Sermon Transcript
Well, if you have your Bible, we’re going to be back in 1 Timothy today. We’re continuing a series there, and today we’re in 1 Timothy chapter 1 and verses 12 to 17. As I was looking at this verse, it just reminded me of times in my life where I’ve received something that was totally undeserved. I’m sure you could probably think about many different things that you’ve received that have been undeserved. If nothing else, you can maybe go back to that time when you were growing up and your parents or your grandparents maybe gave you some ice cream for dessert that you didn’t deserve because you had not finished your dinner, but somehow on that night, you know, they just decided to be gracious toward you anyway and gave you dessert.
Or maybe it was that police officer that pulled you over for speeding but just gave you a warning instead of the ticket, but actually you deserved the ticket or I deserved the ticket because we were speeding. Or maybe it was that time where you were expecting to pay for lunch and as you were getting ready to pay for lunch, you found out that the person had secretly already paid for your lunch. Even though you invited this person out for lunch expecting to pay for their lunch, they had paid for yours, and so it was totally undeserved. Well, this week I was just contemplating different things that have happened in my life over the years, things that we haven’t deserved. I thought back on the time that our daughter was offered an opportunity to go to a brand-new Christian high school called Oaks Christian High School in Southern California.
She was just finishing middle school, And they were building this high school and they were pulling together some initial students. And so we got this invitation. It had been a school that we were watching be built from the 101 freeway in Southern California out in the affluent community of Westlake Village. And so this is like this incredible edifice there that was being built. It was a dream of the community.
It was a dream that was made reality by a $42 million gift. Wouldn’t that be great, huh, Gabe, to have a $42 million gift to work with? And so all the technology that you would want in this school, it was in this school. All the bells, all the whistles, all the things that you would hope as teachers, students, or parents to have your kids be able to enjoy, all of that was there. It was a brand new football stadium that had this beautiful artificial grass turf.
There was this cafeteria for the kids to enjoy that also had a private chef. Who was ready to cook whatever the students wanted. So, for my daughter, that would be a lot of, you know, grilled cheese sandwiches and that sort of thing. Well, anyway, I, as a pastor, was invited as a pastor to enroll our daughter Katie in this inaugural freshman class at the school, and they said, we want her to come, and so we’re gonna make it possible for you. All you need to pay is $100 a month.
Pretty good deal, huh, Gabe? $100 a month. So, the normal tuition, if we remember right, was somewhere around $1,000 or more for the kids to go there. Well, we accepted the invitation and she just began to just have such a great time at Oaks. It did a lot of good for her and it was fabulous.
She didn’t get to finish there, but she got through a couple years and then the Lord moved us off to Phoenix, Arizona. By the way, Oaks Christian High School today, at the time when it started in 2000, they started with 200 initial students, but now they have 1,400 students and from what I know, they’re paying about $3,000 or more a month to go there. So, Katie at the time was, you know, definitely got this wonderful gift that she and we as a family did not deserve. Of course, if you were to, you know, put all these we don’t deserve this or gifts that we received over the years, hopefully we put on the top of the list salvation in Jesus Christ. We did not deserve that.
Christ made it possible. God sent his Son Christ to give his life for us so that we might be forgiven of our sins and come into a new relationship with God and receive this brand-new life. And as we receive this brand-new life, hopefully we receive also or we grow into a different attitude, a new attitude. And one of the areas that that can be a challenge for us in, or something that we would be welcome to receive, is the whole problem in this area and, quite frankly, all around the world, the problem of entitlement. Entitlement.
You ever heard of that before? The problem of entitlement, living with an entitlement disposition, or the mentality of I deserve this, I deserve this mentality. In fact, you can go online. It’s amazing how much is said online about you deserve it, you deserve it, you deserve it, that sort of thing. And so you end up with these entitlement attitudes, or I deserve this attitude, and it’s prevalent in our culture today.
And quite frankly, it just stinks. I mean, it really does. It just doesn’t make a person that becoming. It’s not something that we want to aspire toward. It’s actually something I hope that we would aspire less to have of in our lives.
Well, 1 Timothy chapter 2 actually gets into this subject— excuse me, 1 Timothy chapter 1, verses 12 to 17 gets into this subject. And it really kind of describes, if you will, a before and after Christ experience in the life of a man that we know as Paul, but at this point in time, his name was Saul, Saul. And so, this experience that he’s referring to is something that took place that really transformed his life. And if you go back and you just listen to his description of his former life before he came to Christ, you get these different things that he says about his former life. But one of the places, and I’ll just jump out of 1 Timothy just for a second, before we jump in there is found in Philippians, another book that Paul wrote.
But in Philippians chapter 3, the last part of verse 4 through 6, he wrote this: If anyone thinks— if anyone else thinks he has reasons to put confidence in the flesh, I mean, you know, like parade their accomplishments before others, their earthly accomplishments, he says, I have more. I have more compared to others. And this is kind of, you know, the attitude that a person can develop when they’re looking at their accomplishments and what they’ve done and what they deserve in life. He says, I was circumcised on the 8th day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, Hebrew of Hebrews in regard to the law, a Pharisee as for zeal, persecuting the church as for legalistic righteousness, faultless. So here he’s referring back to his former life and basically is saying, you know, I had plenty of reasons to think that God and I were on good terms because I was a religious zealot.
I persecuted Christ followers. I had a legalistic pursuit of righteousness that gave me a faultless standing. That’s amazing. A faultless standing in the eyes not of God, but a faultless standing in the eyes of the other religious people. You know, religiosity was a big thing at that day.
And so, in the eyes of others, when they looked at my life, I was really something. And that was really descriptive of Paul’s life for 30 years or so before he met Jesus Christ on the road to Damascus, and Jesus got ahold of his life and he began to change. Saul into Paul, and he came to realize in this new life that he wasn’t all that righteous. He really wasn’t. He thought he was.
He wasn’t that righteous. He wasn’t faultless, that’s for sure, and that he was a blasphemer, he was a persecutor, and he was a violent man. Now, that’s how he describes himself in the text we’re looking at. So, this is what he says in 1 Timothy 1:12-17. I thank Christ Jesus our Lord, who has given me strength, that he considered me faithful appointing me to his service, even though I was once a blasphemer and a persecutor and a violent man.
I was shown mercy because I acted in ignorance and unbelief. The grace of our Lord was poured out on me abundantly, along with the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus. Here’s a trustworthy saying that deserves full acceptance: Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the worst. But for that very reason I was shown mercy, so that in me, the worst of sinners, Christ Jesus might display His unlimited patience as an example for those who would believe on Him and receive eternal life. Now to the King eternal, immortal, invisible, the only God, be honor and glory forever and ever.
Amen. Now, what that is, is that’s basically Paul’s salvation story. And we all have salvation stories. And don’t you just love to hear people’s salvation stories? They’re unique.
They’re encouraging. They’re uplifting. Incredible. This was certainly an encouraging, unique, incredible story if there ever was a story. And what I want to do is I just want to summarize this in 3 thoughts this morning that we can use, hopefully that’ll help us move away from an I-deserve-this disposition.
Okay? So the first thought that I see here with Paul is that there was a time in Paul’s life where basically Paul would have said, I wanted nothing. I wanted nothing to do with Jesus. Nothing. That period in his life.
And some of us sitting here this morning can identify with that in a lot of detail. You may have talked to some individuals even recently who want nothing to do with Jesus. I think about the time where we invited our neighborhood over for a dessert and conversation about spiritual things. We had been building some relationships. We were on 2 cul-de-sacs in Phoenix.
And we decided that we were going to just open it up one night in our home to just see if we could dig into a spiritual conversation. Never done this before. So we walked around to the neighbors, and 12 neighbors ended up over at our house on this one particular evening. We had a great time talking together and, you know, just getting to know each other a little bit better and that sort of thing. And we had our cheesecake and all the rest of that stuff, coffee, you know the stuff.
And so then we’re just sitting together, and I decided this seemed to be the right moment to dig into the spiritual part of this evening, and so I asked the question. I said, you know, if you could ask God any question, what question would you ask him? This is the question I asked my neighbors. I had no idea what they were going to say, but it was fantastic. They began to give all these different questions of what they would like to ask God about, you know, and a lot of it was connected to suffering and pain, as you would imagine, and things like that.
And then one woman, she said this, well, first, I would put Jesus over my knee and I would spank him. That’s what she said. And then she went on and asked a couple questions. She said, I have these couple questions for Jesus. I put Jesus over my knee and I would spank him.
I had, you know, I gulped. I choked on my cheesecake at that point. Basically, she was saying she didn’t want anything to do with Jesus. Well, essentially, this little text here tells us that Paul didn’t want anything to do with Jesus. That’s why he was a blasphemer and a persecutor and a violent man, verse 13, who was bent on destroying Christianity.
In fact, if you want kind of more of a description of this, and I’ll just give you a brief one on it, you could just look through the Book of Acts, and you could see the depth of Paul’s persecution and violent hatred toward Christ and violent hatred toward Christ’s followers. So, for instance, Acts 22:4, Paul said, I persecuted the followers of this Way to their death, arresting both men and women and throwing them into prison. In Acts 26:9, he said, I, too, was convinced that I ought to do all of that— all that was possible to oppose the name Jesus of Nazareth. Galatians 1:13, Paul said, I persecuted the church of God and I tried to destroy it. That’s the Apostle Paul, okay?
I wanted nothing to do with Jesus Christ. He was not faultless. He was not righteous. He may have been faultless and righteous in the eyes of religious people, but he certainly wasn’t faultless and righteous in the eyes of God, because in the eyes of God, he was a persecutor and he was a violent man. Which was to say he was a lawbreaker.
Now, let me tie in what this is telling us with what Dan helped us see last week as he took us into 4 different verses, and we looked at the law and the place of the law in our lives. And essentially, what you see Paul saying here is that I was a lawbreaker in the 2 categories that the law focuses on. And what are those 2 categories? Well, there’s the upward focus on loving God, And then there’s this horizontal focus on loving each other, right? And so, even if you look at the 10 Commandments, the upward focus is found in the first 4 commandments on loving God, and the next 6 commandments of the 10 are focused on loving each other.
Well, Paul broke them both. He didn’t think he did. He thought he was righteous and faultless, but he broke them both. But when he came to Christ, he began to realize that he was a blasphemer of God. He didn’t love God.
If he loved God, he would have believed in God’s Son, Jesus, the promised Messiah. He would have come to worship the promised Messiah. But instead, in his ignorance and unbelief— and really verse 13 talks about a defiant unbelief— he was intent on destroying Christ and His work and the church. So, he was far from loving God, but he was obviously not also a lover of people who was violently persecuting the church. That isn’t a description of love.
He was out to kill Christians, Christ followers. In fact, in Acts 8:1, when Stephen— Stephen was one of the early church deacons— when he gave basically a summary of the Old Testament Scriptures, the people came up and they killed him. They stoned him. He lost his life. And it tells us that Saul was there while all of this was happening, and Saul was giving his approval to Stephen’s death.
And after that, in Acts 8:3, Stephen was— after he was martyred for his faith, Saul began to go from house to house looking for Christians. And when he found men and women who believed, he drug them out of their homes and he put them in prison. And in Acts 9:1, we’re told that Saul— or Saul at this point, not Paul at this point, but Saul— breathed out murderous death threats against the Lord’s disciples. So, in other words, what you’ve got here is you’ve got a guy who’s bent on destroying Christianity and destroying Christ. And if you’re living in that day and you’re a Christian, Paul was not the guy you wanted to meet in a dark alley.
He would rough you up and leave you to die, or he would throw you in prison. So, it’s no wonder— now we can understand verses 15 and 16. When Paul comes out and he says, I was the worst of sinners, he was right. I mean, this was a guy who wanted to kill Christians and to destroy the message of Christianity. So, as far as he saw it, he was the worst of sinners, verse 15, verse 16.
He wasn’t faultless. But how did he come to finally see that he was the worst of sinners? Well, that came through the law. In Romans 7:7, Paul said this, indeed, I would not have known what sin was except through the law. So Dan last week helped us understand the law has its place in our lives.
It shows us our sins. It’s kind of like a mirror. You look in the mirror, and the law is the mirror, and it shows us how sinful we are, how dirty and filthy we are. We’re all sinners. All of us are sinners separated from God.
And this mirror, the law, shows us that there’s none righteous. There’s not even one righteous. Now, let me ask you a question. If you’re a Christ follower, did you ever come to understand that? That you’re a sinner, that there’s none righteous, not even one, that our sins have separated us from God?
You know, if you ask somebody today, do you think that you’re a good person? How do you view yourself? Do you see yourself as a good person? You ever ask a person that question? It’s a fascinating question to ask people.
Because most people, when they answer the question, will say, yeah, yeah, I think I’m a pretty good person. I mean, like, what they’re saying is, comparatively speaking, I see myself as a pretty good person. I’ll tell you one thing, I’m not as bad as that, you know, guy down the street down there. That guy down there, you know, he doesn’t love his kids like he should, he doesn’t love his wife like he should, he drinks too much. I’m certainly better than that guy.
And I’ll tell you another thing, I’m better than my boss who’s having an affair. I’m better than my boss. And I’ll tell you another thing, I’m not a serial killer, I’m not a drug dealer, and I’m not a terrorist. So, all of that means I’m a pretty good person. I was talking to Tim Logan, who’s a member of the Gideons, and he was saying to me that oftentimes when they go out and they hand out Bibles— you ever got a Gideon Bible?
I mean, like, they gave it to you, you didn’t steal it out of the hotel. But anyway, so, you know, he’s handing out all these Gideon Bibles, and he said, you know, when we go out and hand out these Gideon Bibles, oftentimes people will say to us, oh, no thanks, no thanks, and then they’ll say this, I’m good. I’m good. Oh, how about that? I’m good.
How do you help somebody who thinks they’re good realize they’re not good? Well, that’s the law. Bring them back to the law. Talk about guilt and talk about shame. Talk about whether or not they have any regrets.
Talk about, you know, even just the big categories. Do you love God? Do you really love God? I mean, what is going on in your life that even would indicate any way that you love God? And are you perfect about this loving other thing?
You see, if we can even just focus on those 2 subjects in conversations with people, perhaps we can help people come to see that they’re sinners separated from God, that the mirror that they’re looking into shows them that they’re dirty. And Paul came to realize that. He came to realize that. And ultimately, because he came to realize that, he came to realize that he needed a Savior. He needed a Savior.
He needed Jesus Christ, the one that he wanted nothing to do with. You know that friend you have or that family member that you know that’s a part of your life that doesn’t believe in the Lord? There’s hope. There’s hope. If there was hope for the Apostle Paul, somebody who was bent on eliminating Jesus and eliminating Christianity altogether, there’s hope.
There’s hope for that person that you care about, too.
So, we can summarize what’s here, first of all, by just focusing on the fact that there was a time where Paul was bent. He was bent on eliminating Jesus. He wanted nothing to do with Jesus. But secondly, what we see here is Jesus gave Paul what he didn’t deserve.
And we could say that in our own words, or we say it in Paul’s words, perhaps, Jesus gave me what I didn’t deserve. And what did He give me? Well, there’s a number of things in this text that Jesus gave Paul. And really, what He gave Paul, He gives to us. And He doesn’t give to us in a meager amount, but He gives it to us in abundance.
Do you notice in verse 14 the word abundance? You might want to underline that word. And what did He give Paul in abundance? Well, several things. He gave him strength and service, first of all.
I thank Christ Jesus, verse 12, our Lord, who has given me strength. Strength, that sounds good. That He’s considered me faithful, appointing me to His service. Can you imagine this? Jesus turned Paul from an antagonist into an evangelist.
He went from an antagonist to an evangelist, to an ambassador for Jesus Christ, because Jesus gave him the strength that he needed for that task, but he also gave him the task itself, the service, the service. And really, Jesus does the same thing for anybody who comes to a relationship with him. He gives us something to do that has purpose and meaning that he has gifted us for, And He gives us the power in order to do what it is that He has given us to do. In fact, in Ephesians 2:10, it says, we are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do. So God has a service for all of us.
He has something significant that He wants us to do. And Philippians 4:13, as Paul realized, I can do all things through Him who strengthens me. He gives us the strength also. So in Christ, if you’re connected to God and Jesus Christ, We’re getting something we don’t deserve. We’re getting strength and we’re getting service, just like the Apostle Paul got strength and he got service.
We’re given something of purpose that he wants us to accomplish, and he’s given us the strength to accomplish whatever that is. That’s not all. Paul got mercy and grace. You’ll notice this in verses 13 and 16 where it focuses on mercy. You see the word mercy there?
What’s mercy? Well, mercy is getting what you don’t deserve. And what did Paul deserve in this case? I mean, he was out hunting down Christians. What did he deserve?
We’d say, well, at least he deserved a little time or maybe a lot of time in the penalty box. I mean, if this had been a hockey game or something like that, he should have been in the penalty box, or maybe he should have been in jail for all of the crimes that he committed against God’s work and God’s people. And not only should he have been in jail for a while, but after this life, he should have spent some time in purgatory. Okay? Now, I don’t believe in purgatory.
I don’t think the Bible teaches purgatory. But hey, let’s just stick it in here, all right? Because it would seem with all that Paul did that that would have been his future. But our merciful God, instead of imposing penalties on the Apostle Paul and demanding, you know, payment and suffering and time and whatever it was, instead of all of that, He treated Paul with mercy.
Anybody here need mercy?
And he was also given grace. The grace of our Lord, verse 14, was poured out on me abundantly. And really, you actually see that from the very first moment that Jesus audibly spoke to the Apostle Paul when he was on the road to Damascus where he was going to hunt down some more Christians. The timing of that’s interesting because when Jesus came to Paul and Paul encountered Jesus, It’s interesting, it was 6 years after Jesus had ascended to heaven. So 6 years after Jesus ascended to heaven, he’s still interested in a personal encounter with somebody.
He comes back, he has a personal encounter with Saul— Saul who was wreaking havoc on the church and the work of the gospel. And even still, in that moment, Jesus showed Paul grace or Saul grace. He showed him grace when he didn’t eliminate his life. Instead of taking his life, he gave Paul life. He gave him a brand-new life.
In fact, the new life that he gave Paul was so unbelievable that when the Lord told Ananias to pay Saul a visit— you can read about this in Acts chapter 9— when he told Ananias to pay Paul a visit and pray over him so that ultimately his sight would be restored, because he lost his sight in this encounter with Jesus, When He told Ananias to do that, Ananias basically pushed back and said, I’m not doing that. Are you kidding? I know about this guy. Rumor on the street is this guy’s out to kill Christians. But the Lord countered Ananias’ excuses, and He sent him.
And when He sent him, He sent him with another dose of God’s grace, and his sight was restored. And I think about that in our own lives. How many times has God given us something that we don’t deserve, like the Apostle Paul received something that he— not deserve, something unmerited, something that came from the God that we have turned our back on time and time and time again. So Paul ended up with strength and service. He ended up with mercy.
He ended up with grace. What else does this tell us? Verse 14, he also ended up with an abundance of faith and love. Faith. What’s that?
Well, first there’s the saving faith kind of faith, the faith to believe. Paul came to believe in Jesus Christ because God God made it possible for Paul to have the faith to believe. God gives us all the faith to believe, and we don’t deserve that. That’s something that’s a gift that He gives. He gave him the faith to believe, but then He gave him the faith to continue to believe.
When pain and hurt came into his life, when people rejected him and beat him and wanted him out of their life, God continued to give Paul faith so that he continued to persevere in the midst of the trials that he faced. But He also gave Paul love. There’s a big one. A different kind of love. We’re talking about a self-sacrificing love.
This is agape love. This is the love that doesn’t give up. This is the love that’s patient and kind, that’s not proud. This is the love that serves and gives. This is the love that’s been shed abroad in the heart of a Christ follower in abundant measure.
This is the love that ultimately changed Paul from a person who wanted to go out and beat others to somebody who was willing to go out and take a beating. For Jesus Christ. I absolutely love this account because what you have here is you have a description of what God did for a person that did not deserve it, the kind of things that He continues to do for people like us that also do not deserve it. These 6 salvation gifts, you might call them, 6 undeserved salvation gifts— strength, service, mercy, grace, faith, love. They’re all gifts that God showered on Paul.
And listen to this, on the day of his conversion, which preceded— which preceded this description that he’s passing along to Timothy, preceded that description by 28 years.
So Paul is describing something that happened in his life 28 years ago, and he’s continuing to experience the fruit of that in his life at that moment in time. Some of us can hardly remember what we were doing 28 years ago. Some of us weren’t here 28 years ago, and that’s why we don’t remember. You know, we weren’t a part of this whole thing. But for the rest of us, if we try to go back 28 years ago, okay, back to 1990.
What was I doing in 1990? It’s hard enough just for me just to remember. Let’s see, where I was living. We lived in Southern California, and I can remember mowing the lawn. That’s one of the things I remember.
1990. It was something I did every Thursday over and over and over. That’s my big memory of 1990— living in Southern California, mowing the lawn, and hating it every time I went out and mowed it. Made my family miserable, but that’s a whole other story. But if my uncle, who lived in Encino not too far away, if he had dropped by my house one day in 1990 and drove up in his really fast red Ferrari and said, Dave, I want you to have this, I would remember that about 1990.
I seriously would remember that. It’d probably be one of the most memorable days of my whole life. I would never forget that, first of all, because the likelihood of that happening would have been slim to none. Right? Slim to none.
Fact is, it turned out to be none, but nonetheless. But if it had happened, it definitely would have been an undeserved gift. I didn’t earn it. I didn’t deserve it. And I’ll tell you one thing, I wouldn’t forget it.
I’d still be talking about it 28 years later. I’d still be talking about the day that Uncle Welco walked up our sidewalk and I answered the door and he was standing there with these keys and right behind him And parked out front of our house was this red Ferrari, and he said, hey, Dave, I want you to have my Ferrari. I’m buying a new one. I want you to have this one. Okay?
I want you to have this. I would never forget that day. Well, I’ll tell you what. There was an even better day when God the Father, through His Son Jesus Christ, gave Paul the gift, not of a Ferrari, but the gift of eternal life. And he never forgot that, and he lived in light of that again and again and again.
So that he wasn’t somebody that became arrogant, and he wasn’t somebody who was always talking about what he deserved. He was somebody that was manifesting an, I don’t deserve this kind of life. In fact, it’s interesting, this story that we find here in 1 Timothy 1, this is the 6th telling of this story. 6 different times you see this story told. You see it’s told in Galatians 1, Galatians 2, Acts chapter 9— excuse me, yeah, well, Acts chapter 9 is the conversion itself.
Chapter 22, chapter 26 of Acts, you find it in Philippians chapter 3. The guy just keeps talking about it over and over and over again. Why? Because he doesn’t forget it. It was transformative.
It was the kind of thing that changed his life, and it was continuing to change his life, kind of like Jesus talked about living water. He was living in the midst of the living water. And so, he could not but talk about his former life, how he wanted nothing to do with Jesus, and his undeserved life that he’s now living because of Jesus’ salvation and what he had gifted him and blessed him with. But he’s also talking here about his present life. And in this present life, he’s basically saying this, I’m giving God now what he deserves.
I’m giving God what he deserves. And what does God deserve? What does God, through God the Son, Jesus, what does he deserve? Well, he deserves ongoing thanks. So in verse 12, he says, I thank Christ Jesus our Lord.
You know, one of the things that we were taught as kids is to always say thanks, right? To always, if somebody does something nice for you, they give you a gift or whatever it was, to always say thanks, even if it was just a glass of water. Well, certainly the gift of salvation would qualify for that, wouldn’t you think? Even if it’s been 28 years. The gift of thanks, saying, Thanks, Lord.
Just thank you so much. Just this unending thanks, something that I’ve received that I did not deserve. You know, it’s fascinating that God the Son, Jesus, thanked God the Father. In John, chapter 11, verse 41, you find these words, Father, I thank you that you’ve heard me. Now, you would think Jesus would know that God heard Him, right?
Of course He would know that. But nonetheless, He expressed His thanks to God. There’s nothing too small or too big that we can’t but say, thanks. Thanks. Saying thanks is actually a way of saying, I don’t deserve this.
Thank You. And God the Son, Jesus, also deserves full acceptance. It says in verse 15, here’s a trustworthy saying that deserves Full acceptance, not partial acceptance, not a little acceptance, not skeptical acceptance, not reluctant acceptance. Says full acceptance. What’s the statement that deserves full acceptance?
That Jesus Christ, or Christ Jesus, came into the world to save sinners, people like us, who Paul says, of whom I’m the worst. And then in verse 16, he says, so here’s Exhibit A. Exhibit A is God’s unlimited patience. God’s patience is unlimited. His unlimited patience to save somebody who is the worst of sinners. I’m exhibit A, he says.
In fact, you could just look at me, and hopefully that’s enough for others to realize that all people need to believe. You notice the word believe there? And they need to receive Jesus Christ as their Savior. They need to fully believe, and they need to fully receive Christ as their Savior, kind of like our daughter accepted that offer to Oaks Christian. When she accepted the offer, she accepted the offer intentionally, willingly, enthusiastically.
She accepted it with an all-in commitment. I’m not going to coast. I’m going to do the best that I can. Well, God the Father deserves that kind of acceptance, full acceptance from us. Thanks, full acceptance.
And God the Father also deserves heartfelt adoration. And that’s what we see. He kind of ends his whole testimony with a heartfelt adoration, a doxology, so to speak. Now to the King eternal, immortal, invisible, the only God, be honor and glory forever and ever. Amen.
I mean, basically what he’s saying is, I just can’t help but thank God and praise Him. I just adore Him. I adore Him as the King, as the one who always does that which is best and right and loving now and forever. And I adore Him as my immortal, Father, the one who is without beginning or end, the one who was and is and is to come, the one who’s going to live forever. And because he lives forever, he makes it possible for people like me and us to live forever too.
That we adore him because he’s invisible, he’s unseen, but yet he’s everywhere present. He’s with us right now, and he will never leave us or forsake us. And we adore him because he’s the only God, the only true God. The only genuine God, the only real God. Every other god is a figment of somebody’s imagination.
This isn’t a made-up god. This is God, the only real God. And we can believe that God is real, and when we believe that God is real through Jesus Christ, we can come into a personal relationship with Him. So, for Paul, just the thought of who God is and what God has done and what God has yet to do, it just filled his heart with a doxology of adoration or a doxology of praise. And essentially, it was just a statement or a song that says, I want to honor and glorify God day after day after day for what he’s done in my life in the past and the present and the future.
It’s not deserved, but I honor him and I give thanks. Recently, Bernice and I have been talking a little bit about the church that we grew up in, in Fresno, California. We also met there. It was a church that every week in worship, besides saying the Lord’s Prayer, they also every week sang the doxology. And so, every week, we would sing this doxology.
And as we’ve been talking about it recently, we were saying to ourselves, you know, I can’t remember a time— we can’t remember a time where we sang the doxology like we just sang the doxology here this morning. But we can’t remember, as we were growing up, a time where we sang that doxology with meaning. It became meaningless. Meaningless. Hopefully, that wasn’t the case in this building this morning?
I know for me, in light of what we’ve been talking about here, I sang that song this morning with new meaning. I think the Apostle Paul would have sang that song with meaning, with heartfelt adoration, not just one time. What I see here is a guy who’s singing a song of adoration and praise to God for the past 28 years. Part of the reason why he’s still singing God’s praise is because he knew he didn’t deserve what God had done for him. He was the worst of sinners.
Same church back in Fresno where Bernice and I took a lot of things for granted, we were in this youth choir. It was called The Eternal Trip. The Eternal Trip. It was named during the time of the hippies, okay? So anyway, the trip, you know, and all that stuff.
But anyway, I can remember these songs that we used to sing, and one of the songs was one that was written and sung by Andrae Crouch. It was titled My Tribute. And the song began this way: How can I say thanks for the things you’ve done for me? Things so undeserved. Things so undeserved, yet you gave to prove your love for me.
The voices of a million angels could not express my gratitude. All that I am and ever hope to be, all that I am and ever hope to be, I owe it all to thee. To God be the glory, to God be the glory, to God be the glory for the great things he has done.
Sounds like a doxology, doesn’t it? Sounds like a heart that’s expressing adoration to God for the abundance of life that he had received. That’s a good sign, isn’t it? I don’t deserve this. All that I am and ever hope to be, I owe it all to the Now sometimes relationships grow stale, don’t they?
I think part of the reason those relationships can grow stale is because we can take the relationship for granted.
Or maybe we become people who think that, you know, that person’s pretty lucky to have me. Focuses on us instead of that other person. All that I am and ever hope to be, I owe it all to thee. I don’t deserve this. Let’s pray.
Lord, thanks for speaking to us this morning. I just pray that what we’ve talked about can help us live with an appreciative attitude So-called an attitude of gratitude.
God, if we’ve been taking this life itself for granted, forgive us. Perhaps we’ve taken it granted by living it without you. The truth of the gospel transforms us, not just initially but continually, and I pray that If there are any of us this morning who’ve not yet come to see our sin and the need for a Savior, that today would be the day of salvation, that we receive this amazing gift of life that’s found in your Son Jesus.
And Lord, if we’ve already received the gift, then may it transform us and may it continue to transform our perspectives and our attitude, transform our relationship with you. May we never take this relationship for granted. May we never come to think you’re so lucky to have us. But God, may we live with hearts filled with thanks. May we be completely surrendered to your will.
May our lives be a doxology, a doxology of adoration to your honor and glory. For we pray this in Jesus’ name. Amen.
