Discover Your True Self - You are Secure, Part 2

Did you know that God offers us the kind of security that can't be disrupted by any person or any circumstance? Not by the threat of cancer or sickness of any kind. Not by violent crime or even the death of a loved one.

We can be completely secure in Christ. Today, we'll learn how. Stay with me. Thanks for joining us for this Edition of Living on the Edge with Chip Ingram. Living on the Edge features the Bible teaching of Chip Ingram on this international discipleship program. I'm Dave Drouie, and in this program, Chip continues his series, Discover Your True Self. As we get ready for this message, I'm thinking about a stark contrast, you know, something that changes from one thing to another in a revolutionary way.

You never expected it and it just blows your mind in a good way. Chip's message is going to help you make that revolutionary change in the way that you think about you, the way you think about God, and about what could happen in your relationship with Him starting today. Now, if you have a Bible, open it now to Ephesians chapter one, and let's join Chip for part two of his message, You Are Secure. Some of you have been through the very painful experience of irreconcilable differences, either in business, in a marriage. You know what the word reconcile means? It means two people that weren't getting along. In our case, we were enemies of God. We were hostile to God. The one who made us, it was either passive indifference, I don't care about God, or actual rebellion.

Don't any of you tell me what to do, even though you made me? And it's, you become friends. Would you write this down? God is my friend. What if this started itching its way?

Maybe at least got down to the collarbone. God is my Father. God made me a new person.

God is my friend. You know, sometimes we'll meet someone famous and maybe we'll get to know them, and sometimes it'll sort of slip out. This happened recently, and we'll sort of, well, he's my friend, right? Plays on the PGA, or he's in the NBA, or she came out with a new album, or he runs this big company, or they got a gold medal in the Olympics and they're my friend. You ready for this?

Here's what you can write down too. I am God's friend. The one who spoke life into existence, he's my friend. I'm God's friend. What do friends do? What do you do? Okay, this is not a trick question.

There's not some like, oh, I hope I get this one right. What do you do with your friends? You hang out. You enjoy each other. You get to know each other.

You do things you both enjoy. Real friends, you can share the good stuff, and they're not jealous, they're happy for you. You can share the bad stuff, and oh, man, and they'll even help you. You can even share the deep, ugly stuff, and they don't judge you, but they also don't let you stay the same.

What if you actually could believe that God is not down on you? He's your friend. He can take whatever you want to share.

He wants to hang out. This isn't, I will not be religious. I'm going to church regularly. I need to read the Bible. I need to pray. Probably need to pray longer.

I need to give some money. Am I okay now? That's how some people live. How about this? Come unto me, all of you that are stressed out and heavy-laden in labor and just overwhelmed with life, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke.

Let's do life together. I'm meek, power under control, lowly of heart, and I want to help you get through this life, and I will never leave you or forsake you. You have been justified. You have been regenerated.

You have been reconciled, and then I love this next one. It's a big word, propitiation. Almost sounds like a dirty word. Actually, it's not. It means that Jesus satisfied the just wrath of God by His death on the cross, and therefore, Jesus took all my punishment forever.

Let me say that again. Jesus took all your punishment forever. Jesus took all of my punishment forever. 1 John, chapter 4, verses 9 through 11. By this the love of God was manifested and made known to us that God sent His only begotten Son into the world.

Why? So that we might live. Well, how? Through Him. In this is love, not that we love God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. Now, you need to understand that God has emotions. He's a person.

He's one essence, three distinct persons. He has feelings and emotions and a mind and a will, and we're made in His image. And there's something that makes Him very, very angry.

It's called evil. But His anger isn't like our kind of anger that flies off the handle or just as capricious and, you know, He's going to blow up one day. John Stott writes about propitiation, and he says the reason why propitiation is necessary is that sin arouses God's wrath or anger. This doesn't mean that He's likely to fly off the handle at the most trivial provocation, still less that He ever loses His temper for no apparent reason at all, for there is nothing capricious or arbitrary about the Holy God, nor is He ever malicious or spiteful or vindictive. His anger is neither mysterious nor irrational. It is never unpredictable, but always predictable because it is provoked by evil and evil alone. The wrath of God is His steady, unrelenting, unremitting, uncompromising antagonism to evil in all of its forms and all of its manifestations. I'm listening to The Life of Bonhoeffer by Eric Metaxas right now, and I'm in the section where the most horrific things were done to the Poles and the Jews.

It's even hard to hear of gassing people and going into villages and just indiscriminately lining everyone up and killing them and then dancing on their bodies. The human heart in the right circumstances is desperately wicked. And evil, and whether it's the abuse of children or whether it's greed or whether it's evil of any kind, God is angry because it's destroying what is just and good and kind and God-like. What you need to understand, when Jesus was hanging on the cross and crying out, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? It's in that moment that the just wrath of God took the punishment you deserve and I deserve and all people of all time deserve, and He placed it on Christ, and He who knew no sin became sin for us that we might become the righteousness of God. And in that single moment, the Father turned away and He became the sin-bearer, and all the punishment of all time was on Christ.

Write this down. God will never punish me if you're in Christ. I'm not afraid to die.

That wasn't always true, but I'm not afraid to die. And for those of you that kind of have this in the back of your mind like in college, no one knows about the abortion I had or I was young in business and it was only once, but I had that affair or that one business that I was in and I sort of skimmed some money or I said some things about someone and no one really knows or I have this private addiction and some of us have some stuff in your background and whenever things are happening that are difficult or painful, here's what you need to understand. All the punishment that ever will occur in your life has already been literally the word is He satisfied is absorbed by Christ. God will never punish you. He's not down on you.

Now, jot down Hebrews chapter 12, lest we misunderstand. Good, kind, loving fathers, when you are moving in directions that are to be harmful to you or others, He may cause some circumstances, I call it the velvet vise of grace, to get your attention, to get you back on the path that's good and holy. Because see, good dads and good parents don't just say, oh well, you know, good luck kid. But He's never punishing you. It's never vindictive. Are you ready for this? God is not mad at you. When you sin, you know what, His anger has been placed on Christ.

Are you ready? It makes Him sad. I will tell you what has helped me more than anything else is not being afraid of God's punishment, it's realizing that my Father who loves me, who gave His Son for me, when I sin and do things I know that are wrong, or when He tells me to do something and I just, nope.

And then afterwards I look at it, I break His heart. See, sin is fundamentally never about a behavior or a word. Sin is always relational. And so it's not sin management. It's not how close can I get to a sin or how long can I do this or how far can we go sexually.

Those are all the wrong questions. Sin is fundamentally that which would make a division between me and my God. And what a relief to know I will not be punished.

It's already been taken. I remember being in the Philippines and being out in a rural area in a jeep with one of my good friends Tom Randall in front of a drunk guard with a big machine gun that went from here right to here. And I thought, I didn't think this is how I would die. And obviously the good news is since I'm here I didn't. But some of you have had those moments and because I know Christ took my punishment and His righteousness has been placed into my account. You know when I go to the Middle East or when I go to some places that I travel and do some things, I'm not being stupid. But if you hear that I die, I'm immediately in the presence of the Lord, it gives me a tremendous freedom.

How about you? The fifth thing that happens is sanctification. Justification is an event, a point in time. Propitiation is an event, a point in time.

Reconciliation is an event that starts a process and a relationship. Sanctification is a point in time but it's a journey. Sanctification is the process, underlined process by which the Holy Spirit transforms my inner attitudes and my outward actions to the character of Christ. The first was positional righteousness. This is how God views me. Justification. This is practical righteousness, living it out as I walk by faith and obedience, trust in His promises and give and receive encouragement in the body of Christ. Jot underneath this one.

Are you ready? God will never leave me alone. He's in the process of changing you. He lives inside of you. The Spirit of God. 1 Peter chapter 2 talks about our part, our responsibility. Therefore putting aside all malice, all deceit and hypocrisy and envy and all slander, right?

That's a part of the old me. But just because I have a new nature, the Bible is clear that the Spirit and the flesh wage war against one another. So he says in light chapter 1, of all that God has done for you, you've been born again through His Word, therefore lay aside actively. Take these things and put them in your past and like newborn babes, long for the pure milk of God's Word so that by it you grow in respect to your salvation. I would suggest there are a lot of people that have been a Christian two years, five years and 20 years that are still in diapers and they're not mature and they don't understand much about God and they're probably thoroughly saved and they've missed probably a lot of their life or if it's 20 or 30 years, most of their life because they have never become someone who decided, I need the pure milk of God's Word, which leads them to meet. Your relationship with the Lord is determined by your relationship with His Word.

Those are Jesus' words, not mine. The second thing is we can't do this alone. I can't walk by faith and obedience alone. I can't say no to malice and envy and all those things alone. My motivation gets low.

I need people. I need the body of Christ. You need the body of Christ and so around here we talk about the pure milk of God's Word coming before God daily, doing life in community and then being on mission 24-7, just loving people, every single person God puts in front of you. What would happen if in your psyche you went from, wow, God feels distance to He's my Father? What would happen if I'm a prisoner of my past to God made me a new person? What would happen instead of what do I need to earn God's favor? God is my friend. What if the fear of if I do this or I do that, is God punishing me too? He'll never punish me.

And even when some relationship or tragedy comes into your life, what if you believed God will never leave me alone? Well, I want to finish our time by sharing how you can know this for certain. It's from Ephesians 1 verses 11-14 and it says, in Him, Jesus, also we have obtained an inheritance. Circle the word we, if you will, in your notes. Literally, in Him, Jesus, we have been made inheritance, having predestined according to His purpose who works all things after the counsel of His will. To the end that we, circle that one again, who were the first to hope in Christ would be to the praise of His glory. Paul is writing as a Jew and this word we is we Jews have obtained or been made God's inheritance. We're the vehicle he wants to use in all of his purposes and that word for counsel is his deliberate strategic choice and that word for his will, it springs from warm deep emotion and he's saying we who were Jews were chosen by God to be an agent of blessing, were made His inheritance and then he flips it and says, what about you Gentiles? In Him, Jesus, you also circle you and write Gentile above it.

Get what happened. After listening to the message of truth, someone shared with them, behold I stand at the door, knock. After listening to the message of truth, the gospel of your salvation, then what is, having believed, not agreeing intellectually, you personally turned from your sin, you believed, you received Christ, what happened? You were sealed in Him with the Holy Spirit of promise. Very interesting New Testament word. In the Roman culture, this word has to do with a transaction, a financial transaction or the sell of something, it's finished.

It has the idea of absolute ownership and security. You, when you believed, all those five things happened to you but God sealed you with the Spirit. The Spirit of God entered your life and you were sealed for eternity if indeed you truly repented and trusted Christ.

It's a guarantee. In fact, he goes on to say, who is given as a circle this, a pledge of our inheritance with a view to the redemption of God's own possession to the praise of His glory. So we have this inheritance and what he says basically the word pledge there is our, we would use the word down payment or earnest money.

I currently am, like probably many of you, some of you have your house paid off but most of us, I have a house, it's my house but the bank thinks they still have a little part in it, pretty big part actually but it's in my name. It is my home, it's a sealed deal and what he's saying is heaven, your inheritance, freedom, the absolute security, there is none in this world, you've got that, right? We're an earthquake, a tsunami, a car wreck, a financial downturn away from all of our lives changing like that and what he's saying is this, when you prayed to receive Christ and he became your father and you became a new person and he's your friend and he says I'll never punish you and I'll never leave you. He says what I want you to know that then I sealed you for myself and this inheritance is that one day I'm going to pull all things together, that's redeeming all the things in my possession and there's going to be a new you, you get a new body, inheritance and it's going to be in a new place, a new heaven and a new earth and you will be with me forever and ever and ever and if you want to talk about security, security, security, security that won't change, that's what you have if you're in Christ and see that's the core and I understand that's a lot of theology and can I encourage you to maybe take these notes and read those big words over but the big words, God is my father, he'll never punish me. On the back page I've given you what I think is the most fundamental lie that we believe and then I want to give you the truth and I've been reviewing cards like this for over 35 years and I got a long way to go but I will tell you, you can be the son of an alcoholic and marry someone who's a son of an alcoholic and you can be through all kind of trash and not believe a single thing that I taught you today and you can change because my experience is proof of that but you renew your mind. So the lies are those who fail are unworthy of love and deserve to be punished.

I believed that for a long time. So what do you do? You try and earn and prove in performance. Doubts, guilt over past mistakes and condemnation are evidence that you're a bad person and unworthy of love by God or others and so people who believe they're a bad person punish themselves and make stupid decisions that bring more pain in your life because psychologically there's something weird about us that if we feel like we're bad we should pay and we figure out ways to make ourselves pay. And then you say stop the truth, I'm secure in my relationship with Christ, in my daily safety and well-being and in my future outlook whether on earth or in heaven because I have been sealed by the Spirit.

Is that awesome? I've been sealed by the Spirit. I want you to know that if you have by faith received Christ everything I have said is true of you and your responsibility is to say no matter what I've got to get it from here to here and if by chance you're here or you're watching or you're listening and all that I've said you realize I'm outside of Christ.

I have never owned that I have sinned against a holy God. I have never turned away from myself and the sin that I know I'm in and ask him to forgive me and come into my life so I could follow him. Today would be like the greatest day in the world and so as you sit in your seat or watch or listen and God is speaking to you just tell him I want what you offered. I think the Holy Spirit might give you a Dr. Phil question.

How's life working your way? And God your Father would say would you please turn from your sin and let me forgive you solely on the basis of Jesus work on the cross and his resurrection. It's transferring your trust so right now tell him God I'm sorry I've sinned against you will you please come into my life right now and forgive me.

Will you make me your son make me your daughter. I believe right now in this moment that you died in my place you rose from the dead and paid for my sins. I receive that right now in Jesus name.

Amen. Before we go on I don't know exactly what may be happening with you right now. Some of you prayed that prayer of salvation many years ago and you have been justified. You have been sanctified. You are growing in Christ and you have ups and downs but you are becoming more and more like Jesus every day and what I just prayed and what I just shared brings back great memories. For others you haven't prayed that prayer. You haven't turned from your sin and received the security and the gift of eternal life through Jesus Christ and I would encourage you to pray that with me. As you listened I shared that in a live teaching at the church and a number of people literally went from the kingdom of darkness to the kingdom of light as they prayed with me and God had prepared them and God has already prepared many of you. This is not an accident that you happen to be listening to me right now whether you're in your car or on the treadmill whether you happen to be listening at work I don't know where you are but God does and he knew all the things that would lead up to today where he could say to you personally I love you.

I've already forgiven you. My son Jesus died for you. I want you to be a part of my family.

It's a gift but like any gift it has to be received. Will you receive the gift of eternal life? God promised as many as receive him Jesus to them he gives the right the authority to become children of God and so wherever you are would you pause right now with me and in your heart of hearts and if it's possible say it out loud Lord Jesus I need you. I admit that I have done things wrong but I'm not the person that I know I want to be or you want me to be. I need your forgiveness and I want new life.

Right now I believe Jesus died in my place for my sin and I trust that he rose from the dead for my salvation. Lord Jesus please come into my life right now and make me your son make me your daughter. Thank you for forgiving me. Now help me to walk with you all the days of my life. If you just prayed with me God has forgiven your sin.

He's made you a part of his family and now he wants to help you grow. I'd like you to call or text the greatest Christian you know and tell him what you just did. I want you to find a good Bible teaching church this weekend and go to it or watch it online and then please go to our website livingontheedge.org and we have a clear section there of some material that will help you understand what's happening to you and how to grow. It's absolutely free and let me be the first to say welcome to the family. If you prayed with Chip I hope you'll take a minute and call us at 888-333-6003.

We'd love to talk with you and get a free resource in your hands that will help you understand what you just did and where to go from here. If you'd rather go to the New Believers tab on our website livingontheedge.org or tap special offers on the app where you'll find that same resource. We just want to help you get started on your new journey of faith.

Well Chip before we wrap up you wanted to say something about the year-end match that we talked about so much through the month of December? Well Dave I just wanted to pause I mean to really pause and tell you from the bottom of my heart thank you. You know every time a person makes a financial gift a spiritual transaction occurs. In other words something actually happens in a person's heart and I speak to those of you who gave. You gave, you responded, you invested in Living on the Edge and I want you to know that as you've invested we're going to invest in the lives of people here and all around the world. It really matters and we are super grateful. Thank you each one of you who prayed and said Lord what do you want me to do and then you followed his lead. The final numbers will be on our website as soon as we get all the mail that comes in but I just want to say thank you. Thank you so very much for hearing from God, responding to God and for being so generous. And let me add my thanks to that as well.

All the information about the match is on our website livingontheedge.org so if you're interested keep an eye out for it there and again please know we're celebrating every gift and the impact it'll have on what we're doing in 2021. Thank you so much. You know an easy way to share Living on the Edge or any of Chip's messages is with the Chip Ingram app. With just a couple of taps any message you choose is on its way to your friend, someone in your family or on social media to help others who could benefit from the truth of scripture and its encouragement. And don't forget to include a quick note about how it made a difference in your life. Well it's been great to be together. Until next time this is Dave Druey saying thanks for listening to this Edition of Living on the Edge.