The Father of Grace #2

God is not a reluctant blesser of His children. God is not reluctant to forgive and to cleanse and to help. He is not an uncaring tyrant.

That is not who He is. God is the Father of Grace. Thanks for joining us on the Truth Pulpit with Don Green, founding pastor of Truth Community Church in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Hi, I'm Bill Wright, and we're concluding our series, Yours for the Asking. Last time, Don reviewed the human illustration Jesus gave us in his Sermon on the Mount. A human father loves his children and naturally wants to provide. Today, we'll see just how much greater a father we have in heaven, and we'll come to better appreciate the magnitude of his grace. That grace is indeed yours for the asking, but you do have to ask. Let's join Pastor Don Green right now in the Truth Pulpit. The disposition of God is when you persistently ask your father to help you grow in righteousness, what do you think he will do? He will help you grow in righteousness.

There's no other possibility. He will respond favorably. When children make good requests to their fathers, the fathers answer and say yes.

That's what they do. And that's the way that we should think about our God as we seek to develop our sanctification. Now, a couple of objections here. First of all, I could well understand someone saying, perhaps some of you, saying that's too simple. Spiritual growth is more than just asking for it. Well, remember Jesus' audience here. Jesus is speaking to those who are hungering and thirsting for righteousness already. He's not making a blanket promise to people who are spiritually indifferent or anything like that. He's speaking to people who have already cultivated in themselves, and the Spirit of God has worked in them a hunger for righteousness. They're eager to obey, but they see their inability to do so. They're eager to obey, but they see their weakness. They've been a Christian long enough to understand, I don't always get this right.

In fact, sometimes I fail pretty miserably. To them, he says, God will help you when you ask. God will help you when you ask. He is describing an earnest, sincere request coming over time from someone who is earnestly seeking to grow this way. This priest supposes that somebody is reading God's word, somebody is seeking actually to grow, not just lazily asking God to do it all while they do nothing. Another objection someone else might say impatiently.

I tried that, and it doesn't work. I ask God to help me get over my particular sin. I've asked God to help me grow spiritually, and it doesn't work. I still struggle. I still fail. I got frustrated, and I just quit asking.

To that objection, I would say this. If you stopped praying for God to help you grow in righteousness, you never once asked in the spirit that Jesus requires here in this passage. You see, Jesus says, you ask and keep on asking. Seek and keep on seeking. Knock and keep on knocking. The fact that the answer was delayed was not an excuse for you to stop asking.

That was not a reason. The goal of righteousness, the desirability of righteousness, the call to righteousness didn't diminish simply because of your failure. You continue to ask. You continue to seek, even when it seems like the answer is delayed. You persevere through that, and you keep asking until heaven opens the door for your growth. If someone stopped praying because he was discouraged, he has no complaint against these words of Jesus. Listen, just think with me here.

Just think with me here. Jesus says, ask and keep on asking, and you will receive. You say, I asked, to which I say, ah, but you stopped, and you brought yourself outside of the realm of the promise. Jesus told you to keep asking, but you stopped. And the fact that you were discouraged beloved is not an excuse for that.

Think with me on that simple example, homely little example here. Can you imagine someone taking that approach with their personal hygiene? You know, I want to be clean, and you know, I tried taking showers, but I found that I just got dirty again, and it just got so frustrating to me that I just gave up, and I quit. No more showers for me.

Really? That might explain why you don't have many friends. You would never do that. You would look at that, and you'd say, friend, that's preposterous. Physical hygiene doesn't work that way. It is a sustained effort. It is something that you do consistently over time, and you don't expect one shower to take care of you for life. We all understand that.

It's so absurd no one would even think it. Well, beloved, just take that over into the spiritual realm and see the obvious application. Your spiritual growth requires your consistent attention through humble prayer to your Heavenly Father. This isn't something that you pray one time.

You see, look, especially you young people that are developing relationships and all of that, hygiene matters to you. You want to be at your best for the person that you're seeking or whatever. Great. Love that.

All in favor of it. It's a consistent day-by-day effort. Well, if you want this kind of righteousness of which the Lord speaks, that that desire doesn't go away. You keep asking. You keep seeking it. You want it day-by-day, and so you seek it and you ask for it day-by-day. You see, the person who gives up, who gets frustrated and quits, the problem is not that God has failed us in some way. Sometimes the Lord lets you go through struggles. Sometimes the Lord lets you fail again and again just so that you would come to realize more and more how empty you are spiritually and how much you are in need of grace.

To humble your pride, to afflict you to the point of humility so that you would come and say, God help me, I can't do it on my own. And only when you have come to a settled rejection of your own natural ability do you start to pray in this kind of earnest spirit that says, God, I really need your help. And you start to pray that way and then you find over time the Lord changing you, the Lord helping you. The whole idea is that this is a sustained matter of spiritual life, not a one-time event that allows you to arrive and then you're on spiritual easy street. It's not like that, beloved.

And sometimes you just lay broken in the trench, bloodied from the battle, and you say, God help me again today. And it seems like the measure of grace is small, perhaps. But that's not the case.

That's not the case. The mere fact that you're asking is showing the work of an operation of grace in your heart. You should never lose sight. You should never lose sight of who your Heavenly Father is. He is a greater father than a human parent and He knows exactly when to give what you need.

And so you trust Him for that and you keep asking along the way. The problem is not that our God has failed us. That could never be the answer. And in our discouragement we need to come back to the fact that possibly, possibly, probably, we just don't know Him like we should. Martin Lloyd-Jones said this, the greatest defect in most Christian lives is our failure to know God as our Father. We say we know that and believe it, but do we know it in our daily life?

Is it something of which we are always conscious? If only we got hold of this, we could smile in the face of every possibility and eventuality that lies ahead of us." Beloved, if you're struggling in your Christian life, I say this to help you and to encourage you, to be a blessing to you, not to rebuke you. If you're struggling with a lot of chronic discouragement in your Christian life, come back to the realization that God is a Heavenly Father who desires to bless you, that He is with you, that He saved you in order to bring you into His family, to put you on the receiving end of His blessing and generosity, and to come back and to ask Him afresh again, God, I've been run over by a truck here.

Can't you help me? And to realize that that's not a prayer of desperation that He may or may not answer. This is a confident request we make knowing that our God is for us.

And if God is for us, who can be against us? He's a greater Father. If the human father would give to his human son, how much more a greater God to a spiritual child. This is fundamental to the way that we think about our God. Secondly, the divine reality, God is a greater Father. Secondly, God is a gracious Father. God is a gracious Father. And as you go to your Heavenly Father in light of this passage, remember oh this is sweet.

Remember how Jesus has described Him throughout the Sermon on the Mount. Look at chapter 6 verse 4. Chapter 6 verse 4.

You must know these things that we are so easy to forget when things don't go our way. Chapter 6 verse 4, what's God like? Verse 4, your Father who sees what is done in secret will reward you. Verse 6, when you pray, go into your inner room, close your door and pray to your Father who's in secret and your Father who sees what is done in secret will reward you. He sees who will reward you. He sees who will reward you.

Look at verse 8. Don't be like them. Don't be like the Gentiles who meaninglessly repeat the same prayers over and over.

You don't need to be like them. Your Father knows what you need before you ask. Your Father knows your circumstances. Your Father cares. Your Father is intimately aware with every detail of your life.

Your Father is intimately aware that these particular things are difficult. He's intimately aware of the struggles that you have, of those besetting sins that seem to, that sometimes seem to dominate you more than you dominate them. He knows. He knows. He anticipated all of that before Christ even went to the cross. He knows. And he saved you anyway. Now having saved you, is he just going to turn his back on you?

This is unthinkable. Look at verse 26 of chapter 6. Look at the birds of the air that they do not sow nor reap nor gather into barns and yet your Heavenly Father feeds them. These little two-cent creatures have needs and your Father gladly feeds them. He gladly makes sure that the birds of the air have what they need. Don't you think you're worth more than a sparrow?

Aren't you worth more than a flitting cardinal that will die in a short amount of time? Well, if God feeds the birds like that, won't he do much more for you? You see, we just need to repent frankly of our unworthy thoughts of God, that somehow he's reluctant to answer prayer, that somehow he's reluctant to bless us, that somehow he's reluctant to receive us when we go to him in prayer. Verse 32, the Gentiles eagerly seek all these things, but your Heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. Beloved, your Father knows, your Father cares, your Father is willing to answer and willing to give.

He sees you and he knows your need and he has promised to provide for you. And so, what do you say in response to that? How do we respond?

How do we think about that? How do we think about God in light of this? Beloved, there is something really basic fundamental that should sink deep into each of our hearts in light of these things. The God of the Bible, the God of your Lord Jesus Christ, the God and Father of your Lord Jesus Christ, this God to whom we pray, this God who sent Christ to lay his life down on a cross for our sins, this God who graciously sent his Spirit to draw us to Christ to save us, to redeem us, and to bring us into his family, this God who, as Christ expressed it in John 14, he's gone to prepare a place for us so that he can receive us and we'll be with him forever, this God deserves your trust. This God deserves your confidence. This God deserves your trust.

He receives you in love. He is sovereign over all and he uses his strength to help you. And so, this frames everything about the way that we pray to him. Look at verse 11 again with me now. He says, If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give what is good to those who ask him? Beloved, I say it reverently, but I say it emphatically, for the love of God, for the love of God, lay hold of this in your heart.

Lay hold of this in your mind. God is not a reluctant blesser of his children. God is not reluctant to forgive and to cleanse and to help us in our struggles with sanctification. He is not an unwilling stranger unwilling to give you five dollars for gas. He is not an uncaring tyrant just looking to smack you and to whip you once more for another failure in your life. That is not who he is. You can't look at the cross of Calvary and think that. No, the one that he whipped was his own son, right?

The son bore the stroke on our behalf. God is like this. He is willing to bless. Now, there's one last thing that you need to notice here, that we see who God is. We trust him.

We bless his name for the goodness of his character, the greatness of who he is. We see that. But we realize in what Jesus says that there is an element of responsibility for you here.

And this is where it becomes, having looked up, now we look in. Notice the last phrase in verse 11. How much more will your Father who is in heaven give what is good to?

To whom? To those who ask him. He gives to those who ask him. Beloved, this is not an indiscriminate promise that God makes to everyone. This isn't something that you just automatically receive regardless of your mental involvement, your mental engagement. No, this is designed to cultivate in you a spirit of dependence and a spirit of humility where you actually go and ask. You actually go and ask in this sustained way. If you want this blessing, you have to ask for it. If you want this kind of spiritual growth, if you want to lay hold of this kind of blessing from God, you've got to ask for it. And it would do us all good to ask ourselves for you and me to ask ourselves this question, do I even ask for this?

Do I even ask? Yeah, God bless my work. God help me this. God help so and so that. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

We get all that. But what about getting to the core of what Jesus is teaching throughout the whole Sermon on the Mount about pursuing a life of righteousness, about having a character that is reflective of the character of Christ himself, of having a character that desires the things of heaven more than the things of the earth and cultivating that, of cultivating a spirit of trust. God, I believe that you will provide for me over a spirit of anxiety. God, I'm afraid you won't. The inner man, beloved, who you are in your heart and who that is shaping up to be, when do you ask God to shape you there, change you there? God, make me into a godly person. Make me into a godly young woman. Make me into a godly young man.

God, make me godly inside whatever else may come. When do you pray that way, beloved? See, that's what Jesus is saying.

That's what Jesus is promising. And he says that that blessing is reserved for those who ask for it and ask consistently. Maybe, maybe we would do well to rethink what we pray for, maybe we would do well to rethink our thoughts about God.

What a good God, what a great God. And to be willing to accept the possibility and the responsibility even to the point of repentance of saying, you know, I accept the responsibility, I accept the fact that the reason I haven't progressed more in my spiritual life is because I really haven't asked God for help. You know, I'll go through my Bible reading plan and I'll do my quiet time and all of that, but when it really gets down to God change me and make me what you want me to be, I don't ask for that, I ask for other things, I ask for lesser things.

Maybe we should change the way that we think about these things. In addition to all of this, this willingness of God to bless us, who he is as a father, beloved, let me remind you of one final central thing. In addition to all of this, as we think about our meager spiritual lives and the help we need to grow, beloved, go back to Calvary, go back to the cross. Our Lord shed his blood to make atonement for your sins. He left the glories of heaven to walk on this earth in the midst of 33 years of sinful opposition to his soul. He was beat and he was crucified.

He was spat upon. He bore the wrath of the Father. He bore the wrath of God on his shoulders on your behalf.

And as they mocked him, he cried out, Father, forgive them, they don't know what they're doing. He saw you and your sin in the 20th and 21st century and overlooked it. The Spirit of God brought Christ to you through the Gospel and he received you when you cried out in repentance and faith, God save me. And he washed you and he cleansed you and he gave you an assurance that now you belong to him. Beloved, think with me.

Think with me. This determines everything about where you go spiritually from here. Did Christ make that gracious self-sacrifice in order to abandon you in the middle of the Christian life? Did he graciously reach out to you to start it only to step back and walk away in shame because of your repeated failure? Having lain down his life for you, will he turn you away as you seek help in the sometimes weary life of being a disciple of his? The question answers itself, doesn't it?

No, no, no, no, no, no, no. He's not like that. He is not like that. He is a gracious Savior. God is the Father of grace. Psalm 86, I believe it is, turned right to it. You turn to it too, Psalm 86.

This is what we walk out with. He knows our weakness. He promises growth for the asking. Look at verse 1. He says, Incline your ear, O Lord, and answer me, for I am afflicted and needy. Preserve my soul, for I am a godly man. O you, my God, save your servant who trusts in you. Be gracious to me, O Lord, for to you I cry all day long. Make glad the soul of your servant, for to you, O Lord, I lift up my soul. Now look at the ground upon which he prays this prayer.

David reciting in Old Testament form, verse 5, Psalm 86, verse 5, For you, Lord, are good and ready to forgive, and abundant in lovingkindness to all who call upon you. Give ear, O Lord, to my prayer, and give heed to the voice of my supplications. In the day of my trouble I shall call upon you, for you will answer me. There is no one like you among the gods, O Lord, nor are there any works like yours. All nations whom you have made shall come and worship before you, O Lord, and they shall glorify your name. For you are great and do wondrous deeds. You alone are God. Do you see it, beloved? Do you see the ground upon which David says, Help me in my affliction and my weakness? Lord, you're good. You're ready to forgive. You're abundant in lovingkindness to all who call upon you.

Did you come in staggering under the load? Been there, done that. Beloved, this God will hear your cry for mercy, and he will answer as you call upon him. And so Pastor Don Green has completed both his message, The Father of Grace, and our series, Yours for the Asking. More edifying teaching comes your way next time here on The Truth Pulpit. Do be with us.

But before we leave you today, here's Don with a final word about this series. Well, you know, my friend, I guess the takeaway for this series is for us to just realize the priority of spiritual things as we go to God in prayer, and that we would make those the ongoing feature of our prayer life, seeking salvation for people who do not know Christ, seeking grace to overcome sin, seeking for our loved ones in Christ that they would be conformed to his greater image. And so, beloved, I would just encourage you to filter those things through your mind and let them shape your priorities in prayer, and God will work in response to your pleadings before his throne. Thanks, Don, and friend, remember to visit thetruthpulpit.com to learn more about this ministry. There you can also find out how to access a live stream of Truth Community Church services. That's all at thetruthpulpit.com. I'm Bill Wright, and we'll see you back here next time on the Truth Pulpit.