By Pastor Samuel Chess

Grace Emmanuel Church

Port St. Lucie, Florida

(Deliverance from this present age)

I. The Principle of Divine Exchange

(Ephesians 4:22-24) You were taught, with regard to your former way of life, to put off your old self, which is being corrupted by its deceitful desires; to be made new in the attitude of your minds; and to put on the new self, created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness. (NIV)

Put off your old self, which is being corrupted by its deceitful desires!

Put on the new self, created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness!

(2 Corinthians 5:17) Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; old things have passed away; behold, all things have become new. (NKJV)

II. The Principle of Deliverance

1) Deliverance from this present evil age

2) Deliverance from the bondage of the Law

3) Deliverance from self and selfishness

4) Deliverance from the flesh

5) Deliverance from the world

A) Deliverance from this present age

(Galatians 1:3-4) Grace to you and peace from God the Father and our Lord Jesus Christ, who gave Himself for our sins, that He might deliver us from this present evil age, according to the will of our God and Father, (NKJV)

Observation #1: This age is going to come to an end!

Observation#2: You don’t belong to this age!

What we are trying to hang onto with all of our might God has been and is systematically working to deliver us from!

Observation #3 This age has an evil god

(2 Corinthians 4:3-4) And even if our gospel is veiled, it is veiled to those who are perishing. The god of this age (aeon) has blinded the minds of unbelievers, so that they cannot see the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God. (NIV)

(Ephesians 6:12) For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world (aeon) and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms. (NIV)

Observation #4 If you get caught up in this age your life will, at best, be unfruitful.

Observation #5 In order to not get caught up in this age you must become transformed!

B) Deliverance from the bondage of the Law…

….Deliverance from self and selfishness….

I haven’t spent a lot of time preaching about the law and whether we are to live our lives under a set of rules or live our lives under the GRACE provided by Jesus death on the cross. The reason I don’t spend a lot of time on the subject is because I think it is a no-brainer. When we sat down to think of a name for this church many years ago, the first word, the most important word, the one that says it all was the first word in the title. I remember we had a long list of possible words we were considering. We struggled with the word Emmanuel against a number of other possibilities. We almost used the word “chapel” instead of church. The word nobody questioned was the first word…..GRACE. I have often suggested that we reduce the title of this church to just the one word…..GRACE. Where do you attend church????? GRACE!

The reality is that there are a whole lot of churches in the world who have the word Grace in their title or their statement of faith, but their attempts to live righteous lives are made up of trying to conform to a list of rules. Some of you who are young and have lived most of your life in this church have no idea what I am talking about, but many, many of you who are older, both from Protestant and Roman Catholic backgrounds know exactly what I’m talking about….trying to please God by following a predetermined list….if I measured up to the list I felt accepted by God and by those around me…if I felt short of the list God frowned, and the people around me frowned even more.

The whole Old Testament, in the Bible, is a set of rules for living.. and they are important rules! They are God’s Law. The OT believers tried feverishly to follow that Law and always, always found themselves coming up short. When we get to the New Testament God….Jesus plainly tells us that while the principles of truth in the Law remain; the New Testament believers relationship to the law not only should change… it better change!

1) Deliverance from the Law…

Law- seeking to achieve righteousness before God by keeping a set of rules.

Grace (in this context)- we do not achieve righteousness before God by keeping a set of rules but simply by trusting in Jesus sin payment in our place!

Paul explained it this way:

(Galatians 2:19-20) For through the law I died to the law so that I might live for God. I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. (NIV)

Watch this closely: Paul says in order to “live to God” one first has to “die to the law”.

If my life is a life lived by the law, I can’t at the same time live to God. In order to get free of God I have to first get free of living to the law.

If this just sounds like a play on words to you, let me remind you:

1) that whole chunks of the New Testament were written to correct people thinking in this are…the whole book of Galatians is about this subject ..so obviously is must be an important subject…

2) The entire Great Reformation in world history was about this biblical issue. The huge world battle that took place between the catholic church and the protesters.. (protest…ants)…Protestants was all about this issue of whether one was justified before God by a list of things they did, or simply by our faith in the grace of God.

Oddly, after the Protestants had broken away from the rules set by the Roman Catholic church they often just set up another list of rules for living slightly different then the one they had left behind and then based their rightness before God on whether they kept the new list.

Let me try to explain this in modern terms because it seems complicated. One of the things Jesus himself, and then the Apostle Paul after him was so clear about is that your salvation comes not because of what you do or don’t do right or wrong but comes as a result of Jesus death on the cross for you and your erasing that as your own.

(Ephesians 2:1-6) As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins, in which you used to live when you followed the ways of this world and of the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the spirit who is now at work in those who are disobedient. All of us also lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of our sinful nature and following its desires and thoughts. Like the rest, we were by nature objects of wrath. But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions-- it is by grace you have been saved. And God raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus, (NIV)

If you sit here today with your sins forgiven and the promise of eternal life, that is not true because of anything you did to earn it. It’s what Jesus did that made your salvation possible. It is true that faith in Jesus will change the way you act ..but you must be so careful not to come to believe that Jesus acceptance of you is based on those new right actions.

Humans are so odd. We come to Jesus and He brings righteous change into our sinful lives. That’s wonderful! Our next tendency is to make a list of the changes he made in us and turn to the next person and say, “Here is a list of the changes God has made in my life. If you will adjust your life to my list you will be acceptable to Jesus as well.

What we so often don’t realize is that; God makes radical changes toward righteousness in our lives; we see transformation in all 20 key areas of our life. We are so proud of the 20 life changes we have experienced that we want to enforce on everybody else the big 20 as well. What we somehow missed was that there really never were 20 areas needing change. There we 168 areas, and we still have 148 other areas that still need transformed. I have yet to see any one who made a list of rules for others to follow who didn’t have glaring deficiencies in their own lives and the only one who couldn’t see them was the rule maker himself!

Paul says:

(Galatians 2:19-20) For through the law I died to the law so that I might live for God. I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. (NIV)

This is really deep. The final thing that the law can do to anybody is to put them to death. Capital punishment. What was the basis used for putting Jesus to death? The religious leader claimed that he had broken the law.

The Law brought about Jesus crucifixion!

It was that very action that set the wheels in motion for him to be able to set free all who would follow him from the bondage of living by the law.

Once Jesus was executed, the Law had no more claim on him. What Jesus did after the law had executed him the law could not control!

Stay with me….

(Galatians 2:19-20) For through the law I died to the law so that I might live for God… I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me……. The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. (NIV)

I have been crucified with Christ

I no longer live, but Christ lives in me…….

The life I live in this body, I live by faith in the Son of God,

who loved me and gave himself for me.

The law brought Jesus to execution, once dead the law lost its effect.

The law brings you to punishment, once you die with Christ, the law loses it’s effect.

This is really significant to rule focused people. You cannot live by the law and by grace at the same time. If the law controls any of you it controls all of you. In order for your life to be controlled by grace you have to die to the control of the law! Until I die to the Law I cannot truly live for God!!! Not my words…they come straight from Galatians 2.

Remember Romans 6:6?

(Romans 6:6-7) For we know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body of sin might be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves to sin-- because anyone who has died has been freed from sin. (NIV)

As long as you have not accepted Christ righteous death on behalf of your sins you are under the guilt and bondage of the law which minute by minute points out to you how much you are lacking. If you are trying to be righteous based on the law you will live your life constantly trying to be better and better, and for every step forward you crawl their will be 20 more un-kept laws pushing you two steps backward. Scripture says the laws in Scripture were put there to point you to a better way…

(Galatians 3:24-25) So the law was put in charge to lead us to Christ that we might be justified by faith. Now that faith has come, we are no longer under the supervision of the law. (NIV)

Please don’t read this to say that once you get out from under the law and you are living under grace you are free to live any old sinful way you want to. On the contrary, it is the break from living under the law that begins to really give you freedom to live above sin.

(Romans 6:14-15) For sin shall not be your master, because you are not under law, but under grace. What then? Shall we sin because we are not under law but under grace? By no means! (NIV)

First of all the implication is that if you are trying to be righteous by living by a set of rules, then sin is your master. The harder you try not to sin the more you will get sucked in. Fro every sin you learn to control by the force of your will, ten more will pop out the other side.

Somehow the move from law to grace actually improves the sinning problem!

(Romans 7:5-6) For when we were controlled by the sinful nature, the sinful passions aroused by the law were at work in our bodies, so that we bore fruit for death. But now, by dying to what once bound us, we have been released from the law so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit, and not in the old way of the written code. (NIV)

How do we “serve in the new way of the Spirit”? How does moving past the control of the Law make us more inclined to obey God rather than disobey? How does not having a list of rules written in our hands make us more obedient rather than less obedient.

It has to do with this phrase: “the new way of the spirit”. Paul says that we no depend on the law written on tablets of stone or on scrolls of papyrus; because God will write his law on our hearts! Because of Jesus death in our place, His resurrection, His ascension back to heaven, and the sending of His Spirit to guide us into all truth, we have far more opportunity to overcome sin than we ever would have had had we simply tried to stay obedient to the law.

(Galatians 5:18) But if you are led (present continuous action) by the Spirit, you are not under law. (NIV)

(Romans 8:13-14) For if you live according to the sinful nature, you will die; but if by the Spirit you put to death the misdeeds of the body, you will live, because those who are led (present continuous action) by the Spirit of God are sons of God. (NIV)

Illustration:

Imagine your are in a strange, dangerous unstable land. As you try to reach your destination there are thousands of dangerous areas that you have to pass through or preferably around. Any one of the danger areas has the power to bring your forward motion to a stop or even destroy you completely.

You are offered two options on how you will approach the journey.

Option 1) You will be given a document that will tell you all the pitfalls that are available to fall into. It will warn you that many have gone before you and have fallen headfirst into those same pitfalls to their own destruction. It will give you hundreds of instructions and command that you must obey. Disobeying any one of them will lead to failure. Not obeying all of them in there totality will leave you unsure of reaching your destination. There is no map to the final destination, you will have to find it by trial and error and if you are successful in escaping all the pitfalls and finding the destination you will enjoy the fruits of your journey forever.

Option 2) You will be given a personal guide who knows where all the pitfalls are, knows exactly where the destination is and how you are to reach it.

Conclusion: Which option would you chose? Which option have you chosen?