Join us as we explore Bob Enyart’s captivating examination of the Apostle Paul’s distinct message, ‘my gospel’, which highlights the shift from living under the law to embracing a life of grace. With historical references and personal anecdotes, we underscore why this transition is not only significant but also essential for modern believers. Discover how grace fundamentally alters our relationship with God, freeing us from the constraints of the law and inviting us into a deeper, more profound faith, as outlined in the epistles and exemplified through Paul’s ministry.
Greetings to the brightest audience in the country and welcome to Bob Enyart Live. Paul says, imitate me as I imitate Christ. And a lot of Christians have this vague sense that Paul is just a good example for us to follow. You know, he’s a real godly man. But it’s a little bit more in-depth than just that. In fact, we are supposed to imitate Jesus as Paul imitates Jesus and not as, say, Peter imitates Jesus. And so when Paul says that, it’s a lot more specific about of a command than we think it is. It’s way more specific. And to get into some depth on that, we are going to my father’s sermon on living for Jesus like Paul. This is part two. Let’s jump right into it.
SPEAKER 02 :
Last week, we began our message, Living for Jesus Like Paul, and it’s the difference between living by law and living by grace. So why like Paul? Why not just like Jesus? Or for that matter, how about like Peter, like the Roman Catholics do? Why like Paul? Well, you’ll find that the best way to learn how to do something often is by example, following someone else. And also a second way, it’s by contrasting with the opposite. Like if you want to teach your kids to smile, kids don’t know how to smile. You don’t want to take their pictures. They do not know how to smile. You have to teach them how to smile. So you can show them pictures. This guy is not smiling. Don’t look like that. So by looking at the opposite. So first, to understand what it means to live by grace and not by the law, we’ll consider by example. The Apostle Paul claims to be the example and the pattern, and he orders the body of Christ, it’s a command, he says, to imitate and follow him as he follows Christ. Like in Philippians 3.17, brethren, join in following my example so you have us, Paul and Timothy, as a pattern. And remember we asked last week, why not just imitate Jesus? Why does Paul say imitate me as I imitate Christ? So we’re going to review three things from last week. There are the charts. Remember the three charts. And there is also the babysitter and crib analogy. And we ended with that. And there’s the list of would-yous. Would you climb up on the cross and pull out the nails to live by the law. Remember that list? So we’re going to review those three things, and first we’ll get to the slides, the three slides. And if you recall, the one was an overview of the book of Acts, and it showed how frequently Peter was mentioned per chapter, and then how frequently Paul was mentioned per chapter, And it starts out all Peter, and then there’s a transition that begins in Acts 9, and then it’s all Paul, wall to wall. As Peter and the law and Israel, as they wane, God institutes the body of Christ, and it just explodes in prominence in the book of Acts. So we’ll see that slide in just a moment. But to the Thessalonians, Paul wrote that you became followers of us and of the Lord. Isn’t that a bit weird? Do we see that in the Old Testament where Moses says, follow me? No, we don’t see that. How about even in the New Testament where we have Peter saying, follow me, use me as an example? No, he doesn’t. If we imitate Paul as he imitates the Lord, we just cut out the middleman and imitate the Lord, right? No, there’s a reason for all of this. It’s because God for 1,500 years was teaching Israel what it means to live under the law, and Jesus came to teach them that. And then there was a transition when he cut off Israel because they rejected their resurrected Messiah and grafted in the body of Christ. And now he’s using Paul as an example to show us what it means to live by grace and not under the law. So, 1 Corinthians. Chapter 11, verse 1. One of these especially important and recurring verses. These thematic verses where the Apostle Paul says, imitate me just as I also imitate Christ. Another verse in 2 Thessalonians 3, Paul says you ought to follow us. This is repeated. 2 Timothy 3.10, Paul wrote that you have carefully followed my doctrine. He doesn’t so often you think that there’s either something wrong with Paul or Jesus Christ gave to him personal authority that he had to emphasize so that we would not be confused and be keeping the wrong covenant. Paul writes also in 1 Timothy 4.6 about the good doctrine which you have carefully followed, the pattern which you have heard from me. That’s 2 Timothy 1.13. How about this in 1 Timothy 1.16? For this reason, I obtain mercy that in me first, Jesus Christ might show longsuffering, also grace, as a pattern to those who are hereafter going to believe. Notice that Paul says that God gave him mercy so that in Paul first, Jesus would show grace as a pattern. A pattern in me first. Also to the Corinthians in chapter 4, he says, I urge you, imitate me. Over and over and over he does this. 2 Timothy 3.14, another verse I haven’t read. Continue in the things which you have learned and been assured of, knowing from whom you have learned them. Paul kept stressing that because Jesus was circumcised. The 12 apostles were circumcised. For 2,000 years, the Jews were keeping the covenant of circumcision and God saved Paul as the apostle to the Gentiles called the uncircumcision. And he said, God says through Paul that the Gentile believers do not need to circumcise because they’re not of the covenant of circumcision. They’re of the covenant of the uncircumcision. If you didn’t know that that changed with Paul, you would be maybe thinking we need to be messianic and circumcise our male children on the eighth day the same way Jesus was, the same way the law says, but we’re not supposed to do that. Paul repeatedly calls the gospel, you know what he calls it? It’s very unusual. He calls it my gospel, like in Romans 16, 25. He says that God committed the gospel to my trust, 1 Timothy 1.11. 2 Timothy 2.8, to me, this grace was given that I should preach among the Gentiles according to my gospel. Over and over and over, God, through Paul, has Paul write that this is all according to my gospel, Romans 2.16, because 1 Corinthians 9, a dispensation of the gospel was committed to me. Wow. Is this just a quirky observation that doesn’t really mean anything? Or did the Holy Spirit really inspire Paul to make this appeal to the personal authority that God gave to him? It’s the latter. Colossians 1.24, for his body’s sake, according to the dispensation of God, which is given to me. 1 Corinthians 3.9, according to the grace of God, which was given to me, I have laid the foundation. Wow, there’s a lot there in Paul’s epistles. Very different from anything written by the other authors of the epistles, James, Paul, Peter, Jude, John, very different. So with that as an introduction, let’s look again at the chart from last week that you guys saw just a bit earlier. An understanding of the overview of the Bible is the key to its details. Likewise, if we have a correct overview of the book of Acts, we can understand what’s happening in the book of Acts and the change, the transition, from Peter in his message of the law to Israel, and Paul in his message of grace to the body of Christ. So there, chapter by chapter, we have a visual representation in this ribbon graph where Paul, his references are in the red, and Peter’s in the blue. And you notice it’s all about Peter, the book of Acts, the Acts of the Apostles. But then God turns to the Apostle Paul and in Acts 9 says, you are my apostle to the Gentiles. Then there’s a transition and then it’s all Paul. And then the next 13 epistles in the New Testament are all written by Paul. And then it returns to the epistles written by the 12 apostles. So that’s why Christians, they could easily get confused because when they’re reading the book of Acts, if in fact there was a transition from the law to grace and from Peter to Paul, from Israel to the body, if that transition is in the book of Acts and the average Sunday school teacher doesn’t know it, do you think he’ll do a good job of representing what God wants us to learn from the book of Acts? No, you can’t get what God wants you to get from the scriptures if you don’t understand the overview of the big picture. And so we saw two other charts that we’ll see in just a moment about grace. But first, this analogy. What does it really matter whether you’re living under the law or you’re living by grace? What’s the difference? Well, imagine that you get a babysitter. You’ve got your infant in the crib and it’s the first time you’re going out since the baby was born. And it’s a little toddler. And you and your husband, you go out and you have a wonderful night and you come back. And you see there’s the babysitter sleeping on the couch. And you go into the baby’s room and there she wrote a note and put it over the crib, taped it up. And it said, remember, do not murder. How will that make you feel as a mom? Will it give you confidence? Will it make you feel good? Would it be the most wonderful thing you could have ever possibly read? Why not? It’s one of God’s commandments. And there is the newlywed who has his car and his bride, his wife, has her car. But one day she has to get into his car to drive somewhere. She gets in, it’s sunny out. She pulls down the visor and she sees he wrote himself a note. And the note said, remember, do not commit adultery. Does that make her feel good? Right off the bat. Confident? No, it doesn’t, does it? There’s something about having to use the law as a motivation to do right that leaves us flat. That, in fact, is rather discouraging. If he had written instead, remember, love your wife as Christ loved the church. How would that make her feel? That’s wonderful. A friend of ours said, from Germany, came to this country, speaks English pretty well, grew up in Germany, strong Christian. And his pastor, he needed a roof on his house. And so I won’t use his real name, but Alfred is real good at construction. So he says to the pastor, I’ll do the roof. I’ll do the whole thing. I’ll do it as a gift. The pastor was stunned. And he showed up early Monday morning, had a trash container there and ripped off the old roof, put on the new roof, did the whole thing, took 45 hours, and by the end of the week, the job was done. And Alfred was so thrilled, he was blessed to be able to do this for his pastor. And so the pastor, he was blown away too. He said, Alfred, I don’t know how to thank you that you did this. It’s a labor of love. You did it for free. Thank you for, thank you. Then he said, oh, wait a minute, really. Remember on Tuesday, I brought you a lunch from McDonald’s. So it wasn’t really free, right? It was like $4.50. That was about 10 cents an hour you got paid. But still, thank you. And Alfred said he knew the pastor was just talking. He didn’t mean it. He was just nervous, didn’t know what to say. But he said it hurt. It hurt in a weird way that here he gave this gift that how do you value it, a week of a man’s life, and then somebody tried to put a price on it. And he realized that’s what we do to Jesus when When he went to the cross for us and paid that price with his blood, with his life, so that we could be righteous. And then we want to return to the beggarly elements, as Paul writes. And we want to say, oh, we’re going to keep the law. And Paul writes, if you’re keeping the law, it’s no longer grace. Now it’s a debt. Now God owes you. He owes you something. And so why would Paul write that? Because none of the other authors of the Bible write anything like that. It’s completely different. The whole Mosaic law, in fact, from circumcision in Genesis 17 through the Gospels, it’s all about the covenant of circumcision, the flesh, the cutting off of the flesh, and the keeping of the law. It’s all about that. Yet includes faith, but it’s all about keeping the law. And then you have Jesus who came preaching the law, the gospel of the kingdom, not of the body. And not once in the four gospels is Jesus quoted mentioning the word grace, not one time. Now, some might think that’s an oversight, but it can’t be an oversight because Jesus is God the Son. And so everything he said was what he needed to say and what the Father and the Holy Spirit wanted him to say. So we saw two other charts. And the first was a chart of the text of the New Testament. How much of it Paul wrote compared to the rest of the text of the New Testament. That’s in the inner donut. And then the outer donut is how often the word grace is mentioned. And so you see that the blue is the part of the New Testament that Paul wrote, and the number of times the word grace appears in his part of the New Testament. And so even though he only wrote one-third of the New Testament, he wrote 300% more instances of using the word grace than the rest of the New Testament combined. I’ll show you one more graphic. In fact, let’s put that up and I’ll talk about it in a moment. This is a graphic of the same observation, but using the whole Bible. These graphs come out of this book, The Plot, and it’s an overview of the Bible. which is the key to its details. So we’ve produced many resources here at Denver Bible Church, but since we’ve been planted as a church, January 2000, we don’t sell our materials here because we think it’d be inappropriate. It’s like having your own little marketplace. And so we just never bring the materials, but since these graphs come out of this book, let’s put this on the back table Michael, if you could put it there. And there’s only a few graphics like this in that book, but then there’s dozens of charts, dozens of charts. And so if anyone would like that, just as we tell people on the radio, if you can’t afford any of our resources, and this is to strangers, whatever you can afford. And in this time, it’s not for the radio ministry, it’s for the church. If you’d like that plot, just put something in the box if you want to, and please take that book. But we don’t even take a collection here. We don’t take a collection, not because it’s wrong, but because unbelievers use that as an excuse to reject the message of the church because they say church is all about money. So for so many years now, over 10 years, we don’t take a collection. And so we try to rob the unbeliever of that excuse so he has to look at Jesus and not at us. So this second graph shows the whole Bible. And Paul… How much of the Bible did he write? How much was about his ministry? 8%, less than 10%. Yet that huge percentage, 70% of the references to the word grace in the Bible, Old and New Testament, are written by Paul or about Paul’s ministry. So there’s something way out of proportion with grace. It’s not as though people in the Old Testament weren’t saved through the grace of God. It was so essential. It’s not as though when Jesus preached that men had to keep the law, the greatest of the laws and the least of the laws. It’s not as though grace had nothing to do with their salvation. It did, but it wasn’t the focus of his message. It couldn’t be the focus of his message because he never mentioned it. Whereas Paul, it was the focus of his message that God gave to him the dispensation of grace for us Gentiles who make up the body of Christ, today Jew and Gentile, together there’s no difference. Because there was such a change between Peter and Paul, law and grace, Israel and the body, Believers who loved the Lord were shocked by the things that Paul was writing. So Peter, the Apostle Peter, who the Roman Catholics think was the first pope, which is completely false. He didn’t even retain the leadership of the church in Jerusalem. That gave way to James, the brother of the Lord. James presided over the Jerusalem council in Acts 15. And when the apostles were dealing with very serious issues in Acts 21, it was James who was in charge of the church. But at any rate, Peter writes in his second epistle, 316, he’s writing of who he calls our beloved brother Paul in the context. And he says, as in all his epistles, speaking in them of these things in which are some things hard to understand. So I’m going to end the quote there. Of course, it goes on. But why would Peter say that Paul writes things that are hard to understand? It’s because Paul’s message was dramatically different than Peter’s message, than Israel’s message, than Moses’ message, than the covenant of circumcision. It was radically different because the Mosaic law was based on circumcision and the covenant of circumcision. And God, Jesus told Paul, teach that you no longer need to be circumcised. If you circumcise your male children for cultural reasons, that’s okay. But don’t circumcise them as part of a covenant because then you’re under the law and you’re not living by grace. Then you might as well start putting notes all around your house. Remember, don’t steal. Would you like that from your employees, who their primary motivation to not steal from you is that they know it’s against the law? Do you want that kind of employee? Or do you want an employee who’s gotten beyond that and realizes that, well, if I care, if I respect my neighbor, I’m not going to steal from them. You see, today, murder, adultery, stealing in the Ten Commandments, they’re still wrong today, of course, and they’re wrong for Christians. But they were also wrong before the law was given. So you don’t need the law to show you how to live a holy life in Christ. Remember we asked from the book of Colossians, who would climb onto the cross? to tear out God’s nails, to live by the law, because there we read that God nailed the law to the cross with Jesus. So who would do that? Because we’ve been taught that as Christians, you have to live by the law. Or who would return to that which Christ delivered him from? Because Paul wrote to the Romans that Jesus delivered us from the law. That’s the Ten Commandments and the Mosaic Law. Who would suggest the law to those for whom it was not made? Because Paul wrote to the Romans that the law is for the world, but it’s not for those in Christ. Who would try to overcome sin with that which gives passion to one’s evil desires? Because Paul wrote to the Romans that the law makes sin exceedingly wicked and it gives passion to our evil desires. How could the law do that? Well, he’s quick to clarify. The law is wholly just and good. But when God said, don’t eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, don’t eat of the tree, there was only one law and Adam and Eve broke it. Then he gave to Moses 10 laws on the tablets of stone. And how many of the 10 did Israel break? All 10. Then he gave a few hundred laws through the Mosaic covenant. How many of those did they break? All hundreds. Today we have governments that think if there are thousands of laws, then men will do what is right. They haven’t learned the lesson of the book of Romans that the law was given to make sin exceedingly sinful, to point us to Christ. But once we have Christ, we’re no longer under the law. Who would eat again from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil? Because the Bible says that the law is the knowledge of sin. And it’s called, in the Bible, the knowledge of good and evil. That’s the law. So God said, the day that you eat of the law, you shall die. The tree represents the law. You have the tree, the law, and the curse. There were two ministries of death. One was the tree. The day you eat of it, you shall die. And the other is the law, the Ten Commandments. And the day, we read in Exodus, the day the law was given, that day, about 3,000 were killed. The law brought about death. And compare that, the day the law was given, 3,000 died, to the day the Spirit was given in the book of Acts chapter 2, and that day, about 3,000 were saved. So Paul grabs onto that and he says, the law is a ministry of death. It’s a ministry of death and a ministry of condemnation. Paul writes to the Romans in Romans 4, verse 5, to him who does not work but believes on Jesus, his faith is accounted for righteousness. If you do not do the works of the law, your faith is accounted for righteousness. Do you want the employee who says, oh man, I know, I just, I’m not supposed to steal. I’m just not supposed to steal. But I really want that money, but I’m not supposed to steal. No, we don’t want that employee. We don’t want that babysitter. If we have that kind of spouse, we got to deal with it. It’s not what we want because what we want is someone who is loving their neighbor, not because they’ll be punished if they don’t. That’s what brings us to Christ. The law is the tutor to bring us to Christ. But after we have Christ, Paul writes to the Galatians, we’re no longer under the tutor. Let me give you a few more verses about the law. Romans 5.20, the law entered that the offense might abound. There are many Christians could go 30, 40 years in a Christian life and never be taught that verse, never notice it. The law entered that the offense might abound. The more laws from God, the more wicked the people are. And that’s exactly the history of the Bible.
SPEAKER 01 :
Stop the tape. Stop the tape. Hey, we are out of time. If you want the entire sermon, you can find that by going to nyart.shop. E-N-Y-A-R-T dot S-H-O-P. That’s nyart.shop. Type that into your browser. E-N-Y-A-R-T dot S-H-O-P. You can find that and get this sermon and so many other in-depth sermons, not just sermons on vaguely how Jesus loves you and Jesus loves the world. Of course, those are biblical, powerful truths, but also we can get a lot of in-depth studies answering difficult questions. What does that love look like in a world of suffering? How do we know that’s true? How do we know that the Bible is true? Is there any evidence for the Bible? All these types of questions, Bob never shied away from difficult questions. Again, nyart.shop, E-N-Y-A-R-T dot S-H-O-P.
Join us as we explore Bob Enyart’s captivating examination of the Apostle Paul’s distinct message, ‘my gospel’, which highlights the shift from living under the law to embracing a life of grace. With historical references and personal anecdotes, we underscore why this transition is not only significant but also essential for modern believers. Discover how grace fundamentally alters our relationship with God, freeing us from the constraints of the law and inviting us into a deeper, more profound faith, as outlined in the epistles and exemplified through Paul’s ministry.
