Grace Revolution: Experience the Power to Live Above Defeat (30 page)

My dear reader, the righteousness of faith speaks! The Bible exhorts us by saying, “Let the weak say, ‘I am strong’” (Joel 3:10). Faith always speaks what it wants to see, not what it currently sees. Faith is “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen” (Heb. 11:1). So when you are weak, you say by faith, “I am strong in the strength of the Lord. I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me” (see Phil. 4:13). When there is sickness in your body, you say by faith, “By His stripes I am healed” (see 1 Pet. 2:24). When there is lack in your life, you say by faith, “My God provides for all my needs according to His riches in glory by Christ Jesus” (see Phil. 4:19).

And when you have sinned, what do you say? That’s the time to say
by faith, “I am the righteousness of God in Christ Jesus” (see 2 Cor. 5:21). That’s the time to declare and reinforce your righteous identity in Christ. Those who receive the gift of righteousness receive the power to reign over sin (see Rom. 5:17)!

There are people who think that all the gospel of grace does is liberate people from guilt and condemnation. That is certainly true, yet I receive many more testimonies from people who were liberated from
destructive sins
,
addictions
, and
bondages
when they began to understand the gospel of grace and actively confess by faith their righteousness in Christ. Here is one from Jimmy, a young man who resides in New York:

What an amazing testimony! Fifteen years of pornography addiction that could not be removed no matter what he did just left effortlessly when Jimmy began to believe and confess his righteousness in Christ. And just like Jimmy, many others today are overcoming sin in their lives by awaking to righteousness. They are learning to lay hold of this gift that they have through Christ and to speak it boldly.

I think it is rather ironic that there are people who have criticized ministries for their “overemphasis” on God’s abundant grace, thinking that this is dangerous and will lead to licentious and sinful living. Well, what is the result of a ministry that is constantly preaching our Lord Jesus and what He says about the abundance of grace? We keep receiving praise report after praise report from people who have been set free from different addictions, including pornography, smoking, drinking, and using drugs, and from other destructive bondages.

Isn’t this the holiness that we as ministers of God are all desirous to see in God’s precious people? Instead of debating and arguing, I believe that ministers should be united in lifting up the name of our Lord Jesus and His finished work. We should be helping God’s people discover their righteous identity in Christ so that they can start experiencing the power to live above defeat. This is what the grace revolution is all about.

I
t has been almost fifteen years since I had the dream in which I heard the Lord saying to me, “The grace revolution is here.” That was way back in 2001. I still remember thinking, “Yes, Lord, I know it is coming.” Then He said, “No, it is
here
.” And He added, “I will set up shepherds over My flock and they will feed them.
And My flock will fear no more, nor be discouraged, nor be lacking.
”

As I heard the Lord speaking in the dream, I knew He was quoting from Jeremiah 23:4. Then He gave me an impartation in my spirit and unveiled to me that the message to be preached—the
now word
for the grace revolution—was also found in Jeremiah 23.

In the grace revolution, God Himself is setting up shepherds who will preach the gospel of grace with authority and impart to the hearers security, certainty, assurance, and confidence so they will no longer be oppressed by fear or discouragement! If you have lost many years living in doubt, fear, and depression, God is restoring those lost years to you in the grace revolution. So as we kick off the final key of this book, I can’t wait to show you how the Lord is going to bring about restoration in every area of your life.

When the Lord restores, what He gives is always greater in quantity or quality than what was lost. Whatever the enemy has stolen from you, we are going to believe the Lord for a 120 percent restoration. Why 120 percent? Because it is based on the principle of restitution in the trespass offering found in Leviticus 5 and 6. Leviticus 6 says,

Here we see God detailing what a person must do to provide restitution (or restoration) to someone he has injured. Notice this law states that he “shall restore its full value, add one-fifth more to it, and give it to whomever it belongs.” The full value of whatever was lost, defrauded, or stolen, plus one-fifth, is 120 percent of the original value. Now, this principle of restoration was under the law of Moses. How much more, then, can we expect restoration under the new covenant of grace—“a far better covenant with God, based on better
promises” (Heb. 8:6
NLT
). This is why we are going to trust God for a 120 percent—and more—restoration!

Notice also that the person brings his restitution on the day of his trespass offering. The trespass offering is a picture of what Jesus did for us at the cross. He became our substitute and was judged in our place for every trespass we committed so that we can freely receive every blessing of God, including the blessing of restoration. My dear friend, if you have accepted Christ as your trespass offering, God’s much-more restoration is coming your way. If the enemy has stolen from you or defrauded you of the best years of your life, then in that very area in which you have suffered loss, God is going to give you much more than you had before. He is going to restore to you the years the locusts have eaten—and in greater measure than you can imagine. Your best days are ahead of you!

Joel 2:25–26 contains this beautiful promise that I want you to read for yourself:

The most precious thing that our Lord Jesus can restore to you is the lost years of your life. All the years that the locusts have eaten, God can supernaturally restore to you. Every minute spent in fear, worry, doubt, guilt, condemnation, addiction, and sin adds up to wasted years that have been stolen from you. But I have good news for you today. Because of what our Lord Jesus has done for us on the cross, you can believe for total and complete restoration, for God to redeem ALL the time that has been lost and wasted!

Let me share this phenomenal testimony of God’s restoration from a brother by the name of Clarence, who resides in West Virginia:

The grace revolution is a revolution of restoration. All the years this precious brother had lost to his addiction were restored to him when
he embraced the grace of our Lord. In the same way, all the years lost wandering in the parched wilderness of legalism, Christian religion, and the ways of the old covenant can be restored to you. You don’t have to live bound by the shackles of legalism. Our Lord Jesus said,

What is “the truth” that has the power to set us free? Remember, our Lord was speaking to the Jewish people, so “the truth that they
shall
know” could not have been the old covenant of the law, which the Jewish people were already well versed in, as they had studied it from a young age. Knowing and attempting to keep the law to earn their righteousness had not given them the freedom they sought. It had, in fact, become for them an impossibly heavy yoke to bear.

To understand what “the truth” is, I want to bring you to Acts 15, where the Jerusalem Council had convened to debate which of the old covenant laws should be imposed on Gentile believers. Look at what Peter said:

There are so many things we can glean from this passage. Let’s start by looking at what Peter was referring to when he spoke about God giving the Holy Spirit to the Gentile believers in the same way that He had given the Holy Spirit to the Jewish believers. Peter was referring to his preaching to Cornelius’s household and how the Holy Spirit fell upon
all
the Gentiles there who heard him as he was speaking these words: “To Him all the prophets witness that, through His name,
whoever believes in Him will receive remission of sins
” (see Acts 10:43–44, emphasis mine). Notice at what point the Holy Spirit fell—when Peter said that those who
believe
in Jesus will receive forgiveness of sins. When the Gentiles there simply put their
faith
in the Lord Jesus for the forgiveness of their sins, they were filled with the Holy Spirit!

The Jewish believers who were present with Peter then were astonished to see the gift of the Holy Spirit being poured out on the Gentiles for the first time. They saw how even Gentiles could receive the Holy Spirit in the same way they did (see Acts 10:45–46). It was an unprecedented, unthinkable phenomenon for the Jews of the early church to witness, since under Old Testament laws, Gentiles were considered unclean (see Acts 10:28).

In Acts 11, when Peter was later criticized by Jewish believers for having entered the home of Gentiles and preached to them, he shared with them his vision in which a voice from heaven had told him, “What God has cleansed you must not call common.” And when he told them how the Holy Spirit had fallen on the Gentiles “as upon us at the beginning” (see Acts 11:9, 15), the Jewish believers acknowledged that God had also granted to the Gentiles “repentance unto
life” (see Acts 11:18
KJV
). Notice that although Peter himself didn’t use the word
repentance
in his preaching at Cornelius’s house, what happened there was nonetheless seen as God’s granting them repentance unto life!