Understanding God's Love and Grace in Difficult Times

Coming to faith in Jesus Christ, and being able to say, "Our Father, who art in heaven," that I'm a child of the King, was a recovery for me. And I don't spend the rest of my life in therapy, but the gospel is the cure and therefore, I think for folk who find it difficult to relate to a father figure because of association with the past experience, a particular past experience, need to preach the gospel to themselves hour by hour and minute by minute, that in Christ we are forgiven, that in Christ our sins are no more, that in Christ we are as accepted as it's possible to be and that we are loved. [00:03:25]

We just need to notice that if you hold up your Old Testament, there's basically nobody in the whole Old Testament comes to God, and says, "Our heavenly Father." But the moment you open your New Testament, even if Mark was the first Gospel, Mathew's first Gospel in the New Testament, and you hold up in your hand just the three pages of the Sermon on the Mount, there is like an explosion of reference to what it means to know God as your Father. [00:06:00]

The wrath of God was poured out upon Jesus Christ at Calvary, and I think the language that the Bible uses, when He refers to the children of God, is discipline. And as Dr. Sinclair Ferguson just referred to, and it's a loving discipline. I think one of the concepts, perhaps the first concept that people need to change for them to change, is the concept of God. [00:08:10]

No, what Peter says is your first responsibility is to live out the covenantal character of the relationship that has been established. And I think that is the, that is the first and primary thing, because I find not least with zealous Christian parents, that they have often tied their children to themselves by only one bond, and that's been a religious bond, a teaching bond, and not necessarily a bond of affection and not necessarily a holistic human bond. [00:11:02]

The law shows us the character of God, for one, and the law shows us what pleases God as well. Now that's not going to save us, it's not going to give us any additional credit, but I think it does play a role in our lives, because it's going to show us better that pure character of the God who gave us the law, and it's also showing to us what pleases the Lord. [00:16:21]

The promise of the New Covenant includes that the law will be written in your heart. So, when you ask these kinds of questions, is the law relevant, and do we obey it? Well, it's the quintessence of what happens in regeneration that it's the law that's written on your heart, and there is only one divine law encapsulated in the Decalogue. [00:18:35]

And the glorious thing about Christianity is that there's forgiveness for all sins if you come to Christ and ask for forgiveness. So to try to get back to Christ, to get back to mercy, because the question may be motivated by a desire to prove how intolerant, how unloving, how bad you are if you really believe such things. [00:15:17]

And then, one thinks about how much Jesus was hurt by the church. So if I at that point make the separation, I really am in a subtle way, and probably unconsciously, I'm kind of raising myself above Jesus. You know, if you took being hurt by the church out of Paul's letters, you would probably reduce them by about thirty percent, because so much of what he writes involves the extent to which the church was hurting him. [00:31:43]

I just preached a funeral of a suicide just a few weeks ago, and I think it is absolutely imperative that we convey to the next of kin the gospel, and that suicide is not the unforgivable sin. What they need to hear at that moment is, and in this case a man who loved the Lord Jesus, but some people die of cancer, and some people die of a heart attack, and some people die of a broken mind. [00:39:10]

But it is in entirely wrong, and I think that the most important thing to do at the time of a suicide of somebody who has professed faith is to reassure them that the gospel forgives all sin, including that one. [00:41:11]

And that restoration doesn't take place so long as we remain outside. [00:32:23]

And the third passage, among others, Romans 8:3-4, that God did what the law couldn't accomplish, because it was weakened through our flesh, sending His own Son in the likeness of flesh, of the flesh of sin and for sin, condemns it in the flesh in order that the requirements of the law might be fulfilled in those who walk according to the Spirit, rather than according to the flesh. [00:20:16]