You might have a spouse acting up, but God can keep you. You might have folk persecuting you on your job, but God can keep you. You might have trouble in various areas of your life, but now that you're in Christ, you have access. to grace. All the gifts in the world won't do you any good if you never accept them.
Hello, and thanks for stopping by for today's Destin for Victory, where we feature the preaching ministry of Pastor Paul Shepard. Christ has given you many gifts: peace that surpasses all understanding, joy that can't be found anywhere else, and the one you just heard now: grace. the grace to be patient with those who have done you harm. The grace to endure tough times in your job or in your marriage. God has already given you these gifts, but as you'll see today, for them to be effective, you have to unwrap them and ask God for the wisdom to use them for His glory.
Online, you'll find us at pastorpaul.net. You can hear any recent Destined for Victory message on demand, including today's. That's pastorpaul.net.
Now let's listen closely to Pastor Paul's Destined for Victory message. Access granted.
Sometimes we're praying for a certain level of income or a certain level of financial provision. And God has not sent it our way yet. But I want to let you understand that when you have access to the blessings of God, before you get the blessing you're praying for, there's a blessing called grace. Grace means God will help me make it before my situation changes. And I don't know if you understand how important that is, but you need a grace that until you get the money you need, God will keep you steady.
God will help you to go on and believe Him that He will bring His promise to pass. And that grace, the Bible says, His grace is sufficient. Sufficient grace. Sufficient means grace has it all covered. I would lose my mind, but grace has it covered.
And I find myself being able to go on and trust God before my blessing comes. See, you might be praying for God to save your relatives, and you might be praying for God to bring peace into your home that has all kinds of confusion in it. But until God is able to get through to those people who are persecuting you, are getting on your nerves, what he'll do is give you grace to put up with them. That's valuable, man. When God gives you grace to look at folk who are working your nerves.
And to say, y'all are not gonna drive me crazy. I'm not gonna lose it over you. You're not that important. I'm not gonna give you that much power. I'm putting you in the hands of the Lord.
I'm praying about you every day. There's some parent here who has a teenager who is acting like God knows what. And you're saying, sometimes you wonder, is this one really yours? See, I was raised by old-fashioned parents, and I was raised around folk in our church. That's the way they talk.
When they would get on those rolls, when we hit those years where we were just making stupid decisions and doing crazy things, they would just get on one of those rolls. My mama would love talking like that. She said, Sometimes I don't know what's the matter with you kids. I just don't understand it to save my life.
Sometimes I wonder, are you really mine? I come to tell somebody: if that's the way you're feeling right about now, you have access to a grace. Where God will hold you steady. And you say, these kids are tap dancing on my reserve nerve. But something inside of me Is holding me steady.
You might have a spouse acting up, but God can keep you. You might have folk persecuting you on your job, but God can keep you. You might have trouble in various areas of your life, but now that you're in Christ, you have access. To grace. He said, Because of Christ we have peace, we have grace.
And look at the third thing he says: he says, we have hope. He said, We have hope. And we rejoice, he says, in the last sentence of verse 2: in the hope of the glory of God. I want to let you know, peace with God covers your past. Grace covers your present, and hope covers your future.
Hope says, I don't have everything God has for me yet, so I have some more coming. I've got peace, my past is taken care of, I've got grace to make it in my present. But don't think for a moment I'm not going to believe God for more. He has done so much for me in Christ until there are some things I'm looking forward to. Hope looks forward to what God will do.
And I come to let somebody know you have access into hope. You can trust God because of Christ, that there are more blessings He has for you, more provisions He has for you. God's not finished showing you everything He has. Your eye hasn't seen, your ear hasn't heard, it hasn't even entered into your heart some of the things God has prepared for you. And so you have a right to have hope.
Now, now it gets a little sobering. See, we just got through shouting.
Now look at verse 3. Not only so, but we also rejoice in our suffering. Uh-oh. I want to let you know that. You are going to go through a process.
In Christ, and it's unavoidable because God doesn't want to just bless you, God wants to also grow you. See, we're the blessed me generation. But we have to be the grow me generation. We have to say, Lord, there are some things in me that aren't right yet. Make them right.
There are some ways in me that aren't holy yet. Make them holy. There are some attitudes that are not Christ-like yet. Make them Christ-like. I have some old actions still plaguing me.
God, make me like you. And so he says, all right, I'm going to take you through a process. And here's the way it will work. I'm going to make sure that you have times in your life where you are suffering.
Now, not everybody's going to tell you this because we have, unfortunately, in this day, too many candy store preachers. You have too many folk who will tell you, all they'll tell you is what you're going to get. All they'll tell you is how you're going to be blessed. All they'll tell you is that God's going to make you healthy, wealthy, sexy, and wise. I've come to tell you there's more to it.
I come to tell you that the Bible says, no, God's not just going to bless you, He's going to grow you. And so, what does He do? He makes sure that we experience some suffering in our lives. And read it in the New Testament: it is crystal clear: God lets his people suffer.
Some folk won't tell you that.
Some folk will assign all of your suffering to the devil, and you need to rebuke it. Listen, some of it you can rebuke it all you want, it'll buke you back. You know why? Because if God let the sunshine dominate, then you wouldn't have the growth that the rain brings. And so he'll bring some rain into your life.
And listen, you don't have to assign all of it to the Lord.
Sometimes the devil does bring it, but God says, rather than remove it, I'll use it.
Sometimes your enemies will bring it, but God says I'll use it. Oh, I'm in the book. 2 Corinthians, Paul said, I sought the Lord three times that he would rid me of a thorn in my flesh. And God said, instead of ridding you of it, I'm going to give you grace. Why did God give him grace instead of removing the thorn?
Because he said, I can use this to grow him. I can use this to build character in him. I can use this to make sure he is humbly dependent upon me. I've given him so many blessings in revelation. If I don't let some suffering come, he'll be conceited.
And so, what I'll do is make sure that he always knows he's got to trust me day by day. Listen, my friend, God's doing the same thing in your life. You've been praying for some things to be removed, and instead, God is allowing them to stay. Why? Because of this process Paul mentions here.
Look at what he says. He says, We have to learn to rejoice in our sufferings because we know that suffering produces perseverance. Perseverance. Listen, I tell you all the time, we are a generation that must let God teach us how to persevere because there's very little in our culture to make us persevere. We live in the technological age, we have so many conveniences at our disposal, and so we are not accustomed to having to persevere.
I tell you all the time, when we say we're washing clothes, that's relative. Relatively speaking, we are washing clothes. When your great-grandmother said she was washing clothes, she was washing clothes. But when we say we are washing clothes, somebody calls you up. Oh, girl, I can't stay on the phone.
I'm washing today. And what do we mean? We mean we took a pile of clothes out of a hamper, we put them in a machine, we poured in some detergent, then we closed the lid, pushed a button or two, and walked away. I can't talk, I'm washing. See what I mean?
We're not persevering through that process. We just dump some clothes in. And then you come back.
Some minutes later, after you hear the machine has stopped, and you go take them out and you put them in another machine where you put in little fabric, softener, whatever it is, and then you close the lid, push another button, and walk away again. I'm drying my clothes. No, you're not the machines drying your clothes. Your great-grandmother hung them out in the wind. Come on, somebody.
Even if you lived in the hood.
Sometimes they had a closed co-op. You had a line and you strung it across the street. And you and your friend had a co-op. You put them on and rolled them out there. It's not our fault.
Let's rid ourselves of guilt. It's not our fault. Technology has spoiled us. You know years ago, not that many years ago, when you were out in public and you needed to make a call, you had to find a pay phone. Or find a generous soul who would let you use their phone in the store or at some business.
And guess what? We survived. Oh, but now we act like life itself stops. If we have lost our cell phone, temporarily misplaced our cell phone, left the cell phone home, you know how you do. You act like you can't live.
Oh, Lord, my cell, I don't believe. It's not our fault. We're spoiled. Still ahead, the second half of today's Destined for Victory message featuring the teaching ministry of Pastor Paul Shepard. As always, you can hear any of our recent messages on demand at pastorpaul.net.
That's pastorpaul.net.
Listen and subscribe to the podcast at Spotify, at Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. Have you asked God for something good lately, and His answer, at least for now, has been no?
Sometimes that's because he knows we wouldn't know what to do with it if we had it.
Now here's the rest of Pastor Paul's Destined for Victory message, access granted. We go to the store. And all we had to do was walk up and down the aisle. See what you want, grab it off the thing, throw it into your basket. We didn't have to grow the food.
We didn't have to, come on, we didn't have to produce the food. All we're doing is going up and down, pulling. And what are we doing? I don't believe that they're trying to charge $5.74 for this. Then we get a cart full of stuff we didn't grow or produce.
To the line. God forbid that there are three people ahead of us in the line. Stand there and huff and puff, make no sense. Where are the rest of these people?
Somebody, look at that. Got three registers with nobody on it. I don't, but. It's not our fault. We just spoil rotten.
Get in an airplane. Fly 33, 35,000 feet in the air. At some 500 miles per hour, zipping through the air in a way that your great-grandparents never conceived. Possible. And what are we up there doing?
I know y'all are bringing me something beside this little pitiful sandwich that all I had to pay for my ticket, you got it on orbit or you got it somewhere at a discount, all that. I'm not sure if I can do it. And God forbid you're on Southwest. Oh, y'all west, south, west, out.
Now, you knew why you got on Southwest because you didn't want to pay for United American Continental USA. You wanted the cheapest way, so you went Southwest. You know by now that it doesn't matter where you're going, whether down the coast or across the country, Southwest is gonna give you two things: they're gonna give you peanuts and something to drink. That's it. No need of fussing, no need of calling the president of the company, no need of showing parts of yourself that need to be concealed.
Southwest is gonna give you two things: whether you are a pauper or the president of the United States, you're gonna get peanuts and you're gonna get something to drink. If you're lucky, every now and then in a basket, I fly it in for just a couple of routes when I have to get down to LA real quick. I jump on there. And the other day I was on there and I said, I don't like those honey-roasted peanuts. I like either the plain ones or I don't want those peanuts.
And so I saw, and I saw another bag in the thing that looked different than that. I said, lady, what is that? She said, Oh, that's pretzels. I said, give me that. Say every now and then, if you want to switch up from the peanuts, they might give you a bag of pretzels.
But that's all you're gonna get. Why are you going in there tripping? Leave those people alone. You want more food? Get on another airline.
pay more money. We're spoiled. Bless our hearts. And so. God says, I'm going to let you learn how to persevere because I won't treat you like technology does.
I'm going to make you wait on some things. I'm going to make you persevere, press through some things. But remember, my grace is going to allow it not to kill you. God will make you persevere, but he won't put more on you than you can bear. And Paul said, We have to learn that our suffering produces perseverance.
Perseverance, watch this, produces character. See, that's what God's trying to do. God wants you to stand in the line and quit complaining. and let him grow some patience in you. And you stand there and realize, you know what, I'm not in all that big a hurry.
I don't just have to get out of this store in the next five minutes. I wish I could walk straight into a line, but let me just stand here a while. Let me look around, smile at somebody, strike up a little conversation, be nice for a change. God wants to grow character in us. If you're standing there, your child of God stands there showing out right along with the folk who don't know Jesus, where's the difference?
And if they try to strike up that, you know, that bad conversation with you make no sense. I don't believe it. You just say, yeah, well, hopefully somebody's coming soon. Listen, listen, how are things going with you? And is that your grandbaby?
Oh, what's her name? Try to get in a different frame of mind. Get that devil out of there. God's trying to grow character in us. The fruit of the Spirit, what God's trying to do is love.
Joy? Peace. Patience, long suffering. That's the ability to outweigh your trouble. I can hang longer than my trouble.
God's trying to grow that in us. Faithfulness, the ability to make your word good. And so, character comes as God exercises us in perseverance. And Paul says, and it is that character. Once that character is developed in you, then your hope is mature.
Because I'm hoping for more blessings, but I don't need them. Because until God brings them, He's given me a character and ability to stand my ground and to represent Him, to worship Him, to praise Him, and to thank Him that He's given me access to everything I need for life and for godliness. I've come to let somebody know. That because of Jesus, access has been granted into everything you need. Peter put it this way in 2 Peter chapter 1.
He said, God has given us everything we need for life and for godliness. He's given us exceeding great and precious promises that through these we might be partakers of his divine nature. Because of Jesus, you and I have access. to every blessing, every provision. Of God that has been ordained for our lives.
But please know that God won't just bless you, He'll also grow you. He'll also make you become mature. In fact, there are some blessings he has for you. He can't afford to give them to you until you grow up a little bit. Because he knows how we are.
He knows if he blesses you and you're immature, that blessing will drive you crazy.
Some folk can't afford to have God's material provisions yet. You don't have your priorities right yet. God can't put more into your hands because he hasn't taught you yet how to value what he's already given you. The Bible says if you want more, you got to be faithful over what you already have. And I've come to let somebody know there's more coming.
You have hope in Christ, but the process is going to make sure you grow. And when you grow to the place where you can handle it, don't worry about it. There are some things coming. We have hope for our future in this world. And let me close by telling you, we have hope for a future in the next world.
I'm so glad I still believe the old-fashioned gospel. I'm so glad I don't believe that all of the heaven is on earth. I'm here to tell you that there is a real heaven. I'm here to tell you that one of these days, God is going to bless us, that we will close our eyes on this side and will open them on the other side. And it doesn't matter how many blessings you've enjoyed in this life.
When you are absent from this body, you're going to be present with the Lord. Don't tell me that all of my blessings are here because this is a wicked world. This is a dangerous world. This is an evil world. But there's another one coming where there's no more sickness, no more sorrow, no more pain.
No more trouble, no more force working my nerves. In a time when I will rejoice in the presence of my God forevermore. Thanks so much for being here with us for today's Destined for Victory message: Access Granted. Always glad to have you with us.
Well, for years now Destined for Victory has been committed to using the media to reach as many people as we can with the gospel of Jesus Christ. I asked Pastor Paul when he was with us to talk about why radio is so important, and here's what he had to say Well, I want to tell you that it's important to me as a discipler That my voice is heard, and it is used to help people grow in their knowledge of the Lord and in their faith walk with Him. Fact of the matter is, my voice doesn't sound like most of the other folks you hear on Christian radio. I'm well aware of that, and I'm really comfortable with that. I come from my own unique background, both ethnically and in terms of life experience.
There are things I share, there are things I say, and there are the ways that I say them that are unique. I believe that that perspective needs to be heard throughout Christendom. And so, while I'm so grateful for all of my heroes, your heroes are mine. I listen to the same people, the guys who have been on the radio for decades and have proclaimed God's word faithfully. I really do appreciate those guys.
But I've learned not to be intimidated by them because I've got my own way of processing and own way of sharing and helping people. learn and to grow in their faith.
So it's quite intentional.
Sometimes I like to be really colloquial in what I say and how I say it because I'm just using who I am and I think God wants to use that. He's the one who called me. I didn't call myself. He called me and I believe he knows what he was getting when he called me into the ministry. And so I'm just trying to make a difference because the gospel really does change lives and I believe I have a unique calling to help present the gospel from my own perspective.
And I pray that that's resonating with listeners and I pray that that means enough to them. That they'll make sure my voice can continue to be heard right along with our other heroes who teach the gospel of Jesus. That was Pastor Paul's mission, and it remains our mission today: to bring timeless truth for a victorious life on radio, online, and through our free mobile app.
So, today we're asking you to send a generous donation to Destined for Victory to carry on the mission of Destined for Victory and to ensure that Pastor Paul's voice continues to be heard. When you do, we've got a great thank you gift to share with you: our new booklet, Rising Above Offense. Because we've all been wounded from time to time, even by the people who love us most. What does God say about how to handle this? You'll find out in Rising Above Offense, something I believe everyone should read at least once.
And if you want to discover the right way to respond when someone offends you, if you want to learn all about the beautiful and amazing power of forgiveness, request your copy of Rising Above Offense when you make your generous gift to Destined for Victory. And as summer comes to a close, your gifts are very much appreciated so that we can be sure to close out the rest of this year in strong financial position. Thank you again for all you've done and for all you're going to do. You can give by phone by calling 855-339-5500. That's eight five five three three nine fifty five hundred.
or visit pastorpaul.net to make a safe and secure donation online. You can also mail your gift to Destined for Victory. Post Office Box 1767, Fremont, California, 94538. You are a designer original. There is nobody like you on the planet.
I don't care if you're an identical twin, you have your unique. identity in this world. Your fingerprints are different. On purpose, you just are a unique person, and God wants to use all of who you are. to accomplish his purpose.
That's next time in our message: Becoming an Excellent Steward of Our Talents. But until then remember He who began a good work in you will bring it to completion. In Christ, you are destined for victory.
