Restoration 2018:  Our Picture of God

<p>Free sharing permitted under the Creative Commons <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/">BY-NC-ND 3.0 (US)</a> license.</p>

Restoration Ministry

Dee Casper

You’re Believing a Lie

Father, thank you for this privilege to come into your presence.

Lord, I pray that you would bless us by abiding here a while, and by speaking truth and clarity to our hearts and minds, particularly in contrast to many of the voices that go through our hearts and minds that are not in harmony with your word.

Help us, oh God, I pray, and show us your glory.

I received an email about a year ago, and someone was sharing the concerns that they had regarding their current experience with God, how God viewed them, how they're viewing themselves.

And this is the conclusion of the email that they wrote to me.

They said, I have to figure out how to love God despite living in judgments and wondering how much God wants me.

How I wish I could hear God say, I want you.

I want you to have the desires of your heart.

I want you to be set free and all my promises are yes in Christ, your promise is restored.

Christ has taken on himself the curses of your disobedience and you are now beneficiary to all the blessings of obedience." They just want to hear this from God, that I'm loved, that I can be forgiven, that I can be accepted, that the promises of God could actually apply to me, but they say, all I hear is that God is not mocked and a man reaps what he sows." This individual is living in a strong experience of condemnation, of shame, of discouragement.

And a counselor friend of mine gave me this in response to what they read in that particular email.

That this individual is looking for verses to reinforce the beliefs in their heart.

As a man thinks, so is he, and so is God.

We're looking for verses to reaffirm our views, our worldviews, and sometimes those can be unbiblical worldviews, but we're looking for verses to confirm them.

And 2, they're finding reasons to discount the verses that mention God's forgiveness and grace because they're opposed to their own view of their identity.

And we've probably been here, where we hear these gorgeous promises from God in his word, and we've asked for forgiveness of our sins, but we just can't believe that that's actually true.

Or it's not that we're living in sin, we want nothing to do with God, and we just don't think about it.

Like, we've actually asked for forgiveness.

We believe that we received it then, but then time goes by and we start doubting everything that we knew as reality.

And it kind of reminds me of Jeremiah chapter 20 in verse 18, why did I come forth from the womb to see labor and sorrow and that my days should be consumed with shame?

If my life is just gonna be filled with condemnation and shame every step of the way, why am I here?

Why did I have to even go through the process of living it?

In Jeremiah chapter 18, 1 through 11, God tells the story of the potter and the clay.

He says, look, if you let me mold and shape you, if you come back, if you repent, I can make something good out of your life.

The people choose not to believe that, and the response is, that's hopeless.

So we'll walk according to our own plans, and we'll let everyone obey the dictates of his evil heart." You ever been there?

God promises if you will repent and come back I can make something new out of your life but you just feel like I've been such a mess in life, I've been such a wretch that there's no way he could do that.

I might as well just live a life filled with sin because I'm never gonna be good enough.

This is not exactly the framework of the person in the email, but it's something that's very similar to people who live in an experience of condemnation.

In short, since it's hopeless for me to try to come back to God, I'm just going to live a lifestyle apart from Him.

Many of us wrestle with thoughts like this.

And I believe this is where the real issue comes down, is understanding the definitions of guilt and shame and condemnation and conviction.

Guilt is that I have done something wrong.

As opposed to I'm wrestling with X, but by the grace of God this will not be a part of my story forever.

So guilt is healthy and it can actually lead us to Christ, the very 1 who died for our wrongdoing.

But shame, on the other hand, fills us so full of unworthiness and unhealthy views that it actually keeps us away from Christ.

We think we couldn't come to him because I'm nothing but a and God wants nothing to do with people who are nothing but a, fill in the blank.

And conviction and condemnation, outside of the judgment at least, have kind of similar opposite poles.

Conviction is a role of the Holy Spirit to awaken us to the fact that we have need of a Savior who has died for our wrongdoing and who wants to transform our lives.

But condemnation, those thoughts that you're no good, you're never gonna be good enough, God doesn't like you, you're wasting your time and even trying to do these things.

You're reading your Bible and you're no different than you were yesterday.

Those thoughts of condemnation come from a different direction.

And what ends up happening is that Satan sets us up for shame and condemnation by leading us into failure and then convincing us to identify ourselves with that failure.

He sets us up to be hurt, and then he sets us up to hurt ourselves, to just identify ourselves as hopeless cases who will never change.

And because God would never want to change you, because he doesn't value you, He wants nothing to do with you, right?

These lies get thrown into our hearts and into our minds.

An example of this is in Genesis chapter 3.

Eve, when she's tempted by Satan, he doesn't come up to her, right, in a red leotard with a pitchfork and horns and just say, hey, I'm on a crash course for destruction.

That's not the way that he goes about it.

What he does is he starts with this insinuation that God is holding something back from her, and then She takes action against God.

He tells lies about God that ends up causing her to believe these things, and then she ends up taking action against God and against herself.

She sins, and soon after this experience, shame and guilt or condemnation come into her experience, right?

It says before they fall that they were naked and they felt no shame.

God never intended for shame to be part of the human experience.

But whenever they fell, when they chose to disbelieve the things of God and distrust God, and they took action against him and against themselves, this is when shame came into the experience, and nakedness, which is a lack of righteousness.

But the beautiful thing is, Eve's only hope is for someone else to take responsibility for her sin and someone else to cover her nakedness because she can't do that for herself.

So she desperately needs someone to do for her what she can't do for herself.

She needs an advocate, as John mentions in 1 John.

If we sin, we have an advocate, Jesus Christ, the righteous, Right?

And so this is what we see in this picture in Genesis.

That Jesus is going to have to die to cover our shame and our nakedness to teach us this lesson.

This is something we're told in 1 of our church publications, Signs of the Times, March 17, 1887.

We can never have a clear appreciation of the value of our Redeemer until by an eye of faith we see Him taking upon Himself the nature of man, the capacity to suffer, and then reaching the very depths of human wretchedness, that by his divine power he might save even the vilest sinner.

And we'll get a verse to elucidate this in a moment, but we do not consider the captain of our salvation and our conscience becomes hardened through the deceitfulness of sin.

Back to Menu

You’re Believing a Lie

Transcript

Parent Conference

Sponsor

Recorded

Related

Jesus On Prophecy

The Cornerstone of Bible Prophecy

52m

The Plan of Salvation

04 The Nature of Christ

1h 14m

Christ in the Coming Crisis

34m

Loss

41m

Secrets from the Ancient Sanctuary

04 Are You Ready for God’s Final Judgment?

51m

The Cross and the Sanctuary

The Cross and The Sanctuary- Part 3

30m

Who Then Can Be Saved?

46m

I Met God

I Met God 9

40m

Revelation Today Crusade

10. Antichrist Exposed- Part 1

1h

Secrets from the Ancient Sanctuary

05 Millions are Looking at the Wrong Temple

46m

The Day of Atonement

01 God’s Love Forgives

53m

Jesus: The Last Adam

1h

Sound Doctrine