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18245 NW Germantown Road
Portland OR 97231
Posted by Pastor Greg Allen on June 27, 2010 under 2010 | 
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Preached Sunday, June 27, 2010
from
Titus 2:11-15
Theme: God’s grace through Jesus Christ teaches us to live a transformed life in this world.
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Posted by Pastor Greg Allen on June 7, 2009 under 2009 | Be the First to Comment
Preached June 7, 2009
Matthew 27:1-10
Theme: The cross becomes very relevant to us when we remember three things: Jesus’ innocence, our sinfulness, and the Father’s sovereign provision. Read more of this article »
Posted by Pastor Greg Allen on May 20, 2009 under AM Bible Study | Be the First to Comment
AM Bible Study; May 20, 2009
Revelation 7:1-8
Theme: Before the outpouring of His wrath, God gives the world a display of His grace. Read more of this article »
Posted by Pastor Greg Allen on March 19, 2008 under Ask the Pastor | Be the First to Comment
A visitor to our website writes:
What subject is mentioned in the Bible the most?
Dear friend,
That’s pretty easy. The subject most mentioned in the Bible is that of a loving God’s redemptive plan for fallen mankind. To be even more specific, it’s how He accomplished this plan to save fallen mankind through the sacrifice of His Son, Jesus Christ on the cross for our sins (Isaiah 53:6; 2 Corinthians 5:21). Jesus is the key theme of the Bible. The Old Testament points forward to His coming and to what He would do (Genesis 3:15); and the New Testament points backward to the fact that He came and what He did (Revelation 22:21). The whole Bible is about Him (Luke 22:44; Revelation 19:10). I hope that you trust Him.
Blessings in Jesus’ love.
Pastor Greg
Bethany Bible Church
(All Scripture quotes are taken from the New King James Version.)
Posted by Pastor Greg Allen on December 3, 2006 under Ask the Pastor | Be the First to Comment
A visitor to our website writes that the mother of a friend of his came to Christ as a result of a tragedy. His friend’s niece lost her life in an auto accident; and as a result of the girl’s death (the girl was a believer), the friend’s mother’s heart was softened to the Lord and she trusted Him for salvation and was baptized in a church.
In other words, it took a tragic accident to awaken this woman to her need for a Savior. And the visitor to our website struggles with this. He knows that the girl who died is now safe in the arms of Jesus; and understands that, from God’s perspective, such a tragedy isn’t a completely bad thing. But our visitor is resentful of the fact that it took something so grievous to cause his friend’s mother to see her need. This visitor writes: “I love Jesus so much and want everyone to be saved, but I don’t want bad things to happen before someone believes. I myself was ‘jolted’ back to Jesus after my marriage fell apart and was denied custody of my daughter.
“It says in God’s word that it is hard for a rich man to get into heaven; … Why? Why do bad things have to happen before we wake up???”
Dear friend,
I sense from the tone of your letter – and certainly because you mention that you yourself went through the terrible trial – that this is a pretty important and perplexing matter for you. I think it is summed up in your question: “Why do bad things have to happen before we wake up?” Why does God, it seems, have to use such terrible trials to cause some of us to realize our need for Jesus and trust Him? Why can’t we just trust Him because of the good things He brings into our lives?
I’m going to confess something to you; I don’t feel as if I have suffered very much in my life. So please understand; whatever I say in answering your question is not going to come from my own experiences of suffering. What I have learned about suffering is from what I have read in the Scriptures or from talking to others who are “seasoned sufferers”. I hope that, because of this, you’ll be patient with my stumbling attempts to answer you. In fact, I have to tell you that I think you’re asking about a great mystery – and I’m quite sure I CAN’T give you a full answer! But let me at least share a few thoughts.
First of all, let’s consider that passage you mentioned. That was from the story in the New Testament of Jesus’ encounter with the Rich Young Ruler. Jesus, you’ll remember, turned to His disciples after the young man walked away and said, “Assuredly, I say to you that it is hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. And again I say to you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God” (Matthew 19:23-24). The disciples were greatly astonished at this; and declared, “Who then can be saved?” They rightly concluded from what Jesus said that, if it were left to being a matter of one’s own power, or stature, or resources, no one would ever be saved! And Jesus then gave a very important answer. He looked at them and said, “With men this is impossible, but with God all things are possible” (v. 26).
The reason I think that this relates to your question is because it involves the whole matter of what it takes for someone to be saved. Salvation is, as Jesus said, an utter impossibility for men. But it is not impossible for God to save a man. In fact, with God, all things are possible. I think that, for some people, God uses trials and terrible suffering to bring them to Himself. In the case of other people, He works in a completely different way. In the end, it’s not the circumstances that make our salvation happen; but rather the grace and power of God that brings us to salvation. Like John the apostle says; “But as many as received Him, to them He gave the right to become children of God, to those who believe on His name: who were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God” (John 1:12-13).
So at least a part of the answer to your question, “Why do bad things have to happen before we wake up?” would have to include the idea that it’s not our circumstances – bad or good – that ultimately cause us to wake up. In the final analysis, it’s God’s sovereign grace that causes us to wake up. Unless God gives the grace to believe; then no amount of hardship will ever make someone believe.
Now; along with saying that it’s God’s sovereign grace that ultimately causes us to be awakened to our need and enables us to trust Jesus for our salvation, we also have to affirm that God has chosen to use a variety of circumstances to do this. The God who ordains the end (our salvation), also ordains the means to that end (that is, our circumstances). And, as it seems to me you have said, the fact that God sometimes uses tragedy or trials to do this isn’t in itself a bad thing.
When I think of this, I think of the Old Testament story of Joseph and of how his brothers sold him into slavery. Because they had done this evil act to him, he was able to rise up to a position of great power in Egypt and serve as their protector and provider during a time of famine. He comforted them and told them, “But as for you, you meant evil against me; but God meant it for God, in order to bring it about as it is this day, to save many people alive” (Gen. 50:20). Look at that carefully. Joseph didn’t say God took what they meant for evil, and “turned it around” for good. Rather, it says that God “meant” it for good. He meant the same circumstance as those twelve brothers meant; but He intended a completely different purpose in it than they intended.
We have to call a thing “good” or “bad” not just on the basis of its immediate impact, but also by it’s ultimate result; and if bad circumstances result (through God’s sovereign love and mercy) in eternal blessedness in Christ, then those “bad circumstances” are really wonderfully good. You could put it this way: If our trial brings us closer to Jesus, then the second most precious gift God could ever give us – second, of course, only to Jesus Himself – is our trial! What a blessed gift such a trial, then, truly proves to be!!
We’d also have to say that not all hardship is intended to awaken people to salvation. Sometimes – and this is a very difficult thing to say – God allows hardship in order to harden some people in their unbelief. The apostle Paul mentions this in his letter to the Romans. He spoke of the Pharaoh during the time of Moses, and said, “For the Scripture says to the Pharaoh, ‘For this very purpose I have raised you up, that I may show My power in you, and that My name may be declared in all the earth’ [here quoting from Exodus 9:16]. Therefore, he has mercy on whom He wills, and whom He wills He hardens” (Rom. 9:17-18).
Just as the Ten Plagues God administered on Egypt through Moses only served to harden Pharaoh’s heart, God permits some trials in the lives of some hardened unbelievers in order to harden them further. If we were to ask why God would do that, the only answer Paul gives us is this: “But indeed, O man, who are you to reply against God? Will the thing formed say to him who formed it, ‘Why have you made me like this?’ Does not the potter have the power over the clay, from the same lump to make one vessel for honor and another for dishonor? What if God, wanting to show His wrath and to make His power known, endured with much longsuffering the vessels of wrath prepared for destruction, and that He might make known the riches of His glory on the vessels of mercy, which He had prepared beforehand for glory, even us whom He called not of the Jews only, but also of the Gentiles? (Rom. 9:20-24).
These passages, I believe, give us some scriptural perimeters within which to think about the question, “Why do bad things have to happen before we wake up?” But I realize that it doesn’t entirely answer the question.
I’m going to suggest to you, friend, that it’s one of those questions that we’re not going to get a full answer to; and that we’re just going to have accept what little we know about it from God’s word, and trust that God will always prove to have done what is right in the end. It’s something about which, as one theologian has said, we need to have a ‘learned ignorance’ – that is, a knowledge of what we cannot and may not know until we get to heaven.
But though we may not have a full answer right now, we can – and should – give God a full response right now. We may not get a satisfactory answer to the question, “Why do bad things have to happen before we wake up?”; but we should praise God, and say, “Thank You, O heavenly Father that – however it happened – I woke up!! Thank you that Your Son underwent the worst “bad thing” on the cross for me; and that You gave me the faith to believe. It was all Your doing; and through it, You proved to be wonderfully good to me; and I will praise You forever because of it!”
And what’s more, I think that you can look at your friend’s mother and say the same thing: “Thank you, Lord, that – however it happened – You allowed her to wake up too!” If she truly believes; then one day, you and she – and your friend’s niece – and your friend, too – will all praise Him in heaven together. There wont be any tough questions then about why it happened the way it did – just eternal praise and thanks to a sovereign God who always does what is right and just.
Again, that may not be an entirely satisfying answer to your very good question; but I truly believe it’s the best one we can have on this side of eternity. I suggest that, when we find that God has so limited things for us that we can’t get the answers we want, we should at least make sure He gets from us the response He desires and deserves.
God bless you,
Pastor Greg
(All Scripture quotes are taken from the New King James Version.)
Posted by Pastor Greg Allen on June 3, 2006 under Ask the Pastor | Be the First to Comment
A recent visitor to our website asks a very simple but very important question:
“Are we still under God’s curse?”
Dear friend,
That is a question to which I’d have to give a “yes and no” answer. If we live apart from God’s grace through Christ and are left in our sins, then the answer is “yes” – we are still under God’s dreadful curse. But if we have placed our trust in the forgiveness of sins that Jesus purchased for us on His cross, and now stand in God’s grace through Him, then the answer is an emphatic “no” – we are wonderfully and completely set free from God’s curse in Jesus.
Perhaps a good place to begin is to understand what this “curse” is all about. We’re first told about it in the story of Genesis. There, after God made the first man, and placed him in the Garden of Eden to tend it, He told Adam about the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. He told Adam, “Of every tree of the garden you may freely eat; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die” (Gen. 2:16-17). That’s our first introduction to this “curse” – God’s warning that death would occure if he disobeyed God’s command.
As we’re told in the next chapter of Genesis, Adam’s wife surrendered to the temptations of the devil and ate of that fruit; and then she gave to her husband, and he also ate. And the next thing we discover is that God called for Adam and Eve, and they hid from Him (3:8-10) Immediately after eating, a separation and a sense of alienation occurred between themselves and the God who made them. As a result, they were driven from the garden, and prohibited from eating of “the tree of life” and thus living forever (Gen. 3:22). The “curse” is “death”. They eventually experienced physical death; but the most profound death they experienced was that immediate separation from God because of sin. That, really, is what that curse is all about – separation from the one who made us; a separation that is spiritual “death”.
And there were other tragic aspects of that curse that sprang forth from that separation. For one thing, Adam’s sin brought a curse upon the whole rest of creation over which he had been placed. God told him, “Cursed is the ground for your sake; in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life. Both thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you, and you shall eat the herb of the field. In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; for dust you are, and to dust you shall return” (Gen. 3:17-19).
And another aspect of this curse is that sin brought a curse upon the offspring of Adam. It was shortly after this sin occurred that Adam’s son Cain slew his own brother Abel (Gen. 4:8). Indeed, the curse of Adam’s sin has brought a curse on the whole human race; “Therefore, just as through one man sin entered the world, and death through sin, and thus death spread to all men, because all sinned.” (Rom. 5:12).
I believe that one of the reasons God gave His Ten Commandments to mankind was to demonstrate the impact of this terrible curse. Moses told the people of Israel, “Behold, I set before you today a blessing and a curse: the blessing, if you obey the commandments of the LORD your God which I command you today; and the curse, if you do not obey the commandments of the LORD your God, but turn aside from the way which I commanded you today, to go after other gods which you have not known” (Deut. 11:26-28). God has set His law before us with the promise of blessing if we obey, and a curse if we disobey; but now, we only find that the law condemns us as being under a curse, because we so constantly disobey it and sin against it.
The apostle Paul said the same thing in Galatians 3:10. He wrote, “For as many as are of the works of the law are under the curse; for it is written, [here quoting Deuteronomy 27:26] ‘Cursed is everyone who does not continue in all the things which are written in the book of the law to do them.’ But that no one is justified by the law in the sight of God is evident, for [quoting from Habakkuk 2:4] ‘the just shall live by faith.’ Yet the law is not of faith, but [quoting Leviticus 18:5] ‘the man who does them shall live by them.’” We have no hope of being acceptable in God’s sight through the law. It only condemns us and confirms us as under the curse of sin.
So, there’s the “yes” part of the answer to your question. It’s true that, if we were left to ourselves – even if we were to try to please God through obedience to His law, we justly remain under the curse of God for sin – the guilt of sin that we have inherited from Adam, our own inability to obey God’s commandments because of the sinful nature of Adam that we also inherited, and the “death” that results from all of it. “For the wages of sin is death” (Rom. 6:23). What a horrible curse this is!
But God didn’t leave us in this situation without hope. He did something to set us free from this dreadful curse. Paul, in that same Galatians passage I just quoted, goes on to say, “Christ has redeemed us from the curse of the law, having become a curse for us (for it is written, [here quoting Deuteronomy 21:23], “Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree.” This Old Testament law declares to us that Jesus – who hung on the cross for us – became “cursed” for us and on our behalf. He actually became “a curse for us”; taking upon Himself the punishment for our sins, and experiencing in our place God’s rightful wrath for our disobedience.
I like to call this “the Great Curse Reverse”. God, though Christ, has reversed the effects of Adam’s sin upon humanity through Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross. The judgment of death for sin is put in reverse, for example; because as Paul writes, “For if by the one man’s offense death reigned through the one, much more those who receive abundance of grace and of the gift of righteousness will reign in life through the One, Jesus Christ” (Rom. 5:17). He goes on to say, “Therefore, as through one man’s offense judgment came to all men, resulting in condemnation, even so through one Man’s righteous act the free gift came to all men, resulting in justification of life. For as by one man’s disobedience many were made sinners, also by one Man’s obedience many will be made righteous. Moreover the law entered that the offenses might abound. But where sin abounded, grace abounded much more, so that as sin reigned in death, even so grace might reign through righteousness to eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord” (vv. 18-21).
God’s great ‘curse reverse’ through Christ will also reverse the effects of the curse upon creation itself. Paul writes, “For the earnest expectation of the creation eagerly waits for the revealing of the sons of God. For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of Him who subjected it in hope; because the creation itself also will be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God.” (Rom. 8:19-21).
In fact, just as the Bible begins with the story of how the creation of heaven and earth was corrupted because of the curse, the Bible then ends in the Book of Revelation with the story of a new heaven and a new earth. In the closing pages of the Bible, it says, “And there shall be no more curse, but the throne of God and of the Lamb shall be in it, and His servants shall serve Him” (Rev. 22:3)? The story begins with the way to the tree of life being blocked as a sign of the curse (Gen. 3:22); and it ends with the way of the tree of life being opened as a sign that the curse is removed (Rev. 22:2).
So, there’s the emphatic “no” part of the answer to your question. Just as it’s true that we’re under God’s curse apart from Christ, it’s also wonderfully and gloriously true that we’re NOT under the curse if we are “in” Christ through faith. Jesus took the curse of God for our sins upon Himself on the cross, and became a curse for us; and therefore everyone who places their trust in Him is set free from the curse of Adam’s sin.
I feel I need to conclude by saying this: There isn’t anything more important in our lives than being clear on our own situation before God; and making sure that we are in Christ and thus delivered from the curse of sin. John wrote, “He who believes in the Son has everlasting life; and he who does not believe the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God abides on him” (John 3:36). That puts the matter as plainly as it can be put. I hope, dear friend, that you have clearly placed your trust in the cross of Jesus yourself; because that’s where your question, “Are we still under God’s curse”, receives it’s true answer.
Thank you very much for your good question, and God bless you.
In Christ’s love,
Pastor Greg Allen
(All Scripture quotes are taken from the New King James Version.)
