Growing in Grace

Well good morning again and today we are kicking off our fall series, "Miracle Bro" and it's all about how God's Spirit produces just through the miracle of His grace, this organic, sustainable, spiritual growth in our lives. My name is Mark, one of the pastors, I want to welcome you. So glad that you are joining us here today, not only in this room, but next door in venue or in Facebook live. However you're with us, we are so glad.

And maybe some of you, you've never even been to Twin Lakes before, you just thought, "I'm going to go check it out," or you've been curious about what it means to be a Christian and so you're just kind of kicking the tires of Christianity and who's Jesus, what does that mean? Some of you, you've been a believer for decades, well I'm here to tell you this morning, you are in the right place, whatever category you fall into, because this series really gets to the heart of what it looks like to be a follower of Jesus, how we live and who we are.

And it looks like this description that comes out of Paul's letter to the Galatians in the New Testament in chapter 5 verse 22, it says that the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Let me ask you, do you think our world could use some people that embody these types of qualities? Do you think just a little bit? I mean my goodness, it is not hard to find the opposite of all of this stuff, whether it's hatred, violence, divisiveness, abuse, it's a lack of civility.

I mean our world is desperate for people who embody love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control and I got news for you at Twin Lakes Church, this is the kind of person that you were created to be. This is who we are created to be, not just Mother Teresa or Martin Luther King Jr. or Billy Graham, you and me. And the only way it's going to happen, if it's going to happen at all, is through the miracle of God's grace in our lives.

And so as an overview of this entire series, I want to give you some context around these verses we're going to be talking about growing in grace. Now if you've been here for any length of time, you know we talk about grace a lot here at Twin Lakes Church. But today I want to give us a sense of kind of the fullness of it. In the simplest terms, grace means to be on the receiving end of God's favor. God's love, His mercy, His forgiveness, but every good thing that we enjoy in life is an extension of His grace.

You know, your next breath, your heartbeat, the fact you woke up this morning, your next meal, the beauty of creation, it's all an extension of His grace. Today I want to draw attention to just three aspects of God's grace and I want to give a credit, a pastor named Francis Chan got a couple ideas from him. Also the book that Adrian mentioned, Cultivating the Fruit of the Spirit, excellent, excellent book and I got some ideas for the sermon from that as well.

So if you haven't picked one up, I really encourage you to do that and if you don't have the money, we don't want that to be an obstacle, we're not really here to make money off this book. And so if you don't have the money, just go up to one of those tables where the books are and say, "Mark said to put this on his account." Okay? I'm serious and we want you to be all in on this series. But again, three aspects to God's grace in our lives and how that brings about spiritual growth and the first one is saving grace and if you're a note taker, you can write that down in the message notes that are in your bulletin, saving grace.

And this is the aspect of grace that we're most familiar with, that we are saved by grace. But you know what? Everything from the beginning to the end of our journey of Christ is again an extension of His grace and Paul touches on this at the beginning where he says in Galatians 5:13, "You, my brothers and sisters, were called to be free." Now, let's just stop there at that word called because the reality is we're not here today because of some innate piety in our lives. We're here because in one way or another, God has called us to gather together and to gather with Him.

You’ve been called. Don't ever take that for granted. In fact, everything inside us that yearns for God is there because He has placed that yearning inside of us. Solomon says in Ecclesiastes 3 that He has put eternity in our hearts. And you know this from your own experience. There's something inside you that yearns for something that's bigger and better than this very brief and broken existence that we experience in this life. That's God's grace putting that yearning in us.

The Apostle Paul says in Acts 17, the story is he's talking to the philosophers in Athens and in that speech, he says that God has essentially been moving throughout history, appointing our time and our place so that we might reach out and find Him, though He is not far from any of us. He's been orchestrating things in your life you don't even see them so that you might reach out for Him and find Him again. That's all part of God's grace in calling us.

I can still remember a very specific moment in my life. I was nine years old. I was in a church not too far from here. I was not there because it was my choice to be there. It was my dear parents' decision to have me in church that day. And two girls that I knew were being baptized. During their baptism, I was struck by something. A light went on in my heart, my little nine-year-old brain. The imagery of baptism, the picture of being buried with Christ and raised to newness and the forgiveness of sin, that just struck me in a very powerful way and I knew I wanted what those girls had. I wanted Jesus.

Now, there were a lot of things I did not understand but there were two in particular that I was thinking of in that moment. The first thing was I knew that if you receive Jesus into your heart, He promises to forgive us of all of our sins. And even though I was only nine years old, I had already racked up a considerable amount of sinning and so that sounded like a really good deal. Clean the slate. Mine's gotten pretty dirty.

The second thing I knew was that when you die, if you're a Christian, you go to heaven and I thought, "Wow, that is far and away the better option." And so I'm like, "I am all in. I want to receive Christ." And in those days, it was traditional in this church, a lot of other churches. If you wanted to become a Christian, take that first step of faith, the pastor would invite you during the last song to come forward in church. So we called it, "You've got to come forward in church. You've got to come down to the center aisle. Everyone can see you during the last song, but that's all right. You're going to do that." And on this particular day, the pastor didn't offer that invitation.

They just went into the song and he's there looking, following the choir leader and singing the song. And I don't know what he's thinking. Maybe he's thinking about lunch or he's thinking, "Football season starts today so he can't wait to get home." Or maybe he just thought, "His sermon just wasn't all inspirational. No one's going to become a Christian. Let's just kind of close in prayer." I don't know what it was, but I was not going to let that stop me. And so during that song, without asking my parents' permission or anyone else, I just get up and I start walking down the aisle.

My cousins are looking at me like, "What's he doing?" People in the church are looking at me like, "There's that Spurlock kid. He's going to go sabotage the service right here and now." That was the day that I received Jesus. Now like I said, there were some things I did not understand in that moment. In fact, I'm convinced that most of us do not understand a couple of things when we come to Christ. The first of us is that when we come to Jesus, we give our lives to him. He doesn't want just like a piece of us. He becomes a 10% shareholder or something like that. Now when he comes into our lives, he wants all of us.

He's not just there to kind of punch the ticket to heaven. He wants it all. It's like what really a man who's become a mentor to me. He's an English pastor named Richard Sibbes. Richard Sibbes lived 400 years ago, but he really, he still speaks to me through his books. I just want to be clear on that. Listen to what he says about saving grace of God and where it takes us in life. He says, "Grace is a powerful work of the Spirit, not only revealing to us our misery and deliverance through Christ, but emptying us of ourselves as being redeemed from ourselves and infusing new life into us and afterwards strengthening and quickening us when we droop and hang the wing, never leaving us until the conquest is perfect." Isn't that good?

You know what that means? That means that if you open up the door of your heart to Jesus, he's not just going to stay there in the entryway. In fact, he's not going to be content to just live in the guest room. Eventually, he's going to take over the whole house. That really leads to the second aspect, his empowering grace, empowering grace. Back of verse 13, Paul says, "You were called to freedom, but do not use your freedom to indulge the flesh. Rather serve one another humbly in love, for the entire law is fulfilled in keeping this one command, 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' If you bite and devour each other, watch out or you will be destroyed by each other."

Now what Paul's addressing here is a misunderstanding of grace. He's been talking about it since the beginning of really Galatians, but chapter 5, he talks about one of two traps that we will fall into whenever we misunderstand grace, and the first trap is called legalism. Legalism stems from this thought that how can we possibly be justified 100% simply by God's grace? There's a lack of confidence in that. The impulse of legalism is to add some qualifications. It kind of boils down to Jesus plus something more.

His life, death, and resurrection, that's not quite enough. We've got to add to that. We've got to help him out. It becomes often Jesus plus a set of very specific rules, or Jesus plus a set of theological perspectives, and invariably they're not about the core, the essentials of faith. There are things about the periphery, biblical molehills become mountains. They become the markers for inclusion in that particular group. So again, in short, legalism is Jesus plus anything in terms of being justified before the Lord.

Now, again, the impulse behind legalism is there's this concern that if I emphasize grace too much, you know what's going to happen? People are going to take that, they're going to run with it, and they're going to go off and live sloppy lives. And sometimes that's exactly what happens. That brings us to the second trap of misunderstanding God's grace, and it's that grace gives me license to just go and do whatever I want. And yet that's exactly why Paul says, "Don't use your freedom to indulge the flesh."

So whether it's the rule makers on one side or the rule breakers on the other, it doesn't matter if it's either self-righteousness or selfishness, in the process people invariably get chewed up in those kind of environments. You get chewed up in those traps. And again, Paul follows with this at verse 15 when he says, "If you bite and devour each other, watch out, or you will be destroyed by each other." There is a destructive, mutually destructive nature to either legalism or license. But the beauty of God's grace is that it empowers us to love others as much as we even love ourselves.

And you know what? You can't manufacture that kind of love. You can't will yourself into that kind of love. And certainly no rule can compel you to love that way, but the Spirit can, and the Spirit does. And think about it. Love is the antidote to self-indulgence. If you truly love someone, you're not going to cheat them, you're not going to harm them, you're not going to rob them, you're not going to abuse them because the love of Christ will form the appropriate boundaries on your behavior. And that's why there is freedom in this, and there's a beauty in this.

Now the question is, though, and this is a rather big question, how do we actually live this out? And the short answer is, we don't, at least in our own strength. We need the empowering grace of God through his Spirit, and Paul's going to tell us how this happens, how this works starting at verse 16 when he says, "So I say, 'Walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh. For the flesh desires what is contrary to the Spirit, and the Spirit what is contrary to the flesh. They are in conflict with each other, so that you are not to do whatever you want. But if you are led by the Spirit, you're not under the law.'

Now the good news is this. When we come to Christ, we're given, the Spirit of the Lord indwells us, lives in us, and we're given a new nature. That's the good news, and that's how we learn to grow. But the bad news is this, that the old nature is still there. And the two do not get along. Did you get what Paul was saying? They're in opposition. They're in conflict with each other. And by the way, Paul calls this sin nature and this old nature the flesh, not because our bodies are intrinsically evil. He calls this the flesh because it's so embedded in us.

I mean, from conception, from birth, it's embedded inside us, this sinful nature. If you're a parent, you never have to teach your kids how to lie, how to hit, how to disobey. They just come by naturally. We all do. That's the flesh. That's the problem. So Paul says, "Walk by the Spirit, and you'll gratify who desires the flesh because they're mutually exclusive." You can't walk in the Spirit and walk in the flesh at the same time. It just doesn't work.

In fact, I'll give you an example. There's a lot of talk these days about the health benefits of walking. How many of you just like to walk, not only for pleasure, but for exercise? Because the more they learn, the more it's just such an excellent way to exercise, and you're not going to pull a hamstring on a walk probably, or get an ACL blowout or something like this. All these benefits. And not only that, but think about where we live. I mean, it's incredible. All the options that we have to go for walks, you know, West Cliff Drive, Pleasure Point East Cliff, or go to Henry Cowles, or Nicene, Redwood Forest. We are so blessed.

So let's just pretend. Let's imagine that we all decide, for the sake of our health, we're going to start walking, and we're really excited about that. And so, you know, we get our special walking shoes, and we get our walking outfits on, and some of us are like the lycra people, and some of us are not the lycra people, but whatever. It's okay, we're all one in the Spirit of God, and then we get, you know, we got your hat and your glasses, and if you're like me, you know, you have to smother yourself with the sunscreen. But we get ready, we're going to go for a walk. We're so excited, kind of heading out the door, and I think, "Oh, whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a minute. Wait a minute. I almost forgot what's the most important thing for this walk. I forgot the Cheetos, right?"

So we're walking along and saying, "We're on West Cliff Drive, and there's Mark going, 'I don't know.' Well, this walk is awesome, guys. Come on. I'm feeling all... Look at that whale. I'm feeling, mmm, mmm." But day after day, I'm not getting the benefit out of walking, okay? It's not going to happen. It's going to walk faster. Now, this is the trick right here. And after a couple months, I just conclude... I'm stuck now. This whole walking thing, it's overrated, okay? I gained weight. What is the deal? All right. You'd never do that. Nobody does that, okay? We all know Cheetos are not for walking.

They're not for exercise. Cheetos are for the couch, right? Cheetos are for when you want to indulge the flesh. You cannot do something that's healthy. Or is Elizabeth in here? If you're pregnant, you'll probably like these too. I will save those for her. Where are we? Paul is saying, "Just keep walking in the Spirit. Just keep walking." You won't indulge the desires of the flesh. And what I mean by this is this is where we... This is why prayer, Bible study, gathering together on a weekly basis. When we get together and we worship, we hear from God's Word, all of these things, times together, times alone.

These are times where we not only make space for the Spirit's influence in our life, but we're participating in this and cooperating with us. And the Spirit cultivates the soil of our hearts and nourishes us and strengthens us as we walk in the Spirit. Paul says it, verse 18, "But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the law." In other words, you're not under the law because the Spirit has set you free to serve out of love. Not because there's some rule that if you don't do, you feel guilty or you feel obligated. You do it because the Spirit has given you the love, the desire to do it.

In other words, though, there's a little thing that he says I don't want us to miss. He says, "If you are led." Little word with big implications, right? The point being, we still have a choice. God's power is available to us, but we get to cooperate. We actually get to invite the Spirit to do His work in our lives. It's not about becoming some kind of robot where you have no more control, no more will. We have the ability to say, "Lord, I want you to lead me." And I have to say, if I'm keeping it real, I've been thinking this week about how rarely I think about coming to the point where I consciously say, "Father, lead me by Your Spirit. Lead me."

There are things I want the Spirit to do in my life. I want the Spirit to be a source of comfort and encouragement and blessing, and I want the Spirit to empower me if I'm preaching or teaching or doing something. Those are all kind of right there, very obvious to me. But to say, "Holy Spirit, will You lead me wherever that may be?" I mean, that's a scary proposition if you really think about it, because what if the Spirit leads me someplace I don't want to go? What if the Spirit were to lead me to a change in career, a change in zip code?

It takes a lot of trust to hand the keys of your life over to God and say, "Now lead me from this point forward." But you know what? If you find yourself in that place, when you find yourself in that place, I want you to be encouraged because that's the Spirit of God working in you. When you get to the place where you say, "Father, not My will, but Your will be done, that's what I want more than anything else. I got news for you." That's the Spirit of Christ speaking through you because the flesh has no interest in that kind of surrender, none at all.

But the Spirit brings us to a place where we grow in love, we grow in obedience, and it all starts with that little saving grace, a little seed of faith, and then again, we grow in obedience and love and Christ's likeness through the empowering grace of God. And along the way, we change. We become examples of His transforming grace. We become more and more like Christ. And through this passage, Paul has really been comparing two very different ways to go through life, walking in the Spirit or living in the flesh.

And so in this next section, he's going to kind of draw out the implications of this. He's going to see this is what it looks like when it comes to fruition, and he's going to start with the flesh and what it looks like when the flesh, life in the flesh, reaches full bloom, you might say. And it says starting at verse 19, "The acts of the flesh are obvious, sexual immorality, impurity and debauchery, idolatry and witchcraft," which in those days involved, "drugs, hatred, discord, jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions, envy, drunkenness, orgies, and the like." Okay, sounds like my college dorm.

I mean, it really does. And the truth of the matter is, hey, I'm on that list. I'm on this list, and I'm not alone, because if we're being honest, we're all on this list one way or another, maybe not all of these things, but some of these things at times. And he says, "This is not exhaustive." He says, "These things and the like." We all at times live in the flesh. That's why we need a Savior. Paul's not talking here about periodic struggles with sin. I don't think he's even talking about long, difficult, painful struggles with sins.

I think what Paul is saying is, "This is what it looks like when the flesh reigns supreme in your life. This is what it looks like when you have no other Lord than you, because if you're your own Lord, man, that might feel liberating at the beginning, but you know what it leads? It leads to slavery, absolute slavery." Paul says, verse 21, "I warn you, as I did before, that those who live like this will not inherit the kingdom of God." Now those are sobering words.

But again, we're talking about the defining characteristics of a person's life, the things that they lived in those things, so they did not inherit the kingdom of God. And you know why they did not inherit the kingdom of God? It's because they did not want it. In the final analysis, they didn't want it, because you know what? After all, the kingdom of God has a king, and that king is Jesus. Why in the world would you want to live in a kingdom when you want nothing to do with its king?

You see, at that moment of saving grace, even if we're just barely aware of it, even if that's just the tiniest seed, there is something in that moment where we are saying, "Jesus, I want you to be my king. I want you to be the one who rules in my life." Again, even if we are just barely aware of it, even if it's just a little mustard seed of faith, as Jesus would call it, or even if it's like the man who said to Jesus one time, "Now I believe, Lord, now help me in my unbelief." God, He takes that little seed that was placed there by His grace, and by His Spirit, He starts to nurture it and cultivate it and cause it to grow, because now there's life in it, and it grows, and eventually it turns into a tree.

We turn into a tree, and that tree, because it's alive, it produces fruit. That brings us to the theme verse for our emphasis this fall, verse 22. I want you to read this with me. "But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control." That's what the Spirit does in our lives because of His grace. That's the promise of that. Now, isn't this the person you always long to be? I mean there's such beauty, there's such appeal to these things, and I'll tell you why. It's because this is a portrait of Jesus Christ.

Jesus embodies all of these things perfectly, and here's the... Holiness is beautiful. It's beautiful. It's lovely. And that's what the Spirit is producing in our lives by His grace. He transforms us into the likeness of Jesus Christ. Now, some of us may be at the very beginning of that, or maybe you haven't even begun that journey yet, but He's calling you. You're not here by accident. But even in those early, early parts of the journey, you start to see little blossoms, little buds. Be encouraged by that because that's the promise that there is more to come.

Some of us, you've been walking with the Lord a long time. The Holy Spirit's done a deep work in your life, and I wouldn't want to call you ripe, but you're mature. You're mature, and you're a blessing. You're a beautiful portrait of Christ to those around you. That's why Paul adds, "Against such things, there is no law." In other words, you don't have to fence these things in. You don't have to put a restraint on love, joy, peace, and so on. You just let them bloom. You let them grow. You let them prosper.

By His grace, our prayer is that we will all grow as the Spirit works in our lives over these next nine weeks. Because listen, Paul says, "Those who belong to Christ have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. Since we live by the Spirit, let us keep in step with the Spirit." This is what growing in grace looks like. It looks like keeping in step with the Spirit. In fact, this is what this series is about. This is the opportunity we have to grow in grace with the Spirit.

Are you willing to lean into this? Are you willing to, Twin Lakes Church, to embrace this opportunity? Because listen, I don't think that any of us, nine weeks from now, will go, "You know what? I got as little out of that as I possibly could." Yeah. No. Plunge yourself into this. Make yourself available to what the Spirit wants to do in your lives. In other words, let me just put it this way. Can we agree that for the next nine weeks, we're just going to put the Cheetos down and we're going to go for a walk? Can we agree to that? Can I hear you, Twin Lakes Church, that you're on board with that?

This could be amazing. What if God were to do an amazing work of revival in this church and what that would mean for our community? It could be so powerful. Now, I want to close speaking to those of you who for whatever reason, it's not resonating. Maybe it's like, "Oh, that's not a church program." No, it's not another church program. Or maybe you're thinking, "You know, Mark, I am so weary. I'm so tired. I'm so confused. I'm so sad. I don't even think. I don't have any expectation of what God might do in my life." Perhaps there was a time when you had a little seed of faith in your heart and that seed, you know, it got stepped on. It got trampled. It got abused. And so now it's gone cold. It's gone dormant in your life. In fact, as far as you're concerned, it's dead.

This week I read a fascinating story about how in 2012, Russian scientists, they discovered these seeds way down in the Siberian permafrost, 125 feet down, where the temperature is a steady 19.5 degrees. But in the very same area where they typically find the bones of woolly mammoths and woolly rhinoceroses, they find this cache of seeds and they're actually able to propagate these seeds and turn them into living plants. In fact, here's a picture of one right here. They don't even have a common name for this because it hasn't been around for a while. In fact, you want to know how old those seeds are according to radiocarbon dating? 32,000 years old.

32,000 years and they're growing plants from those seeds. Now what's amazing is the story gets even better because they're like, "Well, how in the world did this little kind of treasury of seeds get set down in the permafrost and just in the perfect conditions? How did they get there?" Well, there's another story because way back in 1946, some Russian political dissidents were put in prison and they were forced to hard labor. They were digging in mines in the very same area where they found these seeds. But they didn't find the seeds, they found something else. They found these prehistoric arctic ground squirrels. In fact, they were perfectly mummified. This is one of them right here down below the permafrost.

Anyone care to ask how old these guys are according to the same measurement of radiocarbon dating? About 32,000 years old. Now, unfortunately, they were not able to revive the squirrels. But there's this amazing story of these little squirrels, you know, stowing away these seeds down in their burrows in 32,000 years, scientists are able to grow those seeds into plants. Now here's my point. If mere mortals can coax life out of seeds that have been frozen and dormant for 32,000 years, I am confident that Jesus Christ can bring life out of the seed of faith in your heart no matter how cold or dead you think it is.

Because after all... After all, He is really good at resurrections. Really good. And so my question to you, wherever you're at, whether you feel discouraged, whether you feel ready, you feel somewhere in between, you got a lot more questions and answers, wherever you are, are you willing to ask this question, am I ready to grow in grace? Are you ready to grow in grace to In Lakes Church? And if you are, man buckle up because we are praying that the Spirit is going to show up in a powerful way.

In fact, let's pray towards that end. Heavenly Father, we thank You for Your goodness and Your grace to us, express supremely in Jesus Christ. And Lord, before I get to this little prayer at the end of our notes, I do, I just feel led to speak to the person who like me when I was nine felt You calling on their heart. Who like me knew that today was the day that I said yes. And if that's you, you might not understand it all, but you understand, you admit that you need to save you. You've got the scars to prove it. You've got the track record to prove it. You know that.

And you believe as much as you understand that Jesus came and He lived a perfect life, He died on the cross for you. Your sins were nailed to that cross. He took the punishment. And not only that, but He didn't stay down in the ground. He rose to life and because of that, this is a bona fide promise. We have a living Lord who says, I will forgive you of your sins and I will redeem your life. And that life that I give you, it starts here and now, but it extends into eternity. And you just want to follow Him. You want to say, yes, if that's you, I'm going to invite you to just raise your hand. You don't have to walk down the aisle. You just raise your hand right now so that you know there was a time I raised my hand, which is everyone else got their heads down. They're not worried about this, but you raise your hand. Yes. Yeah.

And Lord, I pray, I pray for those today who just want to say yes to you. And I pray that you bless them every step of the journey from here on out. I know you will because of the power of your grace. And Lord, I just want to close with this little prayer that John Stott would pray every day, lovely pastor. I want to pray it for myself and for everyone here, everyone next door, everyone watching wherever they are. Heavenly father, we pray that this day we may live in your presence and please you more and more. Lord Jesus, we pray that this day we may take up our crosses and follow you. Holy spirit, we pray this day you will fill us with yourself and cause your fruit to ripen in our lives. Give us love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Pray this in the name of our Lord and savior, Jesus Christ. And all God's people said, amen.