49. Faith in Christ Means You Have Rested from Your Works

There's nothing you can do to get yourself right with God or keep yourself right with God. There is no work that you can do to earn or maintain righteousness. The only way to be righteous is to receive the free gift of God's righteousness, by grace, through faith. Faith in Christ means you have rested from your works.


Download

46. Sins Not Purged by Our Sorrow; Only by the Blood of Jesus

Our hope really is founded upon nothing less than the blood of Jesus and His righteousness!  We can do absolutely nothing to take away or purge our own sins.  Jesus Himself has already done it and has sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high! (Heb 1:3)  We may feel varying degrees of sorrow for our sins, but no amount of sorrow can purge our sins.  No amount of pleading with God to take away our sins can actually take away our sin.  Again, it's already been done!  It's been done once for all through the sufficient sacrifice of Jesus.


Download

39. We're Righteous Through Christ's Performance, Not Ours

On a recent Growing in Grace podcast (#603) we talked about how believers are identified as righteous apart from their behavior. Faith-based righteousness isn't a matter of pursuing righteousness through what we do, but simply through believing what Christ has done.  Here I share a snippet from that podcast in which I talk about this.  We've been justified, cleansed, made righteous and made holy (sanctified) through the blood of Jesus, not through our own performance.  Do yourself a favor, and spare yourself the anxiety, depression and fear that can result from thinking that it's up to you to gain or maintain a certain level of righteousness.  Believe instead in the finished work of Christ.


Download

35. There No Longer Remains a Sacrifice for Sins

Many people stumble on a verse that is unfortunately taken out of context: Heb 10:26 "For if we sin willfully after we have received the knowledge of the truth, there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins..."

The point of the book of Hebrews was to show the superiority of Jesus and His one sacrifice through which sin was taken away and through which God remembers our sins no more, over the Old Covenant system in which sins were never taken away and in fact were only remembered! Hebrews 10:26 isn't saying that Jesus' sacrifice doesn't apply to people who sin willfully. That would contradict the whole point the writer was making! Rather, as we look at the verse in context, we see that the point is that Jesus' one sacrifice does indeed apply to people who sin, and that there is no other sacrifice that they can turn to.


Download

30. Communion: Remembering Jesus, Not Examining Our Sins

The Lord's Supper (aka Communion) is meant to be a joyous celebration of what Jesus has done for us, and yet many in the church today have sadly made it into a morbid time of recounting and confessing sins. Some people even fear they are unworthy of participating, all because they've sinned. All the while, the very purpose of Jesus' body being broken and His blood being shed was so that our sins would be taken away - not remembered!

Some of these confusing phrases in 1 Corinthians 11 include "let a man examine himself" and "eats and drinks judgment to himself." In this podcast and video I take a look at the passage as a whole, in context, and show how we have nothing to worry about in taking the Lord's supper, and in fact we can be all the more thankful for the broken body and shed blood of Jesus!


Download

27. Rock Steady Salvation

Many believers walk on unsteady ground, constantly (or at least occasionally) worrying about if their salvation is truly secure. Often, the reason for this is that people are basing the security of their salvation on their own performance or commitment to God. But our commitment or performance wavers and is unsteady, so God based the security of our salvation on something far greater: His own promise! God doesn't lie and He doesn't break His oaths, and what makes this salvation doubly secure is that God's oath was made to Himself!


Download