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Teach Them to Live Grace Filled Lives, Part 1

From the series Leaving a Legacy that Lasts Forever

Have you ever messed up big time - like such a major failure that, even years later, you cringe when you think about it? Chip shares how you can begin again - how you can be restored and discover the joy God has ready for you. 

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Message Transcript

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.”

A great portion of this book that I hold in my hands is called: The Psalms or the psalter. It was the hymnal of the Jewish people. And the great majority of these words from God to believers then and now, were written by this man. He is a man that is passionate for God, loved God, humble, God exalted him.

He was the deliverer of the people from the Philistines and later and greater and greater and greater battles. And the trajectory of his entire life changes because one night he can’t sleep. He’s not where he’s supposed to be, but it’s not planned. It’s not malicious. He just can’t sleep.

And he is made to do something but he’s not doing what he is called to do in this window. And as he can’t sleep and he walks out and he looks over and he is a man, like any man, on a business trip or away from home in a different environment, and something catches his eye, and there is something very normal and natural about the magnetic attraction to a very, very beautiful woman.

And then he takes the next step, he probably didn’t plan on doing anything. He inquired. I wonder who that is. I mean, not that I’d do anything, I just wonder who it is. And then he gets the feedback. And during that time, the seeds begin to grow and then he calls for her. And, still, maybe, You know…

And then he lies with her. And then there are consequences. And then instead of owning his stuff and realizing, This is a grievous sin. By the way, we read this in our twenty-first century eyes, the penalty for adultery was to be stoned. This is serious.

And so he, kind of like the many cover-ups we have seen in the last twenty years, so, I’ll cover it up. I’ll just get the husband to come home and he’ll sleep with his wife, he’ll think the baby is his. But he chose the wrong guy. The guy has got too much integrity.

And then in the way sin creeps in, that seed of sin, it was just seeing, then inquiring, then taking a step, then there’s an action, there’s a consequence, then there’s a cover-up. And all I want to do is get this under the…I just want to put this under the rug and it’s a mistake, God, I’m really, really sorry. I’ll never do anything like that again. And he’ll think it’s his baby and it’ll be over. And it doesn’t work.

And so this is how sin works. It’s like a cancer that multiplies rapidly and the cells multiply, multiply, multiply. And he starts thinking things that he would never do and then pretty soon he comes up with a plan, to kill her husband.

And he actually allows other people to go to the front where it’s too dangerous and this man dies and they play the game and she mourns. He marries her. And thinks, Wow, whew.

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

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 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.

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.”

Grace, number six, produces gratitude toward God and love toward others. When you experience grace, it activates something. Philippians chapter 2 says, “For it’s the grace of God; it’s God who is at work in you, both to will and to work for His good pleasure.”

Grace does something where, when you turn, in the empty hands of faith and ask Christ to come into your life, the Spirit of God enters your physical body. You are literally taken out of the kingdom of darkness and into the kingdom of light. You are placed into this supernatural community called, “The body of Christ,” or, “The Church.” You are deposited with a spiritual gift to fulfill your Ephesians 2:10 purpose. Your mind begins to be renewed.

So grace produces this gratitude toward God, it produces a love and a lifestyle and a set of good works. 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.

The Old Testament roots are all the way in the early part of the Bible. Genesis 3, verse 21. After the sin of Adam and Eve, we have, Who takes care? Who covers? And he introduces the concept of the shedding of blood for the remission of sins.

And it says, “Also for Adam and his wife, the Lord God made tunics of skin, and He clothed them.” It’s a picture of what is going to come. Something had to die, blood had to be spilled, and two people got covered. That’s a good picture of what happens in salvation.

The other passage there is Genesis 6:8 and we have this horrendous violence in the world. Violence to the point, it was like back in Noah’s day, they had CSI. Do you realize how obsessed we are with violence?

You walk into, and I don’t recommend you do it long, walk into one of those video stores and look at the top fifteen games. And our kids practice killing things and blowing up people. The way we train our troops, because it is so viscerally difficult to ever get to the point to take a human life. And there are times in war where that happens.

I would challenge you to get a little thing, put it next to your TV, and every program that has to do with killing or violence or, “Why do they kill it?” It got so bad that God said He was sorry that He made mankind, but in the midst of that, “But Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord.”

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. Anybody here been betrayed before? Anybody here have a mate walk out on you and sleep with someone else?

Anybody start a business, do a startup, and get a little slow on getting all the IP and the patent agreements and have someone steal all your stuff that you thought was your friend?

Anyone ever have a close friend that you’re in a Bible study with, a lady or a guy in a men’s group, only to find out that the most intimate things you have ever shared, they have gone and spread around to other people? I don’t know that I have ever been as angry or as hurt as when I have been betrayed.

I’m trying to help you get emotionally to where you understand: If you don’t go with me to where you have done these things, and some, it’s pretty quick and some it’s hard, you’ll never grasp grace because David was probably used by God as much or more than anyone in the Old Testament, even after his sin.

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.

The New Testament command is in John chapter 3 and we so often quote or put at the end of the end zone, verse 16, you know? “For God so loved the world He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shouldn’t perish, but have everlasting life.”

But I love verse 17. “For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through Him. He who believes in Him is not condemned, but he who doesn’t believe is condemned already, because he doesn’t believe in the name of the only begotten Son of God.”

People who reject God will be apart from Him forever, not because they have not been forgiven, but because they will refuse the gift of the forgiveness that has been purchased for them. It’s stiff-arming God.

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.