7 WORDS that can CHANGE YOUR LIFE

Hey, this is Mike Zwick from If Not For God Podcast, our show.

Stories of hopelessness turned into hope. Your chosen Truth Network Podcast is starting in just seconds. Enjoy it. Share it. But most of all, thank you for listening and for choosing the Truth Podcast Network. This is the Truth Network. Seven words that can change your life is a new book that should be on every person's bookshelf that's listening to my voice right now.

I'm Stu Everson. I'm in a coffee shop. It's kind of cool. It's a little bit loud.

Other people are having coffee, and I don't know that they're talking about imputation, propitiation, sanctification, justification. But Pastor Rich Powell, you have really hit a home run with this book. By the way, thank you. You just handed me my copy, and you signed it in there. So congratulations. What's going through your mind just getting a case of these in the mail?

They just came out. Yeah, thank you, Stu. It really is exciting. It's a joy. It's material that I'm really passionate about. And to get it in print so that it's able to be distributed widely, I'm really excited about that.

It's a pleasure of mine to be able to do that. Well, a lot of these things came out of your pulpit ministry at Grace Bible Church in Winston-Salem. By the way, fun fact, fun side note, that church started in our home back in the 1980 area when we lived in California. The family that was house-sitting, the Hopson's, they started a church. And so now you're the pastor a few centuries down the road.

It feels like centuries, it's been a few decades. But your church is, I mean, the foundation, the name of the church kind of says it all, doesn't it? The importance of just expositional Bible teaching. And that's really the product of this book is, I guess, right?

It is. And the first word is very important too, grace. Grace is a word that's misunderstood by a lot of people. We think grace is something that your credit card company gives you 25 extra days to be able to pay your bill, right? But grace is something that God has lavished on us. And to be able to understand the depths of God's grace, it's what we're passionate about teaching at Grace Bible Church, that God has invested himself in us. That's the bedrock of the teaching. And that's what the Bible is all about, right? And so that's what this book is about too. Well, let's go through these words and we'll tell everyone how they can get a copy of that. A lot of folks can listen to your program.

Tell her real quick about the radio program. I believe it's called Delighting Grace. Speaking of grace, right?

Yeah, Delight and Grace. It's a 13-minute program of the teaching, my teaching at Grace Bible Church. And it's on WTRU, the Truth Network, every weekday morning at 10 o'clock.

And you've also got the podcast version so folks can grab it on demand and listen to your series. And so the seven words, can we just go through these real quick? I'd love to almost do a rapid fire survey with you. The first one is the problem, chapter one, righteousness.

Can you speak to that real quick? Yeah, why is righteousness a problem? Well, the righteousness is a problem because we, in ourselves, on our own, we cannot achieve the righteousness that we need. And human history bears that out very clearly. We cannot be good enough. It's not possible for humans to do that. But if we are to know God and enjoy Him, we must have a righteousness that He requires. And so that becomes a problem because we cannot achieve that on our own. But the good news is God has made available, by His grace, He's made available to us a righteousness that we can and must receive. I like that.

Then you go to the bases. Quick comment on propitiation. Now we're starting to get deeper into the vocab here. Yeah, it's one of those words that's not used very commonly in everyday language, right? Propitiation. But it's a biblical word.

And from the original languages, it's a word that's hard to translate even into English because there's so much nuance in it. But, you know, just to put it basically, it's God is good. And because He is good, He must oppose evil.

The problem is that evil runs through every human heart. And so the propitiation is the fact that God sends His Son, Jesus, and Jesus takes the necessary blow of God's holy wrath upon Himself to pay the debt of our sin. And it's a very powerful, it's a foundational truth to the gospel. If we don't understand propitiation, we will not understand the gospel.

Bear in mind, this is a flyby. Folks, get the book and you can plunge deeper into each of these because you give extensive scriptures, quotes, a lot of deep theology, but real practical and real emancipating, the freedom of grace expressed in Christ in the gospel. Okay, number three, the cost, redemption. Speak to redemption real quick. So redemption, you know, we think of, you know, redeeming Cuba, buying back. Redemption is buying back. And so God created us and He paid the price for us to be brought back to Him. And so the redemption there is, there's two senses to it and that is to be rescued from, but also to be released to.

So there's two directions involved in that. That chapter four, the means, here's another big one, imputation. Imputation, and that's an old word and in the newer translations the word would be credited.

So it's like crediting something from one account, an infinite account to a limited account. And that's the imputation. So God's righteousness is imputed to us because Paul talks about the righteousness that depends on faith and that's how the work of one man, Christ, can be credited to the many and that is through faith. We're halfway home. The declaration, chapter five, justification.

Now we've heard this one a lot. Jump in on this one real quick. Justification is what God declares about me. When I've surrendered myself in faith to Jesus and His righteousness is imputed to me, that means I become accepted before infinite holy God. And He declares, it's a judicial declaration, He declares me righteous. He declares me justified, accepted before holy God.

So I am who God says I am. And then chapter six, the outcome, reconciliation. There's another one.

We might be a little more familiar with that one. Yeah, reconciliation, you know, to be brought back to, right? Because we were alienated from God without righteousness. We were alienated from God and He is the very source of our being. He's our creator.

He's our sustainer. He is my highest good and He is my deepest satisfaction. So yeah, so being reconciled to Him means I'm brought back to Him and that's why Christ did all the work for us in redeeming us through the propitiation and redemption. He did all that so we could be reconciled to God. The final one, regeneration, the change.

Talk about that one real quick. So that's the new life that God creates in each of us, you know, as we are in Christ because I have His righteousness. You know, when I surrender myself in faith to Jesus, you know, I am new. I'm not just a forgiven sinner.

I'm a new creation. I am like Christ at the core of my being and that is the outworking of the righteousness of Christ that exists in me. You know, Pastor Rich Powell, someone could observe you should write an entire chapter on each of these seven words.

I kind of, yeah, I really thought I should have done that and somebody, some people encouraged me to do that. So because it truly, when this truth captivates you, it truly transforms your life. Well, when you dedicate the book to the folks at Grace Bible Church, I know a lot of your family's been so loyal, your elders, your deacons, all your leaders, your team, your assistant, so many folks that have helped you, you know, in this process of this book, Seven Words, but really it started just a man of God just teaching the Word of God and it came out and so many folks said, hey, you should make this something that's transferable, that like you just handed it to me, signed. And people can't help but hear the Christmas music coming in the background and folks are meeting and it's festive.

We got a little Frosty the Snowman staring at us here as we're doing this interview. Pastor Rich Powell, your desire, first of all, what does this have to do with Christmas and this incarnation, this advent of Jesus? Well, this is what makes sense out of Christmas, you know, it's that God came to us. He became like one of us to come to us, to make himself known to us in person, not only to make himself known to us, but he gave us his son to also pay the price and do the work necessary for us to be reconciled to him. And then as we live in newness of life, we have someone to follow. It's not just a concept, it's not a creed, but we have someone to follow in his steps. So there's something very concrete about it and really makes sense about the fact that God sent his son.

So it's looking at it, it's looking at the big picture there that makes sense of it. Veiled in flesh, the Godhead see, hail the incarnate deity, Emmanuel God with us, he came to us, we couldn't get to him. And each one of these powerful words in your book, seven words that can change your life, really exemplify that and teach that.

And I want to thank you for sharing this. I encourage everyone to get a copy of this book. The seven words are righteousness, propitiation, redemption, imputation, justification, reconciliation, regeneration. I hope you're thoroughly confused. I hope you're lost because then you can dig in deeper and be found and get into why Jesus came and how each one of these words becomes intensely personal when someone encounters a holy God and when someone needs to be justified before God. That's what the age-old question Job asked, how can a man be right with God? Right.

The illustration I like to use, and I do it in the book, and C.S. Lewis used this also, it's like the branch of a tree doesn't realize what it's doing to itself when it wishes the demise of the tree, right? And that's what we are like. We are like branches cut off from a tree. And the only hope we have is to be grafted back into the tree. So reconciliation is what's necessary, but we have to have the righteousness for that to be available to us, right? So to be brought back to God. And so my hope for this is, there's an evangelistic thrust to this, obviously, because this is the gospel. But my hope is that God's people will truly see the depth of God's heart for us in this and what he has done to invest himself in us. Because he doesn't necessarily want all the things we can do for him.

He wants us. Amen. That's the voice of Pastor Rich Powell, pastor of Grace Bible Church, radio host of Delighting Grace, the radio program podcast, and now author of a brand new book, Seven Words That Can Change Your Life. And with Zulon Press, and I guess folks can get this, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, wherever books are sold, is that right? Yes, wherever books are sold and all of those places, they are available. And Zulon Press, they're the publisher of the book. So I would encourage you to go there or Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

Seven Words That Can Change Your Life. Meet him more at his Delighting Grace website. What's the radio website? Folks can hear your podcast and connect, link over to Grace Bible Church and all that. Yeah, the radio is Delighting Grace, okay? So and you can just type in delightinggrace.com and it'll take you there. This is the Truth Network.