The Path to Freedom // The Grace Transformation, Part 4

The Bible has something incredibly exciting to say about the purpose of God’s grace in your life. Not just the fact that God’s grace is amazing, which of course it is. But it also has a purpose. And that purpose is to take you on the path of freedom. Real freedom.

FORGETTING THE PAST

Over the last little while on the program we have been chatting together about the amazing transformation that the grace of God brings into our lives. I like to think of it as a grace transformation.

If you’ve been able to join me, you’ll know that we’ve been spending some time in just one chapter of the Old Testament, in the book of Isaiah chapter 43 because that one chapter happens to be cram-packed full of the transformation that God’s grace brings into the lives of His people.

It’s amazing to me how much Gods managed to pack into just one chapter of His Word the Bible, His living Word. And if you and I can just drink that in, the amazing power of God’s grace, then we’re going to experience a transformation in our lives that words simply can’t describe.

Now to some that might sound to be a bit over the top, a bit much if you will. Transformation? ‘Hey I’ve believed in God for years’, some people are saying, ‘I’ve never experienced any transformation’.

Well that may be you, that may ring a little true for you and if it does stick with me because we’re going to dig deep today into what God has to say into your life about His grace transformation for you.

Have you ever wondered what grace is? Grace is when you receive something good but you don’t deserve, it’s the flip side of mercy. Mercy is when you are spared a punishment that you deserve. Grace is when in its place, you receive a blessing that you don’t deserve. Two sides of the one coin – mercy and grace. And one of the greatest acts of grace that God could ever pour out on anybody is a freedom from their past.

Let’s dive into Gods Word now, Isaiah chapter 43, a pivotal time in the history of Israel, they were in Babylon of all places, having been captured and exiled as slaves by the Babylonians.

Now for them that was an outrageous thing because they knew that they were God’s chosen people. They knew that God had delivered them from slavery in Egypt some centuries before and brought them to the Promised Land, the Land He had promised to Abraham many many centuries before.

And yet here they were again, not living in freedom in that Promised Land but living in captivity as slaves in another land. Why? Well because they had turned their backs on God. Now God was patient with them but eventually His patience ran out and He allowed the Babylonians to destroy Jerusalem, destroy the Temple and take His own people into captivity.

The Israelites were living out the consequences of their own sin. Does that sound vaguely familiar? It happens to all of us when we turn our backs on God and go our own way in sin, in rebellion against Him. We all end up living out those consequences and as far as the Israelites could see there was no hope for the future, they were stuck there in slavery, great, just, let me say, like it is for you and me when we’re wallowing in the slavery of our own sin.

But then God decides to speak through the great Prophet Isaiah. He speaks of bringing the power to change things. He speaks of breaking into their dismal reality. He speaks of the fact that He has redeemed them, that they are precious to Him, that they needn’t be afraid, that He’s going to open their eyes to the great reality, the great unseen reality which is Him.

He is bringing transformation, release for the captives, a new life, the very same thing He wants to bring into your life, the very same thing that Jesus came to this earth to bring for us.

But before that transformation, before that release can happen something else needs to happen in the hearts and the minds of His people. Have a listen to what God says through Isaiah chapter 43, verses 14 to 21.

Thus, says the Lord your Redeemer, the Holy One of Israel, ‘For your sake I will send to Babylon and break down all the bars and the shouting of the Chaldeans will be turned into lamentation. I am the Lord your Holy One, the Creator of Israel, your King’. Thus, says the Lord who makes a way in the sea, a path in the mighty waters, who brings out chariot and horse and army and warrior. They lie down, they cannot rise as they are extinguished and quenched like a wick.

‘Do not remember the former things or consider the things of old. I’m about to do a new thing, now it springs forth, don’t you see it? I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert, wild animals will honour me, the jackals and the ostriches, for I give water in the wilderness, rivers in the desert to give drink to my chosen people, the people who I formed for myself so that they may declare my praise.’ (Isaiah 43: 14-21)

What is it that needs to happen? God needs to shift their focus off their circumstances onto the great and mighty redeemer that He is. And God needs to get them to forget their past and place their hope in Him for the future because if all they can focus on is their past failures and their present predicament then they won’t be ready to receive the freedom that He’s about to bring. And the very same is true for you and me.

There are some people tuned in today who are gripped by their past. They can’t get over their failures, they can’t get over their hurts, perhaps the abuse, whatever it is in their past that’s holding them back. And the thing about the past is that it’s so powerful it seems that nothing, NOTHING, can set you free.

That’s precisely how it would have seemed to the Israelites. Seventy years in captivity, seventy years of the punishment that by now they knew they so richly deserved and no hope for the future until all of a sudden, without warning the grace of God breaks into their bleak reality and God calls on them to forget their past and replace it with a vision of a bright future – a way in the wilderness, waters and rivers in the desert to give drink and to bless His chosen people, the people whom He formed for Himself to declare His praise.

I believe that God is saying the very same thing to us today, to you and me. Forget the past, He’s wiped your slate clean through Jesus, through the death and the sacrifice of Jesus on that cross for you, the past is irrelevant when you consider the future in the light of the grace transformation that God wants to bring into your life.

Do you hear Him through His word today?

LET GO OF YOUR IDOLS

It’s one of the great paradoxes of life: that the good things in our lives can actually distract us from the best thing in life. It’s actually far more common that you may think.

Consider a marriage, the most important of all human relationships on this planet, always has been, always will be. How easy is it for a young couple to get married and then they buy a home and the mortgage cuts in and so they work longer and harder and in any case, they both enjoy what they do.

Then children come along and they focus on those as they rightly should. And as the months and years slip by they become so focused on all those other good things that they forget to focus on their marriage. And then one day they wake up and they wonder, ‘where did all the love go?’

Is it a bad thing to buy a home? No. Is it a bad thing to enjoy work? Of course it isn’t. It’s great to have a job that really invigorates you. Is it a bad thing for a husband and wife to bring children into the world and to love them and to nurture them and to sacrifice for them? No, that’s a great thing! In fact it’s hard to imagine a greater blessing than children.

None of those things in and of themselves are bad things, they rarely are. But when it comes to the health of that marriage, if those good things become more important then the best thing – the marriage that brought them to pass in the first place then that, that’s a bad thing, a very bad thing.

Over the last little while on the program, we’ve been looking at the nation of Israel through the eyes of the Old Testament Prophet Isaiah at a time in their lives where they’d been in exile as slaves because they turned their backs on God to follow after a whole bunch of other things that seemed good in their eyes.

We’ve picked up the story in Isaiah chapter 43 where God speaks of the amazing grace that is about to befall them, the grace transformation as I call it.

But to bring about change sometimes we have to let go of some apparently good things, things that are drawing us away from the best thing.

Let’s pick up their story now in the next chapter, Isaiah chapter 44 beginning at verse 9. God says this:

All who make idols are nothing and the things they delight in do not profit, their witnesses neither see nor know and so they will be put to shame. Who would fashion a god or cast an image that can do no good? Look all its devotee’s will be put to shame, the artisans too are merely human. Let them all assemble, let them stand up, they shall be terrified, they shall be put to shame.

The ironsmith fashions it and works it over the coals, shaping it with hammers and forging it with his strong-arm. He becomes hungry and his strength fails, he drinks no water and he’s faint. The carpenter stretches out a line and marks it out with a stylus and fashions it with planes and marks it with a compass.

He makes it in human form with human beauty to be set up in a shrine. He cuts down cedars or chooses a Holm tree or an oak and lets it grow strong among the trees of the forest. He plants a cedar and the rain nourishes it, then it can be used for fuel, part of it he takes and he warms himself, he kindles a fire and bakes bread.

Then he makes a god and worships it, makes it a carved image and bows down before it. Half of it he burns in the fire, over this half he roasts meat and he eats and he’s satisfied, he also warms himself and says, ‘I’m warm, I can feel the fire’. And with the rest of it he makes it into a god, his idol and bows down to it and worships it. He prays to it and says, ‘save me for you are my God.

They do not know nor do they comprehend for their eyes are shut so they cannot see and their minds as well so they cannot understand. No one considers nor is there knowledge or discernment to say, ‘Half of it I burned in the fire, I also baked bread on the coals, I’ve roasted meat and have eaten, now shall I make the rest of it a abomination? Shall I fall down before a block of wood’? He feeds on ashes and a deluded mind has led him astray and he cannot save himself or say ‘is not this thing in my right hand a fraud’. (Isaiah 44: 9-20)

It’s a pretty simple and powerful piece of logic, isn’t it?

Okay back then, people made idols and worshipped them. Of course in some parts of the world that still holds true for the rest of us though we make idols out of other things, good things it would seem – jobs and careers and relationships and reputations and possessions.

Mostly none of those are bad, I mean the wood that the idol makers used wasn’t bad of itself but they become bad and they become dangerous and they become destructive when we elevate them to a level in our lives where we start believing that they have the power to save us and to make us happy. Because when we do that, in our hearts we have no need of God and He becomes less important in the scheme of things.

That’s exactly what Israel had done in the first place seventy years before which had landed them in this mess of slavery and exile that they found themselves in, a mess that God allowed to befall them to bring them back to their senses. They built these idols in their lives and in effect they worshipped them instead of God and it’s in the same way that we make idols of things in our lives and worship them in place of God.

Can an object make you happy on your deathbed? Can it? Or some prized possession that you’ll soon be parted from? No of course not, they’re powerless. It doesn’t make any more sense than taking a bit of wood and using half of it to cook your dinner and the other half to make an idol that you worship.

God’s grace is completely and utterly amazing but for God’s grace to have its full effect in radically, powerfully transforming our lives then you and I need to worship just the one God. The God whose poured His grace out on us through Jesus Christ. The God who has the power to transform our lives.

So you and I need to renounce some of the things that we’ve put above God in our scheme of things, some of the things that are just good things that we’ve elevated to the wrong level, that will be most of them and a handful of them will be the things that we know are wrong. Whichever they are we need to put them back into their rightful place so that God can be in His rightful place in our lives and our Lord of all. That’s where transformation begins.

A FUTURE OF FREEDOM

Freedom is a big deal. I grew up during the cold war at a time when the threat of communistic dictatorship loomed large as a threat across the globe – or at least that’s how it appeared to most of us. And still today there are totalitarian regimes where people aren’t free to say what they think or do what they please within the reasonable bounds of a just law.

I remember some years ago I was in a place, a country in Asia, that on the surface of things seemed to be a peaceable, lovely place to live. I was doing some IT consulting work for a large well-known organisation. Late one Saturday evening when a few of us were still at the office getting some work done that had to go out as quickly as possible, we sat down to have a bite of dinner.

And I was chatting with one of the young men whom I’d come to know reasonably well over the preceding few weeks and I was telling him what a lovely country I thought this was. As I did, a dark look came over his face. His eyes darted around to make sure that no one else was within earshot. He lowered his voice and said, ‘Well yeah it is on the surface but understand we’re not free to say what we think. If I criticised the government in any way I would probably go to prison. It’s a terrible thing’, he said, ‘when you can’t say what you think.’

Up until that point in my life I’d never even thought about it because I have, all my life, lived in a country where we have complete freedom of speech and action and religion within, as I said, the reasonable bounds of a just law.

And yet the more I thought about it the more I realised how terrible it must be simply to not be able to have one of those basic freedoms, the tension and the oppression that a person must feel when they simply aren’t allowed to speak their mind.

My dictionary tells me that freedom is the power or the right to act, speak or think as you want, the freedom of choice, the absence of subjection to a foreign domination or a despotic government. The power of self-determination or that sort of thing.

To a degree that definition hits the mark and yet to a greater degree I think it completely misses the mark. Why do I say that? Because the dictionary definition of freedom, the common definition assumes that freedom means to be free from something out there somewhere whereas the most common slavery that we all experience is the slavery to the evil that lies within.

Don’t believe me? Ask anybody who has ever been addicted to something. Ask anybody who has ever suffered because of their selfishness or their anger or their dishonesty. Ask anybody whose marriage has ever failed because they were unfaithful. Yeah surely the greatest tyrant of all lies within and God calls it sin.

Now conventional wisdom has it that we are masters of ourselves, that we can determine how we think and act and feel and react and behave. The Bible on the other hand, God’s Word, maintains that we are all slaves to sin until God sets us free. It’s a view that’s one hundred and eighty degrees diametrically opposed to conventional wisdom in this world.

In the course of the story of Israel’s redemption from slavery in Babylon that we’ve been looking at and exploring together over these past few weeks through the Book of Isaiah chapter 43 and 44. It’s really interesting that God isn’t about just setting them free from their captors, the Babylonians who had enslaved them in a physical sense. God’s also is in the business of setting them free from their sin which led to their physical enslavement and which has enslaved them in a spiritual and emotional sense as they live out its consequences.

Have a listen to this, Isaiah chapter 44, verses 21 and 22:

Remember these things O Jacob and Israel for you are my servant. I formed you, you are my servant. O Israel you will not be forgotten by me. I have swept away your transgressions like a cloud and your sins like a mist. Return to me for I have redeemed you.

I love that. I absolutely love that because you and I know that the most powerful slavery of all is our slavery to sin, our addiction to some behaviour based on a destructive attitude or thought pattern that try as we might we cannot, simply cannot rid ourselves of. It is every bit as powerful as a heroin addiction, this slavery that each one of us has to our sin.

And God comes along and says, just look at the powerful picture language here. He says that He swept away our transgressions like a cloud and your sins are like a mist for He has redeemed you. Past tense, done deal, end of story. Again centuries later the Apostle Paul puts it this way writing to his friends in Galatia, Galatians chapter 5, verse 1.

For freedom Christ has set us free. Stand firm therefore and do not submit again to the yoke of slavery.

It seems a strange saying, ‘for freedom Christ has set us free’, it’s a tautology in grammatical terms and yet it’s a powerful statement of the whole purpose of Jesus coming to this earth. The whole purpose of His sacrifice on the cross, the whole purpose of His being raised up from the dead, the whole purpose of God’s grace is to set you free.

Did you hear that? The whole purpose of God’s grace is to set you free. For freedom Christ has set you free so that you can be free indeed. How ridiculous is it for us to go looking for freedom in the idols of this world, which only lead to slavery and destruction? How ridiculous is it to look for freedom in the works of our hands, which only lead to enslavement to our own dead works.

The only place where we find true freedom, freedom that exists even amidst the most oppressive regime – is in Jesus Christ, an inner freedom that is so free that there is no condemnation, no guilt, no limit, no boundary. A place where we can soar like an eagle though a storm may rage around us. The whole point of grace is to set you free. That’s the grace transformation, its freedom.

Just a few verses on in chapter 5 of the Book of Galatians, Paul writes that we have all been called to freedom, so don’t use your freedom for an opportunity for gratifying your desires but use it to serve one another in love. That’s verse 13 of Galatians chapter 5.

Imagine a Church, imagine a world even where people instead of always being out to get what they want, turn their whole lives around to help others to get what they need. Just imagine such a Church. Just imagine such a world. How different would things be if people truly were free to live that way?

Well my friend that freedom isn’t something that you and I can conjure up in our lives. It’s not something that we can make happen in us. It’s not something that we can work harder to make happen. It’s only by the power of the Holy Spirit, the very power of God that dwells in each one of us who believe in Jesus Christ that it will ever happen and that freedom is available to each one of us here and now.

Father God, we know that we’re sinners saved only by grace, by your grace, your free unmerited favour through Jesus Christ and we believe each one of us that you mean to bring an amazing grace transformation about in our lives.

Lord God, we confess to you today how desperately we need that. And we pray that you will bring this grace transformation to pass in our lives for every day that we have left on this earth so that when we come to you on that day we’ll be ready, ready to live eternity in the presence of your glory. Through Jesus Christ we pray. Amen.

And may the amazing grace of God lift you out of the pit of your sin and raise you up to be all He meant you to be.