Grace & Men Conf 2012

The GRACE AND MEN CONF 2012 April 27-28, 2012- Perimeter Church

These are notes, not transcripts 

You can listen to or watch the messages from the Grace & Men conference April 27-28.

Messages from the Orlando event are also available along with the conferences from 2008-2010

http://www.thegospelman.com/audio/index.html

SCOTTY SMITH #1 – FRIDAY NIGHT

Psalm 73

This was a season in Asaph’s life when he got disconnected and it shows that we were MADE FOR WONDER, BUT ARE PRONE TO WANDER.

TWO Pulls that lead us to Wander…

1.    Filling emptiness

2.    Medicating our pain

Asaph wanders toward Position v.3; Prosperity v3; Power v4; Peace v5, 12

Medicating our Pain – Posing and Pretending

Pain doesn’t just go away with time; it requires the grace of Jesus.

Scotty noted three “themes” of success that have plagued him in his life:

1.    Notice me, but don’t know me – we have a deep insecurity outside our areas of competence

2.    The Wizard of Oz – “don’t look behind the curtain” and discover the real me. We must be careful not to confuse knowledge of grace words with knowledge of Jesus. We may know the words and the doctrines without knowing the person and the reality of grace in our lives.

3.    Protect your heart at all costs.

SCOTTY SMITH #2

SATURDAY morning

We were made for loving the triune God with all our heart. The Gospel answers the question – how is that possible? It happens through the story line of just, sanctification, and glorification. Justification does what we can’t do for ourselves. I fail to love God with my heart, let alone my neighbor. God’s mercies are more than a match for our hearts. Sanctification is not a to do list. It is becoming as lovable and as loving as Jesus, which won’t happen fully until glorification. Jesus is our judgment day. We don’t have to be afraid of God, but now we can FEAR Him.

Ps 73:21ff – the Wonder of Grace

Perfect love drives out all fear of God as our judge. Ps 73 Asaph’s wonder: cultivating a grace saturated heart. God is working in Asaph in the context of community.

vv 25-28 GRACE-SANITY.

Grace changes the price tags – we value things in a new way.

this is not girly poetry. It is masculinity. Asaph give three Affirmations:

1. Own your weakness in community as Asaph did. Who knows your first half of Ps 73? Pain, struggles, burdens, questions, temptations? I don’t just have bad habits. I have a broken, needy heart. Who is helping you believe the gospel? Who are you helping to believe the gospel. We need a GOSPEL POSSE.

2. Preach the gospel to yourself (and one another) every day. Get to know the lyric (theology) music (doxology= truth wrapped around my heart) and dance (missiology) of the gospel.

It is an enormous treasure house – search the immeasurable riches – the language Paul uses.

Asaph shows 3 G’s –

Grasped – our past. V 23

Guided- our present. V. 24

Glorified – our future. V 24ff

If you are focused on overcoming instead of the Overcomer, you will be so preoccupied with self. Jesus is your active and constant Good Shepherd.

The means of grace are not tools by which we earn things. They are gifts to enjoy freedom. We don’t need more than we already have, we just need to see what we have. Samuel Rutherford – God is more willing to give us grace than we are willing to confess our sins. The more you are convinced Jesus is your righteousness the more willing you are to surrender and do dangerous and difficult things.

We must learn to live “palms up” – it symbolizes surrender and receiving

3. Celebrate God and his story in corporate worship. Continue to make the sovereign Lord your refuge and “tell of his deeds.”

Friday Night – Tullian Tchividjian – Luke 4:16

Beware of the “buts” and “brakes” on Grace. Satan’s lie is that grace is dangerous  and must be kept in check.

Grace doesn’t come naturally.

Grace is not a App for a conditional OS; it is a new OS.

1.    Grace alone can liberate you. As men we’re afraid to “mess up” our lives; we want to “get it right”. We can either go the Way of Law or the Way of Grace. We resist the words “it is finished”.  

Lord, please restore to us the comfort of merit and demerit. Show us that there is at least something we can do, that we can even in a small way keep some small earning power in our own hands. Tell us that in spite of all our nights of losing there will be at least one redeeming card of our own. Lord, let your servants depart in the peace of their proper responsibility. If it is not too much to ask, Lord, send us to bed with a few shreds of self-respect upon which we can congratulate ourselves. But whatever you do, do not tell us about grace. Give us something to do, anything, but spare us the indignity of this indiscriminate acceptance.    Robert Farrar Capon, Between Noon and Three

The worst people get the best stuff = GRACE Rom 5:8

Read “The gospel for those broken by the church” Rod Rosenbladt

Once you give up, you’re free

• Doesn't unconditional grace lead to moral license? No! Grace doesn't create lawlessness; legalism does.

Rom 3-5

If you say, “I’m saved by grace so now I can sin all I want; I get all the grace I need so now I can go party.” Paul says, Rom 6 “you don’t get it”. It’s not that you need less grace, you need more grace. It’s not that you get grace too much and you’re out of balance so you need Law. You don’t get grace enough. You don’t need Law, you need to get deeper into the gospel – rom 6.

EX: Lincoln with mule and horsefly on his rump. His brother can and flicked it off. Lincoln said, “why did you do that; it was the only thing that kept him moving forward.”

Don’t we parent and preach like that? Keep the “horsefly” on their rump so they keep moving forward. The gospel isn’t about behavior modification, but heart transformation. We often settle for the former.

2) Grace alone can Liberate the Church

Attacks on morality come from outside the church; attacks on grace come from within the church. Somewhere we’ve come to believe that this whole things is about behavioral modification and personal moral improvement and grace doesn’t have the teeth to scare us into changing. That is what has happened all across the church.

We get a lot of self help Christianity and Law-lite; a to do list version of Christianity

We hear more about the Christian and his life than we hear about Christ.
“Do more, try harder” makes people give up. Legalism produces lawlessness 10 times out of 10.

People get burdened with trying to create their own record of religious behavior. We think grace produces lawlessness; wrong. Watch kids from legalistic homes when they go to college. Grace is not the obstacle to obedience; it is its catalyst.

As Spurgeon wrote, “When I thought God was hard, I found it easy to sin; but when I found God so kind, so good, so overflowing with compassion, I smote upon my breast to think that I could ever have rebelled against One who loved me so, and sought my good.”

http://thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/tullian/2011/06/16/first-things-first/

High octane grace breathes new life that transforms.  Here’s a question that shows you’re beginning to understand the gospel. You’ll find yourself asking

What are you going to do now that you don’t have to do anything? Gerhardt Forde

That is the scandalous nature of Rom 8 and of the Eph 2:8-9.

Paid in full forever; a done deal.

We don’t like the Forde question. When the heart knows we don’t have to do anything for Jesus it wants to do so much.

EX: when your wife love you when you’re a jerk does that cause you to be more of a jerk? NO it makes you respond with “honey, I’m sorry; please forgive me.”

Unconditional love meets with selfish failure= change.

Philip bliss  Freed from the law

1. Free from the law, O happy condition,
Jesus hath bled, and there is remission;
Cursed by the law and bruised by the fall,
Grace hath redeemed us once for all.
Once for all, O Christian, receive it,
Once for all, O brother, believe it;
Cling to the Cross, the burden will fall,
Christ hath redeemed us once for all.

2. Now are we free--there's no condemnation,
Jesus provides a perfect salvation;
"Come unto Me," O hear His sweet call,
Come, and He saves us once for all.
Once for all, O Christian, receive it,
Once for all, O brother, believe it;
Cling to the Cross, the burden will fall,
Christ hath redeemed us once for all.

3. "Children of God," O glorious calling,
Surely His grace will keep us from falling;
Passing from death to life at His call,
Blessed salvation once for all.
Once for all, O Christian, receive it,
Once for all, O brother, believe it;
Cling to the Cross, the burden will fall,
Christ hath redeemed us once for all.

SATURDAY MORNING – Tullian Tchividjian #2  Jesus + Nothing = Everything pt 2
            Galatians 5

The idea that grace produces lawlessness is ludicrous. It doesn’t even happen in our human relationships.  When your wife is kind to you when you’re a jerk is more of a motivation to repent than the law motivates.

 Gal 5:1 is a summary of what Paul is saying in this letter. What follows v1 is a description of freedom. Faith working itself out in love. V6 because he loved us we are freed to love others. Law turns your attention to you. Freedom turns you to others. Way too much spiritual narcissism in church today.  The Law says, “the goal of life is to get better”, but with that with that as a goal we get worse and more self obsessed.

The more I obsess about getting better the worse I get. I get more focused on me (ex of Peter walking on water). We sink when we obsess with how we’re doing. And we think this is godly. It is never honoring to God to take our eyes off of Christ. The Gospel frees me from getting (I have all I’ll ever need in Christ) and frees me to give.

Blessed self-forgetfulness = Sanctification

 People are so afraid of Rom 8:1. They want to qualify it. We really believe God’s love has to end. His forgiveness is based in what Jesus has done for us, so it is inexhaustible. The law produces works of flesh. The Gospel produces fruit of the Spirit. Similar to what he said in Rom 7.

We struggle flesh vs spirit. Luther said we are justified and sinful. The Christian life is experience as both/and (simul justice et peccator) – at the same time just and sinner.   While there may be some truth to the “good dog/bad dog” analogy, we are New creatures with a New nature and NEW CORE ID.

The battle with sin is a battle of unbelief and it is played out in works of the flesh (unbelief) VS fruit of the Spirit.

Before God we are sons, not slaves. Justified. But in our experience is this battle. JI Packer said every time we sin we have an identity crisis. Every temptation to sin is temptation to not believe the Gospel. We think increased independence equals freedom instead of more dependence on Christ equals freedom. We are desperately searching for something we already possess in Christ. In the moment of temptation we are looking for something that in Christ we already have. We give in because we want something that we don’t believe we actually already possess in Christ. Temptation has more to do with belief than behavior

The sin underneath all sins is that we can’t trust Jesus and we have to take matters in our own hands. – Luther. vv 18-19 the law turns us inward and leads to law-breaking. If we want to live by that rule we will indulge the flesh. The contrast is life led by the Spirit. As you see all you need you have in Christ the spirit produces fruit and these things grow. The Fruit of the Spirit is not produced by Law but by the Gospel. Law is active, something we do. Fruit is passive, something done in us. Paul is not being prescriptive, the fruit is done for us not something we do (descriptive). Real freedom happens only when the resources of the Gospel smash any sense of need to secure for myself what Christ has already secured for me.

Notes from McKay Caston   http://mckaycaston.com/

Tullian's first message on Jesus + Nothing = Everything, based on Luke 4:18-19.

• Unless we are making folks nervous with our preaching of grace, we are not preaching grace. We are like a declawed cat—too safe. Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones said that if we are not accused on occasion of antinominanism, we probably have yet to preach the radical nature of the gospel. 
• Why do people get so angry when grace is so emphasized? Dr. Doug Kelly says that if you want to make people mad, preach the law. But if you want to make them really mad, preach grace. 
• Stop qualifying grace! When I say, "Yes we are saved by grace, but..." we lose the gospel. When I say, "Yes, grace, but...", my flesh is fighting for its life. 
• Grace is not an app. It is an entirely new operating system.
• We don't need a different message every week. We need the gospel every week from a different passage, for each new passage will provide new grace-driven applications of the gospel for our lives. 
• The gospel sets us free from self- salvation.
• Doesn't unconditional grace lead to moral license? No! Grace doesn't create lawlessness; legalism does.
• Attacks on grace always come from within the church. In the earthly ministry of Jesus, the folks who hated grace the most were the Pharisees.
• A big question: Do we primarily want outward, short-term behavior modification or heart oriented, long-term spiritual transformation? You can have the first without the second. But if you go for the second, you usually get significant behavior change thrown in for free. You can have the first and still end up in hell. Just ask the Pharisees. 
• Grace is not an obstacle for obedience; it is the catalyst for obedience.

NOTE 1: It is this last point that emphasizes that justifying grace must not be disconnected from sanctifying grace. Theologically, they should be distinguished, but never separated, since it is faith in the justifying work of Jesus (John 15:4-5 / abiding in Jesus as my righteousness) that fills us with the Spirit and enables us to produce his fruit (Galatians 3:1-5; 5:16ff). This is why preaching and teaching on justification is so crucial, not just for positional righteousness, but for progressive righteousness (sanctification) and is why folks talk about "preaching the gospel to yourself every day." In other words, it is the nature of grace to sanctify. 

NOTE 2: When we speak of grace and gospel, we mean the substance of the person and work of Jesus, who died for our sin (as a legal substitute, not merely as a moral example). Grace requires law. It requires bad news (my total failure to fulfill the law) in order to have good news (grace=forgiveness, imputed righteousness, eternal love in adoption). So, to speak of grace and gospel is to speak of the person of Jesus and the benefits we receive from him through faith in his finished, redemptive, reconciling work on the cross. 

Here is a summary (Part 2) from last weeks Grace and Men Conference at Perimeter Church. For Part 1, just go here. The notes below are from Tullian Tchividjian's talk on Galatians 5:16-26.

• There are no human fingerprints on the golden chain of salvation (Rom. 8:29-30). So... 
• Don't fall into the trap of thinking that at your worst, God loves you less.
• Don't fight against our only hope of grace! Don't water it down. Fear not the sanctifying nature of grace.  
• Grace does not make a regenerate heart rebel. It melts my heart and compels me toward love-motivated obedience.
• My core identity is in Christ, but we have an internal war that rages between the flesh and the Spirit. Thus, our experience is simul justus et peccator.
• Sin is an identity crisis. When we sin we are dealing mainly with belief, not primarily behavior. This means that change in behavior must mot merely be the result of moral reformation via law, but spiritual transformation by the Spirit. 
• A failure to believe the gospel functionally (Jesus is my righteousness) gives birth to all of our sin.
• Obedience to Jesus is not drudgery or obligation; it is freedom and blessing.
• A genuinely gospel-driven life will enable us to manifest the fruit of the Spirit (which fulfills the law at the deeper, motive level rather than mere surface, outward, Pharisee level).
• Freedom is a life rooted in grace that fixes a gaze on Jesus as Redeemer. As I gaze and believe, fruit begins to grow on the branch as the Spirit fills us and influences us.

Obviously, there is much more to say. Nevertheless, I think it helps us see that that a radical justification focus is the critical element in bringing about the radically sanctified life. After all, we are not sanctified by talking about sanctification, but through living in union with Jesus as our perfect righteousness. In other words, the root of positional justification produces the fruit of progressive sanctification. 

Or as John Bunyan said, "Run, run the law demands, but gives me neither feet nor hands; 'tis better news the gospel brings: it bids me fly and gives me wings."