Growing in Grace Together - Jim Robbins - The Good and Noble Heart - Part 2

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Part 2 of Joel's interview with Jim Robbins, author of the book Recover Your Good Heart.  (Here's Part 1). Among other things, this week Jim talks about the desires of our hearts, and how God is a God of desire and how desire is a good thing and is integral in every part of our lives.  Using some personal stories, Joel and Jim talk about how our relationships with God and with each other should be motivated by desire, and not by duty or robotic obedience.

Also discussed is the question of what to do with the desires that we have that don't line up with who we are in Christ.  Are those really "our" desires?  Do those desires come from the new heart?  And Jim ends up talking about the question of whether or not a person should stay in a fellowship/local assembly in which the true message of grace and the new heart is not being taught.  A very thought provoking conversation that will help us to recognize and live from the new good and noble heart that God has given us!

Find out more about Jim's ministry - The Good and Noble Heart - which includes a blog, a Ning community and a Facebook community.

217. God's Acceptance of Mankind / Sins Taken Away

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We're taking a look this week at God's acceptance of us apart from our behavior - the unconditional love and grace of God for all of mankind. It's His love that sent Jesus to the cross, and it's the cross that showed His great love for all. When Adam fell, God didn't change - Adam changed. God didn't hide from Adam - Adam hid from God. In His passionate love, God pursued Adam and made the way for all of mankind to be saved. The issue isn't whether or not God loves and accepts people. The sins of all of mankind were dealt with at the cross. They have not only been covered - they have been taken away.The issue is whether or not people have believed and have received the gift of life that God freely offers.

Andrew Farley - The Naked Gospel - Part 3

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Part 3 of 3 of Joel's conversation with Andrew Farley, author of The Naked Gospel. This discussion includes the good news of the once-for-all forgiveness through Jesus Christ.  All our sins have been forgiven - past, present and future!  The New Testament speaks of our forgiveness in the past tense!  And so what do we do when we sin?  Do we need to ask for forgiveness?  How did everything change with Christ having taken away our sin (not just covering it), and with us already having been washed, and made clean and spotless?  Andrew provides some great biblical insight on all of this and much more.

Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3

Growing in Grace Together - Jim Robbins - The Good and Noble Heart - Part 1

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Joel had the pleasure of sitting down with his good friend Jim Robbins, author of the book Recover Your Good Heart, for a two-part interview. Jim talks about his ministry - The Good and Noble Heart - which includes a blog, a Ning community and a Facebook community as well.  These days, people are truly connecting and finding authentic, meaningful relationship through sources such as these online communities.

Joel asks Jim to define and describe what he means by the "heart," and about the difference between what is said in the Bible about a heart that is "deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked" and a heart that is "good and noble."

Listen in for some great conversation about why Christians tend to walk around in guilt and shame, and why there seems to be such a focus in the church on behavior management and sin management - and how living with a New Covenant mentality rather than an Old Covenant mentality, as well as a proper view of the new heart, will overcome all of that.

The conversation was only getting started - Here's Part 2!

216. How Jesus the Man Did the Things He Did

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During His time as a man upon the earth, Jesus said and did a lot of things. How did He do them? Did He speak great words and perform great works because He was God? He Himself said, "I can do nothing of Myself." So if He did nothing of Himself, how did He do the things He did? The scriptures reveal that He didn't do the things because He was God, but because God was with Him.  Jesus had an abiding relationship with the Father, and the Father did His works through Jesus.  In the same way, we can do nothing of ourselves, but Christ who abides in us does His works in and through us!

Andrew Farley - The Naked Gospel - Part 2

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This week Joel continues his conversation with Andrew Farley, author of The Naked Gospel. Sometimes the words of Jesus are difficult to understand, especially when compared to the New Covenant concepts given by the Apostle Paul. Andrew talks about putting the cross at the center of our understanding of the words of Jesus.  As Mike and Joel have talked about several times, even recently, on the Growing in Grace podcast, often Jesus was raising the standard of the law, saying things such as, "be perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect," "cut out your eye if it causes you to sin," "your righteousness must exceed that of the Pharisees," etc.

And so in this week's discussion of The Naked Gospel, Andrew talks about how we can either water down Jesus' words and take them to mean that He was simply trying to get us to "do our best" at the things He said, or we can take His words literally and understand the larger point, that the law was pointing out our faults, and through Jesus' very own words we find that we can't do what He was saying to do - therefore setting us up to receive the gospel freely, and not by what we do or don't do.

All of this, then, leads up to chucking aside our own efforts and instead we find a new and living way.  It's not "Moses 2.0," as Andrew calls it (an upgraded version of Moses, or the Law), but rather a life in which Moses is gone and we're actually inhabited by the Spirit of Jesus Christ Himself.  A life in which we're in union with Him - united with Him in His death, in His burial and in His resurrection.  We're not copying or imitating Christ.  We're not trying to be like Him.  Rather we're living from His very life that indwells us.

You'll be greatly encouraged this week as Andrew once again clearly describes the pure gospel of Jesus Christ, and the difference between the old way and the new and living way.

Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3

215. Change the Way You Think About How You Relate to God

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Picking up on what we talked about last week, about the true meaning of repentance, and building on it a little this week. Stop thinking you relate to God through your behavior, and start believing that you relate to Him through the good news!

Also: In case you haven't heard, Joel has started a new "Growing in Grace" feature called "Growing in Grace Together." All the programs will be posted here! Check out the first two programs that have already been posted, featuring John Lynch (coauthor of Bo's Cafe) and Andrew Farley (author of The Naked Gospel).

Andrew Farley - The Naked Gospel - Part 1

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This week Joel begins a three-part chat with Andrew Farley, author of the book The Naked Gospel (thenakedgospel.com). Andrew talks about the overall theme of the book, "Jesus Plus Nothing," and gets into such topics as:

-Whether or not the Christian has any more relationship with the law (including but not limited to the "Ten Commandments")
-The Old and New Covenants
-The fact that we're dead to sin
-Jesus' words in which He elevated the standards of the law, and what this means to us on this side of the cross
-How we are now motivated, not by law, but by the new heart and spirit that God has given us
-Much more!

If you're a regular listener to Growing in Grace, you'll notice that Andrew's heart and mind is that same as ours on all of these things!  Listen in as Andrew presents the straightforward truth of The Naked Gospel.

Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3

214. Repentance Means to Change Your Thinking

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The word "repent" has traditionally been taught as a word that means "change your behavior." "Repentance" is taught as a necessary part of being saved. But if repentance means that we have to change our behavior in order to be saved or in order to keep ourselves saved, then doesn't that mean that it's our own works/effort that saves us?

What does it really mean to repent? We'll get into that this week on Growing in Grace.

Growing in Grace Together 1 - John Lynch, Coauthor of Bo's Cafe

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This week we're happy to present a new feature here on Growing in Grace, in addition to our regular weekly podcast. "Growing in Grace Together" will feature informal conversations with various people, simply chatting with them about their own grace journeys.

For this inaugural edition, Joel speaks with special guest John Lynch, coauthor of the new novel Bo's Café (boscafe.com), a book he wrote along with Bruce McNicol and Bill Thrall.  In short, Bo's Café is a book that will help people who are struggling with a performance-based life, and with various issues in life that never seem to get resolved. Even after hearing all the "right" things preached and knowing all the "right" things to do, we find that our lives are still mucky and falling apart, and we live with guilt and shame - and yet we make ourselves appear nice and shiny to others as we wear masks and as we hide our guilt and shame well, presenting ourselves to others as the person we wish we would be, rather than being real and genuine with others about how things really are on the inside.

As John shares, we need to find a place where "the worst about me could be known and I'd discover that I'd be loved more and not less in the telling of it, and just that alone would start breaking my shame that would allow me to enjoy this health."  Listen in as John talks about the various characters in Bo's Café, and how they come to find that Christ-in-them is enough, as He works in and through them - not with quick fixes to their problems, and not through well-laid-out and well-lived-out rules and principles, but rather as they learn to be vulnerable with one another and as they learn to trust in God's grace to work powerfully and dynamically in them through the safe - and often messy - place of genuine relationships.

213. Faith, Works and Dead Works

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"Faith without works is dead," says James. We talked about that a little bit last week, and we'll talk about it a little more this week. We'll dig into the idea of how faith and works work together, so to speak, and we'll show how we believe this phrase from James does not mean that we do works in order to "prove" our faith or in order to make our faith genuine. We'll also talk a bit about how "works without faith are dead works!" (See how we cleverly moved the words around a bit). ;)  Anyone, even people without faith, can do good works.  People can be good imitators, and their imitations can appear very close to the real thing, and yet just as an imitation is not the real thing, in the same way people can do works that appear really, really good, but are nevertheless dead works.