Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Foreign.
[00:00:07] It's Rick. Welcome back to the Nomad Pastor Podcast.
[00:00:10] Glad you're here today. You know, and I don't say it just to say it. I mean it.
[00:00:15] And today what we're going to talk about is one of those conversations, hopefully, that can change how you see yourself and how you see God and whether or not you can truly walk free.
[00:00:30] And so today, what I'm going to talk about is grace. I've talked about grace many, many times on this podcast, but I want to talk about it different today because I want us. I don't want to talk about it with the definition, not with a verse. I mean, we're going to talk about scripture, but I want to start with something that happened to me recently.
[00:00:49] Last month, we're sitting at the beginning of the. The month, beginning of April, we were sitting at our Bikers for Christ motorcycle Ministry chapter meeting.
[00:01:00] And it's just a room, right, full of men and women.
[00:01:04] Some of them walked through loss in their life, addictions, I'm sure, through things that they don't talk about out loud, but it's just real people living real life.
[00:01:16] And one of my brothers, Pete, said something.
[00:01:21] I mean, it was kind of simple. He said he had heard it from a pastor, share it a while ago, and it just never left him. And what he said was grace.
[00:01:30] And he said, God's riches at Christ's expense, grace.
[00:01:36] And when he said that, I thought, whoa. I had to write it down.
[00:01:40] I had personally never heard that before.
[00:01:44] And it just really.
[00:01:47] I don't know, it just kind of flipped a switch in my mind.
[00:01:53] I mean, we've all been there, right?
[00:01:55] You've been somewhere where something simple like this was said.
[00:01:59] And it hits deeper than anything complicated. It's just one of those moments. It's just this phrase, right?
[00:02:06] God's riches at Christ's expense.
[00:02:09] Not mine, not yours, his.
[00:02:12] And in that moment, Pete said he always loved that way of explaining it.
[00:02:17] And I get it, because it's simple enough that anybody can understand it, but it's deep enough that you can spend the rest of your life trying to fully understand, to fully grasp it.
[00:02:32] While I was sitting there, I started thinking about something.
[00:02:36] Most people don't struggle with hearing about grace.
[00:02:41] We struggle with believing it applies to us, especially men who've been through things, right?
[00:02:49] People who carry regret and shame, a past that keeps showing up whether we want it to or not.
[00:02:56] We hear grace, and somewhere inside we think, that's not for me. I've gone too far. I've done too Much. I've hurt too many people.
[00:03:05] Well, if that's you, that's who I want to talk about today.
[00:03:08] Because that's exactly who grace was built for.
[00:03:14] But before we understand what grace is, we have to understand what it is not.
[00:03:22] And so grace is not God pretending your sin doesn't matter.
[00:03:29] Grace is not God lowering the standard.
[00:03:33] Grace is not God saying it's not a big deal. That's not grace. That's denial.
[00:03:38] And God is not in the denial business.
[00:03:42] You see, the Bible is honest about sin in a way that makes a lot of people uncomfortable. But you can't receive what you don't think you need.
[00:03:53] Romans 3:23 says, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.
[00:03:59] It doesn't say some people, it says all people. No exceptions.
[00:04:07] That's not condemnation. That's a diagnosis.
[00:04:12] And you can't treat a condition you refuse to call out or name.
[00:04:21] And then the Bible gets even more direct, right? Romans 6:23 says, for the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.
[00:04:34] So let's stop on the word wages, because wages means earned.
[00:04:39] Wages means deserved, right? If you worked a full week and your employer handed you a check, you'd cash it without guilt because you earned it.
[00:04:48] That's what wage means.
[00:04:52] So when Paul says the wages of sin is death, he's not saying God is being cruel.
[00:04:59] He's saying death is what sin earns.
[00:05:04] Spiritual death, separation from God. That's the bill.
[00:05:09] And here's where I think most people get grace wrong. They think grace means God tore up the bill.
[00:05:19] No, God didn't tear it up. He paid the bill.
[00:05:23] There is a massive difference between those two things.
[00:05:28] Because if you tear it up, it means it doesn't matter.
[00:05:32] Paying it means it mattered so much that someone had to cover it.
[00:05:38] And that someone was Jesus Christ.
[00:05:42] So if you don't understand the weight of sin, you will never understand the value of grace.
[00:05:50] You have to know that what you owed before you can be broken by the fact that someone else paid it.
[00:06:03] Think about that for a minute.
[00:06:08] Someone else paid it.
[00:06:12] So if we go back to what Pete had said, right? If grace is God's riches at Christ's expense, then we have to ask the hard question. What was the expense?
[00:06:27] It was Jesus.
[00:06:28] Not just his life, his suffering, his rejection, his humiliation, his death on a Roman cross outside of Jerusalem, that was the expense.
[00:06:41] And Isaiah wrote 700 years before it happened. 700 years.
[00:06:48] Isaiah 53. 5.
[00:06:51] And it reads like a firsthand.
[00:06:54] But he was pierced through for our transgressions. He was crushed for our iniquities.
[00:07:02] The chastening for our well being fell upon him.
[00:07:07] And by his scourging we are healed.
[00:07:11] Pierced through, crushed, scourged.
[00:07:14] That's not theological language.
[00:07:17] That's a physical reality that happened to a real man in a real body, on a real cross for real sin.
[00:07:28] For your sin. For my sin.
[00:07:33] The punishment that should have fallen on us, on me, fell on him.
[00:07:42] It's not just a metaphor.
[00:07:45] That is the transaction that makes grace possible.
[00:07:51] And in 2 Corinthians, Paul says this. It's 2 Corinthians 5, 21.
[00:07:56] He made him who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf, so that we might become the righteousness of God in him.
[00:08:08] That is the exchange at the center of every everything.
[00:08:13] Jesus, who had no sin, none took yours, took mine.
[00:08:19] And in return, we get his righteousness credited to our account.
[00:08:25] Not because we earned it, not because we deserve it, because he paid it.
[00:08:31] That's the expense. That's what grace cost. And when you sit with that long enough, it stops being a church word and starts being the most staggering thing that you could ever hear.
[00:08:44] I think we throw the word grace around a lot.
[00:08:50] So let's talk about what are riches, right? We said God's riches at Christ's expense. What are God's riches?
[00:08:58] What does grace actually give you?
[00:09:02] In Ephesians 1:7, it says, in him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses according to the riches of his grace.
[00:09:13] There's a bunch of words in there. Redemption, forgiveness, according to the riches of his grace.
[00:09:21] Not according to the depth of my failure or your failure. Not according to how long you've been in church or how bad you've been on the outside.
[00:09:32] According to his riches.
[00:09:37] I think there's a lot of people who sit in church and if you listen and this is you. I'm sorry, I'm probably not sorry.
[00:09:44] But they think because they've been going to church for 20 years, they've sat in the same seat, they've said the same prayer that gets them where they need to go.
[00:09:55] That has nothing to do with it. It's according to his riches.
[00:09:59] And, and that matters because his riches don't run out. You cannot use them all, you cannot exhaust them. You can't go so far that grace can't reach you because the measure isn't your sin. The measure is his supply.
[00:10:16] And God's supply has no ceiling.
[00:10:20] Ephesians 2, 8:9 says, for by the grace of God, you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves.
[00:10:28] It is the gift of God.
[00:10:31] Not as a result of works, so that no one may boast.
[00:10:36] It is a gift of God, not of yourselves.
[00:10:42] That sentence carries the whole thing.
[00:10:45] Not of yourselves.
[00:10:48] You don't earn grace. You can't earn grace. You can't do enough good to deserve it, and you can't do enough bad to disqualify from it. It's a gift. It's free to you, but it was not free to God.
[00:11:07] You see, Romans 5:8 says, but God demonstrates his own love towards us in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us while we were sinners.
[00:11:24] Not after we got cleaned up.
[00:11:26] Not after you got your act together.
[00:11:29] Not after you made the decision or walked an aisle or cleaned out the bottle, threw the bottle away while we were still sinners. While we were still right in the middle of it. Christ died for us.
[00:11:50] That's when grace showed up.
[00:11:52] In the middle of the mess, not after it. I used to believe that I couldn't go to church because I had to fix myself first.
[00:12:03] I had to clean up. I had to do this. I had to stop doing that. I had to change this in my life.
[00:12:08] No.
[00:12:11] While we were yet sinners, That's what God's riches look like. They look like a savior who didn't wait for you to deserve him.
[00:12:27] So what do you do with that when?
[00:12:30] What do you do with grace once you really understand it?
[00:12:39] If you think about grace, right, there's two ditches on either side of grace, and most people fall into one of them.
[00:12:47] The first ditch is thinking that grace means nothing.
[00:12:51] Grace means nothing changes that God forgives everything, so it doesn't matter what I do.
[00:12:58] But in Romans 6:1:2, Paul shuts that down.
[00:13:05] He says, what shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin so that grace may increase, may it never be? How shall we who died to sin still live in it?
[00:13:16] You see, grace is not a license to stay where you are.
[00:13:22] It's the power to move. It's the freedom that breaks the thing that you have locked down.
[00:13:30] And then there's the second ditch. The second ditch is thinking you have to earn it before you can receive it. That's where I was.
[00:13:38] I'll get my life right first. Then I'll come to God.
[00:13:42] See, but that's backwards.
[00:13:45] You don't clean up to get in the water.
[00:13:49] You get in the water to get clean.
[00:13:53] Grace meets you where you are.
[00:13:56] But it does not leave you where it found you, either.
[00:14:02] So if you're sitting here listening today and you're carrying something heavy, something you've never said out loud to anybody, Grace isn't afraid of that.
[00:14:10] That's exactly what it was built for.
[00:14:16] So as we get ready to close this, I want to start.
[00:14:19] I want to close right where we started, with what Pete said to me.
[00:14:24] Grace is God's riches at Christ's expense.
[00:14:31] God's riches, Everything you need.
[00:14:35] Forgiveness, freedom, a future you didn't earn. And you can't buy God's riches at Christ's expense.
[00:14:48] He paid what you couldn't pay.
[00:14:52] He stood where you should have stood, where I should have stood. He took what was yours so you could receive what was His.
[00:15:04] That is not religion. That is rescue.
[00:15:09] And if you've never surrendered to that, if you've been carrying the weight of your past thinking, well, God's just done with me, I can't say it more plain. He's not done.
[00:15:26] He was never done.
[00:15:29] Grace does not have an expiration date.
[00:15:34] If you're ready to receive it, you don't need to clean up first.
[00:15:39] Just come as you are.
[00:15:42] Tell God the truth about where you've been.
[00:15:47] Tell him you believe Jesus paid your bill.
[00:15:53] Ask him to be lord of your life. And that's where it begins.
[00:16:01] And if you've known grace for years, but you've let it get smaller in your mind, let today be a reminder.
[00:16:15] What was paid for you was not cheap.
[00:16:20] What was purchased for you was not small.
[00:16:25] Walk in it like it's real, because it is.
[00:16:32] I just want to say thank you for listening. And I want to thank Pete for just that simple thing that to so many people, may not have meant anything, but to me, it meant so much to help me understand. And that's why I did the podcast about it today.
[00:16:52] God's riches at Christ's expense.
[00:16:58] Thanks for listening today of the Nomad Pastor Podcast. If this episode hits you somewhere real, share it with somebody who needs to hear it.
[00:17:08] Subscribe like it.
[00:17:11] I'll be back with you next time.
[00:17:13] And I just want to remind you until then to love God and love people.
