The Power of the Gospel in a Weak and Wandering Heart

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Welcome to Grace at the Fray, a podcast that explores the many dimensions of God’s grace that we find at the frayed edges of life. Come explore how God’s grace works to renew your life and send you on mission in His Kingdom.

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0:00:23.0 Jim Lovelady: Hello, beloved. How are you? Are you a bit afraid right now? A bit frantic? A little sense of urgency or even desperation? Before we begin today, I want us to pause. I want you to take a deep breath and make yourself aware of God’s love for you. The Lord loves you. He delights in you. And this is where we begin. There’s a radio station here in Philadelphia, 93.3 WMMR, and they’ve been playing rock and roll music since the late ’60s. And one of their most famous DJs, Pierre Robert, he features a vinyl cut during his segment where he goes down to the basement of the station and he plays a track from their vintage collection of records. Well, so Pierre inspired me to go down to the basement of the Serge home office and dig through all the old tapes in our archive. And I found one of the original Sonship talks given by the founder of Serge, Jack Miller. He gave it decades ago, and I want to share it with you today. If you’ve heard or even own the original Sonship tapes, this will be familiar to you. I’ve removed the super cheesy music, the original music, and I’ve removed the silence at the end of side one with a voice that says, “This concludes side one of the recording. Please turn the tape over.” Well, this talk is fantastic. I want you to hear a guy who knows he needs Jesus. He just happens to be a pastor, seminary professor, and founder of a missions organization. But Jack doesn’t want to be known as a pastor, seminary professor, or founder of Serge. He wants to be known as a guy who needs Jesus and is resting in the fact that he is a work in progress. He’s talking about the law and the gospel. But what I love about this is not the theological truths, which there are many, but the fruit of the gospel working itself out in his awareness of his deep need for grace. He was a big sinner who didn’t hide it, and therefore he got to celebrate really big grace. He was stubborn and fiercely independent and struggled with the temptation to stay strong instead of rest in the grace of God. If you’re strong and capable, accomplished, ambitious, fiercely independent, and yet deeply exhausted and maybe desperate, I hope you’ll respond to Jack’s invitation to rest in God’s grace.

0:03:00.1 Jack Miller: In my last lecture, I spoke on how the gospel liberated me. My intention in that lecture was to get to the place where I had gone through the law and the gospel, really my encounter with the law and the gospel. And I didn’t get there. I covered a lot of other ground, but I didn’t get all the way. And so this is going to be the law and the gospel, but it still is going to be how the gospel liberated me. We’re continuing on that theme, and we’re going to be looking more directly at the gospel this time. If you recall in that previous lecture, I spoke about the normal tensions of the Christian life. I spoke about the long haul in which you had to take short steps, and then you also got big breakthroughs as you took the long steps. And there can seem to be a tension between that. You have to keep walking—right foot, left foot—and then as you do that, you get breakthroughs. But sometimes it gets pretty dry, but still those two go together, and you have to accept that. The second thing I said was there was a tension between being honest and open before God and people and your fear of rejection.

0:04:25.8 Jack Miller: Oftentimes there will be within you a desire given by the Holy Spirit to be honest and open, and yet a counter-desire or a counter-feeling that if you open up, you might get hurt. And so those can be there, and I think I said they will be there all your life, but you hopefully will grow in your freedom and your openness, and you will. And then the next pattern I said is that there is a seeking on your part to know God’s love, and that might seem to be Arminian, but really it’s in the believer because it has come as the gift of God. But then the other thing I said is that there’s God seeking you, and sometimes you feel more you’re seeking God. Other times your awareness is more God seeking you. Well, whichever it is, it’s both God seeking you, but there are going to be stages where you’ll seem to go back and forth. I believe that’s normal also. And then I did say that the goal of the whole thing is to know the unknowable, and that’s the love of God revealed in the cross. That’s that simple thing, to know the unknowable, to love Jesus.

0:05:42.1 Jack Miller: And then the other thing I said from Ephesians 3, that same passage, the goal of it is to be filled with all the fullness of God. And I said, I thought that meant that your whole being was captured, captivated by God himself. And that God had become exceedingly wonderful. And mysteriously, you knew that with all your being and the depth of your heart. That’s the aim. That’s what Paul was praying for. It’s what all these things are. And you’re involved in the long haul, the breakthroughs, the struggle with honesty, the pattern of seeking and being sought, the stumbling and all the rest. Now, tonight, we’re going to be talking about the gospel itself and the law. And I want to tell you a little bit about, again, where I think it should bring you out. And it’s very close to what some of the things you were sharing tonight and what was in that little vignette. If you look with me in Luke chapter 7, we find here the story of a woman who was apparently a dreadful sinner who came to lunch uninvited. In verse 36, “Now one of the Pharisees invited Jesus to have dinner with him.”

0:07:06.9 Jack Miller: Now, this woman comes in and she stood behind Jesus at His feet weeping. She wet His feet with her tears. Verse 38, “She wiped them with her hair.” She must have made an awful mess. “And then she kissed them and poured perfume on them.” And it really must have been scandalous behavior as far as the manners of the day were concerned. A kind of a picture of that shamelessly bold person we were talking about in Luke 11. A person who doesn’t know how to control his or her love and his or her boldness. Now, Jesus, in assessing her, explains her love in verse 47. He says, “For she loved much.” And the reason was that her many sins have been forgiven. It isn’t a legal relationship. But rather, because her many sins have been forgiven, out of gratitude, she loves much. And then the other is true also. He says in the second part of verse 47, “But he who has been forgiven little, loves little.” Awareness of being a small sinner leads to small love. Awareness of being a big sinner leads to a big love. And to what person? To Jesus Christ. And it simplifies a lot of nonsense.

0:08:32.9 Jack Miller: It cuts through a lot of issues. Why is my life not working? Probably, I should consider, I have lost touch with what the law says about me. Recently, I had a little cold, an allergy problem, and I took Benadryl. I said to Barb one morning as we were working on the book, “I think you better—this morning, to get me moving, you better slap me awake. Give me coffee intravenously.” Well, the law slaps us awake. It says love God with all your heart, soul, and strength. Love your neighbor as yourself. You haven’t done it. And this woman knew she hadn’t done it. She knew she was an adulteress. Big A right on her bosom. Hester Prynne, first century. And she though has learned that what is the issue? That she loved Jesus. And that’s what she’s done. Now let’s put that in context, what some of you have been saying. And where all of us wrestle. It’s what’s been behind what Rose Marie and I have been trying to say in our poor, halting way. And it’s simply this. For you to really get what God wants you to have, you’ve got to be very much like a new convert who has a strong conviction of sin. And who has a strong conviction, boy do I need Jesus.

0:10:15.0 Jack Miller: I don’t know anything about all the theology of it, but I need Jesus. And that’s what we’ve been saying about justification. Because justification is always that statement. I need Jesus. I have no righteousness of my own before God. I never could rely on my law keeping. I have no strength if left to myself. All I’d know how to do is go astray. And so it’s that sense. And oftentimes when we commit one of those technicolor sins and we repent and we confess and we get cleansed afresh by the blood of Christ, we say, “Oh, this feels so great. I just feel like I was born again all over again. But I can hardly wait to mature and get away from this feeling.” Do you see what the Lord must just sit there and say? You’re losing the foundation already. You’ve hardly got out of the mess and you’re headed right back into a worse one. Watch out. Because he who is forgiven much loves much. And it’s not the knowledge of sin that’s going to make you a nut or a neurotic. It’s running away from the knowledge of your sins that makes you a nut and a neurotic.

0:11:38.8 Jack Miller: Because what is a neurotic but a person who repeats his or her sins endlessly and will not accept correction or direction? And in that sense, we all got a lot of it. And so grace is making us so secure in the blood and righteousness of Christ and the knowledge that we are new people in Jesus, that we have been united with Him by faith, by the power of the Spirit, and we’re dead to sin, we’re alive to God, and we now can yield our lives, our whole being, in obedience to him, kind of an act of worship. So that simplicity that really runs through Romans and Galatians, that’s what the Spirit is trying to do, to woo us back to, to keep us there, and so that we don’t somehow, in our complication, our sophistication, our imagined maturity, lose touch with the living God. And so it’s an odd thing that there is a way, we all know people who go around parroting the doctrine of justification and show no sign of having grown for 20 years. And sometimes I see these bumper stickers where it says, “I’m not perfect, just forgiven.” And I kind of wonder, now that’s true, but is that person using that as an excuse for not growing? What does that mean?

0:13:01.3 Jack Miller: So we can be properly wary of a kind of cheap grace. We should name it and claim it, God is my Ouija board, or my way of manipulation, my bellhop, I press the bell when I need Him, let Him come running. But all of that awful business we see in America shouldn’t cancel out for you the basic truth that to the day you die, you need to be alert to your sins and taking them to Jesus and to His blood, repenting of them with all simplicity of heart and trusting only in that great overarching umbrella of free justification. Are you with me? That’s essentially what we’re saying, to keep the vibrancy, the fountain of spiritual youth flowing by drinking of Christ. He has plenty of grace for those who are thirsty. He has plenty of food for those who are hungry. And that’s really where I’m coming to tonight. Now, the deceitfulness of sin is that it isn’t always just leading us into the technicolor sins, but those subtle ones of self-righteousness that were dramatized in the little vignette.

0:14:17.1 Jack Miller: And so there is this struggle. And so what I’m really trying to say to you is don’t be frightened when you go into this struggle and feel that you lost all fellowship with God, that it may be just at that time that He’s graciously wooing you to understand about the depth of His love that you had missed. Don’t misinterpret in a negative way even your falls into something that’s pretty gross. And watch out for those deeper ones, though, like getting control, like pride, domination, the spirit of deceiving, all of these deeper ones. And probably some of you take some others that are less serious too seriously and you’re not giving sufficient attention to the deeper ones. But remember this, no matter what sin it is, it needs to be brought to the cross quickly and promptly and left there and with the confidence it is forgiven. And then go on your way knowing that the one who helped you with that one will help you with the next one. Okay? Now, as we go back into what I was doing, I was tracing the history of a lot of my own stumblings. And you remember I was saying that from the beginning I had a desire to know more about the love of God, have that in my life and my ministry.

0:15:51.4 Jack Miller: And at least that I was central on. I didn’t know exactly how it all worked. I would get a bit of it and a little help, a little help, and that slip and fall and so on. But after I went through the repentance in 1970, I did have a big breakthrough in the fall of 1970, which came out of once I had repented, not leaving a vacuum, but saturating myself on the promises. I spent the whole summer, I said, studying the promises of God. And I want to say, here was the change that came to me. I’ll make it just a little clearer as a preliminary to going into the gospel and the law. After I studied these promises all through the summer, and it was kind of dry and not all that exciting, here are the small steps, no big breakthrough, small steps and then big one. But the big one wasn’t yet there. Now, the thing that happened, I began to realize there was something in my theology that wasn’t in the Bible. And here’s what it was.

0:17:04.5 Jack Miller: I wanted to know about the love of God, and I would for a while learn quite a bit, but then I would lose it. And then I’d get it back, and then I would lose it. And I didn’t seem to have a knowledge of how to relate to God on a more effective, ongoing level. And when I went through the promises, I had gone through the Old Testament ones, especially those about the Spirit being given and coming as a water of life. I was stacked up to here with Water of Life passages from the Old Testament, and then I went into the Gospel of John, and as I was in the Gospel of John, and I was translating out of the Greek into the English, the promises of Jesus, and it was astonishing to me how many of them, I guess maybe all of them as I recall, especially the drinking, thirsting ones in the water, they were present tense. And it dawned on me that my theology in respect to promises was past tense and future. That kind of in my theological tradition, when you hear about a promise about the Holy Spirit in the Old Testament, you say that’s Pentecost, and then if it’s a pretty sweeping thing, you say, well, that’ll be fulfilled when Jesus returns.

0:18:24.9 Jack Miller: And so here I was with the promises, all of these grand promises about the Holy Spirit, part of them behind me, some in front of me, and myself in between. And when I got the fact that Jesus was taking these Old Testament promises, which He was doing, and He was saying, and just take one, if anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink. Let him keep coming to me literally and keep drinking. The Greek present is linear. It’s not like the English present. We might say he goes. The Greek present means he is going or he keeps going. And so the Greek present then has this continuing action. So the idea is you keep coming, you keep drinking. He that believes, the idea is he that keeps believing right now at this very time. And that really shook me. And I didn’t know exactly what to do with that, but I realized my whole theology had a big hole in it. Does that make sense to you? And so here I was constantly running dry in the middle, getting a little help here and a little help here, but expecting that somehow these things happened in the past and they would happen in the future.

0:19:43.3 Jack Miller: In the meantime, I was stuck by having to work out my own salvation by my own effort. And I felt that was reformed theology. And for a lot of people that is, but I think that’s dreadful. And I think dispensationalists have something of the same thing. So at this time I had read my Calvin quite well. Even when I was first converted, I read Calvin and John Owen and all these people. And I knew what John Owen and Calvin had said about that. They didn’t hold that view at all. Both of them had said, “No, once the Pentecost had come, this is the age of the Spirit and you’ve got to keep drinking all the time. And the abundance of the Spirit is for you now.” Well, when I thought about that, earlier I had thought, well, Calvin and John Owen both are great men, but every great man has his weaknesses. And this sounds to me like some sort of post-millennialism or something, I don’t know what and it really just isn’t true. And so I passed it over. So I went back to Calvin and John Owen. I read it again.

0:20:50.7 Jack Miller: I said maybe they’re right. And that was the crucial turning point in my life and ministry. Not just that I studied the promises, but I decided to become a Trinitarian. I believed in the sovereignty of God, the greatness of the Father, the efficacy of the atonement, the riches of grace of the Son of God. I believed that He was an omnipotent Son of God, but somehow got short-circuited because I’d left the Holy Spirit out. So I became a Trinitarian at that point. And it was interesting that when New Life Church was first established, one of the older people came. We had so many young people come. At the beginning, we were jammed into the library in Jenkintown. They all came early, and you could hardly get a seat. Most older people come just right on time or a little late. They couldn’t sit down. But there was one lady who came and stayed. And she came from a reformed church background, a very solid church. And we asked her why she stayed. And she says, well, she said, “I’m staying here because you people believe in the Trinity.” I said, “Well, didn’t you come from a Trinitarian church?”

0:22:05.5 Jack Miller: She said, “Well, maybe.” But she says, “I never heard about the Trinity there.” She says, “We heard kind of about God. We didn’t even hear too much about God being the Son too much for you and the Holy Spirit. This is all new to us.” Well, you see, that is the dividing line when God begins to bring revival. It’s got to be not only faith in the gospel, but the teaching in the reformed tradition properly has been over against the Lutheran tradition. That it’s not just the gospel which brings about the work of God, but it’s the gospel as it is applied by the Holy Spirit. That’s right out of the Reformation. And I don’t know that they should have quarreled with the Lutherans so much as they did about it. But this was one of the causes of division. The reformed insistence on the priority of the Spirit. Well, it drifted out of my life. It wasn’t there. And so when I began, then, to get a hold of this and I began to claim these promises, I became bolder. Now, the person who further helped me on this was Dr. Edmund P. Clowney, the [previous] president of Westminster Seminary.

0:23:19.7 Jack Miller: Not too long after this, he got together with Rose Marie and me and another couple, and he spent the evening expounding Luke 11:1-13. And he took the theme of bread, which goes through the passage, food, and then he says, what an amazing thing it is when in verse 13, you get to that verse, you expect the word bread to come, because this is what’s all been about, sons get food, the friend at midnight gets food, and now you’re expecting food to come up, and instead Jesus inserts another two words, Holy Spirit. “If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the Heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask Him?” Well, that is the climactic point. And Ed’s conclusion was that if we are going to see God bless us in our time, we have to keep asking for the Holy Spirit. And the passage in the context, it’s shameless boldness, but then it also has a marked emphasis on persistence. Ask, present tense, in other words, keep asking, seek, keep seeking, knock, and keep knocking. So you ask for the Holy Spirit.

0:24:47.3 Jack Miller: And I admit, I do love to shock people. I do. Creative tension, I call it. Sometimes it’s just a shot in the dark, doesn’t do anything. But sometimes people who say there’s no solution to my problem, then I might ask them, “Well, why did you come to me?” Or I might say, “I see, well, you don’t believe in the Holy Spirit, then do you? Have you ever thought about becoming a Trinitarian?” Let God have a chance with them. There’s no solution to my problem. Well, have you ever met God? Why try so hard as counselors? See what God can do. And even maybe for yourself, why try so hard? See what God can do. Become a Trinitarian. God blessed my ministry, and it had this kind of pattern in it, weak-strong, in which the weaker I got, the more I cried to God for grace, and the stronger I got. And that is the marvel, isn’t it, of the Christian life. And my biggest problem was that when I was weak and then I got strong, I wanted to remain strong. And it goes back to the same problem I was talking to you about earlier.

0:26:19.2 Jack Miller: The constant temptation to want to build myself up to a level of strength and security where I wouldn’t need God quite so much. The flesh, there it is. A dangerous, dangerous thing. And you may think that you don’t have that problem. Well, if you don’t, you probably will not live the night because you’re ready for heaven. So if you’re raptured tonight, we’ll know why. Because you’ve got to the place you really understand grace and you’re ready to be translated.

0:27:05.0 Jim Lovelady : I want to pause this conversation and invite you to join us in prayer for the Serge field workers that we at the headquarters here in Philadelphia are praying for each week. We meet on Tuesday and Friday mornings to pray, and this week we’re praying for our new and incoming missionaries. Would you pray with me? Lord, we pray that You would bless these folks and give them joy in their work in Your Kingdom and the pleasure of Your joy as they follow You. Give them wisdom and let Your grace abound in their relationships with one another, with family members and children, and with the people that they serve. Heal all sicknesses, liberate the enslaved, protect them from the powers and principalities of darkness, restore to them the joy of Your salvation, and let Your Kingdom come and Your will be done in their life, in the places that they’re going to be going to, just as it is in heaven. We pray in Your name. Amen.

0:28:06.7 Jack Miller: So in case you’re here tomorrow, those who are planning to be here tomorrow, we will go on and see now how the Lord began to show me that I was far too strong to understand the gospel and to be effective in witnessing and counseling and pastoral work, evangelism, whatever. And it was this that began to hit me, and it came out like this. In ’72, I took my courage in my hands, and I gave this as an assignment to some of my classes, and I asked each of the people in the class to go home and ask your wife, if there’s one thing about you that you could change, that she could change, what would it be? And I went home myself that time and asked Rosemary what it would be, and she told me, you don’t listen. So for 10 months, I really worked on listening, maybe a year almost. I really cocked my ear every time she talked and I could remember everything. And I was really impressed by how I had grown in this. It really was hard work, but I had really achieved something.

0:29:23.3 Jack Miller: She didn’t say anything, but I’d pick it up right away. I’d even sometimes correct it. But anyway, here I had improved in listening, and then I got another class, and it was in January of ’73. And in this class, I gave the same assignment, and so I would go home. I thought, well, now that I’ve had that other matter corrected, listening, I’ll go home and ask Rosemary that question again, and I’ll get something else to work on. So I went home, and I remember coming in, and we have in our house a very large living room, and it’s a big old drafty place. It was, especially in those days, we didn’t have the storm windows up to the degree we do today. And Rose Marie at night would sit behind the couch on a little stool we have right next to the heat vent and absorb all the heat coming into the room. Everybody else would be a little cold, but Rose Marie would be as cozy as could be. So my solution to that problem was to come sliding in and get up as close to her as I could and absorb some of this heat.

0:30:24.1 Jack Miller: So I came in out of the cold, and I sat down on the couch, and she was behind it, and I smiled my evangelistic smile that you were showing. I said, “If there’s something about me, Rose Marie, you could change one thing about me, what would it be?” And I sat back rather comfortably in my strength, and she said, without a pause, “Jack, you don’t listen.” I about fell off the couch, and I backed up, and I said, “I guess you didn’t hear me. Let me try it again. If there’s one thing about me you could change.” And she said, “You don’t listen.” I was stunned and crushed. I said, “You can’t mean that.” She says, “I certainly do mean that.” And it was very upsetting, because when I work on something, my willpower is pretty strong, and I’m accustomed to winning. And I was shot down twice in one year, and it really bothered me, because I felt she was wrong, and I started to explain to her all the ways I listened to her, and then I thought better of it. The intervention of the Holy Spirit at this point.

0:31:44.0 Jack Miller: Keep your big mouth shut. Shut up, Jack, and listen. I was going to tell her don’t you know how I can quote conversations for years from past. You remember things said way back. I often surprised counselees. I can tell them what they said three years ago and this was all ready to come out of me, and I thought, “Shut up, shut up, shut up.” So I asked her a few more questions, and that really discouraged me, because it came out of me at this point that I was powerless to change. I was not only a non-listener, it was so rooted in my personality, it couldn’t be changed unless something in me died. And who wants to take a dagger, put it in your own heart? I didn’t. So that wasn’t very encouraging. It was not a wonderful beginning in 1973, and yet at the same time, God was blessing us. We wrote the New Life booklet that week, or that month, and we had many people getting converted, all kinds of people converted, all excited. We outgrew our home in a very short time for meetings, moved over to the library, and pretty soon the library was filling up, and it was just a grand time.

0:33:08.4 Jack Miller: Well, then some things began to fall apart, and this always happens in the planning of a new church, at least any one I’ve ever seen. After you have a surge of conversions, there’s a kind of momentum that carries along some people who just didn’t quite get it, that were caught up emotionally, or they wanted to identify with the group and all the joy, and we had some people fall away. It was really crushing, and I think probably that year, the total, I think we had probably five or six families we won and lost, and you just poured your life into them, you know what I mean? And you were so identified with them, they were really your good friends. Eee, that was a rough, hard, hard time, and some of it started fairly early in the year. And then, as Philadelphia weather is the world’s best, but sometimes the winters seem awfully long. And they’re not really, but they just give you that impression. And it just seemed to me very gray. To top it off, we were having our marriage struggles, and oh man, the kids had left home, and it was an odd paradoxical situation where on every hand God was blessing us with the ministry, but we were rubbing each other not the right way, and she wanted to talk to me more and more.

0:34:38.3 Jack Miller: And I provided her the opening by saying, letting her tell me I didn’t listen. Then she was trying to talk to me all the time, and I didn’t want to hear all of this. And it was a really bad time. And we would have these weekly days off, and we’d get in the car to drive away. And after we… Within an hour, she’d begin to tell me all the problems that she had stored up for the week and maybe a lifetime. I didn’t want to hear this. I was tired. I wanted a chance to refresh and be spiritual, unreal, whatever. Well, the amazing thing was, this was not really a very happy time in our relationship. It was not working well at all, and I wasn’t listening, and I kept feeling guiltier and guiltier. All this success on every side. I’m even learning how to claim the promise of the Spirit, and everybody seems to be getting changed around here except our relationship isn’t. And it was kind of sickening. And the day came that I decided I just felt like I was all out of center.

0:35:46.6 Jack Miller: And when I do that, I believe it’s time for me to repent, even though I’m not quite sure what’s wrong. What I do is get my Bible out, and I just read it until I become sane again through repentance. I just read myself full of it and don’t worry about how I feel or what’s going on. And I usually do that to the Gospel of John or the Gospel of Mark or Luke or Romans or something like that. This particular time, I decided to be a little adventurous. I would try Leviticus. I am a fast reader, so I sped-read Leviticus. That was the last time I’m going to speed-read Leviticus, because I understood Leviticus for the first time. It just leaped out at me. And I read it. If you committed a sin by ignorance, you could be forgiven ceremonially. If you stole something, you’d have to give restitution four times. If you slandered somebody, I believe you got the same treatment and what you expected to get to them. But for all the rest of it, anything you did wrong, you got capital punishment for it. Death, death, death for anyone who broke God’s law.

0:37:14.9 Jack Miller: I was astonished. And in one of the chapters, I believe I counted over 30-some sins that got the death penalty. And I said, “Well, isn’t there any mercy in the law?” Oh, I said to myself, “I remember now, there are those cities of refuge.” And then I looked at the cities of refuge, and that was only for the innocent. Only those who seem to be murderers, not real murderers. I thought, well, dear me, I guess I’d better try Deuteronomy. I didn’t do too well in Leviticus. I was really depressed by now. So I started speed reading Deuteronomy. And that was very encouraging. At least part of it was a little grace thrown in here and there, and a lot of do’s. I discovered there were over 50 do’s in Deuteronomy. That didn’t quite build me up too much, but still, there was a warmth and a touch of love. Obviously, a wonderful book. But then I got to Deuteronomy 23, and I started to read Deuteronomy 23, and I was shaken to the bottom of my boots. And I began to understand the law in a new and a clearer way. And it says, “No one who is a eunuch,” verse 1, “may come into the assembly of the Lord. No one born of an illegitimate descent, a bastard,” as the King James says, “may enter the assembly of the Lord even down to the 10th generation.” That’s quite a while. “And no Ammonite or Moabite may go into the assembly of the Lord for the 10th generation.”

0:39:13.0 Jack Miller: And the Egyptians, they’re in a bit better shape because they can come in in the 3rd generation. But it says, in each case, there has to be perfection. You must have a perfect body, not a eunuch, an emasculated person, or you may not have an imperfect origin, an illegitimate child. And like an Ammonite or a Moabite, you must not be a hater of God’s people, because that’s really bad. If somebody says, we’d like to have you come to our church, but wait 10 generations. What are they saying? You really wouldn’t feel warmly welcomed. It’s really an exclusion, isn’t it? A total exclusion. And it’s really saying that only the law requires that you come near to God, but only those will be accepted who are perfect. And you have the thunder of the Sinai in Exodus 20. Even a beast would be stoned if it got close.

0:40:33.2 Jack Miller: Don’t touch the mount, as Hebrews says. And then, to complete my depression, my mind went back to Deuteronomy 6, where it says there in verses 4, 5, 6, and 7, “That the law requires that you love the Lord your God with all your heart, your soul, your strength, your mind, your whole being.” That is, the perfection is not merely ceremonial, external, and outward, but it’s internal. It goes to the heart. I trust you paid your income tax this year. Well, maybe you haven’t yet. We really stirred your conscience. It ruined your whole week. But when you pay your check to the IRS, you write it out, they really don’t care what your attitude is. You can take that old check and you could jump on it. You could put it in the envelope and you could throw it across the room. And you could scream at it. And you could hate the IRS. And then mail it off. You had never heard a complaint from the IRS. All they want is what you owe. But God’s not like that. His law demands. It’s not just a mechanical law. His law demands that you come to Him freely, gladly, with a heart that loves Him with your whole being. Love the Lord your God with your whole heart.

0:42:18.1 Jack Miller: And by this time, I was so convicted of how far I had been from God. It wasn’t I hadn’t just been listening to Rose Marie. I really hadn’t been listening to God. The law is holy, just, and good. And it shows what God in His perfect nature must require of sinners. To not require this of sinners would be to repudiate His own nature. He is all glorious, and therefore He must require that we live for His glory. We are put into this world for one reason only, and that is to glorify Him. And the very reason we’re here in this world as Christians is for training for that final program of praise which will be introduced in eternity in the return of the Lord Jesus and in the new heavens and the new earth. And we’ve not done that. We’ve been unthankful. And to God, these are dreadful monster sins. I was pretty shook by this time. But God gave me grace not to make any excuse, to accept the law for what it was in all its glorious reality and in its condemning power. I let it wallop me, good and hard. And it didn’t make me a neurotic.

0:43:48.2 Jack Miller: It made me sane. It made me see the truth. The law has a purpose in relationship to the gospel. As a commandment, I’m talking, now you can use the word Torah or law in a larger sense, which includes grace, but the sense in which we’re talking about it here, it means multiplied ordinance and commandment, that which says do, or Leviticus 18 says, “Do this and thou should live.” The doing, the doing which we saw in Galatians 3. Well now in that sense, the law provides no substitute. The key thing about the law is commandment. It simply tells you what you must do. It shows you that you have not done it. And then having exposed all of that, it hits you right between the eyes and says this is you. But it does not pick you up. It leaves you slain. People today are being slain by the Spirit, they say, I’m not so sure of that. But whether that’s true or not, I would think most of them need to be slain by the law. And it would make a great deal of difference to American Christianity if we had more people who had really seen the awfulness of their sin before a holy God. It was Isaiah who cried out, “Woe is me, for mine eyes have seen the King. “

0:45:16.4 Jack Miller: I’m undone. I’m a man of unclean lips and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips. I’m exposed. I didn’t know that God was holy. I went to church and what do you know? I met God. I wasn’t planning that. That’s what happened to Isaiah. Well, when I had finished with that, I remembered Isaiah 56. And Isaiah 56 seems to contradict Deuteronomy 23. Because almost everything it says here is reversed in Isaiah 56. It says, “The eunuch will be welcomed into the presence of God in a day to come.” And it says there that the foreigners, the strangers, the Ammonites, the Moabites are going to draw near to the temple. And it says the temple will become a house of prayer for all nations. Translated into that for the enemies, the unwashed, for the lawbreakers. And the implication is it’s going to be overflowing. So that when Jesus went into the temple and He cleansed the temple, He was fulfilling prophecy. That it was not meant to be a house for robbers, but a place where God, by His Spirit, would gather together the unclean. So the thought occurred to me, how many gods are there in the Bible then?

0:46:37.1 Jack Miller: We’ve got the God of Deuteronomy 23, the law, and then we’ve got this tremendous prophecy of this great new day in which they’ll come near. What’s going on here? And then it dawned on me, what made the difference was this, the gospel. That in the gospel there had come what Paul says in Romans 10, an end to the law. Christ has made an end to the law. What did He mean? Well, He means simply that Christ perfectly obeyed the law and Christ took away the penalty of the law by His death on the cross. And so that God the Father who sent the Son out of love is satisfied and those who believe in Jesus are accepted by faith and there is no condemnation. And we have another way of putting what Alan Harris was saying is that we have a verdict theology. God has stepped into history in the person of His Son and He has said on the basis of what Jesus has done, the Son of God, I am justifying the ungodly. Now that is exactly what Deuteronomy said no judge can do. But God did it without losing His righteousness because He gave his Son.

0:48:06.8 Jack Miller: And so that language of justification which is so strong in Romans, if you notice a good deal of it is really language of the last judgment. It’s language referring to doom. There is therefore now no doom to those who are in Christ Jesus. That’s the sense of the passage. And the verdict is in and the point of Romans 8 then is that because Jesus Christ has brought about no condemnation there will be no separation. And here is the Savior remaining in heaven as the permanent bond of that verdict. So that not only am I pardoned once and for all the great umbrella over me, but as I confess sins as I go on in life, these are constantly taken away through the blood of that same atonement. And I know that when I appear before the Father, He will be my welcoming God, my welcoming Father. Let me drive this home very simply by saying if that is true, then what the law could not do, the gospel does. It provides a substitute. There has been an exchange. Our sin, our unrighteousness, Christ’s righteousness, His atonement. And that exchange gives me an exchange position and that gives me an exchange life.

0:49:56.4 Jack Miller: And when I saw this, I got up and I was so happy. I even wanted to listen to Rose Marie. And believe it or not, if this had not happened, if I had not seen this, I would never have done that. I would not have been able to. Because somehow the law killed me. Paul says, “I had not known sin except the law had said, Thou shalt not covet.” I had just a whole life of lusting for your own way. Dominating, controlling, conceited. And I will say this, the marvelous thing that happened is I had this sense that I had gone through an ultimate criticism and it didn’t matter what happened to me now. You couldn’t criticize me any more thoroughly than to tell me I didn’t love God with all my heart, soul, and my neighbor as myself, and that what the cross says about you is you are a terrible sinner, Jack. But God is filled with an almighty love. And having felt that embrace, my compulsion then was to share it. I had received a forgiving God and I wanted to extend the forgiveness. And from that point on, it became more and more instinctive for me to love and forgive Rose Marie.

0:51:23.6 Jack Miller: And I went out. We were going down to speak on this very subject, the law and the gospel, down in Virginia. And on the way out, we went over the bridge into Wyncote from Jenkintown and I saw a young man on the corner. And I was late, as usual, but something said to me, “God didn’t pass you by, don’t pass him by.” So I picked him up, and God gave Rose Marie and me such joy that he didn’t get out of the car. We gave him the New Life booklet. And later we began to get these drunken phone calls. And Karen, who was about 13, would hang up whenever they would come. And then I got depressed again in August. The same year, I went back to the law and the gospel, and I tried to get people to come and go with me. I was going to look for the pagan motorcycle gang. Tried to see those who needed, who’d been… I felt I had been down so deep, I wanted to go down where God went. So I tried to find the people who were most unlike me. And I figured the pagan motorcycle gang would do.

0:52:50.9 Jack Miller: And they lived there in Glenside. Somebody told me that they were at the Jack Frost Freeze Place. And so I went over there one night. And even Paul, he was a much younger Christian then. I said, “Paul, will you go with me?” And he says, “Dad, I just have a strong call to the prayer ministry.” It was amazing how many prayer warriors we had at New Life when I announced what I was going to do. But I went with a fellow who had to go with me because he was the assistant. We paid him. But anyway, he went willingly after we found out his insurance was paid up. We never found the pagan motorcycle fellow that night. But we did find this wild gang of teenagers. And we hung in and we hung in for four months until I went over to visit this one on a Saturday night. And he had my Bible. He was the worst of the lot. I mean, he would make Charlie look like a Sunday school kid. And I said, “Have you become a Christian?” And he says, “I think so. I have been sober for ten days. 16 years old. Since the last time I saw you, I’ve neither been high nor drunk.”

0:54:08.1 Jack Miller: I said, “Well, that’s amazing, isn’t it?” And that was the one who’d been making the drunken calls to our house. And the girl that he’d been scaring, Karen, became his wife. And that’s the power of the gospel. The power of the Spirit when we realize we’re weak and we can only lean on grace. Rely, know, and rely on the love God has for you in the gospel. And then the law of love to God and your neighbor will be fulfilled as you go with the gospel. Amen? Thank you.

0:55:07.0 Jim Lovelady : Jack’s story makes me think about Simon Peter’s sin boldly and repent boldly kind of life, his approach to life, or the psalmist’s raw honesty, and even King David who sins boldly and offensively and horribly, but repents boldly. The commonality in all of these examples is realizing a desperation for God’s grace that comes from either recognizing that we are in a desperate situation or having the courage to put ourselves in the desperate situations that the Lord is calling us into. Our temptation is to stay safe, to stay comfortable, to always put ourselves in a place where we don’t desperately need grace. We know it’s always there just in case. It’s kind of like my water bottle. It’s here just in case I get thirsty. But no, no, no. The key is to realize that grace is the air we breathe. And I’d forgotten until when I was surfing in the ocean and a wave hit me and I was pushed under the water for too long, scrambling for the surface. I was desperate for air. And sometimes someone just needs to remind you to take a breath. There are entire classes focused on helping you take a deep breath because sometimes you forget to breathe. So sometimes you’re underwater, sometimes you just forget to breathe. If you’re currently in a place of desperation and you need to be reminded of the nearness of God, Jack Miller has a little devotional book called Saving Grace, and it’s perfect for a little pause to take a deep breath and be reminded of God’s grace. For example, I want to read today’s devotional. “Jesus wants to make you into someone like Him, someone who seeks out and fights for those who are lost. To be like this, you have to become a little more reckless and a little more foolhardy. Imagine that you have an acquaintance with whom you’ve built a relationship and won their friendship. Would you be willing to share with them how you needed God’s help to change something about yourself? Would you tell them about how you repented and experienced God’s forgiveness and mercy? Would you ask them whether they’ve ever experienced repentance? If you pointed your finger at your friend and told them to repent, they’d probably be scared to death. But if you embodied repentance in front of them, that’s where they’d see the power of Jesus. That’s the Kingdom. That’s the power. That’s revival. Are you willing to fight for it where you are?” So good. Now, if you’re afraid to allow yourself to feel the reality of your desperation, like how I’m afraid to go surfing and get hit by a big wave and pushed underwater, this is where I want to call you out of your comfort zone and encourage you to go show God’s love to someone who doesn’t deserve it. This is an easy way to reveal your desperate need for God’s grace toward you. In fact, experiencing God’s unmerited, unwavering favor and delight for you is the only way that you are going to be able to love difficult people. And if you need some more coaxing, there’s another Jack Miller book that will inspire you. It’s called Outgrowing the Ingrown Church. This book puts a fire under me every time I read it. So fair warning. And the second is a conversation that I had with Barbara Bancroft here on the podcast on what it looks like to be filled with the Spirit and led by the Spirit to wherever the Lord is calling you. You’ll find all these links in the show notes and do me a favor, like and subscribe to our YouTube channel. Share this episode with some friends so that this can get out to more and more people. A desperate child of God, always in need of grace, but dearly loved more than you can imagine. As you follow your Savior, breathe in His delight for you and go with His blessing. May the Lord bless you and keep you and make His face to smile down on you. May the Lord be gracious to you and turn His bright eyes to you and give you His peace. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, one God, life everlasting. Amen.