Point 1Faith is God's gift, so boasting ends
Romans chapter 4. Today our assignment is 16–21, and, I'm not going to belabor a bunch of things. We have really been in this chapter, we've talked quite extensively about faith and hope, and I really feel like we're starting to get it, that faith is a gift from God, and why it's a gift from God is so that it will eliminate our boasting. God's goal, and the way that he functions salvifically in our lives, is that it's his business, it's not our business, and he so takes ownership of salvation and gives us faith that we might believe for the purpose of eliminating our boasting, and then furthermore so that all glory will go to him.
It is amazing when we talk about things like salvation and faith and hope and love and mercy and all of these things, how often we begin to then evaluate how well we do those things. And I just want to remind you today that a secular mindset starts with you and everything emanates out, but a biblical mindset, everything starts with God and emanates out. So if some of these attributes of God, like faith, love, mercy, if those things get to you, it didn't start with you, it emanated from God.
And so the reason why he does that, and as a reminder, we've been learning this in Romans, the reason why he does this is to delete or eliminate boasting out of your life. He wants to take away every opportunity that you can take credit for what he's done. And if you've lived with yourself any amount of time, and all of you in the room have some amount of time living with yourself, you know that no hope can be placed in you, that if our hope is placed in us, we will be a hopeless generation. But our hope placed in Christ is strong. Our hope grows, our hope is stable, our hope can be confident. And I think that's what the apostle Paul wants for us: to have confident hope in God, confidence in a world where we're unsettled and we don't have a lot of confidence in very many things. One day something's bad, the next day it's good. One year coffee's good, the next year it will kill you and give you a heart attack, and then the following year after that coffee is good again, right? And there's many other things, and we don't really know who to believe and who to trust and who's telling a lie and who's telling the truth, amen. But with God, we can have confidence that what he says is true. Now, in a world where we're unsettled and we don't really know who we can trust, it is good to know that we can turn to his word and we can trust that. And really, quite honestly, it is very important that we understand that this Word is inherent, and we can have confidence in it.
That's important. It's important for our faith, and it's important for our hope, and it's important for our salvation, because the power of the gospel for salvation is not found in an evangelistic explosion or conference, it's found in his Word. The people are saved. You know how God gets faith to us?
Faith comes by hearing, and hearing the Word of God.
Some of us need to spend less time
Pastor Shawn Gray · 3:45
Point 2Open the Bible to know God's will
Trying to figure out God's will, and we need to spend more time opening his Word up so we can know his will. You can wonder what his will is, and you can use all of these New Age tactics that have steeped into the church, or you can just open his Bible and you can know his will. It is amazing how we will explore every other option possible, and we will put ten times the effort to try to discover God, when all we have to do is open a book up and spend five minutes in it. Now, in the church we don't get that, we don't see that as people are doing that. People go to conference after conference after conference, they pray for hours on end to try to hear God speak. Open it, and you'll hear him speak every single time.
Is prayer bad? No, that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying sometimes we are
Pastor Shawn Gray · 4:48
misusing what God has given us to do for our good pleasure, because at the end of the day, we really don't want to know God's will. Most of us know God's will, we just don't want to do his will. And so it is very important that if we're going to have hope, it comes from opening this up. Listen, and you may not be a reader today, I understand that, but if you want confidence today, you don't get to peruse the titles of a blog post and not actually read the blog post, or peruse a title on Facebook of a blog post, formulate an opinion, and make a comment before you ever read the blog. How many of you have ever seen that? It's hilarious, because some of those, just so you know, let me warn you, some of those posts they do is what they call clickbait, and so what they're actually talking about in the blog is not even what the title says. They just do it to get you to click in. And I've seen people actually make paragraph after paragraph refuting what the blog is about, but you clearly haven't read the blog, because it's not about the title at all. And we will formulate an opinion based on nothing, based on nothing. Now listen, so we spent all this time trying to discover God's will when all we have to do is open the Bible. I watch these movies, these criminal movies, you know, where they're bank robbers, and, you know, and then I've seen shows where drug dealers are laundering money. You know, I'm not washing it because it's dirty. But just like they, you know, they launder money. I actually used to think they washed the money. I was like, what's so wrong with the money? Is the money dirty? Like, did ink get on it? Or like, what? When I was younger, and now I realize, and here's what I think when I watch all of these things, or crime investigation, or CSI, how many of you ever watched CSI Miami, CSI new York, CSI Winchester, CSI, right? Why? One of the most fascinating things to me is I sit back oftentimes and I look across the way at Brook and I say, "man, if criminals would spend half as much time being legitimate, if they would just spend half as much time and energy educating themselves and being legitimate, they'd be wealthy without fear of prison or death." This is how I believe Christians live today. We will go through great measures to ensure that we continue to boast in ourselves. If I just open the Bible up and I look in there and I discover his will, all credit and glory goes to God. But if I have a dream and I interpret my dream well, now I get the credit for being a dream interpreter. Are you with me today? So we go through painstaking measures to get the glory. We create entire movements and divisions and sections and ministries in the church that people might get the glory. Open your Bible, God gets the glory.
That's why opening the Bible is boring for people, because they don't get a special title, they don't get a special calling, and they don't get a special position in the church, because everybody can open their Bible. And so what we will do is, much like a criminal, we will find every other way to get what we want from God without actually doing it legitimately. Paul is warning us of this. He's saying this kind of attitude causes men to boast.
You can't have confidence in yourself, you can only have confidence in him, so put your trust in him. Romans 4:16–21 says, "That is why it," everybody say it, "depends on faith." Now we need to know what it is. "That is why it depends on faith." What depends on faith? Now listen, part of the problem with reading sections of Scripture, even though we're going verse by verse, it's week by week, is we very easily forget what we talked about last week or the preceding eight weeks. Now listen, we are in a section where we are talking about we are justified by faith alone and made righteous before God.
That is pertinent information, and if that information does not then carry on to this, you miss it. "That is why it," it's connected to something that's been said before, "depends on faith, in order that the promise may rest on grace and be guaranteed to all his offspring, not only to the adherent of the law but also to the one who shares the faith of Abraham, who is the father of us all, as it is written, 'I have made you the father of many nations,' in the presence of God, in whom he believed, who gives life to the dead and who gives
Point 3God gives life; stop reviving dead things
Life to the dead." God. Oh listen, now that seems easy, but some of us have committed our whole lives to trying to revive something that God's trying to kill. Are you with me today?
Because how many times have you just tried to bring something back alive, but it's dead?
Could it be God gifts and God takes away? Could it be that the thing you've committed your whole life to revive, God's trying to kill?
Pastor Shawn Gray · 10:58
God didn't design you to run around and try to revive stuff. You only do that if you think life comes from you.
Some of us have busied ourselves trying to bring things back to life because we have quickly forgotten that from God life comes, and if life isn't coming, God isn't giving it. Okay, now let me pause here for a second, because some of you are wondering, "Shawn, that's tiptoeing close to fatalism."
Fatalism is, well, if God's sovereign and he's in control of everything, then I just don't need to worry about anything, I'm just going to live my life however I want, and I don't need to care about others, I don't need to love my neighbor, I don't need to feed the hungry, I don't need to do any of that. That's not what
I'm saying. I'm saying we need to let God be God.
Pastor Shawn Gray · 12:09
We need to let God be God, "who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist. In hope he believed against hope." It is hard to have hope when it seems hopeless. If you're putting your hope in things that are hopeless and that will never bring hope, but if you have put your hope in God, everything, and all hell can freeze over, and everything could go wrong in your life, and you can be in prison, and you can be tortured, and you can be hung upside down, and you can be persecuted, and you can lose your job, and you can lose your house, and you can be homeless, and everybody can hate you and your family can reject you, and you will still be confident in hope because it's in God, and he never wavers, and he never leaves or forsakes you, and he's always constant. That hope can be confident if it's in the right thing. Some of us live hopeless lives because we don't hope in God, we hope in us. And so the apostle Paul is trying to help us have confidence in our hope, and he's trying to help us to place our hope in God. I actually heard, I'm going to pause here for just a second, I actually heard somebody say that it's a popular position that people take that when people get to hell, people are going to be in hell wishing that they were in heaven, wishing that they were in heaven. This person, and I can't remember who it was, because I read a bunch during the week and I listen to stuff and I actually can't remember who said this, but I heard it wasn't from me. This person said no, everyone in hell will be happy. God's not there.
Because this is not an issue of whether or not you'll have a beautiful place to live in, a pretty house like in America, and you'll have good four-wheelers and maybe ten acres, and you'll have all this special, and a creek runs right through your yard, and you have a never-ending supply of food in your refrigerator, you never have to pay anything, and all life's wonderful, and everything you touch turns to gold, and it's wonderful and it's beautiful. That's not what
Heaven is. Heaven is you get to be in God's presence.
Pastor Shawn Gray · 14:33
And those who reject God, who are debased in their thinking, who do wrong against God although they know what is right, like in Romans 1, who then encourage other people to reject God and to deny God and to be debased in their thinking, and they encourage other people to sin, those people won't want God.
That was fascinating for me, because that turns heaven and hell, it takes it away from what we get to who we're with.
And today we are exercising the reality of our eternity by how we live.
"So shall your offspring be." In verse 19, "He did not weaken in faith." Notice here that the emphasis of weakening is not on faith being weakened, but he did not weaken in his faith. A lot of times we want to talk about our faith being strong. Listen, if God gives a measure of faith to every single person, he does not give in lack. He will give you what you need to accomplish everything you need to do in your life. Amen. Those Scriptures that I'm paraphrasing, you would agree with: God is not going to ask you to do anything that he will then not empower you to be able to do what he's asked you to do. That power by which he empowers you is faith. It only takes the faith of a mustard seed to move an entire mountain, to say that mountain, "Be removed from here to there." Only a faith of a mustard seed. So even little faith moves mountains. Little faith does more than we could ever hope to do in our own strength. But notice here that it is not the faith that grows, it is not the faith that is weakened, but it is that Abraham did not weaken in his faith. "He did not weaken in faith when he considered his own body, which was as good as dead, since he was about a hundred years old, and when he considered the barrenness of Sarah's womb. No unbelief made him waver concerning the promise of God, but he grew strong." Who grew strong? His faith grew strong?
No, "he grew strong in his faith." Let me just pause here. So all this thing where the church is creating this dispensation between where you are currently to what you could be, to the type of faith you have now to the type of faith you could have, we are making the issue as if God gave in lack, an insufficient supply, and it is our responsibility to make his trashy gift better by how we live.
Why do we do that in the church? Let me tell you why we do that. Because we want to boast, because we want credit for having a stronger faith than the person sitting to our left and to our right, because we want to have a select and special connection with God that no one else has, so that people will celebrate us, stand in awe of us, be amazed by us.
Listen, if you have faith of any measure, God is the one who should be worshiped, and God is the one we should be amazed about.
Pastor Shawn Gray · 18:09
And if your faith robs glory from God, it's not true faith. We should look at it's your pride, and it's destructive, and it goes before a fall in your life.
So don't forget here how easy it is to take biblical things, biblical gifts, biblical characters, biblical attributes, and apply it to our life, that we taint it and destroy its purpose. Verse 20: "No unbelief made him waver concerning the promise of God, but he grew strong in his faith as he gave glory to God,
Giving glory to God." Now, some of you, when you hear
Pastor Shawn Gray · 19:14
that, you think, "Oh God, we praise you." I mean, okay, but how many people, you know, they'll go, "oh God, we praise you," walk out and make everything about themselves. Giving glory to God is not lip service, ladies and gentlemen. Giving glory to God is when people look at your life, they see God is involved.
You can celebrate him with your lips, you can deny him with your life,
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and you can stand before him at the end, being involved in the church, having a title in the church, even pastoring the church, and God will say, "Depart from me, I don't know who you are." "Fully convinced that God was able to do what he had promised." Man, that's good news, right? How many of you wish today, you don't have to raise your hand, wish that you could be fully convinced that God will do what he promised? Now, some of you, when I say what God promised, be fully convinced that God will do what he promised, when I say promise, you guys thought of hundreds of things in here, but those hundreds of things are not listed here.
You're getting that job, that's not listed here. You marrying that man, although that would be great, that's not listed here.
God moving in and reconciling and helping you reconcile your marriage that's on the rocks, that's not listed here. Your children growing up being faithful servants of Christ, that's a good desire, right? The church fixing its glass that the deer ran through, it's not on here. I wish it was, because we need that fixed.
That's not listed here. You cutting that 20 pounds, 30 pounds before summer, and you should have started two months ago, just saying. Because I mean, because, saying, I mean, the groundhog ran back in and you got a couple more weeks, but I'm just telling you it's on the way, baby. And if you ain't done it by now, if you, I mean, just let it all hang out this summer, that's all I'm saying. Like, just keep eating Oreos and just let it all hang out, because it's too far, we're too late now, it's too late. No, you shouldn't keep on eating Oreos. I'm just saying. Actually, in the last, in this week, I've been passing a kidney stone. I've been very sick. I've been very sick this week. What I've noticed is that when I'm in pain and when I don't feel good, there are two things that I love in life: one is sugar and the other is macaroni and cheese. Now, I don't know, but I have gone through like seven boxes of macaroni and cheese, and I'm not talking about I share it with the family. Like, I will get a box of macaroni and cheese, I will put a half a stick of butter, and sometimes I do a whole stick, just don't tell Brook, and I put that in there, I put that in there, I mix all that cheese in there, and it's like 1,500 calories. Yum. Get you some, you know what I mean? It's good, I love it's fantastic, it's just amazing. And then I sit around the house during the day, I have some macaroni and cheese, you know, I'm thinking, man, I got, shoot, I mean, just in my resting calories I got another thousand calories I can burn, so I save it, I don't even, I'm going to skip dinner, and then I eat like a whole row or half of Oreos, you know?
And it was interesting, because last night I actually felt convicted, right, about this. You laughed. I was a legitimate conviction, and I felt like there's kind of this lingering thought in my head: is that what you turn to when you're in pain? Now, we can sit here today and we can be critical of those who have drug addictions, we can be critical of those who have alcohol addictions, we could be critical of those who love attention and they will get attention by any means necessary, if it means kill and assault your character, they will kill and assault your character. But it is because they are trying to medicate the pain of their life, the rejection, the pain of their life. Paul is telling us nothing satisfies like Christ.
You can turn to it, you can have sweet and momentary relief, but it is not lasting. It is not lasting.
And if you live your life with Christ the way you lived it without Christ, chasing the next fix, I just came here today to tell you,
God isn't your fix. He's not going to be the next hit. He's either everything or he's nothing.
Pastor Shawn Gray · 24:13
And if you're still everything, then he's not everything. Coming into a relationship with him kills you. You have to die.
Now, let's back up. I'm going to make a couple points and I'm going to close this thing out. What is the "it"? We'll make this quickly. I don't think we need to belabor them. I think we've talked a lot about faith. But what is the "it" at the very beginning, "that is why it depends on faith"? Let's start with verse 16 and answer the first question that turns up. Here's verse 16: "For this reason it is by faith." What does "it" refer to?
"For this reason it is by faith." Now, if you had the NIV, they interpret it for you by saying this: "The promise comes by faith."
Now wait just a second. The original simply says this, in the original Greek, this is the way that it words it: "For this reason, by faith, in order that according to grace." That's why they translated for us, because if you weren't confused, you know what I mean?
At that, I'm going to read it again: "For this reason, by faith, in order that according to grace." What then is by faith? It is simply the promise that is by faith. Now look back to verse 13, if you have your Bibles. Here's what it says: "For the promise to Abraham or to his offspring that he would be heir of the world did not come through the law but through the righteousness of faith." This is imputed righteousness, ladies and gentlemen. This is imputed. Everybody say "imputed." We've talked about that for three weeks. Here he says that the promise comes not just through faith but through the righteousness of faith. It's certainly not wrong to say that the promise is through faith, but Paul is saying something more here. Don't forget what this whole chapter is about. It's about justification by faith. That is, it's about having a righteousness that is not our own but is credited to us by faith, apart from works, that no man can boast. So don't turn faith into a work. Verse 13 says that the promise that we are heirs of the world is ours through the righteousness of faith, that is, through the righteousness of God credited to our account through faith. So then what is by faith in verse 16?
When Paul says, "For this reason it is by faith," here's my answer: the righteousness of God that obtains the promise for us is by faith.
You can't get the promise until you're made righteous, and you can't be made righteous and have that imputed to you unless you have faith in Jesus Christ.
You see, they're all connected. They're all connected. Now, what we want to do is we want to pull righteousness out and we want to think, "I'm going to live righteously," or we say, "I'm going to have faith," and we turn it into a work. Now God doesn't get glory and we can boast in it. All of these are connected. Why are they all connected? Because you're only justified by faith in righteousness.
We believe, we trust God's promise to us obtained for us by Christ, and God imputes his righteousness to us through this faith, and on the basis of that imputed righteousness, the promise is secured for us that we then will be heirs of this world. Number two, so what is the "it"? We talked about what the "it" is. Number two, God gives life, not you. Some of you have carried the burden too long to bring life to your kids, life to your marriage, life to your job, life to your community, life to your neighbors, life to the lost, life to everyone. Life to everyone. Life comes from God and God alone.
Some people try to bring life to situations so much they end up smothering it to death and killing it. You remember that book, "I just want to love it and hug it and squeeze it and kill it," you know what I mean? Just want to love it and he's loving it and cuddling it and squeezing it and smushing it and kissing it so much he ends up killing it. Some of us do that with our children.
Some of us don't care enough, but some of us smother our kids to the degree that we just smother them and kill them in an attempt to bring life. Let me tell
You what, that's the craziest part, is that we're trying to help but we end up killing,
Pastor Shawn Gray · 30:08
you know, while we end up killing when we try to help, because we don't bring life.
God does. Some of us need to spend more time turning to God and less time fixing our neighbor.
That's good stuff right there. God gives life. Psalm 121 starts with a question, and here's the question: where does our help come from?
And then the writer begins to go down all the different ways that we see that our help comes from God alone. Let me ask you this question: when you're in trouble, who do you turn to? Who's the first person you call? Who's the first person you talk to? I don't think it's bad to come talk to your pastor. I think the counsel is good. I think your pastor is a cure for that. But if you turn to me before you turn to God, you're missing the mark.
Where does your help come from? Some of you might say my parents, some of you might say, well, my friends, some of you might say, well, my family members, some of you might say, well, my husband or my wife, some of you might say, well, from people in the church. But whose first answer would be, "My help comes from God"? And who's, who's, who's got, I would propose to you today that who you have on speed dial, those people run the risk of you going to first. I know you're like, "Well, if I could have gone on speed dial, I'd go to him first."
You know, I get it, but who do you turn to? Who do you turn to?
Point 4New Age ideas masquerade as biblical truth
Our help comes from God. Now, today we live in a generation, can I just stop here for a second? Let's just talk for a second. Living in a generation now, one of the things that I am really concerned about, in church, not just our church but in the hearts of men and women in our fellowship, but the greater evangelical church today in America, we have allowed so much New Age ideology to begin to shape how we function and, more importantly, the way we interact with God. And as a matter of fact, we so adore New Age principles and ideas that those things we post get more likes than anything else. You could literally post Scripture, crickets. You could post some New Age idea that
People use in their Christian walk, thousands of likes. Paganism is not just out there
Pastor Shawn Gray · 33:16
anymore.
Paganism has worked its way inside the church and sits in our pews on Sunday, and what's even sadder about that is that this is not a mutiny against the house of God. There are people every Sunday who walk and live with New Age ideologies and pagan reality and they think they're godly. That's what's concerning.
They have lost all ability to be able to discern what is right and what is wrong. Listen, I think it was Spurgeon who said anyone can discern what is the
Difference between right and wrong. What is hard, what is hard to discern is what is right and almost right.
Pastor Shawn Gray · 34:02
The issue today is not what's right and wrong, the issue is what's right and what's almost right. Some of us have submitted ourselves to almost-right theology. Let me give you some examples. Two things, you write these down, and I want you to go do some research on this, and I want you to begin to look in the life of the church and see, maybe in your own life, in the way that you think. I want you to begin to, when we say secular mindset, we say biblical mindset, here's some things that shape our secular mindset with pagan ideologies. Two of them are big right now in the evangelical churches of America. They're two words, so other, two phrases, there's one that's a phrase and one that's a word. The first one is the law of attraction. I mean, have you ever heard of that? They actually created a movie called The Secret, right? In this movie, The Secret, they're really hammering in on the law of attraction. The next word is manifesting.
Manifesting. There's a slide up there that has a list of ten different things on it. No, there it is, daily affirmations. Now, I'm blind, I don't have my glasses, so I apologize to the camera guy, but I've got to go up here so I can read these. I'm really bad. Here's ten affirmations that many of us, if we were to come across this on our Facebook page, we would think this is wonderful. As a matter of fact, we might even print it out. Many people in here might even print it out, put it on their mirror, and begin speaking this over themselves. "I dream, I believe, I receive." Notice the indicating marker of who it is that does these things: "I." Notice that God refutes this kind of attitude at the very beginning, all the way in the Old Testament, when he speaks to Moses and says, "I am, not you."
He didn't say that, but I think it was implied, right? Number two: "A beautiful day begins with a beautiful mindset." Law of attraction: what I put out into the world I will attract to me. How many of you have heard this used in the church? It has some biblical footing in there. There is some truth to this, but what is hard is to discern what is right and what is almost right. And I want you to know, if it's almost right, it's a complete lie.
Number three: "I believe in the woman I'm becoming," or the man I'm becoming. You believe in what you put your hope in, what you trust. What?
Now, what if you haven't become that person you dream of after a year from now? Well, the best is yet to come. It's okay, I have another year. Now, if you say "the best is yet to come" regarding being in heaven with God in his presence for all of eternity, used appropriately. If you use the message "yet to come"
Because the church is going to be better, we're going to have more people, my family is going to be better, our marriage is going to be better, we're going to have more money, I'm going to get a raise, if you use it in that sense, you can't have hope that's confident in anything, because you're constantly having to push off your hope until whatever comes that never comes. "I believe in the woman I'm becoming." Number four: "Visualize your highest self and start showing up as her or him." Visualize it, just envision yourself. It's called vision boards.
Now, some of you would be like, "Well, Shawn, why are you hating on vision boards?" I don't think that's bad. God made a vision board, so you can live by your vision board or you can live by his. Yeah. So you're saying I shouldn't do a vision board? Yeah, that's what I'm saying.
Who are you living for? Now, part of the frustration in people's lives is we need to move people from living for themselves to living for God. It is either your will or it's God's will. I'm saying it's dangerous to put you at the epicenter of all things in your life. That's, you know why we're the most medicated generation in the history of the world? Because all of us are living for us, and we don't like where us is going. All right, number five: "The secret of your success is found in your daily routine."
I'm not against that. I think routine matters, I think discipline matters, but that's not the secret to your success. And as a matter of fact, if you're a believer in Christ, success is different for you. We find our victories in Christ, not in the things we accomplish in the flesh. Eternal, fleshly, carnal, heavenly, which one is it? There is duplicity in our nature. We want the best of both worlds.
Oftentimes, if you want to trust in God and put your hope in God, it might mean you lose your life. We don't preach that. We just tell people if you set up a God, you'll never have to lose your life. You can have everything you want plus some. As a matter of fact, the more spiritual you are, the richer you are and the less pain you face.
It's nonsense, complete nonsense. It's not even in the Bible. I don't know where people get this. People believe it. I don't understand churches that start like this. I don't understand it. "My income is constantly increasing." Wrong. Just by the nature of depreciation and the lack of raises, cost-of-living raises we get year to year, no, it's not.
It's not increasing, and you can say it all day long, it ain't increasing. We are wasting away day by day, and so is our paycheck. Anyway, moving on.
Number seven: "I am limitless and anything is possible." Care Bear beam. "Oh, I wake up each morning feeling confident and empowered." Be the best version of you. The best version of you is worthy of hell. You don't need to be the best version of you. That'll get you hell. You need to be the best version that Christ makes you through belief in him. This is nonsense. This is nonsense.
That many of us like on Instagram: "Great things never came from comfort zones." Agreed.
And so would the apostles, who were crucified and killed and sacrificed and suffered and beaten and put in prison. Uncomfortable for them, either. But for somehow, for some reason or another, the church excuses themselves from that kind of life. Notice the faith chapter we read about in Hebrews. Notice that the first whole half of chapter 11 is saying, by faith this person conquered, by faith this person overcame, by faith this person was freed, by faith this person was delivered, by faith this person was set free from prison. And then it switches on a dime and says by faith this person's entrails were cut out, by faith this person was killed, by the same faith, this person stayed in prison, by the same faith. God didn't deliver them. Why don't we just delete the second half of that chapter? See, we somehow or another have this idea that faith is here to serve us.
Faith serves God, that he might get the glory when it changes a broken person.
Pastor Shawn Gray · 42:32
Faith is not about you. The gospel is not about you. It's about God. The law of attraction, little definition, is the New Thought spiritual belief that positive or negative thoughts bring positive or negative experiences into a person's life. That's why you have Word of Faith people that will say, listen, and i'm not criticizing everybody, but there is this idea, not only in the Word of Faith movement, but it has worked its way into every single church in America, and it's this idea that I've met people that refuse to say, they'll have a 105 temperature, need to go to the but they will refuse to say they're sick, because they don't want to give life to that. That's law of attraction. They're scared to say anything negative, because they think it'll continue to bring that to them. I'm glad that when God inspired the Holy Bible, he didn't use law of attraction methods, because we wouldn't know what to believe. Oh, that's good. Think about it for a second. That what he says is true, and that's why we don't love the Bible all the time, because sometimes what he says is hard. And really today, why I think we have such a hard time with people engaging the Bible, not because people don't like reading it's because the Bible doesn't line up with what we hear preached on Sunday. And so if I have to choose between the two, I'm going to choose the sermon. I'm going to choose to listen to the sermon and forsake the hard teaching of the Word, because Sunday morning is more law of attraction, say a bunch of good things, and the Bible just says it how it is, and i'm not comfortable with that. Then there's this thing, it's in law of attraction, it's called manifesting.
Manifesting refers to various pseudoscientific self-help strategies that can purportedly make an individual's wishes come true by mentally visualizing them. Manifestation techniques are based on the law of attraction and New Thought spirituality, or New Age. Here's a couple, here's a couple manifesting posts: "your energy is cleansed, all your blocks are removed, $20,000 is about to land in your hands. Affirm by saying yes, and it will manifest in your bank account."
Yes, amen, praise the Lord, hallelujah. Nonsense. Hundreds, thousands of sheep being led astray straight off into the pits of hell. All right, here's another one, and sorry, I mean, she posted it, let me know this week: "Everything attached to you will win. Your family will win," unless someone dies this week of cancer.
Oh, you're like, well, that's still winning, they went to heaven. How do you know? "Your ideas will win, your dreams will win, your business will win, your health will win, your children will win, you will win. We are fighting a battle you've already won."
My question is, what battle are you fighting? Are you fighting a battle that God's already won? Are you fighting a battle that you've uninvited God to?
Some of us are still trying to win a war that we should have never engaged in. And you guys are quiet. I hope you don't leave the church. I don't know why you're so quiet, but it's making me straight nervous in here. I know that I don't smile a lot, so I might come across as angry or unhappy. I couldn't be more pleased with our fellowship right now, guys. We've been through it.
You know, there are days where I look back to the starting days of Echo Church, I think of the times where we, some of the things we did, participated in, our behaviors, our attitudes, some of the pride in our life. I think, I remember thinking we knew a lot about a lot. And over these years, specifically the last six years, God has really been humbling us. I believe that God's Word has opened up in a way for us. We see that much of what we did, although well intended, was not what he wanted.
We made people turn to entertainment quicker than they turn to God, and in the process, people substituted their relationship with God for an opportunity to be entertained.
I'll be held accountable for that. Here's the thing: I can't go backwards, I can only move from here, and this goes for you too.
Much of us, although we see some of the wrong things that we did in that, and I'm talking about the church, you know, specifically, there are times where I look back and long for the meat pots of yesterday, and we have to be honest about that, because just because we know what's right doesn't mean we don't long to do what's wrong. There's still some broken in us that God is sanctifying day by day. But here's the thing: i've learned where my hope comes from. I know that I can have confidence if my hope is in God, and I can have no confidence if my hope is in this church building, group of people, organization, the money in the organization.
But if I have God, everything can fall apart around me, everything can begin dying, I, like Job, can be sitting in ashes and still be confident in the hope I have in God. This is the type of people we're called to raise up and disciple in the church, not people who can show up to be entertained.
They are different. Now, New World theology, New Age, will try to flatter you with all kinds of offerings of greatness, but I want you to begin to notice when people put their trust in themselves and when they put their trust in God. And he could be well-meaning, but ladies and gentlemen, all of us are guilty in our week. I guarantee it. If you try to mark it down, in your week this week, take a notebook and mark down those times where even you've said something where you're trusting yourself, or you read the Bible and you begin to think about yourself and you put your hope in you. Just write down how many times you do it. This is not to villainize you, it's to help us get an understanding, because "in all thy ways," if you can have an understanding, God can renew your mind. "He believed God." Now notice,
Point 5Believe God, not just believe in God
Believing in God is not the same thing as believing God. And I know you say, "Shawn, you can't just add -ing on the end and change it's the same thing." Well, Brook said something Wednesday night that I thought was fitting, and I'm totally robbing it from her. I love this. She actually told a story that was my story as if it were her story. It actually was our story, because it happened together. I had this guy in high school, his name was Quincy, not Quincy Adams, it's Quincy McKnight, anyway, great guy, and, but he just had a hard time. You ever met somebody that just seems like every time their mouth is moving, they're not telling you the truth? It was like that. I called him a habitual offender, a habitual liar, you know. But he was my dearest friend. One day we were going into Dillard's, Brook and I were married at this point, had gone out, I think playing basketball with Quincy or something, we were going into Dillard's, and Dillard's, they had those shoes that are displayed. Now, back in the day, in the men's section sometimes they would place these gigantic shoes, and it would be one shoe on a gigantic stand, and all the kids would love to come and try to put their hand in it. But this shoe was this big, like, I'm not fish-storying you here, it was this big. No human wore that shoe. It was for display purposes only. It was bolted down to the piece of wood that was there. And Quincy, we walked up to the shoe, I was like, man, can you imagine somebody wearing a shoe like that? And Quincy says, "That's my dad's shoe." Now, I believed Quincy. I believed in Quincy. I believed in Quincy because I played basketball with Quincy. I knew he was real. I knew what he looked like. I knew that he had a family. I knew he came from somewhere, and I knew he had a house. I believed that Quincy was real, but that doesn't save you, because even Satan believes that God is real. Satan started out in his house. Are you with me a little bit here? But that's different than believing what Quincy says, because everything that Quincy has said proved to not be true. When he told me that was his dad's shoe, that his dad donated to Dillard's, well, I knew, quite honestly, that wasn't true, and the ridiculous thing about that was I'd been to eat lunch at his house on Sunday and I'd seen his dad, and his dad was short, and his feet were probably this big. It was not that big. It was tiny. So although I believed in Quincy, I didn't believe what he said.
Do you believe what God has said in his Word? Because faith cometh by believing in what he said. Some of us, I'm afraid, have more confidence in those memes I posted than we do God's Word. We believe those, that word from strangers greater than we do God's Word. What do you believe? "He did not weaken in faith." And I'm done.
His faith in God was not deterred by what he saw. His faith in God was not dependent on what he saw. Hebrews 11:1: "Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen." That is why faith comes by hearing, and hearing the Word.
Faith does not come by seeing. Faith cometh by hearing. Be careful, little ears, what you hear. Be careful, little eyes, what you see, because your faith is strengthened by what you let come into this gate. Now, that should concern us in a world of technology. Look in your settings today at your average phone time alone. That didn't count your TV time, it didn't count your computer time, your average phone time alone, and you will be mortified at the average daily time you spend on your phone. Be careful, little ears, what you hear.
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