Grace Revolution: Experience the Power to Live Above Defeat (31 page)

This brings me to my next point. At the Jerusalem Council, what did Peter say about
how
the hearts of the Gentile believers were purified? By their confession of sins or by faith?

By faith (see Acts 15:9)!

The Gentiles heard the forgiveness of sins being preached by Peter,
believed
the good news, and had their hearts
purified by faith
. Not by works, but by faith in Christ. Their hearts were purified by their
believing right
—believing that those who believed in the Lord would receive the remission of sins and be made the righteousness of God. Can you see that?

How are we made righteous today? How are our hearts purified today? By faith in our Lord’s finished work at the cross!

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus said, “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God” (Matt. 5:8). Now you are equipped to answer this question:
who
are the pure in heart? Those whose hearts have been purified by faith. Amen! This is how we use Scripture to
interpret Scripture. So don’t let someone impose on you his own opinion about how a person can be pure in heart. People can inject all kinds of their own beliefs and tell you that in order to have a pure heart, you need to do this and that. And you will end up thinking that if you fail to keep to their list of dos and don’ts, your heart will not be pure. Can you see how dangerous man’s opinions can be? Just like that, precious believers can come under great fear that if they aren’t doing something hard enough to continually keep their hearts pure, they will lose their salvation and end up not seeing the Lord.

I really struggled with Matthew 5:8 when I was a young believer. This was before the Lord opened my eyes to the gospel of grace. I sincerely wanted to have a pure heart before the Lord, and based on the teachings I had heard, I believed that I had to keep my heart pure by continually confessing my sins throughout the day. So I kept trying to confess all my sins, but the harder I tried, the more oppressed I felt. It felt as though I could never confess my sins enough to keep my heart pure. But praise the Lord for revealing to me that according to the authority of His Word (and not the uncertainty of human tradition), our hearts are purified
by faith
in our Lord Jesus. Hallelujah!

Now let’s go back to what the apostle Peter was saying. He told the Jerusalem Council, “[God] made no distinction between us and them, purifying their hearts by faith. Now therefore, why do you test God by putting a yoke on the neck of the disciples which neither our fathers nor we were able to bear?” (Acts 15:9–10). I submit to you that the “yoke” that Peter described as unbearable and impossible to keep
is the old covenant law. Some people will argue that the yoke here refers only to the ceremonial law of circumcision, but does that make sense to you?

Jewish males were circumcised on the eighth day after their birth—a time when they would not have been conscious of the law. Why would Apostle Peter describe circumcision as something that they and their fathers could not bear when it was something that was practiced on infants? Clearly the ritual law of circumcision was not the yoke he was referring to. The yoke that he was referring to was the yoke of the law. It was heavy, unbearable, and, when preached by our Lord, an impossible standard for any man to keep. That’s why the Lord told all the Jewish people who were under the heavy yoke of the law,

That, my friend, is the gospel of grace! Stop trying to be justified through the law of Moses. You are justified by faith. The Lord Jesus says to you, “Come to Me, and I will give you
rest
.” Notice that the word
restoration
begins with REST. As you rest in His grace and finished work, you will receive your restoration!

The Bible makes it so clear that we are justified by faith. So why is it that so many people continue to be bound by the crushing demands of the law of Moses? I believe that it is because they don’t fully understand what our Lord Jesus paid for on the cross of Calvary. They don’t understand what the new covenant is all about. I’m about to delve into something that could seem somewhat profound if you are hearing it for the first time. But stay with me. I believe that you will be greatly blessed when your eyes are opened to the truths I’m about to share!

When our Lord stood in the synagogue in Nazareth, He was handed the book of Isaiah and He found the place where the following was written:

Now pay close attention to what our Lord did next. The Bible records this: “Then He closed the book, and gave it back to the attendant and sat down…. And He began to say to them, ‘Today this Scripture is fulfilled in your hearing’” (Luke 4:20–21).

Many people have missed what our Lord did. He
closed the book
. Why is this significant? My dear reader, if you don’t understand why our Lord closed the book, you will struggle to understand God’s
Word. There are even respected Bible scholars and learned theologians who fail to fully grasp why our Lord closed the book. As a result they don’t have a holistic understanding of the gospel of grace.

The apostle Paul would be able to identify intimately with such ministers. Before his encounter with the Lord on the road to Damascus, he too had the veil of the law over his eyes and couldn’t see and appreciate God’s grace. With all sincerity he persecuted those who believed in the gospel of grace. In fact, Paul was so zealous that the Bible records he “made havoc of the church, entering every house, and dragging off men and women, committing them to prison” (Acts 8:3).

Having personally experienced such blindness, Paul described the condition in 2 Corinthians 3:14–15: “But their minds were blinded. For until this day the same veil remains unlifted in the reading of the Old Testament, because the veil is taken away in Christ. But even to this day, when Moses is read, a veil lies on their heart.” But once the veil was removed from Paul’s heart, God entrusted to him the gospel of grace. That’s right, God turned the most notorious and zealous Pharisee of Pharisees into His biggest champion and evangelist for the gospel of grace. So don’t be surprised if one day, you see the most notorious critic of the gospel of grace become the biggest evangelist for the grace revolution!

Let’s come back to the question I asked: Why did our Lord close the book of Isaiah after He had read the portion that we quoted earlier? To understand this, you have to look at the Scripture He was quoting from in fuller context:

Notice that a comma separates “the acceptable year of the L
ORD
” and “the day of vengeance of our God.” And it is right at this comma that our Lord closed the book of Isaiah. He didn’t go on to read the part about the day of God’s vengeance. Why? Because our Lord, Who was standing in Nazareth as He read those Scriptures, had come to proclaim the acceptable year of our Lord—remember what He said next: “Today this Scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.” Our Lord Jesus was teaching us to rightly divide the Word of God.

The age that we live in today is the age of grace. We are under the dispensation of grace. The “acceptable year” is not a calendar year from January to December. It speaks of the dispensation, time, and season that we are in. We are not in the age of “the day of vengeance.” That day will come, and our Lord will return to deliver Israel from total destruction and judge the earth.

The Greek word for “acceptable” here is
dektos
. According to the Greek scholar Thayer,
dektos
is “that most blessed time when salvation and the free favors of God profusely abound.”
¹
Praise be to God, we are still in this
dektos
season. We are still in the acceptable year under the dispensation of grace. Our preaching and understanding of God’s Word must be according to the dispensation we live in.

If I were living in the time of the Old Testament, I would be a preacher and advocate of the Ten Commandments and all the rituals of the tabernacle. But I am not living in that time, and neither are you. We are living in “the acceptable year,” the
dektos
year of our Lord, which has spanned two thousand years. Isn’t it amazing that God’s Word is so rich that a comma represents a divide of two thousand years? So when you study God’s Word, you have to read the context, understand whom the Scripture is written to, and, as we have just seen,
rightly divide the Word
, as our Lord Jesus did in Nazareth.

There are people who accuse those who preach grace of picking and choosing Scriptures that fit into their messages. Hang on a second—are you saying that our Lord Jesus was picking and choosing Scriptures when He read from the book of Isaiah? I didn’t think so. The Word of God is very consistent and precise. And like a surgeon wielding his scalpel, those who are teaching God’s Word need to be skillful and rightly divide God’s Word. We just witnessed how precise our Lord is. Once He proclaimed the
dektos
year, He shut the book. Is our Lord ignoring the context of those Scriptures? Absolutely not. In fact, He saw the bigger context in terms of dispensation and declared that at that precise moment, Isaiah’s prophecy was being fulfilled. The age of grace had come.

Unfortunately, there are many who are getting the larger context of the dispensations and covenants all jumbled up. They mix the dispensation of the law with grace, and confuse the old covenant with the new covenant. The result is a confusing theology. They preach grace and they also preach the law. They preach new covenant truths, but they also preach old covenant truths. They preach righteousness by faith, but they also preach righteousness by works. They preach that all your sins are forgiven, but then qualify that your sins aren’t
forgiven if you don’t confess them. They take Scriptures that are specifically meant for Israel and apply them directly to the church today. They preach an unconditionally loving Father, but also an angry, frustrated, and disappointed God. What they think is “balance” is really mixture—and it results in confusion for all who hear them.

My dear reader, God is not a schizophrenic God. God is the same yesterday, today, and forever. There isn’t one God of the Old Testament and another God of the New Testament. There is only
one
God. But He relates to us according to the age, dispensation, and covenant that we are in. You can’t simply take something that was recorded and spoken during the dispensation of the law of the old covenant, and apply it to new covenant believers today.

Likewise, you cannot take what was recorded and spoken
before
the cross of Jesus and apply it to new covenant believers today. Can you learn and draw principles from those Scriptures? Absolutely, for “all Scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, thoroughly equipped for every good work” (2 Tim. 3:16–17). You can draw guiding principles from all Scriptures, but you need to be discerning and to rightly divide the Word. As the apostle Paul said to his young apprentice, Timothy, “Be diligent to present yourself approved to God, a worker who does not need to be ashamed,
rightly dividing
the word of truth” (2 Tim. 2:15, emphasis mine).

When you learn to rightly divide God’s Word, I believe you will
begin to see His grace, His love, and His security flood every area of your life. Let me share with you a precious testimony of restoration that Valerie, a lady from Illinois, sent to us:

Valerie, thank you for sharing your powerful faith journey!

Isn’t it amazing that as Valerie began to learn how to rightly divide God’s Word, she began to experience God’s abundant restoration in quite literally every area of her life, that included an intimate relationship with Him, restoration of physical health, and blessed family relationships? This is such an encouragement to my team and to me because preaching the gospel of grace is all about helping and lifting up God’s precious people. I am deeply humbled and grateful to be a part of this grace revolution that is transforming one life, one marriage, and one family at a time across the entire world. All honor, glory, and praise to our Lord Jesus Christ!