If you can turn your Bibles with me to Hebrews chapter 13, we're going to finally finish the second part that we started a couple weeks ago. We're focused on verse 9 obviously, but I want to read it in context, verse 7, 8, and 9. Hebrews chapter 13, verses 7, 8, and 9.

Okay, reading out of the NASB. Remember those who led you, who spoke the word of God to you, and considering the result of their conduct, imitate their faith. Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever. Do not be carried away by varied and strange teachings, for it is good for the heart to be strengthened by grace, not by foods through which those who are so occupied were not benefited.

Let's pray. Heavenly Father, we thank you for the privilege that we have to be able to come before you in worship. We ask, Lord God, that you would soften our hearts, open our ears, that we may remember and to give you praise for all the grace that you've given us that we do not deserve.

We pray, Father God, for your kindness, your presence with us. In Jesus' name we pray, amen. You know, I know most of you guys who celebrated Thanksgiving with your family and all that entails with all the family members gathering together, the food that you eat, and sometimes we celebrate and at the end of our celebration we're so tired that we're ready to go back to whatever is normal.

But when you think about the purpose of these gatherings, the purpose of holidays, is to kind of take a break for us to remember, to celebrate, rest, maybe even recuperate so that we can get back to work. You know, but a lot of times the way that we practice these holidays, it does exactly the opposite.

We get so tired that we need to take a break from the break that we took, you know. And so this time of the season is typically we can kind of get burnt out because we have Thanksgiving, we have Christmas, and then after Christmas you have New Year's. And so when New Year's come around you kind of have a big sigh of relief, it's like, oh, we can get back to normal because all this stuff is, you know, behind us.

Obviously that was not the intent of that, but as human beings we have a tendency to make what was intended for rest and recuperation into work. And that's exactly what Jesus said to the Pharisees when they made the Sabbath work and they were so meticulous about keeping the Sabbath and who's breaking it and who's not breaking it and who's keeping it right.

And when Jesus showed up, he said, "The Sabbath was made for man, not man for Sabbath. The whole purpose of the Sabbath was to give you rest and you made it into more work than even before." So we have a tendency as Christians to do exactly that. God gave us life and he said to give it abundantly.

But if you've been a Christian for a while, if we're not careful, we can easily turn all of our service, all of our worship, giving sacrifice into labor and work. And so if you're not careful, when you think of church, it's a place to work. It's not a place where you find rest, right?

You go hiking and take trips for rest, but then we've got to get back to work when we come to church. But when you look in the scripture, it says he came so that he can give us rest. Are we truly experiencing that rest? Have we come this morning because this is where we truly find life?

Or have we made it into a Sabbath of works where we just need to get going? There's a tendency, especially in our generation, that we think that if we preach too much about grace it's going to lead to cheap grace, licentiousness. Or maybe some of you in here says if we emphasize too much on holiness, it's going to lead to legalism.

And so because of fear of cheap grace and because of fear of legalism, we kind of end up over-embracing one or the other, and then we kind of teeter-totter back and forth. And I've mentioned that in the first sermon. But the scripture is absolutely crystal clear. God never does anything where he compromises either.

So the text that we're looking at where he says, "Do not be carried away by varied and strange teaching," the varied and strange teaching that predominantly was affecting the church was legalism or cheap grace. And they're going back and forth, back and forth. And he says here, "For it is good for the heart to be strengthened by grace, not foods, and through those which those were so occupied were not benefited." They worked so hard to be righteous by their own standards, but they didn't benefit from that.

So therefore he says, "Be strengthened." In other words, to live righteously, pursue holiness, he said, "But by the grace of God." God will never compromise his grace or his holiness. And whenever we catch ourselves doing one or the other, we know that we've strayed. Grace will never compromise righteousness, and righteousness never compromises grace.

Because to compromise either is to negate the necessity of the cross. If you emphasize grace without righteousness, there's no need for the cross. If you emphasize righteousness without grace, again, there's no need for the cross. The cross is a perfect union where neither his grace or his righteousness is compromised.

The early church wrestled with this because people who are hearing this and saying either they emphasize grace, so let us sin so grace may abound. Jude actually mentions that in verse Jude 4 when he says, "For certain persons have crept in unnoticed, those who are long before marked out for this condemnation, ungodly persons who turn the grace of our God into licentiousness and deny our only Master and Lord Jesus Christ." So this is a struggle from the very get-go.

Because salvation was by grace, well if it's by grace, then it doesn't matter. And we have people who think like that today. Since it is by grace, we should be righteous, and it'd be good if we were taking the commandments of God seriously, but even if we don't, one saved always saved.

And we kind of cling on to these cliches and turn the grace of God into licentiousness. First Peter 2.16 again says, "Act as free men, men who have been freed from the law, and do not use your freedom as a covering for evil, but use it as bond slaves of God." I don't know how many people that I've talked to in our generation where they're talking about the freedom in Christ, and that their freedom means that they can do whatever they want because we're free.

And the scripture clearly says, "Do not use your freedom for licentiousness." If you want to know what God thinks about this cheap grace, it's spelled out in 2 Peter 2.19-22, "Promising them freedom while they themselves are slaves of corruption, for by what a man is overcome, by this he is enslaved.

For if after they have escaped the defilement of the world by the knowledge of the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, they are again entangled in them and are overcome, the last state has become worse for them than the first. For would it be better for them not to have known the way of righteousness, than having known it, turn away from the holy commandment, hand it on to them?

It has happened to them according to the true proverb." And look what he says here. I mean this is probably one of the harshest criticism in the New Testament. "A dog returns to his own vomit, and is so after washing, returns to wallowing in the mire." I mean that's a pretty vivid image of a dog going back to its vomit.

And that's how he describes somebody who turns the grace of God into licentiousness. Faith without deeds is dead faith. You can say whatever you want, you can proclaim whatever you want, you can sign whatever doctrine that you want, but if your life contradicts your faith, it says it's dead.

What it means by it's dead is it's not saving faith. You have faith that's the same faith that the demons do, and yet they shudder in fear because there's no fruit that comes from that. Billy Graham years ago, probably, there is no argument with this, that he probably preached the gospel to more people than any other human being alive, in number.

It's somewhere in the millions. He was able to at least preach the gospel through his crusades and years of ministry that he did. But years ago, Billy Graham began to notice something in his ministry that was very concerning to him, and according to their own statistics, that out of hundreds and thousands of people who made commitments of faith during these crusades, they found out that over 94% of them, after they make their commitment of faith, never make it to church.

94%. That means only 6% of the people who raised their hand, came down, accepted Jesus Christ, ever continued to walk after that. So you have hundreds and thousands of people walking around, one saved, always saved, and hearing these cliches, and never actually understand what it means to live according to all that I have commanded you, because they never made it to church.

And the statistics are actually even more dire than that, because they said that of the 6% who made it to church, only a very small percentage of that made it after the first year. So you have all these people walking around, like, "We're saved by grace. God loved us unconditionally." And that's all they know.

Again, it's not false, but it's not complete. And as a result of that, we have what we have in our generation. Again, I'm not saying Billy Graham, it's just the way that we've done evangelism today that has brought a lot of confusion. In fact, I had a pastor say to me years ago that he was so frustrated with the way that our faith is being practiced, that it was just cheap grace, licentiousness, and he said, at one point he said, "You know, we need some more legalism in order to balance out the cheap grace." I remember when he said that, I was in agreement.

Yes, I'm so frustrated that this is...Christianity that I know of what I see in Scripture doesn't look like what we see in our generation. But as the years passed by, I realized just how wrong that is, because legalism is just as sinful as licentiousness, because in the early church, that was their primary battle.

The whole book of Galatians is to combat legalism. So we don't combat false teaching with another false teaching to try to balance that. In fact, I think what we need in our generation is to truly understand when the Bible says grace, what that grace means, and how we are to be empowered by that grace.

So we don't balance each other by doing...because it's legalism, we're going to fall to licentiousness or cheap grace. Because we're concerned about cheap grace, we're going to go to legalism. I think the answer to that is the Bible, that we need to get into Scripture, make sure that we understand when we say grace, that we are practicing what the Bible says grace is, and what it's supposed to do.

So a couple of weeks ago, we started out with four points. I only did two. So let me review the first two, and then we'll get to the third point today. And I promise I will finish today. First one, we talked about how does grace strengthen us? It empties us of our pride.

It completely empties us of our pride. So every single individual that comes to church, our beginning point is the same. Whether you are Nicodemus, or whether you are the Samaritan woman, the entrance into the kingdom is the same. The hearty needs to be humbled, the humble need to be brought up, but the entrance is the same.

You know the passage, Ephesians 2, 8, 9, "For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves, it is a gift of God, not as a result of works, so that no one may boast." So the first thing that it does, it gets rid of any human pride, any human glory.

It gets rid of that. You know, years ago, many of you know that during a period of our church, I had to run a business out in Vegas. And again, I'm not going to go into the details of what happened there, but for that year, I learned something that I'm very thankful that I was able to be there for that period, even though it was difficult.

Because one of the things that I observed while I was there was the different groups of people that came into town. What's unique about Vegas is they would have large conventions. And so the conventions would, you know, sometimes would have 5,000, 4,000, but sometimes they would have large conventions where somewhere around 30 to, if it's a large convention, 100,000 people would come into town, all in the same industry.

And there's two groups of people that we all hated when they came into town. The first group were the salespeople. So if you're in sales, I apologize. This does not apply to you. It applies to all your friends. So whenever they would come into town, they're just so obnoxious because everybody is selling themselves.

I haven't met a single person who didn't do at least a million dollars or $10 million sales, right? They wear $5 shoes, but then they did $10 million sales. And so they're always trying to sell something. And so they're not bad people, but just obnoxious. You never feel like you're talking to the real person.

That's the one group of people. The other group of people that would come to town was the TV executives. And they were the worst. Again, if you happen to be a TV executive, I'm not talking about you. I'm talking about everybody else around you at work, okay? When these guys would come to town, I think they're so used to bossing people around, you know, and they're making power decisions.

And these are decisions that they make over celebrities. And so they kind of had this paradigm that everybody was below them. So again, if you see one or two of them, you kind of say, "Wow, they're jerks." But when you see a convention come in and you see 30,000, 40,000 of them, nobody wanted to be around because everybody was, you're getting ordered.

And they calculate every single penny. And so there was kind of like all our coworkers when we were working out there, like we just hated when that week came around because we knew we were going to be cranky at the end of that, you know? But the main reason why that was, was because they were just filled with pride.

And when you're around with a lot of people who are filled with pride, they're just miserable. But there was one group of people that would come into town we all looked forward to, and they were the cowboys. You know, they would typically come to some sort of a NASCAR convention or something.

And it was a big, one of the biggest conventions that would come into town. And over 100,000 of them would come in. And when the cowboys came into town, it was party time, you know, because they're not, they weren't rich. They knew that this convention was coming and they saved all year.

And so when they came into town, they were just happy to be there. So they were generous and they knew that they only had a short period, so they're going to live this up. And anybody that was around just partied with them. Just humble guys who, you know, blue collar workers just knew that this was their special time and they're just going to enjoy it.

There's no ego. And so we did the best sales during that time, you know, got the best tips. And these guys just wanted to hang out with you, you know, and all of it because there's no ego. They just came in, saved up all year, and they're just going to come in and have fun and they want you to have fun.

But I remember that the primary difference between the people who came and the people that we enjoyed and people who didn't, who came in that we didn't enjoy, all had to do with their attitudes. People who were filled with pride, right? You see one or two of them, now you try to avoid them.

The whole convention comes into town. You can't avoid that, right? But when the cowboys were in, it was, you know, we all became cowboys for a period, right? The church, if we're not careful, we can turn the church into a measurement of righteousness. And everybody's looking at each other, who's doing what, who's not doing what, and it becomes a miserable place when we are not strengthened and moved by the grace of God.

We forget how we got here. We weren't just justified by grace. We are also being sanctified by the grace of God. When that becomes the primary motivation, primary thing that we sing about, it changes the culture of the church. Sad thing to say that years ago, I went to a pastor's convention out in Kentucky.

I mean, some of you guys know, you know, what convention I may be talking about. And this was like 3,000, 4,000 pastors were in town. And this was the second year, second time we were having this convention. And the leader of the convention, as we were starting, had to address the pastors and say, after the first convention, there was a lot of complaint in town that all these pastors were acting obnoxiously and that they were rude to the workers there.

And so they had to tell us that you guys left a pretty bad taste in the mouth of the workers here. And so they were cautioning us that to be a better witness. And this wasn't just a gathering of a bunch of Christians. This was a gathering of pastors.

And obviously, we were all rebuked, and everybody acted extra nice and left big, fat tips to combat whatever it was, the negative thing that we've left behind the couple years before. But the fact that they even had to remind us of that says a lot about where we're at.

That we can get so caught up in this business of Christianity that the end result doesn't turn into praise and glory to God, but it becomes a heavy burden. Just like we celebrate Thanksgiving, at the end of it, it's like, oh, thank God it's over. It didn't actually recuperate or strengthen or remind.

Rather, it's like, OK, we're done with it. And sometimes we can approach our Christian faith that way. We're done with Bible study. We're done with fellowship. We're done with that. And then where we find rest is we travel. We go things. We have a bucket list. And that's where we find rest.

This is where we come to get burdened at the work. If we're not strengthened by grace and our starting and continuing point isn't grace, we can easily turn into that. Secondly, to be strengthened by grace is to have absolute security in our salvation. That we're not constantly wondering back and forth every time we struggle and every time we're righteous, that we are filled with pride or filled with fear.

Isaiah 41.10 is that, "Do not fear, for I am with you. Do not be anxious and look about you, for I am your God. I will strengthen you. Surely I will help you. Surely I will uphold you with my righteous right hand." You and I are in a covenant relationship with God.

That's why whenever two people get married, we remind them that this covenant is not dependent upon one person's faithfulness or the other. God's calling to the husband and the wife is unilateral. As he loved us, we love our wives. As he loved us, we love our husband. It's unconditional.

And so that's not broken because of unfaithfulness of one or the other. That's what a covenant is to symbolize. I think the best way to describe that, where we find strength and security, is, you know, when you're dating and you get in a fight, and some of you guys may be in a dating situation now, maybe this is very personal to you, but when you're dating and you get in a fight, every fight is dangerous because there's always this nervousness that, "Is this going to lead to a breakup?" And so you have to make sure, and you're putting out the best foot, and every fight becomes something much more serious.

And I'm not saying that if you get married, you know, fighting is okay, but there's a piece that you have that when you have disagreements with your wife in a covenant relationship, because you know at the end of the day, you're going to end up going back to the same house, right, sleeping on the same bed.

And so you know that that bond is not easily broken because of this covenant relationship that God places on us in our marriage. And in the same way, our marriage is a reflection of the covenant that God made with us. And that's why in Isaiah, he says, "I will uphold you, I will strengthen you, I will hold on to you." And so our relationship does not teeter back and forth between being saved and unsaved, being saved and unsaved because of what you and I do.

God made a unilateral commitment to us, and so we have that security. And so that's how we are strengthened, number two. And here's where I left off, number three. To be strengthened by grace means we are being equipped for good works. Let me say it another way. Grace leads to righteousness.

It's not righteousness that leads to grace. Grace is what fuels us for good works. So again, we have a tendency, if we're not careful, that we start with justification by grace, but when it comes to sanctification, we really have to be committed and to be discipled and disciplined and shamed and taught and equipped.

And so we have a tendency to start with the grace of God, and the rest of it, I'm going to have to work hard. Paul addresses that in Galatians 3, 1-3, when he says, "You foolish Galatians, who has bewitched you, before whose eyes Jesus Christ was publicly portrayed as crucified, this is the only thing I want to find out from you.

Did you receive the Spirit by the works of the law or by hearing with faith?" In other words, justification. Did it happen by faith or by works? Of course, by faith. Are you so foolish, having begun by the Spirit, are you now being perfected by the flesh? If you started by faith, you continue by faith, and you will finish by faith.

What he means by this is, people who tend to be focused on their will, their discipline for righteousness in their sanctification, usually ends up becoming either self-righteous or self-condemning. You will be one or the other. If you're working hard by your own effort, you will eventually, it may not happen immediately, but eventually, it leads to self-righteousness, where you measure everybody based upon your righteous standard.

So whatever you're good at, you're frustrated that other people aren't as good as you. And then when you don't live up to even your own standard, you go into self-condemnation. And you teeter back, back and forth, back and forth. Then eventually you get burned out, because it doesn't bear true fruit.

Some of the most bitterest and angriest people are the people who used to serve in the church faithfully for a long time. And they got frustrated. They got angry. I did this, and they didn't acknowledge me. I gave so much, but they didn't give back to me. How come I'm the only one serving?

How come I'm the only one doing this? And eventually, their frustration, either self-righteousness, and when they don't live up to it, they lead to self-condemnation, but they don't last long. So he says, we started by faith, and we will continue by faith. Paul says in 2 Corinthians 9, 8, "And God is able to make all grace abound to you." He's able to make all grace abound to you, "so that always having all sufficiency in everything, you may have an abundance for every good deed." So why is grace abounding?

"So that you may have all sufficiency to do what? So that you can have good deeds." So he says, the purpose of grace is not simply to free you from the penalty of sin. The purpose of grace is to free you from the penalty of sin, and to equip you so that you can do good works.

First Corinthians 15, 10, "But by the grace of God, I am what I am, and His grace toward me was not in vain." So I want you to pay attention to that. What would it mean? What does Paul mean here, that grace be in vain? On the contrary, I worked harder than any of them, though it was not I, but the grace of God that is with me.

So in other words, he says, grace would be in vain if it didn't lead to greater work for God, greater righteousness. Because we have a tendency to think grace is applied when we are not working, when we are not laboring, when we are not pursuing righteousness. And then when we're pursuing righteousness, it's our discipline, it's our work.

But Paul says, grace of God was not in vain because the evidence of God's grace is what caused me to work harder than anybody else. Ephesians 2, 8 through 10, this is a passage that we sing about grace of God. "For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves.

It is a gift of God, not as a result of work, so that no one may boast." But then he says in verse 10, "For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for what? Good works, which God prepared beforehand so that we would walk in them." He says he humbles us, he saves us for what purpose?

For good works. So our salvation isn't simply being saved from hell. That is a byproduct of what he's doing, but his ultimate goal is to restore us back to good works. And when did he plan this? He says from the beginning. So good works and righteousness and holiness is not a byproduct, it's not something extra.

He said from the very get-go, he says, righteousness and good works is the intent of our salvation. From the get-go. You see why when you either fall on legalism or cheap grace, that's not the gospel? It's not the complete gospel? Paul says that we have been gripped by this.

You know, in the early church, the Judaizers who embraced Christ's forgiveness, and yet they were saying, "No, you need to be a Jew. You need to still keep the Sabbath. You need to still keep circumcision and all of this." They're saying, "Well, if true salvation is by grace alone, then are you saying that we should sin so that grace may abound?" He says in Romans 6, 1-7, "What shall we say then?

Are we to continue in sin so that grace may increase? May it never be." I think some of you translated it, it says, "By no means." Or modern translation, "Are you kidding me? You know anything about who God is? By no means. How shall we who died to sin still live in it?

If you've really been crucified with Christ, how can you continue to live like you've never been crucified? For do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus have been baptized into his death? Therefore we have been buried with him through baptism into death so that Christ, who raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in the newness of life." The whole reason why we baptize in the way that we do is because the symbolism of that is death and resurrection.

That's why we don't sprinkle at our church, because that's what it says. It signifies that we are dead in Christ, we are buried in Christ, and then we are resurrected as Christ was resurrected in verse 4, verse 5. "For if we have become united with him in his likeness of his death, certainly we shall also be like in the likeness of his resurrection, knowing this, that our old self was crucified with him in order that our body of sin might be done away with so that we would no longer be slaves to sin, for he who has died is freed from sin." Let me ask you this question.

We were studying through the book of Titus, and we had a brief discussion about this in our home group leaders meeting, but oftentimes people think of justification in an incomplete manner, and it doesn't make any sense if you don't really understand the whole context of justification. Because when we think about justification, we probably have heard that maybe you committed murder or something, right?

And you deserve the death penalty, and that was a sentence that was given to you. And the judge, who happened to be compassionate, steps in and says, "I will take that punishment so that you can go." So the judge takes the punishment upon himself, and the murderer ends up leaving to live his life.

A lot of people think that that's the totality of what justification is. Now if that was all of what justification is, did a good thing happen? Because that murderer had no penalty, went out to do whatever he wants, and the righteous judge got punished. Who would look at that situation in life and say, "That was good"?

Would you? Would you look at that and say, "That murderer who deserved to be punished, and yet the judge got the punishment, and all these people were just walked out, never committing or being in jail at all, no punishment whatsoever, and we celebrate that and say, 'Wow, that's so loving, that's so gracious.'" Who would think that he's a good judge by just letting them go?

There's a crucial part of that that a lot of people don't understand, which leads to cheap grace. It wasn't that sinner that was let go. The Bible says, "If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has gone, behold, a new has come." He said, "Their old self has been crucified with Christ.

It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me." So when we get baptized, it's symbolic of our old self dying, that it completely renewed who we are. So it wasn't that same sinner, it wasn't that same person who was judged to eternal damnation, our whole destiny changed because our whole identity and who we are has changed.

And only then we can say the righteous thing happened because that old self died, and the new self walked out. But if it's the old self, and all that happened was that the penalty of sin was paid for, so you can go out and do whatever you want, so now you're covered by the blood of Christ, so do whatever you want.

That is not the complete picture of justification. Justification tells us that we are crucified with Christ. Our old self is done. That's what the Bible says. He explains it a little bit further in Romans 6, 15-18, "What then, shall we sin because we are not under law, but under grace?

May it never be. Do you not know that when you present yourself to someone as slaves or obedient, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin resulting in death or of obedience resulting in righteousness? But thanks be to God that through you, though you were slaves to sin, you became obedient from the heart to that form of teaching to which you were committed.

And having been freed from sin, you became slaves of righteousness." Not only were we freed from the slavery of sin and condemnation, he says, now we become slaves to righteousness. Now that sounds good in theology, but in practice, what does that look like? Because I know we all still struggle.

I think the best way to illustrate this is from my own life. I remember, and again, I've shared this before, but I remember when I first became a Christian, I was so excited about my faith. But after months have gone by, I started struggling with the same things over and again.

My temper, you know, like I was getting into fights, purity issues, and every Friday I'm going praying and praying. And after about seven, eight, nine months of this and getting into fights and disappointing my mom again, and I just couldn't do it anymore. Not because I was tempted by the world, but I was just frustrated with myself.

I was so determined to prove specifically to my mom that I was a different person, and I kept on falling into the same sin, and I just kind of let it go. So I just walked out, and I just started to backslide and do whatever I wanted. And I had some friends who, you know, was doing whatever they wanted and happened to have some money.

So I remember during that period, about a year and a year and a half, I was backsliding and going to parties and getting drunk, and I was starting to do things that I didn't do before because I was a bit older. But I remember the whole time being at parties, getting drunk with my friends, and never feeling like I belonged here.

And every opportunity I had, I would start to tell them about God at parties while I'm getting drunk. And I knew how that sounded. So you're getting drunk, you're doing everything that they're doing, and they said, "Yeah, but you know, I got saved. You know, I met God. He's real.

You know, I know what I'm doing is stupid, but one day I'm going to have to go back, and this is not who I am." I'm telling them this is not who I am, even though I was acting like it. And I never felt like I belonged. And the funny thing was, the only people that I really connected with were the other Christians who were also backsliding.

And we would sit there while we're doing stupid things and talking about how, "Well, how did you get saved? And how did I get saved?" And then we would connect with each other and always tell us that one of these days we're going to have to go back, one of these days we're going to have to go back, because we weren't the same person.

You know, I went and tried to go back and embrace that life, but I just was not the same person anymore. And so at one point, I made a decision. We had a crazy night, you know, we almost got arrested. I won't get into all the stories, but by the time I got home, three in the morning, I was sitting there, slowly starting to sober up, talking to myself, "Is this fun for you?" And I was talking to myself.

"This is so stupid. This is not who you are." And so I made a decision. It wasn't like a fantastic decision. There was no tears coming down my face. I just made a decision. I'd rather at least face the right direction than to continue to do what I'm doing now, because this is not who I am.

That's all it was. I just made a decision. And I remember at that time, if God didn't make me a new creature, if I was able to walk away from God, I would have. I would have many times. I remember even in ministry, there were times when I just want to quit.

And I remember, you know, I was ready to just pack it up. And something simple that my mom and my wife Esther said the exact same thing. And I know they wanted me to quit more than anybody else. And I remember saying this to Esther, it's like, "If you want," you know, like I've reached my end.

And then I remember specifically Esther's telling me, "I know you." As much as I don't want to do it anymore either, I know you. If you quit, you're not going to be able to be okay and live another life. And she was absolutely right. As much as I may be tempted and frustrated sometimes, God gave me a new...

He made me a new creature. I don't find life out there. I don't find peace in money. I don't find peace, even though there might be periods when I'm tempted and frustrated. But who I am, He's God made me to function in the light. So my life doesn't feel comfortable in the darkness anymore.

Even though at times I may be tempted, I may be frustrated to run to it. If you are a new creation, you're no longer a slave to sin, but He made you a slave to righteousness where you can do no other than to follow Christ. Even though at times you may be kicking and screaming, but if you are a new creation in Christ, you only find peace when you are near Christ.

Because your eyes no longer function well in darkness. Because He made it new. And so when you make decisions, when you try to live in darkness, you're fumbling through the night, banging your knees against walls. And you second guessing every decision that you make because you weren't meant to function in darkness.

You and I have been made new creation. That's what that means to be strengthened by grace. It is the grace of God that caused me to persevere. It's the grace of God that caused me to love. It's the grace of God that caused me to sacrifice. It's the grace of God that caused me to worship.

And fourthly, it's the grace of God that caused me to proclaim His word with boldness. That's the fourth point. To be strengthened by grace gives us boldness to proclaim the gospel. You know, when the apostles stood, risked their lives to preach the gospel, people didn't observe their education or their great training or discipleship.

In fact, they observed exactly the opposite. It says in Acts 4.13, "Now as they observed the confidence of Peter and John and understood that they were uneducated and untrained." Stop right there. Think about that. You know, a lot of the secular scholars will say that the apostles manipulated the New Testament for their own benefit.

So they made up the resurrection to venerate Jesus for their own benefit. If that's what they did, the New Testament is ... they're the dumbest people in the world. Because they made them look so foolish. The text that they manipulated for their own glory says that they were rebuked by Paul publicly, that the women came to the grave before they did, and when Jesus was standing before them, they had a hard time believing.

I mean, if they did this for their own glory, they sure did a bad job. Here it says, "They were uneducated and untrained men. They were amazed and began to recognize them as having been," what? With Jesus. Their boldness didn't come because of training. Their boldness didn't come because of the education or their experience.

All it says was their boldness came because they saw that boldness in Jesus. And they were remaining with Christ. Just as Jesus told them in John 15. When I go, if you want to bear fruit, you remain in me. And that's what they said. They recognized these uneducated, untrained men.

They were with Jesus. It was the grace of God that gave them the boldness to proclaim the truth. That's why it says in 1 Corinthians 1, 18-19, "For the word of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved, it is the power of God.

For it is written, 'I will destroy the wisdom of the wise and the cleverness of the clever. I will set aside.'" Our boldness does not come because we're very well educated or you took some evangelism class and all of these things are the grace of God, right? These are all beneficial, but that's not where our effectiveness come from.

Our effectiveness comes from being affected by the grace of God. The reason why sometimes we feel so inadequate is because we have drifted from His grace. Being strengthened by the grace of God are people who have been enamored with Christ. Remember when you first came to Christ, you know who are the most bold for their faith?

Not the people who went to seminary. I've been there. Not the people who are the most well-equipped. You know who are the most bold for the kingdom of God? Brand new Christians. They don't know about the theology. They don't know about dispensation of covenant theology. They don't know anything about that.

But they're the boldest for the kingdom of God. You know why? Because they have been deeply affected by God's grace and they're eager to tell other people about it. You know the best salesmen are not the people who have the best personalities or best techniques. The best salesmen are the people who believe in that product.

So when you watch a movie, right, I'm going to say, "Oh, I'm an introvert. I don't tell people." It has nothing to do with your personality. When you watch a movie and you like it, people find out about it. I remember a couple of years ago after the retreat, some people said that we have to go to this place in LA to eat some tacos.

It was in the middle of nowhere. We thought we were going to die that day. You know, literally, it was like an abandoned area of an industrial area in LA somewhere, and then some people said that they ate it and it was the best tacos that they had in LA.

So we were curious. So we drove out there and said, "We must be lost because everything's shut down." You know, this is the kind of place where you get jumped. And so we made that and we turned this corner. All of a sudden, this taco stands there and all these people, right, are coming.

I said, "Where are these people coming from? I've never heard of them, never seen an advertisement. There's no commercial I saw. But we're willing to risk our lives to eat these tacos." Why did we go? Because some people ate it and they told us it was good. It was worth the drive.

The best witnesses for Christ are not the most educated, are not the best trained, are people who have been deeply affected by the grace of God. And you can't help tell other people because it's just overflowing in you. And that's where the boldness comes from. Boldness does not come from years of training or education.

Boldness comes from you believing with all your heart. And that's why Jesus says, "The greatest commandment is love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength." Because that's where love of your neighbors comes from. That's where sacrifice comes from. That's where true praise comes from.

That's where evangelism comes from. Brethren you and I have been deeply affected by the love of Christ. It is His grace that strengthens us. That's why Paul says in 1 Corinthians 2, 1 through 5, "And when I came to you, brethren, I did not come with superiority of speech or wisdom or proclaiming to you the testimony of God.

For I determined to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and Him crucified." I was with you in weakness and in fear and in much trembling and my message and my preaching were not in persuasive words of wisdom but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power so that your faith would not rest on wisdom of men but on the power of God.

You know sometimes people would look at that and say, "Oh, demonstration of Spirit and power like He was performing miracles." That's not what He's referring to. He's talking about His own testimony. Look at the text of that. He's not talking about supernatural power where He raised people from the dead.

He's talking about His own witness of how God saved a sinner like Him. And that was the power of God that downfounded the wisdom of mankind. That the weakness of man, weakness of man, the weakness of God is much more powerful than the greatest power of man. That's why He said, "I resolved to know nothing but Christ crucified." If we've drifted away, if we've frustrated or if the work of God or church has become burdensome, maybe it's because we have drifted away from the grace of God.

That we've forgotten what we have been saved from and what it is that we have been saved to. That if there's anything that we need to prioritize in our life is to get back and to refocus and recommit to the grace of God so that the grace of God would empower us, strengthen us, humble us, revive us, renew us, secure us so that we may find strength in Him and Him alone.

So as we enter into this busy season of Christmas, right, you're probably already decorating your homes and already burdened by the gifts that you need to buy. Maybe you already feel behind because you missed the Black Friday sale. You know, and then you have all these things that you need to get done before Christmas comes and in the midst of our busyness to really consider why do we have this day as Christians, right?

That we don't celebrate it like the rest of the world. That it truly would function to recalibrate our hearts to know that the Son of God came, took on human form, humbled Himself to save us. How should believers who believe that respond to that? Let's take some time to pray again as we ask our worship team to come.

Just take some time to really reflect, to celebrate, to rest, to recuperate. Focus on the grace of God that has been given to us.