Teach Them to Live Grace Filled Lives, Part 1

Sometimes stories have a tremendous power. People give us stories and movies and if you’re a child, sometimes a parent will, at nighttime, read a story. And rather than me tell you what a story says, I would like to do something a little different.

I would like to tell an accurate, historical story of a fellow who was the most powerful man in the world. He had very, very humble beginnings; he was of a tribe that was of the lower class; and he was the youngest. And he went from being a shepherd boy to being the most powerful king in the world.

I want to tell you a story of how a very good man, who was passionate and loved God and who never planned to make a mistake, in a weak moment, destroyed major portions of his life.

It says in 2 Samuel chapter 11, “It happened in the spring of year, at the time when kings go out to battle, that David sent Joab, the servant and all of Israel, and they destroyed the people of Ammon and they besieged Rabbah. But David remained in Jerusalem.” Every other year, he went out to battle. A lot of success. Things are going great. “I probably don’t need to go this year.”

“And then it happened,” notice it’s not planned, “and then it happened one evening that David arose from his bed, walked out on the roof of the king’s house, and from the roof he saw a woman bathing. And the woman was very beautiful to behold. And so David sent and he inquired about the woman. And someone said, ‘Is this not Bathsheba, the daughter of Eliam, the wife of Uriah the Hittite?’

“And then David sent messengers and he took her. And she came to him, and he lay with her. (For she was cleansed from her impurity.) And she returned to her house. And the woman conceived, so she sent and told David and said, ‘I am with child.’” God’s man in a weak moment.

“Then David sent to Joab saying: ‘Send me Uriah the Hittite.’ And Joab sent Uriah to David from the battlefield. And when Uriah had come to him, David asked him how it was going and how were the people doing and how has the war prospered. And David said to Uriah, ‘Well, go down to your house and wash your feet.’ And so Uriah departed from the king’s house and he got a gift of food from the king that followed him. But Uriah slept at the door of the king’s house with all the servants of his lord. And he did not go down to his house.

“So they told David saying, ‘Uriah didn’t go down to his house,’ David said to Uriah, ‘Did you not come home from a journey and why didn’t you go down to your house?’” And he confronts a man with great integrity and loyalty.

“And Uriah said to David, ‘The ark and Israel and Judah are dwelling in tents, and my lord Joab and the servants of my lord are encamped in the open fields. Shall I go down to my house and eat and drink and lie with my wife? As you live and as your soul lives, I will not do this thing!’” The contrast. Commitment. Loyalty. Integrity. What is fair. What is right.

As I read this passage, I notice the phrases: “Then it happened,” “He saw,” “He inquired,” “He sent,” “He lay,” “She conceived.”

And then begins the cover-up. And Uriah said to David, “I can’t do it.” So David tries plan B. In verse 12 he gets him drunk, sends him down, even in a drunken stupor, his loyalty is intact. And then cover-up plan B emerges in verse 14.

“In the morning it happened that David wrote a letter to Joab,” that was the head of his army. “And he sent it by the hand of Uriah.” What irony. “And he wrote in the letter saying, ‘Uriah, put him in the forefront of the hottest battle and retreat from him that he may be struck down and die.’

“And so it was that Joab besieged the city, and he assigned Uriah to a place where he knew valiant men were. And the men of the city came out and they fought and some of the servants of David fell; and Uriah the Hittite died also.” Cover-up complete.

Skip down to the very bottom, verse 26. “When the wife of Uriah heard that Uriah her husband was dead, she mourned for her husband. And when her mourning was over, David sent and brought her to his house, and she became his wife and bore him a son.” Commentary: “But the thing that David had done displeased the Lord.”

And then that famous, famous passage in the New Testament, “Do not be deceived; your sin will find you out.”

And I want to make a couple observations. I don’t know how you have heard this taught before. But my first observation is: He is a good man. A very good man. Sometimes we hear about people who make a big mistake and they commit adultery or embezzlement or they do something really horrendous that is so counter to everything we know about them.

And we are so quick to say, “Well, everything they ever taught was wrong. And must have had this super dark heart.” The fact of the matter, David was a very, very good man in a weak moment. And according to Scripture, there is not a person in this room, given the right circumstances, at a window of time when you are vulnerable, that you couldn’t do the same or worse.

And, by the way, until you come to that conviction that that could actually happen, you are even more vulnerable.

Second, he is described as a mighty warrior, a righteous king, and a man after God’s own heart. And, by the way, that is after this event. That’s a New Testament quotation.

Third, the words murderer and adulterer are added to the biography of this amazing, godly man who is used by God in ways beyond anything probably we can imagine.

And here is the point I would like to make. We all make big mistakes sometime in our life. Some of them get found out, some of them don’t, but we know them. The question is: How do we recover?

And the temptation and the enemy’s desire is to cover you with condemnation. It’s too late, you blew it, you’ve ruined their life, there is no hope.

And the transferrable concept you want to teach those you disciple, the transferrable concept we must pass on to our kids and to our grandkids and to people that are in our local bodies of fellowship is this: Teach them to live grace filled lives.

I want to go over a theology of grace. And it’s from the beginning to the end of Scripture, so I want to give you the high marks very briefly and quickly. And then explain, maybe, grace that we really get our arms around: what’s it mean to receive grace? What is grace?

Grace is the unmerited and unconditional love of God toward us. Underline the word unmerited; unconditional. We don’t understand either and you’ll never get it anywhere else, from anyone else at all, like this.

Unmerited means you can’t earn it. Unconditional means you have it when you’re bad, you have it when you’re good, you have it when you’re up, you have it when you’re down. Grace is the disposition in the eternal God of wanting to give you what you do not deserve, on the basis of His character alone, not on your performance or your activity.

Second, grace is free to us, but it’s costly to God. It’s absolutely free. Completely removed from our performance. But it’s very costly to God.

Third, the cross is God’s greatest act of grace. We’ll develop that. But the greatest act of grace is the cross where He allowed His Son – fully God, fully man – to die in your place and my place to pay for, to atone, to be the substitute for all the things that you have ever done or ever thought or ever said that violated a holy God.

You are responsible for every one of those, I am responsible for every one of mine, and God said, “Since you could never live up to that, I will allow My Son, who is absolutely perfect, to hang between heaven and earth on a wooden cross. And I will take My just wrath and My judgment for sin, and I will pour it on My Son, who is an absolutely perfect sacrifice because He is God, and He is able to die because He is man, and in this moment of time, I will cover or atone for the sins of all men, of all times.” And whoever would choose to, with the empty hands of faith, ask for this gift of substitution and grace, I will give it to them on the basis of them believing.”

“God so loved the world He gave His only begotten Son. That whosoever would believe might receive eternal life.”

Four, salvation is a free gift from God. It’s not of works.

Five, grace must be received by faith. You might jot, Ephesians 2:8 and 9, “For by grace we are saved through faith, and that’s not of yourselves.” The idea is not of your religious or moral attempts of good works. “It is the gift of God, not of works, lest any man should boast.”

And I would like, if you would, just to stop for a second, because what is so deeply embedded in our minds is a concept that goes something like this: God has a big chalk board in the sky. And there is a line down the middle. And on one side it says: “Good deeds,” and there is a line and on the other side it says, “Bad deeds.”

And the way I grew up thinking was, When you get to the end of the game called “Life,” if your bad deeds are more than your good deeds, you go to the bad place. And if your good deeds are better than your bad deeds, you go to the good place.

Nothing could be farther from the truth. If you had nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand and ninety-nine good deeds, and one bad deed, you would violate the holy, perfect perfection of God, who can live with absolutely no sin.

If you put it in a score card, it would be something like this: In order to have a relationship with God the Father, you need your test score in every aspect of life to be a perfect hundred. You either have a hundred, or you fail.

Now, maybe the Billy Grahams of the world, although I’m sure he wouldn’t say this; or the Mother Teresas or some famous missionaries, maybe they get a ninety-two or ninety-four and maybe axe murderers get threes and fours and serial killers are a minus five. And most of us see ourselves as maybe seventy-five or eighties.

But unless you’re a hundred, you can’t have a relationship with God. So being a good guy, being moral, intellectually believing in God is not what it means to be “saved”, or have a relationship or be prepared or allowed to go into heaven. It’s by grace you are saved through faith.

Grace, number six, produces gratitude toward God and love toward others. When you experience grace, it activates something.

So grace produces this gratitude toward God, it produces a love and a lifestyle and a set of good works. Verse 10, right? You are saved, not by works but you are His workmanship, you are created and there this is this new power and life, this grace that gives you a “want-to” and a will to have good works of love and kindness and concern for other people.

Our biblical profiles are David, the adulterer and the murderer; and Peter the betrayer.

Some of us really put David in that, Boy, those are really, really terrible. I don’t know that you can do anything worse than what Peter did.

And Peter became the core foundation person for this thing called, “The Church,” after he betrayed Christ. And what the big theme about grace is, failure is never, ever final. He is the God of the second chance, the seventh chance, the seven times seventieth chance. He, out of His grace, extends mercy. That means He withholds the just judgment, penalty that we deserve.

And He is willing and open wherever you’re at, whatever you’ve done, to forgive and to cleanse, to restore, and to renew.

Jesus’ message was not, “Everyone is all messed up, get with the program.” His message was, “I didn’t come to condemn you. I came to help you own and come to grips with the failure and the sin and the using of people and the abuse and the lying and the deceit to let you know I will forgive you and cover you and I want you to know, you can have a relationship with My Father. He loves you.

And I am going to pay the highest price that could ever be paid. And I am going to be separated in this moment of historic time, from the Father, the Tri-unity of God,” for the first time ever, He would bear the sins of the world and the Father would turn His head because He can’t look upon sin.

And Christ would bear your sin and my sin in that moment of time, in that price tag, to cover or atone for your sin and that is grace. That’s what grace is. And when we tell God, I know You have forgiven me, but I can’t forgive myself, that is an insult. That is an insult and it is arrogant. Well intended, though it may be, it is arrogant. I had an abortion and I can’t ever forgive myself. I did this when I was young and no one knows about it; I can’t forgive myself.

God has forgiven you and He has atoned for it. For you to not receive it is to tell God that what He has done for you doesn’t measure up to your standard. Whoa. I didn’t realize your standard was higher and better than His. Wasn’t it pride that kept Peter from saying, “Lord, not my feet!”? And wasn’t it the call to humility where Jesus would say, “Peter, if I don’t wash your feet, you don’t have any part in Me.” “Well then, Lord, wash all of me.”

What was he saying? It takes huge humility to admit I have need and allow another to wash our feet, to cleanse us, to meet our need, to say that there is dirt here. And it takes great humility to allow God to do that.

The number one reason people miss heaven is, at the core of it, they are unwilling to humble themselves, admit their need, and realize, I can’t do this on my own.

Let me ask you: How do we pass this radical, radical concept on in a performance-oriented world to those we care about most? I think the first step is for you to write in your name. In my notes, it says: I, Chip Ingram, choose to believe that, with God, my failure is never final.

I choose to believe, that’s not an emotion, I choose to believe that with God, my failure as a parent is never final. My failure as a pastor is never final. My failure as a friend is never final. My failure, morally, is never final. My failure with regard to neglect in the past is never final. It’s powerful. It’s grace.

Now, let’s talk about: How do you experience that? Let me give you three specific ways.

First - encourage them, whether it’s a fellow you’re discipling, a young woman, one of your grandkids - encourage them to meditate on the lives of David and Peter. Murderer, adulterer, and betrayer who are among God’s most beloved and mightily used servants.

Did you ever wonder? Some people wonder, Is this really God’s Word? Can you really trust it? Did God really write this? The many authors over sixteen hundred years and all the alignment and all the archeology, and all those are great reasons, but I’ve got news for you. No man would ever write such a self-revealing book and allow the heroes of the story to be so messed up.

This is God’s dream team! And we have the audacity to say, “Well, God could never forgive me. I don’t think He could ever use me.” Are you kidding?

I remember I had not read the Bible growing up at all. And I remember probably after a year or so and dealing with all the stuff that I had to deal with and just sort of a naïve thought, I thought, You know, I’ve not killed anybody. I think God could use me! Because so far, the people that are used the most, they have all at least killed someone. I’m thinking, How much worse could it be than that?

And with your kids, they are going to fail. Now, does it mean that there’s not consequences for sin? Absolutely not. Does it mean you don’t discipline? Absolutely not. But I will tell you what. We can pass on, Oh, Jesus died for you. He loves you, He rose from the dead, you need to put your faith in Him because I want to feel really good about us being in heaven and all that stuff. And then raise them and your disciples in way that, basically, your love is conditional. They get good marks on the one side of the board and bad marks on the other side and when they do good, you’re affectionate and caring, and when they don’t, you back away.

And part of that is we have to tell stories, we have to tell the stories of Peter, more than walking on the water, and saying, “You are the Christ,” and talk about what goes in a human heart to betray the person who loves you the most? What happens in people who really, really are good people and love God that they start getting deceived and then they lie and then they commit sexual acts and then they cover it up and then they commit murder and then they go into denial and then they lie about it and the web that occurs.

And how did God treat people who blew it that badly? He caused some loving consequences and He restored and loved and used them.