that period where it would have been difficult, the transition, because they knew that that whole temple thing was going to end. They knew that the temple would be destroyed. And then it happened. You have the temple become destroyed, so you would think, well, where does Galatianism fit now? How does Galatianism enter into the church after the temple has been destroyed and you can't even observe the law? You've been listening to Waking Up the Grace. Find the companion study and continue the conversation at WakeneUpTograce.com. Remember, the work is finished.