Transcript

00:00 Paul Tripp: Hey, Shelby

00:00 Shelby Abbott: Hello.

00:02 Paul: Well, I got a couple things I want to introduce.

00:04 Shelby: Yes, we got a few things on the table here.

00:05 Paul: Yes. This is my latest book. Probably the most timely book I've written.

00:19 Shelby: For sure.

00:20 Paul: Maybe this book won't speak ten years from now. I've tried to write things, usually, that I think are perspectives on God's work that just have longevity.

00:31 Shelby: Yes, regardless of what's going on.

00:32 Paul: But I thought we were in this moment where it was so important for somebody to speak into our present culture. This is called Reactivity: How the Gospel Transforms Our Actions and Reactions. It's about this culture of toxic reactivity that we're in, the level of normal meanness and accusation. We're in a culture where if you make a mistake or you do wrong — which everybody's going to do — there's no redemption for you.

01:07 Shelby: No grace, no forgiveness.

01:08 Paul: You're canceled and it's not just that people turn their back on you, they want to harm you, hurt you and I just think it's those kinds of things that sin brings into the world that the gospel always speaks to. So I'm not a sociologist, I'm not a social media strategist, but I think the gospel does speak to those things.

01:37 So this is just asking the question, "If we looked at this present cultural moment through the lens of the gospel, how would that change us and how would that change the way that we carry on this discourse," because the human community is just one endless conversation, that's what it is.

02:00 Because we all have the desire to know and to think and to understand, it's all wired in by God and we all have some recognition that we need one another. And so, I'm really hoping this book will be a bit of a light in an awful lot of darkness.

02:18 I'm going to anticipate some criticism because I think people think that being loving is being compromising. These are hard times when you speak hard to hard times and listen, I don't ever, ever want to compromise God's truth.

02:42 Shelby: Yes, I know that's true of you.

02:43 Paul: But with God, absolute anger with sin and absolute love for the sinner never contradict one another. He doesn't have to sacrifice one for the other and we shouldn't either. So I'm excited this book is out. I have to say this. It was hard for me to write, too, because it exposed a lot of those reactions in me.

03:13 Because I want to be protective of the ministry God has given me, I never put those down on Twitter or whatever; but I had those in my heart. I think despicable things about people in my heart, which I should never and so, I'm thankful for the conviction.

03:33 Shelby: Yes, you said that this is entering into a conversation that's happening and I think this is going to be really helpful because the culture at large right now is not interested in a conversation. They're interested in talking at people instead of with people and I know that that's counterproductive to any kind of progress when it comes to humanity, certainly, connecting with God as well and so, I'm thankful of this.

04:00 I remember 18 months ago when you were writing this, you talked about putting together this book and I said, "This is so necessary, so necessary," and that was a year and a half ago. I think now, more than ever, in this cultural moment, this book will speak to something that we as a culture are wounded with right now. So I'm thankful.

04:20 Paul: Yes, thank you. And you reminded me of something we were talking that my first awareness was just how the surrounding culture has gotten to the place of such reactivity. I call it toxic reactivity. And I think we're meant to care for our culture around, we should care for the world around us. But then I got paying attention to Christian social media and the way that Christians respond to one another.

04:56 Pastors that I mentor handed me their phone and texts that were sent to them in the middle of a sermon that... I tear up reading the text because I know these men. I know what they stand for. I know their hearts. And I thought I need to write to the Christian community because we're losing our way. We're letting the anger of the surrounding culture mold the way we respond to one another.

05:23 Are there high stakes? Yes, every point of Christian theology is a high stake. Everywhere where that theology is applied to everyday life is serious and valuable, but there's a way of having that conversation.

05:38 Shelby: Yes, and you're not neglecting any of those high stakes at all and I know that to be true of you, too. As the conversation about race started to pop up in the culture, you commenting on that through the lens of the gospel and the reactivity that happened as a result of that, which is very, very surprising. And I think that's come out with a lot of pastors, people in full time Christian work.

05:58 They've just been shocked that this kind of stuff was bubbling under the surface the whole time and there were certain things in the culture that ignited them, and now, we're seeing the truth of what's been going on in the hearts of many people and we need to filter those reactions through the lens of the gospel; and I think that's what this will do.

06:17 Paul: And uniquely, this book is written to the average Christian.

06:24 Shelby: Yes, and that's important to know, too, not just academics or pastors.

06:28 Paul: No, it's written to the average Christian because what happens is — and I've seen this, I've experienced this — if we get comfortable with that kind of disrespectful, accusatory meanness on social media, it bleeds into our physical relationships with one another. And so, I think we all just need to stop and say, "How does the gospel teach us to live with one another in a radically different way even when we disagree?"

07:02 Shelby: Yes, that's important, too, because can you sit next to someone in a church service who you know voted differently than you, who you know has a different opinion about certain things that you hold sharp convictions on and still love that person as a brother or sister in Christ first, as opposed to all these secondary and third issues that are really tearing all of us apart right now?

07:25 Paul: And can we just say that the reason you're sitting next to that person is God's sovereign plan because we need to have these conversations with one another? I need to have somebody who challenges me if for nothing else, I go back and I re-examine and strengthen that conviction or I think maybe I've held this in a wrong way. So it's not an accident that that diversity is in the Christian community. I mean, why the biblical call to unity?

07:56 Shelby: All of us need our rough edges sanded down and that's never going to happen if we only hang with people who agree with us. I'm excited for it, man, I really am.

08:08 Paul: I have a second thing I want to show here. This is a very heavy piece of Lucite that has etched in the middle — I don't know how they do this, it's just floating — a beautiful etching (3D) of the globe that we live on, the world.

08:34 I tell you why I have this in my living room and I literally look at it every morning. It was given to me on one of my international trips and it reminds me that we are all part of a global Christian community. We are brothers and sisters, literally, with a worldwide church.

09:04 And there's a way in which we have bought into — I'm using "we" in the largest sense — this sort of America-centric view of the church where America's epicenter of Christianity and we go out to the foreign world, and there's a bit of weirdness to that. First of all, we kind of know that the kingdom of God was strong and mighty before there was ever America.

09:39 Shelby: We kind of know, but we don't literally live it.

09:41 Paul: And it will be that after. Am I thankful for the country I live in? Absolutely. It's a mercy of God that I was born in America. Of course it is, but the kingdom of God is way larger. Think of China. China probably has the greatest population, largest population of Christians in the world right now.

10:03 Shelby: And people don't know that in America. They have no idea.

10:04 Paul: The Chinese church is a force, but we don't think about this. The things that are happening in South America, like I've spent time in Brazil and one of the finest Christian universities in the world is in Sao Paulo. It's huge.

10:26 Everybody on the board of that university is an elder in a church. They have a cutting-edge bio department. They have a cutting-edge engineering department, but it's solidly all done inside of a Christian worldview. It's just amazing. It's probably the Harvard of Brazil, uniquely Christian.

10:54 Shelby: And who's heard of that in America? Nobody even knows its name.

10:59 Paul: Yes. So I'm just caused to remember the humbling truth that we are just one part of this marvelous work of redemption that has gone on before us, will go on after us and we share deep commonality. We need the world. It's one of the things that just reminds me of is how much I've learned about my faith from being outside of my own culture. I can remember in Korea just being confronted with Christian values that I sort of have, but Korea has much stronger because of the nature of the culture.

11:47 Shelby: Can you give me an example?

11:51 Paul: Yes, community over individuality. You know, we talk about individual salvation. I mean, you know, Jesus and me.

12:02 Shelby: Yes, you accept Jesus in your life.

12:04 Paul: And I was just very, very aware of that, just the emphasis, the beautiful emphasis on community. In India, how helpful it was to be exposed to overt religious culture-shaping idolatry. You learn so much about our private, covert idolatry by seeing how overt idolatry operates and, I mean, to be in the presence of idols, to see what it does to people. I was in a temple that was basically — in India — a huge sculpture of a male sexual organ and people would come in and kiss it till the bottom was dented from just lips.

13:06 Shelby: That's horrifying.

13:06 Paul: I literally ran out of the temple. And we interviewed a family — they were carrying water bottles; I thought that was just for their trip, the gallon sort of water bottles — who had walked 400 miles to get to that temple.

13:31 Shelby: That specific one that you were at.

13:32 Paul: And the water was actually water from the Ganges because they believe the Ganges is holy and the degree to which this evil thing was that valuable to him, then as I was running to my vehicle, I was first thanking God that I was not like these people, which in ways, that's true. But then it hit me I am, that I have idols that you can't see, that are just as dominant in my life, that I do these kind[s] of sacrificial things for.

14:19 Shelby: You gather the water and walk 400 miles, too.

14:21 Paul: Absolutely, but I don't know if I would have had that if I hadn't been in that moment and seen the ugliness and the slavery come together; and every idol is just that ugly. Anything that replaces God is massively ugly, although what sin does is cause us to be able to look at ugly and see beauty.

14:45 Shelby: Yes, and in seeing that temple, that physical representation of something, put a mirror up to your heart, that was a gift of God's grace in your life.

14:58 Paul: And yes, there's a Sri Lankan theologian, Vinoth Ramachandra, who's written a book, [Gods] That Fail, and that book is so helpful because he's lived with overt idolatry everywhere in his life. Little temples this big along the road that you can make sacrifices to, place a bowl of beans or something in front of. And so, the insight with which he can talk about the rise and the failure of idolatry is just so incredibly helpful.

15:41 I could never write that book because I haven't had that, so my point is that the church everywhere needs a church everywhere and when we think of the worldwide church, we should not just think of ourselves as givers, but receivers as well because we need our brothers and sisters in Christ, and the many things they have to teach us.

16:08 One other observation. I learned that quickly in as a seminary professor, that my students from other cultures would ask questions that their Americans friends wouldn't ask. That's not a bad thing, but it's just because of the way they were raised. I thought, "Wow." Sometimes, I would literally write down questions because I was learning from the questions, because it was a question I would have never asked.

16:34 Shelby: And again, that's good to be in the room with those kind[s] of people because they're sanding off your rough edges as a seminary student. That's great. Think globally.

16:43 Paul: So we're going to spend this time we have together today talking about one of the most important concepts in all of the Bible and in Christian theology and the Christian life and the church: grace. I was joking with you earlier that we don't have a guest, but we do. A massive important guest and His name is Jesus.

17:14 And so, what I want to do Shelby is I want to read a quote, something that I wrote several years back in a book called Broken-Down House[: Living Productively in a World Gone Bad], about just the life in a fallen world and then, I want to talk about how the strain of grace, the cord of grace, goes throughout scripture. Theologians have called that the golden cord.

17:43 And then, I'd like just to have a lengthy conversation with you, look at the various aspects of God's grace toward us. And then, I want to think a little bit about grace-horizontal, how grace becomes a lifestyle and grace is a community thing and how do you live a life of grace. So let me begin with this reading. It's a bit lengthy.

18:16 Grace is a thunderous, expansive, powerful, and life altering word. Other than God, there is no more important word that the human mind could consider and the mouth could speak. Grace is the ultimate spiritual game-changer. It is the one thing that has the power to change you and everything about you.

18:33 There is simply nothing comparable to God's grace. Grace explodes, explodes into your life in a moment, but will occupy you for all eternity. You could dig into grace every day of your life and not reach the bottom of its power and glory. Grace is the bottomless treasure-laden mine of divine help.

18:52 In his famous hymn, John Newton really did choose the best word ever to describe God's grace. "Amazing". Grace is why God sent His Son into this world to do for us what we could not do for ourselves, to transform us from what we are (sinners separate from Him) into what we are becoming (Christ-like) and with Him forever.

19:11 Because you are God's child, grace is something you'll never deserve, but can always expect. Grace is a tool that God uses to transform you, but it also defines the nature of His relationship to you. Grace will devastate you while giving you peace of heart and rest of soul you have never experienced before.

19:28 Grace will require you to confess your unworthiness, but will never, ever make you feel alone and unloved. Grace will remind you again and again that you have no ability whatsoever to earn God's favor, but it will spell your fear of not measuring up.

19:41 Grace will confront you with the reality that you are way less than you thought you were, while it comforts you with the promise that you can be way more than you ever imagined. Grace will call you to examine yourself with honesty and humility, but free you from being paralyzed by fearful introspection.

19:58 Grace will ask you to admit your catalogue of weaknesses, while at the same time, empowering you with newfound strength. Grace will keep reminding you of what you are not, so you will receive God's welcome to what you can now be.

20:11 Grace will make you sadder than you've ever been in your life, and give you cause for joy and celebration that nothing or no one can take away. Grace will blow up your little kingdom of one while it introduces you to a much better, more glorious King.

20:26 Grace will work to expose your blindness while it gives you eyes to see. Grace will drive you to the end of yourself while it holds you before the promise of fresh starts and new beginnings. Grace is a person and His name is Jesus.

20:41 Shelby: We can probably end there if you want. And you wrote that how many years ago? Broken down a house, you said?

20:52 Paul: It's over ten, I'm sure, yes.

20:58 Shelby: Let me just comment on this. That was not only a robust description of the beauty of this word and this lifestyle that we live, and this golden thread throughout scripture; but it's also something that is not purely conceptual for you.

21:17 It is embodied in who you are and what this ministry is — Paul Tripp Ministries — and the truth of the fact that you not only understand it intellectually and theologically, you live it as well and that spills out over onto the people you interact with.

21:37 I've seen it spill out over onto Luella, certainly spilled out over onto me, your friends that you've interacted with, people we've had on this podcast before. It's a life-changing element that you not just talk about, but you embody.

21:51 So I think that that's important to start with because a lot of us can just understand these things and think these things, and not really live out these things. And living out these things and knowing that it's true in your heart is what God cares about, not just knowing them.

22:08 Paul: Yes, thank you. I would say that I have this passion burning in my belly that I don't think I'll ever escape and it is that where I am and what I'm doing, I would, in some faint way, live out the majesty of what I just wrote.

22:32 It is also the greatest grief of my life and it's a grief that I don't think until I'm on the other side, I will ever escape in the places where I fail to do that and those failures are still there, but I thank God that He has put this passion inside of me that this would not be for me just a message.

22:57 It would be the core value of the way that I live and it's funny to say, but it's absolutely true that craving to live a life of grace only happens by grace because I do need to be rescued from me. So, yes, that is important.

23:26 Where I want to begin with our discussion of grace is I want to talk about the Bible and grace first because I think there's a lot of misunderstanding there. And then, I want to pick through some of the awesome facets of God's grace, how it works, so that we help people to see this amazing process of God's redemptive commitment to us that just is mind-boggling.

24:01 But there's a misconception of people that the gospel of grace actually begins in Matthew with the arrival of Jesus on the scene and I get why that because the epicenter revelation of grace is Jesus and the ultimate tool of grace is Jesus, so I get that. But the Bible is, literally, from cover to cover, a narrative of God's grace.

24:35 Think of Genesis 1. What an awesome grace it is that God doesn't hide Himself from us, that He introduces us to the reality that we are not in the center. He is the beginner, the planner, and the center of all things. That's beautiful grace. And then when human beings blow it, God immediately steps in and says, "But I'm not going to leave things that way. I'm going to build a plan for this sin to be dealt with." That's in Genesis.

25:18 Think of Exodus, where we learn that God is willing to unleash His awesome power to redeem His children from slavery. Now, if that's not a finger pointing to Jesus, where He would unleash His power to release us from the slavery of sin, but it's right there in Exodus.

25:44 How about the giving of the law? These people had been slaves for 400 years. They didn't have a clue how to live and the law, therefore, isn't their way of earning favor with God because they already have God's favor, but God loves His children and He gives them boundaries for their living because God wants His children to thrive. How gracious is that?

26:12 And then, we learn that God's actually going to dwell with His people. So He says, "I want you to build Me My house." I love this. There's a humor to this. But He said, "I'm going to design it. It's great and I'm going to give you guys gifts to execute it," because I was thinking about this. Everybody's house, you go into somebody's house, it's not totally comfortable to you because it represents their personality and their values. Everybody's house does.

26:48 So God says, "I want My house to represent Me and My values." And what are the two high points of that temple? One is the Holy of Holies. It's God's unapproachable holiness. He wants us to know who He is. But the other thing is the mercy seat. So this Holy God, unapproachable, is a God of mercy. Again, where does the holiness of God and the mercy of God meet? On the cross of Jesus Christ. So there's the gospel again.

27:29 People say, "Oh, I can't read through Leviticus. I just get so burned down with law after law after law." I read that and I think, "How could God care about us so much that He actually cares about a woman's cycle? He actually cares about the way you respond to a stranger that comes into your gates.

27:55 Shelby: Very specific. Very, very specific to the realities of human flourishing, human condition, human experience.

28:02 Paul: There's almost every aspect of human life is addressed. The other thing that you get that really comes to the fore in Exodus is the sacrificial system and it's a bloody weird scene in a lot of ways, priests up to their knees in blood. But what is God saying? "I'm going to make a way for sin to be forgiven," and this whole system is a placeholder 'til the final forgiveness.

28:39 Shelby: Yes, you need to look at all of that and go, "The bloodiness of this is just egregious. And God goes, "Yes, that's the point." It's pointing to something that you should be like, "This is awful," like you should recoil from that. It shows you the strength of what Jesus did on the cross.

28:57 Paul: And that these sacrifices have to be repeated over and over again because they do not provide the final thing. Only the Messiah was going to do that. So we could take our way through every book of the Bible and do what we're doing.

29:10 I just want to give that as an illustration that, literally, when you read the Bible, read looking for grace because it gets presented in so many different, very beautiful ways and if you are living with this thought that grace is a New Testament discussion, you miss so much of the beauty that is right there in front of the Old Testament.

29:32 This is going to sound like I'm strange. Leviticus is one of my favorite books in the Old Testament because it just reminds me of just a God who cares for me this much and it's not just the big, broad things in my life, but the details of commerce and sexuality and community and safety, what animals are safe eating and what are not.

30:05 Shelby: Yes, one of the things I highlight with students is in Genesis 3 when Adam and Eve mess up, God immediately provides for them by killing the animal to provide covering for their shame and then we just pause and let it sit and go, "Does that sound familiar to you at all that God is acting to kill an animal in order to provide something to cover their shame. God is involved."

30:35 It's like, "Do you see it? Do you see," and it's really fun to watch the light bulbs pop on and go, "That's the gospel right there in Genesis 3. And by the way, it doesn't even start in Genesis 3. It goes back to Genesis 1. The Gospel starts there, so the gospel is a gospel of grace.

30:49 Paul: And I think again, if you're not reading with those eyes, you'll miss that moment where, "Okay, they were naked, God clothed them," and you miss that the way scripture is being written, there's nothing we should say is every bit of that is purposeful.

31:09 God is purposely retaining that moment because it's illustrative of the gospel. That's just not happening because we know the Bible doesn't contain everything that God knows. It couldn't possibly. If it contained just a certain percentage, you would drive your Bible in five 18-wheelers to church on Sunday.

31:33 Shelby: Well, even the end of John is like, "We didn't write all the stories about Jesus. The whole world wouldn't be able to contain it.

31:38 Paul: So that means there's an intentionality to the things that are retained and the core intentionality — I'm convinced — of scripture is redemption, redemption, redemption, redemption, redemption. You're cooked. You need redemption and here's how it's going to happen, and it's just everywhere in scripture.

31:59 Proverbs is filled with the gospel. Now, you can read that as just isolated wisdom statements like sort of Christian Confucianism and not realize that there's a way in which everything that the Bible is about is in some form in Proverbs, and that's why the book is so majestic.

32:26 I'm just arguing, read with eyes of grace as you go through your Bible. It will just explode this book in ways. I'm very sad that it was probably in maybe my mid-30s before I began to get a glimpse of what my Bible is about. The other thing is that cord is what creates the unity of scripture.

32:52 It's not a collection of stories. It's not a compendium of theological statements. It's a narrative of the operation of God's grace, ultimately, in Christ with God's theological, explanatory, and applicatory notes, but that's the cord that goes through it. And so sad to think that people may be doing a daily Bible reading plan — which I think is wonderful to do — and they're plowing through scriptures and they don't see that cord there.

33:28 Shelby: A lot of times, too, that we read the Bible with that, "What can I get out of this?" Like, "And I'm reading in Leviticus right now." I've heard that tons of times. "I'm reading in Numbers right now and I'm not getting anything out of it," and I'm like, "Well, you're probably approaching your Bible with the expectation that this is about you and about your personal application for what's going on in your world," and that's not the case most of the time.

33:52 We need to read the Bible with, as you say, through the lens of grace, but it's really like the start of it is in God manifesting Himself in Jesus Christ, which is grace. It's not about you, per se. You will benefit from reading the story, ingesting it, applying it. Certainly, you will benefit from it but, ultimately, it's not about you.

34:16 Paul: Yes, and the way that I talk about that same thing is read scripture seeking to understand how God embeds your story in the larger story of grace, the larger story of redemption. So then, you live with a God's-story mentality. You don't live with a my-story mentality. You live with "I've been brought in to this larger, glorious narrative, so everything in my life I look at from the vantage point of not my story, but God's story."

34:50 Shelby: Yes, and we even teach people how to share their own personal testimony, but the overarching point of sharing your personal testimony is it's actually not about you. It's about how you fit into the larger story of what God is already doing. It's not taking Jesus and putting Him into your story. And that's a huge cultural shift for people.

35:10 A lot of people, "Well, I'm sharing my testimony about how God changed my life," but if you stop them in the middle of that and go, "It's actually not about you, it's about God's greater story and how you fit into it," you'll tell your own personal story in a different way.

35:23 Paul: You reminded me. Yesterday, Luella and I were New York City, and we were at the memorial service for Knox Martin. Knox is a revered painter. We have some of his work in our loft and Luella showed him, we got to know him and he is in every major museum of substance around the world.

35:52 In the memorial service, they did a documentary of his life, which is very interesting; but the thing that really grabbed me was the people who spoke talked about how light came in to their life through this man because I don't think he was a believer, but he loved God's creation and you couldn't be around him without being exposed to that. And he loved people and he said this art thing is this chain that you keep passing down.

36:33 And people talked about how their life was changed by knowing this man. And what was really interesting to me is exactly what you're talking about. They told their story in the context of a larger story of who Knox Martin was and I thought it was a great illustration of how God works in our lives, and how you begin to see your story in a very, very different way. And nobody there was thinking what I was thinking, but I was thinking, "Wow," and there's a joy of people just being... will say, "That light shone on me, too, and look what it did for me."

37:21 Shelby: Yes. If only we can make the turn toward the goodness of God's grace because that light doesn't extinguish itself ever in the context of the scriptural narrative ever. It doesn't ever go away. This is eternal.

37:33 Paul: That was another thing. That was really a source of grief to me is Knox is dead. We, too, treasured our time with him. It's just one of those men that there's just not many like this guy, but that the people were talking about a light like you said that had turned off. No more Knox.

37:59 Shelby: No more painting, no more inspiration.

38:03 Paul: Yes, and he had a Wednesday where a select group of artists at the Art Students League. It's one of the revered art academies in the world. He would spend 10:00 in the morning to 6:00 at night in a large studio with them, and just pour into students everything he knew in his experience about art and the great artists that he knew personally and painted with and the way he looked at the world. And it was very, very giving of himself, but he's gone.

38:45 Shelby: He's gone, yes, and that reminds me, too, I mean, he's a renowned artist and people will probably remember him in generations to come, but the average person out there, do you know the name — maybe you do because you're different than most people — but do you know the name of your great-great-grandfather? Probably not. I mean, I don't know the name of mine and he's my great-great-grandfather, and I don't even know his name right now.

39:15 And it reminds me a little bit about the rich young ruler who comes to Jesus [saying], "What must I do to inherit eternal life?" Jesus tells him he needs to do all these things because he's reading his heart instead of actually... and he goes away sad because he doesn't want to give up his wealth.

39:33 And when you think about that story, we don't even know the name of the rich young ruler. We don't even know his name from the story and right now, he's not rich, he's not young, and he's not ruling anything.

39:47 But we definitely know who Jesus is. We know who He is. So as long as we're connected to the greater story of what Jesus is doing in the world, we're a part of that because of Jesus' name, not because of our name.

40:00 Paul: Well, again, we're just saying that it's the permanence of grace because of the permanence of the God of grace that should help us to deal properly with the impermanence of everything else.

40:20 Shelby: Yes, we shouldn't be afraid of it and we can wrestle with it. We have the liberty to wrestle with that. I'm afraid of like tons of things, but I can hold those things in tension with knowing that God's grace covers that and I'm drawn to that.

40:30 Paul: But also rescues you from putting the wrong kind of hope in those things because they will pass away. I always say to Luella — we love having fresh flowers in our loft — and she'll say, "This bouquet is dying," and I say, "And we're supposed to see that."

40:55 Shelby: Yes, that's good.

40:57 Paul: God's reminding us that this thing that we brought home — such delicate, gorgeous, beauty; beauty God created — it's not permanent.

41:07 Shelby: Yes, and once it's clipped from the bush, it starts dying.

41:11 Paul: And we have reason to hope in the morning because what we have been hooked to is permanent. Okay, let's begin to talk through some of these aspects.

41:25 Shelby: Yes, let's start this podcast.

41:28 Paul: That was just a bit of an introduction.

41:30 Shelby: Yes, yes, yes. It's like a sermon from a pastor.

41:33 Paul: So some of these are in a bit of order. Many of them operate on top of one another all the time, but I think to delineate these elements is important. I want to talk first about, I think for many people, the scariest and most misunderstood aspect of God's grace is His electing grace. The scripture doesn't hesitate to tell us that God chose us before we chose Him. In fact, the scripture says that choice was made before the foundations of the earth were laid in place.

42:17 Shelby: It should blow your mind.

42:18 Paul: Which is mind boggling, but sadly for people, that means I never have a choice and I'm just a robot, and then it gets us in all kinds of nasty controversies. And so, it's really important to say there is no spiritual hope for us if we have to make the first move. Because of the blindness and the rebellion of sin, we will not make the first move. We just won't.

42:56 First of all, I have no sense of my spiritual need apart from grace because sin blinds. Guess who blinds first? Me. I can see the sin of other people, but I'm regularly blinded by my own, so I need God to act on me. And I'd like you — because you do so much evangelistic work — to interact with what I'm going to say is the Bible says that we're dead in our sins.

43:36 Now, what more humbling, powerful illustration of our inability to choose God? I once sent a sermon. Luella got mad at me. She said it was so inappropriate. I said, "You know, if you had a funeral, you walk by a casket, the last thing you expect of that person... I mean, you expect things for everybody who's there, you don't expect anything of that person. They're dead. She said, "That's such a crass way of talking about a deceased person."

44:03 Shelby: It is, but it illustrates the point nicely. You're dead. You're dead.

44:06 Paul: You know going to that casket that whatever encounters you have, whatever are over. That person's gone, so it's a very humbling way to talk about. How do you think about that when you're training people to move into a campus or...

44:24 Shelby: Yes, yes. It's hard to do it with young people, especially, because most young people today have no idea how much they are in need. You can't tell people that they need to be rescued of anything if they don't feel like they're actually in danger and so, we need to first create a need.

44:44 And I'm not saying like there's plenty of people on campuses who go and stand in public squares of a campus and wear a sandwich board — and I've literally seen this dozens of times — have a megaphone and yell at people as they walk by and scream at them that they are in need of salvation because they are going to hell.

45:08 Now, that did work in the 1950s and God can still use it today. I know what the heart is often from those people. I get it, but the discernment is lacking there and so, I've found as you talk to young people, engaging in conversation, being intentional about first leading them to a place that God loves us first, He extends His love to us first and, therefore, we love Him second.

45:40 We love Him because He first loved us and getting back to the basics of why did He need to love us first. Because we would never love Him first, because we would never choose Him first. In other words, we are dead. We are in need. We are on the Titanic and no matter how much we shuffle the furniture around and listen to the beautiful music, the boat is going to sink.

46:07 So helping people to know that they are in danger first, even though they're super comfortable, especially, on a college campus — they're probably wealthy, at least, can afford it; or they're on a scholarship so they're experiencing the benefits of being on a college campus and they're in an environment where everybody is cool.

46:27 Everybody's just doing the same thing and so, when you surround yourself in that environment, you don't recognize that you're in need. And so, helping people to recognize their need, that they're in danger and that they need to trust in something to rescue them from themselves is actually a gift of God's extending His loving grace to us. That's really where I like to start with people. It's a combination of God's love and then your need because of your sin.

46:57 Paul: Yes, and think about this, that the message of scripture is not about my getting my act together 'til I ascend to God. It's about God descending to me in the form of His Son, so that there would be hope for me because I would never make that ascent. I can't.

47:21 I remember, you know, in the Old Testament that you have Jacob's ladder, and the angel ascending and descending. And Jesus then says, "You will see the angels ascending and descending on the Son of Man." He's saying, "I'm Jacob's ladder."

47:38 What He's saying is, "I'm both access to God and provision from God." That's the only way it works. God has to act on us first. Now, I want to balance this by saying that does not remove human responsibility.

47:54 Shelby: Yes, that's very, very important.

47:55 Paul: And I've said this before on this podcast and I will continue to say it. The way scripture presents how God's sovereignty and human responsibility work is this. God exercises His sovereign purpose through the true validity of the choices of the secondary agent. We're the secondary agent, people. So we could say God exercises His sovereign plan through the true and valid choices of the people He created.

48:31 I never get up in the morning and my arm goes to a shirt I don't want to wear because God's planned for me to wear that shirt. Or I've never felt yanked through a door that I don't want to go through. If you look at your life, you know that's not true; but yet the Bible presents that God set this thing in motion, literally, before the physical world was created.

49:02 Shelby: Which should make us go, "Why does God care about all those little mini decisions that I make? Why is He sovereignly in control of all those decisions? Why did He elect me? I heard a pastor one time read through that as they gave their sermon and they said elect, and they're like, "Don't worry, that word just means exactly what you think it means," and then he kept going; and everybody was like, "Uh." But it was good because you addressed those things.

49:27 And again, it's not me-centric here. When people get offended by these kind[s] of things, you don't have to take up an offense there. You don't have to. But if you're God-centric in all of these things, you can read this stuff and begin to start to hold intention that God is in control of all those things, yet my decisions matter.

49:47 And again, coming back to, "Why would God care about what shirt I wear, who I talk to, what door I go through, what I eat, how I interact, what I read, what I watch on Netflix?" And the answer is because God cares about me. He cares about every little detail of my life.

50:05 Paul: And all those little details all string together to make a life. I mean, you don't live running from three or four big moments in your life. Lives aren't shaped by that way. Lives are shaped by ten thousand, ten million little moments. That's why those moments are important.

50:24 I want to be sure before we move on to say that when we talk about electing grace and the topic of God's sovereignty and human responsibility, it's never "either-or". The Bible never presents it as "either-or". It's "both-and".

50:47 I think that moment in Acts 12 where Paul and Barnabas are preaching. First of all, they had to preach. And then, it says the Gentiles heard the word of the Lord, so that had to happen, too. They had to hear. And then, it says, as many as were ordained to internal life believed.

51:08 So there you have both these operating, that these people who had been chosen by God would have never come to faith if there hadn't been the preaching of the gospel, if they hadn't been willing to hear, listen, and consider. So one isn't operating against the other.

51:24 They're operating in this beautiful tandem. Can I take that apart fully for you? No, I can't. It's a glorious mystery, but the Bible puts it that way for us so that we would find hope in the fact that God is always the initiator. That's a beautiful thing.

51:49 Shelby: It's a very beautiful thing because we're hopeless without it.

51:52 Paul: And He's still initiating in your life, He's still initiating in my life, still taking us places we've only chosen to go because He's still committed to His work.

51:59 Shelby: And that doesn't mean that we can't grieve certain things, that we can't call sin, sin. You know, if people have been hurt by other people, if people have been injured by other people, God grieves that, too. As you would say, He never calls a wrong thing right. He never calls sin okay. So He's involved in the process as we continue to live in a sinful environment.

52:27 Paul: Well, all you need to know is that the Bible uses this term, "sin", to know that human responsibility is important to God, that what you do is valuable and significant. And you wouldn't have the concepts of sin and righteousness, sin and holiness if human behavior didn't matter. So the doctrine of election never denigrates these things we're now talking about. In fact, it elevates them. Okay, next.

52:55 Shelby: That was point one.

52:58 Paul: Yes.

52:59 Shelby: Only 17 more to go.

53:01 Paul: Calling grace. It's that majestic process by which God calls us to Himself. I want you to talk about your coming to Christ in a minute, but the thing that just always blows my mind is somehow, God's grace moves us all in the same direction, moves us all to the same point that we would be finally conformed to the image of His Son and, ultimately, delivered from sin.

53:37 But the way He calls us is utterly particular and unique. Nobody's story of calling grace is the same. It's just amazing. You think God would repeat Himself? Well, it's sort of like human noses. There are no two alike. You think at some point, God would just run out of models.

54:05 And so, for me, for reasons I don't understand other than we were all crazy, my parents emptied their house one summer and sent my older brother and sister, Ted and Barbara Joe, to work at a Christian conference on the staff because they were old enough; and Mark and I, at eight and six, spent the whole summer at a Christian camp away from our parents.

54:34 Mark was too young. He ended up not being with the campers and living with the director of the camp and his wife, but although raised in a Christian home, I didn't have awareness of my own sin. I thought I was in because we were good people.

54:54 And my camp counselor, by the name of Paul, decided he would teach through Romans with eight-year-old boys and he did such an incredible job. By the time he got to Romans 3, I was so deeply convicted of my sin.

55:17 And we were in this cabin with three high bunks and I was on the top bunk, and I went to bed and I began to cry, which was mortifying. And I knew that I had to confess my sin and entrust myself to God's mercy. Just a little boy, I thought, "I can't do that lying down. This is perverse." So I climbed down off the bunk and I knelt in the middle that floor, and prayed for God's forgiveness.

55:57 Now, I think amazing as that is, it's almost crazy. Just one little boy. Who cares? This kid in northeast Pennsylvania that happens to be just a few miles from where my first pastorate was, and that happened to be the camp that we always used for our picnics and stuff.

56:23 Shelby: Really, okay, I didn't know that.

56:24 Paul: Yes, Harmony Heart. That was a heart-shaped Lake. That's why they called it Harmony Heart. But no, that's not everybody's story, but it's my unique story of God just in that moment using that. It was a hard summer for my brother, Mark and I, but He used that hard summer to expose my sin into calling me to Himself.

56:51 Shelby: Yes, so His calling grace in my life, similar kind of being raised in an environment where we went to church every Sunday. I was a military kid, so those were often military-based chapels and so, I got to know a bit of the liturgical methods of what it meant to connect with God.

57:10 And truth be told, I was the golden child of the family. I was the good kid. I didn't rebel. If I did do something bad, I got caught immediately. If I was in the hallway when I wasn't supposed to be in the hallway, the teacher would walk down the hall. "What are you doing here?" So I would just be the good kid all the time.

57:33 I obeyed. I was the model child that every parent wants and, consequently, in some ways, it was great, of course, but it also poisoned my heart. It made me believe that I was better than other people. And I think that danger of thinking that you're good and God loves you because you're good is actually a greater danger than someone who's in complete rebellion because you're blind to your own blindness, as you've said before.

58:05 Recognizing that is something that's very difficult for a young person to do because you get pats on the back. You get rewards from older people whom you respect and it's difficult to see that you're in need of anything. And so, I thought I was a Christian because I was good and I went to church. That's pretty much it.

58:27 Now, when I got to college, you know, I was kind of disinterested in the partying lifestyle and so, I didn't want to do that. And I know that tons of people did do that and so, when I got to college, I joined not one, but two Bible studies. One with CRU, one with Navigators. I wanted to cover my bases.

58:49 And so, I was studying the Bible a lot the first semester of my freshman year and the Holy Spirit was beginning to chip away at the fact that, "Hey, you need grace just as much as all those partying frat boys do. You need Me just as much as they need Me."

59:04 And I remember literally thinking, "Well, I can't go back and accept Christ, and be at the beginning again," and that thought that was in my brain that I never articulated to someone, the Holy Spirit immediately came behind that and said, "You're being arrogant. You're being prideful. You're thinking that you don't need the grace of God. You're in danger."

59:31 And so, I remember going away for Christmas break, coming back. The first large group CRU meeting that we had of the second semester, January of my freshman year. Two students got up front, articulated the gospel from the front. That was the talk for the night and one of the students — I'm actually still friends with, I met with him this last summer and talked and thanked him again for what he did in my life — just shared the gospel.

59:55 Super convicted of the fact that I was arrogant, that God loved me and was extending His grace to me, and I was saying no to it by what one theologian calls my damnable good works. I needed to repent of my goodness because I believe my goodness would get me to God.

1:00:13 And so, I was so convicted of that that after they spoke, the worship band got up and played, I left, went down the hall to the men's bathroom. Nobody was in there and I pulled out a little old-school [The] Four Spiritual Laws booklet that Bill Bright wrote back in [1952] because I had it in my wallet, because that's what good Christians did. They carried the gospel around with them. It was so ironic.

1:00:39 Flipped to the back where the prayer was, read that prayer and I said, "I know those aren't magic words, God, but I do know that I'm in need. I do know that You love me and that I'm just as much in need as all the people who are rebelling against You. Will You forgive me of my sin, come into my life, and make me the kind of person You want me to be."

1:00:59 And so, I like to preach the gospel to younger people who believe that they don't need the gospel of grace. I like to preach grace to people because it helps them to see that not just the "bad people", the sinners need grace. The Pharisees need grace, too, and you're probably a Pharisee.

1:01:23 So I definitely was a Pharisee. I was the person who said, "Thank You, Lord, that You didn't make me like this person," when, in reality, I needed to be on my knees and beating my chest and say, "God, forgive me, a sinner, because I need You. I need your grace."

1:01:37 Paul: Yes, you said something I think I need to point out and then, something else you made me think about. It's so important to understand that, as God is calling you to Himself, you cannot confess your sin until you first confess your righteousness. You have to abandon your righteousness and that takes grace to do that does because we hold on to our righteousness.

1:02:08 You know when you sin, you only have one of two choices. You confess that sin and place yourself once again under the justifying mercies of Christ or you erect some kind of self-justifying argument that makes that sin look okay in your life because you're polishing your righteousness; so that God calls us to abandon hope in our righteousness, to confess the ugliness of that self-righteousness.

1:02:40 It's actually part of sin's deceit. It's not righteousness. It's part of the system of deceit. We have to abandon that before we can say, "God be merciful to me, a sinner." It's so important and I thought you illustrated that well in your talking about how God called you to Himself.

1:02:58 The other thing I want to say is what we're talking about, I can never talk about without thinking about Christian parenting because what greater goal for a Christian mom and dad to say, "We would love our home to be a tool of God's calling grace and our children"?

1:03:19 That means you can't just have law-based parenting, where it's a set of regulations with a set of punishments, you're the cop and you're the judge and you're the jailer because if all your children needed was God's law, there would be no reason for the coming of Jesus. It wouldn't have been necessary.

1:03:53 The other thing it does is rather than delivering your children from sin, it can make your children smarter sinners because they learn the system and they learn how to escape it. And they learn when they can get away with something and when they can't, and the kind of attitudes that sort of get you off their back.

1:04:21 And I've had to say to parents of teenagers that I was counseling the whole family, I would say, "I'm sorry to say this to you, but what you think is a growth and Christian maturity in your child, when I'm with him, that's not what I [inaudible]."

1:04:37 This is a kid who's just gotten smart and he knows how to work the system to his advantage, but why doesn't he like to participate in family worship? Why does he complain about going to youth group? Because you have a heart for these things.

1:04:54 On the other hand, having your parenting shaped by this gospel of grace and looking at every opportunity to talk about... hope is not found in our obedience and I want to encourage parents to be transparent about their own need for God's grace. Your kids need to hear you confess.

1:05:21 Some of the best moments with our children, when I would be at the dinner table and I'd say, "I want to talk about last night. You guys were loud at the table and I got mad, and I said things I shouldn't have said; and I should never do that. Your dad still has sin inside of him and please forgive me. I'm so thankful God has forgiven me."

1:05:36 It's important to do that, but your hope is that you would be an instrument of God's grace in the life of your children because grace has the power to deliver them. Grace has a power to transform them. Now, here's what the law can do. Law can expose sin.

1:05:58 You know, that's why we use rulers because we can tell if things are the right size or too short or too long. We need that standard and the law gives us a wonderful guide for life, so it's not lawless parenting.

1:06:19 I want to say one other thing, that grace parenting doesn't mean permissive parenting because the Trinity didn't look down at fallen humanity say, "Oh, let's just be nice and just let this go, and let's just wrap our arms around them and call this nothing," or else Jesus wouldn't have had to die.

1:06:39 So you referenced this earlier. Grace never calls wrong right. If wrong were right, there'd be no need for grace. So I just want to encourage parents that what a powerful vehicle of calling a Christian family can be, but you must have a lifestyle that's formed by the redemptive story with your children and not just putting all your hope in, "If we just have good system of law and we enforce it well, our kids will be okay."

1:07:11 Shelby: Yes, we think that if we can get our kids to be obedient and do the right things, do we really want what the outcome of that is? Do we want to build robots that just do whatever we say? No, we want young people to be raised into young adults who actually care about why they're doing what they're doing."

1:07:31 I watched this documentary recently about Woodstock '99 and if you remember what happened at Woodstock '99, it started initially like what the original Woodstock, where it was lots of great music and people were entertained, but it ended on Sunday with literally, they burned the place down. All these kids just destroyed the entire thing.

1:07:56 And there was a lot of series of events that happened that led to literally setting the place on fire and destroying it, but they interviewed this one girl who basically said, "I was raised in a Christian home and I was given a lot of rules to do my whole life, and I obeyed those rules; but I never really wanted to do what my parents were telling me to do. And they let me go to Woodstock '99 because they believed it would be like the original Woodstock of peace, love, and happiness, flower power."

1:08:28 And she got there and she was like, "I knew exactly what I was doing," and isn't that a picture of how we can raise kids to be obedient robots, but their hearts can be in the complete opposite direction and it leads to burning the place down? We don't want to raise young people, our children to be just obedient servants of what we want [them] to do. We want their hearts.

1:08:50 And by the way, that's exactly what God wants of us. He doesn't want us to be obedient robots, begrudgingly submitting to everything that He wants us to do. He wants our hearts and obedience is not a method of gaining His acceptance. Obedience is a reflection of the fact that we already have His acceptance.

1:09:10 Paul: Yes, and the bright, golden promise of the Old Testament is "I will give them a new heart". I mean, that's the essence. I say it in a way that's a little more stark, that the forces of darkness will give you externally obedient children if they can rule their hearts.

1:09:33 Shelby: If they can rule their own hearts, you mean?

1:09:33 Paul: No, rule the hearts of their children. So the enemy would be glad to give you external obedience if where the actual action takes place, in the heart. The heart, by scriptural definition, is the causal core of our personhood. It's the center of our thinking, our emotions, our will and so, whatever rules the heart actually rules us.

1:10:00 So it's a great deal for the enemy to say, "Sure, you can have that external obedience. Have at it, as long as I can control what really directs that person." It's a massive victory when we are satisfied for externalistic Christianity that it's not an actual reflection of the person's heart. I mean, just take one example. The figures of divorce inside the church rival the culture.

1:10:42 Shelby: Yes, they're not as large, but they do rival it, yes.

1:10:44 Paul: So something's wrong there. Something's wrong with our Christianity. Now, there are times when there's abuse and you have to break the cycle of evil, but there's so much just ugly selfishness that comes out that's never been transformed by grace because it's been about externalism.

1:11:11 And look, when you're in a 24/7 relationship with person, externalism breaks down real quickly. I mean, you will not hide your true self for very long and then all this ugliness takes place. People have no capacity to know how to deal with that and another marriage dies.

1:11:28 Shelby: Yes, and just for the sake of obedience, you could refer to it essentially as acting. You are acting in a play or a movie. So you might know the lines really well, you might know the positions to go to on the stage, you might know how to "interact" with the other characters in the play, but you're not being yourself. You're pretending to be someone else.

1:11:54 There's a reason why we want to know what's going on with celebrities for real in their real life because we want to know who they are in real life, not who they're pretending to be. When they're pretending to be someone else, we know that they're pretending because it's a movie or a play or whatever.

1:12:10 But we're acting when we're doing obedience without the right heart and acting is playing pretend, which is ridiculous, because God is never fooled by that. He's never fooled by our actions of going through the motions, of doing the things without our hearts.

1:12:28 I don't know why we constantly... me, I constantly do this. Yes, I'll go and do these things because I have to do them; and I sit and I quietly listen, and then I check off a box. Who do I think I am? God knows exactly what's happening in my heart in those moments. I'm not fooling Him at all.

1:12:45 Paul: I thought of two things, you were talking. One was the Pharisee in the temple who says, "I'm glad I'm not like these other..."

1:13:02 Shelby: Yes, that's what I referred to earlier, yes.

1:13:05 Paul: And, basically, he's just looking God in the face, saying, "I'm just here to tell You I don't need You." And so, what one thing calling grace does is it calls us to quit comparing ourselves to other people. Compare ourselves to God's standard. It's that standard that we just realize, "I am so messed up. I am so, so wanting."

1:13:34 You can always find somebody a bit worse than you and say, "Well, I'm not like that person," and God's after the heart. I mean, passages say, "These people acknowledge Me with their lips [can you finish it?] but their hearts are far from me." He says, "I see through that."

1:14:02 I think of these things maybe because I'm crazy, but you know when you take public prayer as rather something that you do to God, but something to build your reputation and the people around you, so you're rehearsing the prayer before you pray it? God hears the rehearsal. He hears all the comments that you edited out. Well, it's silly and it's perverse.

1:14:33 One is what seems like the most obvious act of worship becomes an obvious act of idolatry because I would rather get this then get this. Prayer! And that's why this emphasis on God is calling our hearts to Himself — because that's the operating system that drives everything in life.

1:15:02 There's a way in which your body only ever goes where your heart has already gone and so God is doing what we could never do because I can run from a situation, I can run from a location, I can run from a relationship, but I can't run from me. So that leads us to the next aspect, God's rescuing grace. How does God rescue us?

1:15:33 Shelby: I think even kind of going off from what I was saying before with talking with students is that helping them to know that they're in danger. So when something or someone, like an animal or person or tree or whatever, is rescued, the implication there is that they need to be rescued from something or someone, and that something or someone is threatening them.

1:15:57 And so, realizing that there's a threat, there's a danger, that you're in need, that there needs to be some sort of outside interaction to get you away from the threat, the danger, something that's looking to destroy you.

1:16:17 And so, you know, I was recently reading the Sermon on the Mount again at the end of Matthew 5. I just flipped here. It's Jesus talking. 48You therefore must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.

1:16:31 Can you imagine the faces in the crowd when Jesus said that? Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect? It's impossible. It's impossible. You need to be rescued from something. It's just impossible to do that. So seeing the impossibility points you directly to your need for Jesus. You need Him and needing Him in understanding the impossibility of doing it on your own is the entire point of everything, and a lot of people miss that.

1:17:10 So I remember reading this as a young kid and going, "'Therefore, be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect.' All right, well, I guess I'll work at it. I guess I'll just try harder," and I missed the point entirely because it should drive me to my need for Jesus, as opposed to a need to grind and be better.

1:17:35 Paul: That's very helpful. I always think that one of the important questions when we talk about rescuing grace is to ask the question, "What am I being rescued from?" And the ultimate biblical answer of that is I'm being rescued from me. My problem is not just external evil. It's only ever the evil inside of me that hooks me to the evil outside of me.

1:18:05 Shelby: I am a sinner, therefore, I sin.

1:18:07 Paul: I love this way — this is presented in Titus 2, this is just such a magnificent passage, just one of those that I don't think I'll ever reach the depth of. 11For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation for all people, 12training us to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright, and godly lives in the present age.

1:18:32 Now, that immediately tells us that grace isn't this permissive thing. The goal of grace is to teach us to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions. A life of grace should result in the fruit of obedience, so we're not pitting those two things against one another.

1:18:54 But then he goes on. As we're 13waiting for our blessed hope, the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior Jesus. Now, how does He do this? How does He create these people who are serious about ungodliness, saying no to worldly passions, who are waiting expectantly for His return?

1:19:17 That's pretty unique because you would expect normal human beings, they do what they want to do, they follow their passions like they've got a hook in their nose and they're not waiting for anything because they complain any moment when they wait. It's just such a radical picture of transformation.

1:19:33 He says, "¹⁴Who gave Himself for us to redeem us from all lawlessness and to purify for Himself a people for His own possession who are zealous for good works." He has to redeem us from us or this beautiful culture of what the Bible would name holiness and expectancy will never exist. This is what grace addresses. My biggest problem in all of life — I don't want to think it is — but my biggest problem is me.

1:20:10 Shelby: Yes, and I remember reading something you said, listening to a sermon you said, this is before we even knew each other. And I remember reading that you said, "The biggest problem in your life is your own sin. It's you," and prickling at that, for one, and recognizing that, "Oh, finally, when God's grace moved into my life and helped me to see that, that I am sabotaging everything in my life if I neglect the fact that my biggest problem in my life is me," because I'm always going to bring my own perspective into stuff.

1:20:50 I can easily point at other people and say, "You made me mad," or, "You did this to me," or, "You whatever," and now, a long line of that has culminated. And you know this recently of whenever I would think of an enemy in my life, I would think of my own biological father and he did stuff to me. He abandoned me. He injured me. He didn't care about me. Therefore, I had the right to be able to judge him in my life and condemn him.

1:21:17 And then, recognizing God's grace in my life eventually led me to a point where I was finally able after 29 years to write a letter to my biological father and say, "I forgive you and I forgive you as beautiful as Jesus forgave me." I shared the gospel in the letter and even in the letter, I worked on it. I sent it to you. You screened it a little bit. I sent it to some other friends and they helped me edit it down to what needed to be said and what didn't need to be said. And in the context of community with other brothers in Christ, in a room together, I read the letter to them.

1:21:59 One of my friends, Brian, prayed for me. I put my iPad in the middle of the room and I clicked send on that email, slapped high fives; and we went and grabbed lunch together, and we celebrated. But it was this beautiful moment where I was like, "I need God's grace, therefore, I need to extend God's grace to other people." And that never would have been possible if I didn't recognize that my biggest problem is me.

1:22:28 Paul: Yes, I think that the most succinct place where that is stated is 2 Corinthians 5:15 where it says that Jesus came so that those who live would no longer live for themselves, but for Him who loved them and gave Himself up for them.

1:22:45 Our default system, apart from grace is me — what I want, when I want it, where I want it, how I want it, why I want it. It's just total self-obsession, self-obsession. And I want to write my own laws and I want you to live for my happiness, and I don't want ever any discomfort in my life of any kind. And that is the exact opposite quest from God's purpose for giving me breath in the first place.

1:23:24 It's perverse and despicable, but it's such a comforting deceit to always say to yourself, "The big problems outside of me." Like, it's one of the things, again, in twenty years in the counseling office I encountered, "But you don't know what my husband's like. You don't know my kids. You don't know the church I go to. You don't know the family I was raised in."

1:23:59 And I would always say I don't want to denigrate any of those experiences. Those things are important, but you can't back away from the choices you make that are uniquely yours, that the particular way you have fought disrespectful war with a spouse because he's hurt you.

1:24:28 There's a thousand ways to respond to hurt. You have a particular way that you can't back away from that, but it's so tempting to and that's such a compelling false gospel, that if I could just be delivered from this, that, or the other thing, I would be cool.

1:24:49 Shelby: Everything would be fine if my circumstances changed, but even if you were, you're going to move into other circumstances and drag your sinful heart into those circumstances anyway.

1:24:59 Paul: So I love how Paul does that in Titus. He says, "Look what grace is intending to do, delivering you from ungodliness and worldly passions and expectant waiting for the final deliverance from sin. But the only way that happens is if God redeems you from you. He sent His Son to rescue you from you." It's just powerful.

1:25:34 Shelby: It's amazing. It's humbling and it also, "Yes, if I would just get my sinful eyes off myself and lift them up, just die to myself." That's one of the things I had some students ask me recently. "If you can give me any piece of advice, what would it be?"

1:25:52 And I was like, "Well, I'll give you three. One was think biblically. Be in the word daily. You have to do that. The second of the three was live sacrificially, die to yourself. When you die to yourself, you recognize that you're not as big of a deal as maybe you think you are and when you start to recognize that you're not as big of a deal as you think you are, you see your own sin in new lights and new ways.

1:26:20 The third thing, by the way, was walk in the power of the Holy Spirit. So, yes, it's needed. We have to be able to understand. And the only method by which we can die to ourselves is by the grace of God.

1:26:32 Paul: So in His instruction on prayer when Jesus counsels us to pray deliver us from evil, He is counseling us pray not just deliver us from evil, but deliver us from evil.

1:26:46 Shelby: Yes, inside.

1:26:48 Paul: I pray every morning for that. There [are] three prayers I try to pray every morning. My first moment of consciousness is first one's a confession. "God, I'm a man in desperate need of help today."

1:27:06 The second one is a plea. "Please send Your helpers my way." That could be a Christian friend. It could be Luella. It could be a passive scripture. It could be a hymn or a song. Could be a variety of things. So I'm a man of desperate help, please send Your helpers my way, and the third prayer is, "Please give me the humility to receive the help when it comes," because it's got to be said that rescuing grace is not an event, it's a process; and we are still in need of rescue. We will be in need of that rescue until sin has been finally eradicated.

1:27:54 Shelby: Yes, and I think we're all event-driven people, too. What's next?

1:27:57 Paul: So, convicting grace. Talk about conviction. What do we mean when we talk about conviction?

1:28:07 Shelby: Conviction is coming to the recognization — I don't know if that's a word — the realization that we are in need, that we are sinners, that the truth has been revealed. We're no longer living in the deception of the blinders that exist in our lives because of sin.

1:28:28 We are being faced with the reality of the truth of who we are, of who God is, of how He's rescued us as how He wants to continue rescuing us. Conviction is agreeing with God, calling the reality of our lives what God calls it. So calling sin sin. Calling grace grace. Calling our need our need. Agreeing with God that we are sinners, that we are failures, that we will never measure up, and that we are in desperate need of His rescuing work in our lives.

1:29:09 And so, that can lead us, sometimes, into despair. That can lead us into, "Well, I'm convicted of stuff, therefore, I'm just this rotten, miserable, evil, horrible person." And to a degree, that's true, but it should also take you naturally into the next step that God is there to rescue you from all of that.

1:29:32 It should help you see the beauty and the love and the extravagant benevolence that God has in our lives, His sovereignty, His grace, His care, His kindness, His compassion for us. Conviction should always come before the beauty of what God's work is in our lives.

1:29:52 Paul: So the value then, the importance is the actual essentiality of convicting grace is because God knows we have this perverse ability to deny and minimize sin, to make my sin not sin-sin. It may be weakness or was it a busy day or it's my personality.

1:30:20 Shelby: Or a conflict with someone else.

1:30:22 Paul: So we have ways of denying and minimizing sin. And whenever you minimize sin, you devalue grace because you're making grace less necessary than it than actually [is]. So God knew that we have this ability to minimize sin, to deny it, to actually be more concerned about the sin of somebody else than we are of our own. If you're in a place where you're meditating way more on other people's sin than your own, you're in a very dangerous spiritual place.

1:31:03 Shelby: And that's where we are right now. That's why we need this book because that's everything that's going on right now.

1:31:09 Paul: Yes, it absolutely is. So God has to work conviction into our hearts and that conviction is God given us eyes to see — this is so beautiful — sin as it actually looks to God. I'm now being able to see my sin the way God sees my sin.

1:31:36 Now, that's just impossible if God doesn't move on me with convicting grace and that is meant to produce — you mentioned this — deep grief. No longer am I able to hold that in my hands and be okay with it. That's a beautiful thing, just that we can look at ugly and see beauty is horrible.

1:32:05 We can look at danger and see safety. It's crazy and we're being delivered by God from our own insanity because to look at sin in ways that we can explain away and even sometimes make it look beautiful is just insane.

1:32:29 That grief is meant to produce hopelessness. Now, that hopelessness should not be dark, depressive, and suicidal, but it is the process where I give up hope in me because if I don't give up hope in me, I will not reach out for hope in God.

1:32:53 I think of this with my granddaughters. I love them so much. I mean, when I look on them, sometimes, I think my heart's just going to explode. They're just so dear to me, but I've watched this operate in them. They'll be learning to tie their shoe and they're struggling, and you reach down to help them, they slap your hand away.

1:33:18 They want to believe that there's something that they're not and that they can do what they're not able to do. And I'll say, "You know, I know you're still learning to do this and it's really great that you're trying hard, but grandpa knows how to do this. He's done this a few times," and they'll laugh at the old grandpa. I said, "Let me just help you." But it's so hard to relinquish that because that sturdy independence is formed already in them.

1:33:50 Shelby: Yes, and remind me, too, even tying shoes is great and God wants to help us in those things that are good things because tying your shoe ends up leading to a good thing. But illustratively, my in-laws just moved recently and they have a pool in their backyard. And the pool is partially chlorine, partially salt water.

1:34:11 And so, when we go over to swim at their pool in the summertime, we bring our dog with us and the dog likes to drink from the pool because it's salty. But I know that it's not horrible, but it's kind of poison for my dog. So my dog was drinking from the pool and I go down to take the dog away. I say, "No, don't do that," and she nipped at me. She tried to bite me.

1:34:36 And so, I took her in and I put her in the house; and I came back out and my wife, Rachael, goes, "Isn't that an illustration for how we behave in life?" We're killing ourselves, we're poisoning ourselves with sin. God tries to intervene and interact and say, "Don't do that because I love you and I care about you, and I want your flourishing and your survival."

1:34:57 And we nip at Him. We try to bite His hand as He's trying to correct us. So in good things, tying shoes. In bad things, drinking bad water. God wants to get involved and allow us to flourish and be better if we would stop smacking His hand away and stop trying to bite at His fingers.

1:35:16 Paul: And it's why Jesus said on the Sermon on the Mount, "Blessed are those who mourn. They should be comforted." Remorse over my sin is not natural. Remorse at conditions outside of me is natural. That's why if you see a protest, you never see somebody carrying a sign with an arrow coming down that says, I'm the problem.

1:35:40 Shelby: Yes, wouldn't that be amazing?

1:35:43 Paul: You don't because we don't want to believe that we're the problem. So this work of conviction is so, so important and I just want to say allow your heart to grieve. Allow your heart to be remorseful. When I read my little reading at the beginning, I said grace will make you sadder than you've ever been in your life. It should do that. That's the doorway to greater joy.

1:36:17 Shelby: It's a good place to be.

1:36:20 Paul: So God won't leave us in that condition. The great Christian philosopher, Francis Schaeffer wrote in the '70s, "When you've destroyed a person's foundations, don't walk away."

1:36:39 Shelby: Yes, because then, they end up homeless.

1:36:41 Paul: Yes, they have no reason to live and so, God immediately accompanies convicting grace with forgiving grace. Talk about forgiving grace, talk about justifying grace a little bit.

1:36:53 Shelby: Yes, so for me, it was, like I said, coming face to face with the realization that I was not good, that all my good works were as filthy rags in my attempts to try to justify myself, make myself look okay in front of God, recognizing the convicting power of God's grace in my life, that calling my sin what it was — evil, ugly, disgusting — and then, knowing that in spite of all of that, seeing the truth of the reality of how ugly my sin was, how despicable it was, that God still said yes to me. In all of my filth, oozing toxicity in my bad works or in my self-righteousness, God still said, "Yes, you're on My team. I pick you. Put on the jersey. You're with me."

1:37:49 That recognization that God has forgiven me of my sin and adopted me, brought me into the fold to say, "Yes, come near. I am here for you," should magnify the magnitude of Jesus' work on the cross. When He said it is finished, "it is finished" is not just sin is taken care of. My sin is taken care of. My personal rebellion against Him.

1:38:29 I read a book recently by Rebecca McLaughlin who said, "If you don't think you're bad, think about comic books." And she goes on to say, basically, comic books give people the opportunity to that thought bubble that comes up in the head of a character. What if people could actually read if there was a thought bubble above my head all the time, if they could read my thoughts?

1:38:54 You don't think you're bad? Think about comic books for a second, recognizing that all those thoughts that go through my brain all the time, all the judgments I make about every person that passes me on the street, all my self-righteous attempts, all my lustful evil things, that those are forgiven and that God accepts me in spite of that thought bubble that exists on a continually vile basis, that He still says, "Yes, you're with Me," should drive me to my knees.

1:39:24 That little boy on the third bunk should go to his knees and say, "I am so grateful and thankful." Tears should pour down our face when we think about the magnitude of God's forgiveness. That cross represents my life. His death represents everything that's good about me and everything that's good about me comes from His forgiveness.

1:39:48 Paul: So we need to talk about the process of that.

1:39:53 Shelby: That was sloppy, I'm sure.

1:39:53 Paul: No, it was very good. It was very good. There had to be a righteous life, a life lived that was in every way possible, every situation, every location — not just external obedience, but the internal heart — totally pure. Impossible for human beings, so God sent His Son to live that righteous life so He could be the acceptable Lamb of sacrifice. That's very, very important.

1:40:32 Every moment of Christ's life is substitutionary. He's the second Adam — now standing where the first Adam stood and failed — but without failure. Every choice He made, every word He spoke, every action He took was for our redemption. He's standing in our place. People talk about it, they run to the cross and I get that because of the significance of the cross, but every moment of Christ's life, He is purchasing my righteousness. He's my substitute. And then, sin demands a penalty. The penalty is death, so there had to be a death. Someone had to absorb the penalty, satisfy God's anger.

1:41:33 And so, it's the grace of God and the anger of God with sin that kiss on the cross in the person of the Lord Jesus, so that it's not just that I get forgiven, but the righteousness of Jesus now is given over to my account. It's imputed to me. So I can stand before God as righteous, although I'm not actually. It's just so amazing.

1:42:13 Shelby: Again, another mystery, yes.

1:42:15 Paul: So I'm no longer under His condemnation. I'm under His mercy. That process is so incredible that every aspect of what I need for my forgiveness is done. And then after the cross, Jesus walks away from the tomb, destroying the power of sin and death over us, claiming the ultimate victory. All that is necessary for forgiveness to be granted and righteousness to be given, so that I can stand before God, not now constantly afraid of His condemnation.

1:43:05 I mean, imagine — you've had this situation in your life, I surely have — where someone exposes your sin, but just walks away and you just wallow in condemnation. So God won't leave us just with conviction, He immediately meets us with that forgiving, justifying grace.

1:43:25 Shelby: That's something that a lot of people don't understand. They think, "I'm forgiven," and they put a period at the end of that sentence, and then they just also experience the continuing life of living in sin and being in a sinful world, "but I'm forgiven." And it's like breathing in without breathing out. You have to do both of those things.

1:43:48 So when you're forgiven, yes, of course, you're forgiven. But now, because you're forgiven, Jesus' righteousness has been imputed upon you, it has been lavished on you and you are a righteous saint. You are a wretched sinner and a righteous saint, and you're forgiven. So live like it. Why don't people live like they're forgiven? And I'm talking to myself, I do not live often like I'm forgiven and I've been given the righteousness of Christ. The great exchange has happened. I often just don't live as if it has actually happened in my life personally.

1:44:29 Paul: Yes, I love the capstone of 2 Corinthians 5, a passage I referred to earlier. ²⁰Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, God making His appeal through us. We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. ²¹For our sake He made Him to be sin who knew no sin, [here it is, awesome] so that in Him we might become [how are these words ever written] the righteousness of God. Paul and Shelby, the righteousness of God.

1:45:09 Shelby: It doesn't make any sense. It doesn't make any sense.

1:45:13 Paul: I mean, how does anything in life get better than that? So it's not just my identity is, "Okay, I'll forgive you." You know, that sort of begrudging forgiveness. It's, "I'm going to name you as righteous. I'm going to give you a new identity." What is my identity right here, right now? Righteousness of God.

1:45:41 Shelby: Yes, and you know, this is how I felt as a younger person. If you did something wrong, you were called out on it; and when you're called out on it, maybe you said, "I'm sorry," but then you had to wallow for a while. Then you had to hang your head, tuck your tail between your legs for a period of time.

1:46:00 Paul: Well, I don't know. I didn't ever have a tail, but I get what you're saying.

1:46:04 Shelby: Neither did I, but this is a metaphor, run with it. If you decided to feel bad about your sin even after you've already said, "I'm sorry," for a length of time, that undetermined length of time would then prove that you were actually sorry for what you did.

1:46:25 Now, I'm not saying that was a necessarily family thing, it was just my heart. That's kind of how I felt in those moments. I felt as if I acted like I was sorry after I said I was sorry, then I actually meant it.

1:46:37 And that wired me in a way that I thought even after I became a Christian, that I had to act really sorry or be really good and not do the sin that I did before for a while in order for God to accept me. Everything you just read flies in the face of that.

1:46:56 It just says, "No, it's not like that at all. You're forgiven and you are righteous. You are counted as righteous." Don't wallow because wallowing is penance. Penance is unnecessary. It's just unnecessary. It's diminishing the work of the cross. It's saying, "It's Jesus + my penance = actual forgiveness," and it's neglecting the gospel of grace. It's neglecting it completely.

1:47:23 Paul: It's not like, say you've got a position with a company of some kind and you really mess up, and you mess up bad; and they put you on a probationary period. There's no probationary period for forgiving grace. We go from sinner to "by forgiving and justifying grace, the righteousness of God".

1:47:52 Shelby: Your account is clean. It's done.

1:47:55 Paul: So I want to move us to a couple [of] things that go together, but I want us to delineate them because we just don't want to miss the specificity of these different aspects of God's grace. It's reconciling grace. I mean, it would be a beautiful, beautiful grace if God just said, "You know, I'll forgive you. I'll remove your penalty, but I don't really want anything to do with you."

1:48:28 I mean, people have committed crimes that get it all the time. They're released from prison, they're not going to have relationship with the warden. He's not going to say, "I'm going be in your life. I love you and I accept you. You can be part of my family." It never happens.

1:48:46 But with God, He says, "I want to draw you to Myself. I want an eternal life with you. I want to be with you," and somehow, because of justifying grace, this incalculably Holy Being is able to live in intimate community with yet unholy people. It's just beautiful.

1:49:24 Shelby: Yes, and the evidence of that is the Spirit of God Himself. Not only does God want to be with us like next to us, He wants to live inside of us. That's how much He cares about us. That is just astounding when you think about it, that God had to be in a temple before and there were all these rules, and certain people couldn't go in certain places; and the rope was tied to the one person who would go in and represent the people to do the forgiveness of sins for the people and they might die.

1:50:03 There's all these things that happened because God is holy, God is separate, God is pure and perfect and righteous, and we are not; and the temple represented that. Now, all of that lives inside of us and that's terrifying because I know myself pretty well.

1:50:22 Paul: Let's talk about the metaphor. Let's just pretend that President Biden would say, "I want to find just an average family that I can spend time with," just real America. And, somehow, your family gets chosen and you know he's going to come to your house. Your house would look the best it's looked in ten years. The Holy Spirit of God moves into a dirty, disheveled house still in massive need of repair and He's willing to live there. I never am able to offer him a completely clean temple.

1:51:10 Shelby: Yes, He's not just visiting. He's there.

1:51:13 Paul: And He's willing to live — it's the metaphor from that book I read from earlier — He's willing to live in a broken-down house. If you think about that in a physical setting, I wouldn't be willing to do that. I want to live in a nice house. I wanted to be comfortable in every way. I want to be clean.

1:51:37 You know, when you rent [an] Airbnb, you don't want that place to be dirty or you're going to be calling somebody on the phone real quick. The love, the patience, the tenderness of our Lord that He will enter a less than clean house because He wants to be in us. He wants to be with us. He wants to be for us. He wants to animate things that won't get animated unless He's there.

1:52:14 Shelby: Yes, because what you just said, you answered the question, but because it's inevitable when we... "Why would God want to live in a broken-down house like me?" The "why" question should it inevitably lead to... the only practical answer is because of me, because He loves me.

1:52:35 It's not necessarily like seeing all the filth and the dirt, yes, but someone would do that if they value that person enough. They would want to be in community with that person, intimate with that person, sharing life alongside with that person in that house.

1:52:54 So that should communicate not only my value that God sees me as valuable, but also God's tenderness, love, grace, forgiveness because He just actually cares about me enough to live inside of me. It's just amazing. It doesn't make any sense at all, humanly speaking.

1:53:10 Paul: Yes, and you can't really understand the majesty of forgiving grace unless it's coupled with reconciling grace and you see that again in the entirety of redemptive history. God has always chosen to dwell with His people.

1:53:31 He was there in the garden. He was the cloud in the pillar of fire. He dwelt in the tabernacle in the temple. He was there with Jesus. Now, He's there with His children, in them and He will be with us for all eternity. So that means that essential to that work of grace is the presence of God.

1:54:07 There's a way that I think of saying this is God's greatest gift to us is Himself. It's one place where the giver and the gift are the same thing because what has to happen won't happen without that. It's just so beautiful that God says to me, "I'm not just going to forgive you and walk away. I'm not a warden. I'm a redeemer."

1:54:33 Shelby: And the reconciliation that happens in us — and we need to probably draw this to a close now soon — but the reconciliation that God gives us in 2 Corinthians 5, therefore we become ministers of reconciliation. God draws us into a relationship with Him in order to send us out to communicate with other people that there is reconciliation available for them as well. You are an ambassador. You represent God. You've been reconciled. Therefore, go tell people about what that reconciliation looks like.

1:55:08 Paul: So I want to make a little twist on what you just said because it's easy for us to think that being ambassadors reconciled as just evangelistically. But if you go back to 2 Corinthians 5 and he says, "We implore you be reconciled to God," who's the you? It's the Corinthian church. It's believers.

1:55:35 So positionally, I've been reconciled to God. I'm His. He's drawn me close. But in actuality, if my heart is still ruled by other things, I need to be further drawn to Him. And so, again, we're seeing reconciliation as this point in time where God reconciles us to Himself and this ongoing process of continuing reconciliation.

1:56:03 Shelby: Yes, ministry of reconciliation, which again comes back to this in a lot of ways, your book, of connecting not only with God in ourselves, but reconciling in amongst one another as believers, helping people know that they need to be reconciled, that the answer is not like a principle or an argument or being correct. It's actually God, that's the answer.

1:56:25 And when people see the reconciliation that happens in and amongst the church, more than likely, they will go, "That is different than what I've ever experienced. What is this reconciliation?" They would never put it in those terms, of course, but they would see it and they would be inexplicably drawn to it.

1:56:42 Paul: So I want to finish this triad that we're working on, this triad of saving grace, which is forgiving, justifying grace, reconciling grace. There's a third piece of the triad. These all work on top of one another. It's adopting grace.

1:57:01 So even if it were God reconciling to Himself, but there's still some distance there, it's literally Him naming us as His children. I mean, that adoption is the most intimate form of acceptance you could have. "I'm taking you into the intimacy of My home and I'm giving you My name."

1:57:36 We have a daughter that we adopted. There's absolutely no difference in the magnitude of our love for her and our natural children. And she is a Tripp and forever will be. I love this in 1 John because, again, the way John talks about this is so sweet and tender.

1:58:02 ^3:1See what kind of love the Father has given to us [look at it, study it, meditate on it] that we should be called the children of God; [and then he says] and so we are. I just love the way that's put together.

1:58:20 Look at this. How could this be? This is how big His love for us, that He opens Himself up to us in the most intimate way — family. It's not just kingdom, it's family and we are now the children of God. And then he says, "And so we are."

1:58:46 Shelby: And I think about, you know, my daughters. You know, I'm known in some circles as a public figure, minorly, and people treat me differently. I know that happens with you all the time and they feel timid or nervous or whatever when they come and talk to you.

1:59:04 But my daughters will come to me in the middle of the night if they have a nightmare and they will wake me up from my sleep. And they will pull me out of bed and take me to their room. And I will sing to them and scratch their back, and help them to go back to sleep.

1:59:21 That is the kind of relationship we have. We don't have a, "Hey, God, it's good to meet You," kind of relationship with God. We have a, "Let's go wake God up in the middle of the night because I need Him right now and He's going to sing me a lullaby and scratch my back as I go back to sleep." That's what family is. That's what family does.

1:59:40 Paul: So think about that. It never ends. I just, last week, got a call for my one of my sons. He's in his 40s. And I answered the phone and said, "What's up?" He said, "I just need a dad-talk." And he said, "You just always give me perspective and you give me hope," and he's facing some difficult things career-wise; and we were on the phone for about an hour. And I thought of this passage, that he's my child and I have an affection for him that is just deep and full. And when I'm talking to him, I'm talking to my boy. It's just different.

2:00:39 Shelby: It's different. It's not the same as talking to anybody else.

2:00:41 Paul: And I love that all the things in scripture talk about God's discipline of us, it's always presented as fatherly discipline, that it's the discipline of love because He looks on us and says, "That's my boy. That's my girl. I love them. You're mine."

2:01:13 Shelby: And that's what I tell my daughters, too. I said, "Daddy loves you. Why do I love you," and they know now how to answer. But earlier in their lives, I would tell them, "I love you because you're mine. You're my daughter, not because you behaved a certain way, not because you were right, not because you acted well. I love you because you're mine." We cut through all of that. "Obedience or disobedience, I still love you because you're mine."

2:01:42 And when you're adopted into the family, you are family. The robe has been put on your back. The ring is on your finger. The sandals are on your feet. The fattened calf has been killed. "We're celebrating because you're mine." It's family.

2:01:55 Paul: Yes, and in that call which was lengthy, Justin said something about... it was a long conversation. I just said, "You're my son. This is never an interruption." And I am a poor representation of the fatherhood of God.

2:02:25 If you know, the Bible says if a less than perfect father gives good gifts to his children, how much more our heavenly Father? And what I want to continue to say about all these aspects of God's grace, it's important to know every one of them. It's important to study your Bible, to look at that because there's such a deep motivating protection in these various aspects.

2:03:02 It animates your desire to serve this One, to witness to the grace of this One and we don't want to ever get the point where grace bores us or it all lumps together in one big soup of whatever; and we're just scratching the surface.

2:03:26 Shelby: I know, it's just small. We got a lot more things to talk about.

2:03:30 Paul: So let's see if we can get a couple more here. Transforming grace. The classic biblical way of talking about sanctifying grace. What's God doing with His transforming grace?

2:03:45 Shelby: God's putting on our hearts, not only recognizing from the beginning that we're sinful, that we're forgiven, that we're adopted; but now, we don't have to stay where we're at. We're liberated from the chains of sin that bound our feet earlier.

2:04:01 I've heard a lot of people say, "I just can't change. I can't be any different than I am. I'm just so used to being a certain way." And when you qualify that and make that definitive statement about yourself, you're nullifying the grace of God. Grace saves us from our sin and grace will get us to heaven in the end, but grace also operates in sanctifying us now. It's not just about as you've said, an entrance and an exit. It's a process as well.

2:04:37 God cares about us enough to transform us, to help us to look at our sin, call it what it is, not label it as our identity. We are more identified as believers with the transforming grace of God than we are the sins that we wrestle with on a daily basis.

2:04:54 I think that people need to rewire the way they think about themselves and rewire the way that they feel. They feel that they're unable to get out of the traps that they're caught in when it comes to sin.

2:05:05 Paul: So this is the warden releasing this guy from prison and inviting him into his house to live with him; and then, pouring into him everything he needs to live in a brand-new way so he'll never be back where he was before.

2:05:25 How amazing is that, that God adopts me into his family and then, He says, "I know the potential — because now, you're My child — is for you to live in a much better way than you're living"? And so, we're going to roll up our sleeves here and we're going to get at the work of transforming this life from what it was to what it can be. Now, the transformation of a life is really the transformation of the heart and it's a particular passage that always is where I go when I think about this. It's Galatians 5.

2:06:18 ²²But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, ²³gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law.

2:06:27 Now, look at these. Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Who would want to live with such a person? That's a beautiful life. Now, why is it called fruit of the Spirit? This is very humbling because I have no ability whatsoever to work this stuff up.

2:06:51 Shelby: Yes, it's His. It's His fruit.

2:06:54 Paul: So Jesus died — so this would be my potential — then He gave me a Spirit to begin to move me toward these things. Am I more loving than I once was? Praise God, that's true. Am I as loving as I could be? No, I'm not.

2:07:14 So we're all on — we use this term a lot — we're all on the spectrum; but this time, it's a spectrum of godliness, but we continue to need that ongoing work of transformation.

2:07:36 Do I always love peace? No, sometimes I like to fight in places where it's just ridiculous for me to fight. Am I always patient? Again, by God's grace, I'm a much more patient man than I am. I want to just declare this patience. Impatience is one of my natural sin patterns. Luella says that I do everything in my life as fast as I can do it for reasons neither one of us understand; but God is working patience in me.

2:08:09 Shelby: Yes, well, you look at this list, too, and you think, "Love, joy, peace, I'll spin the plates. You know, I'll spin the plate of love, I'll spin the plate of joy, peace, patience. I'm working on this here and then, the place start to topple if you keep working at all of them and that should be the point to go. I can't be this person. I cannot be this person."

2:08:27 And again, coming to that realization is a gift of God's grace, that He needs to be the one to transform me into this person that this is talking about in Galatians 5. It is the fruit of the Spirit. It's not the fruit of my effort. It's not the fruit of Shelby trying really hard. It's the fruit of the Spirit and why am I so thick headed to not understand that?

2:08:51 I cannot produce fruit in my life. I can bear fruit. I can be the branch that the fruit is produced on. My job is to stay connected to the vine, John 15. Stay connected to the vine and the Spirit of God will produce love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness.

2:09:09 Paul: It's so important that this passage is not presented as a set of moral goals for you to achieve to.

2:09:19 Shelby: Yes, because it will kill you.

2:09:20 Paul: Well, it will kill you and it also denigrates the gospel. That's why Paul, very carefully, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, names it the fruit of the Spirit. It's telling us what the source is, so that we do not think that, "I'm forgiven and I'm going to heaven. And in between, my job is to gut it out and make myself acceptable to God."

2:09:52 Impossible. But that God has come, indwelt me and now, if anybody ever asked a Christian what God is working on, it's a simple answer: massive personal change. That's what He's working on all the time. The Bible, the book tells us that and who needs that?

2:10:19 Shelby: Yes, all of us and it should be no coincidence that we see that Paul gives us the fruit of the Spirit and then, he just moves on. He just starts talking about other things. You would think that if he wanted us to be like this, to try harder, he would unpack how to do that, but he does not do it at all. He goes, "Oh, this is the fruit of the Spirit. Let's move on to something else." That should give us a clue as a reader to go, "Oh, maybe it's about God and not about me."

2:10:44 Paul: Now, I want to say that these are beautiful things to quest for. You should want to be that kind of person. You should wake up in the morning and say, "Help me to be loving today to the people who are near me. Help me to be joy." Joy is the product of gratitude. You never go to complainers for joy. They don't have much. And so, let me be so grateful today that I'm better at counting my blessings and numbering my complaints. So you should want these. You should work toward these things. Of course, you should, but you should know that you have an inability to produce them without the work of the Spirit.

2:11:37 Shelby: Yes, again, it drives you to your knees to go, "God, have mercy on me.

2:11:41 Paul: So Shelby, we're a little more than halfway down and so, we're going to have to do this again. I'm serious.

2:11:51 Shelby: And this has been one of my favorite episodes.

2:11:54 Paul: Continue our conversation in God's grace.

2:11:57 Shelby: It's just so magnificent for my soul.

2:11:57 Paul: And there are things we haven't talked about that are glorious and beautiful that I think we need to talk about, people need to know and understand. But where would we be apart from God's grace? And it is something that we should never stop studying. The magnitude of God's grace has no bottom. We will dig and dig and dig, and I believe ten million years into eternity, we'll still be wondering at the magnitude of God's grace.

2:12:39 Shelby: Yes. The end of Galatians, chapter 6 says, ¹⁸The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with your spirit, brothers. Amen.

2:12:48 Paul: That sort of says it all, doesn't it? Amen.