by Dr. T.L. Osborn
Transcript made by Colin Melbourne with permission of T.L.Osborn in Kuala Lumpur 1-2nd. July ’93 © 93 Born-Again-Christian.Org
“The Greatest Gospel Message You’ll Ever Hear”
“This is what we must tell believers. This is the message we have got to get over to them.”
Paul starts all his letters to the Church in this way; Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ
A couple of times he writes, ‘Grace, mercy, and peace to you’. The difference is; grace is getting what we don’t deserve. Mercy is not getting what we do deserve.
So grace, mercy, and peace must be very important foundations for believers.
You’ll never have peace until y’understand grace. Grace is the only way you can ever have peace with God. When Jesus died on the Cross, He died in our place. The point is: He endured all judgment in your name. Try to get that.
All the sins that you ever committed, or ever will commit, He assumed the judgment, and endured the full penalty, satisfied the full demands of the Law for the punishment of every sin that you ever committed or ever will commit.
Never forget that.
We can’t comprehend it, we believe it by faith. We take it from the Bible, that:
He was wounded for our transgressions, and bruised for our iniquities, and the chastisement of our peace was laid on Him.
Is. 53:5 KJV
He endured it all to give us peace. Everything is paid for. That’s why we can have peace. Paul wrote,
If God be for us, who can be against us? … It is God that justifieth. … Who is he that condemneth?
Ro. Ch.8 KJV
It’s vital to your faith that you embrace that. He paid it all. It wasn’t your idea. You didn’t ask Him to do it. You had nothing to do with it!
God wanted you. You didn’t want Him. God reached out to you. You didn’t reach out to Him. So, since that’s the case; accept it. Embrace it from your heart, and you’ll walk in a new freedom, of peace with God that passes all understanding.
God wanted to shut the Devil up completely by being perfectly just and legal with him. So, He calculated that giving the life of His Only Son in our place would totally satisfy any claim Satan has against anybody who trusts in Jesus.
Now, God has decreed, that anyone who, in their heart, believes in Jesus (Paul said it in Romans 10) and confesses it from their mouth, will be saved.
God’s free Gift of Life through Jesus’ sacrifice on our behalf is the only way anyone can ever be saved. Jesus’ Blood, the Bible tells us, was shed for us, taken into the Holy of Holies, and placed on the altar of God, to speak in defence of all who accept Jesus as Saviour.
And God accepts that perfect sacrifice. So there’s nothing against anyone who trusts in Jesus Christ. There is nothing charged against me in all the records of Heaven, because of the Blood of Jesus. I believe that.
Some may call me sacrilegious. No. That’s the Gospel. You see, people are so sin-conscious, they forget righteousness consciousness.
I’m not sin-conscious. I’m righteousness conscious. My sins have been put away.
I’m not perfect. But when I make a mistake, it’s not from my heart, and my Advocate intercedes for me. As soon as I slip up, I cry out, I didn’t mean it, it wasn’t from my heart. I’m sorry. Help me. And He does, and the record’s clear.
I will not go through life a minute, not an hour, not a day, with an acknowledgement of a sin on my record. No! I cannot have that, and have peace at the same time. I am a redeemed person. I am restored to God. I am not a half-Christian, and a half-sinner. I am not a sinning Christian. I am a believer. I walk with God as Adam did in the Garden before sin came.
Believe that! Learn to believe that. If you don’t get that far, you don’t need any of this power we like to talk so much about. Any devil in town can frighten you.
You’ve got to come to accept that you are what God says you are. And when you do that, faith is not a problem, because you have a firm foundation of peace with God through Christ. The reason people fuss so much about faith is that they don’t have peace.
Realize the immense cost God has paid to make you righteous, so you can walk with Him at peace, and not have to carry the guilt complex that religion will always put on you. Rise above it. Come out of religion. Come into Jesus.
It’s up to you to choose, To believe and say; “I embrace my redemption, and I’ll never bow in guilt and condemnation. I am the righteousness of God in Christ, and I walk with God in dignity, and no devil can put me down again.”
Religion uses our sins: Jesus remits our sins; forever, and they are gone. Forever, and they never come back to condemn me. Never, ever, ever.
I am the righteousness of God clothed in human flesh.
Now people challenge me for that. They say, Don’t talk about your flesh, it’s bad.
Mine is not. My body is the temple of the Holy Spirit. I’m not bad. My body is holy. I have peace.
My mind is at peace, my heart is at peace. They say, Don’t say, your mind. Your mind is sinful.
Mine’s not! Yours may be; but mine’s not. You see, people who don’t have peace can be frightened by anything.
Your body’s bad, your flesh is bad. Read everything Paul said about your flesh.
No peace. Those kind of people have no peace.
Your mind is bad, the sinful mind is hostile to God. It does not submit to God’s Law, nor can it do so.
Not mine! Mine is subject to the Law of God. I have the mind of Christ. My mind is renewed by the reading of the word of God. It pours into me the nature of God, and my mind is transformed by it. Alleluia! And conforms to God’s will and life.
People call me holy for that, as though I’m special, super-spiritual. No. That’s the life of Christ. I have peace. I’m at one with Him. My emotions are tuned to His emotions. I only want what He wants. My life is tuned to Him. I came to understand this salvation. I realized, He paid for me.
You brag about your, “Faith in God.” That don’t impress me at all! What impresses me is God’s faith in you. How He never quit loving us, as helpless and foolish as we were.
Oh that impresses me.
“I called on the Lord.”
Yeah? Big deal. What thrills me, is that God sent Jesus, and He called on me saying;
“Follow me, follow me.”
Wow! Not that I’m chasing God, but that He’s after me, because He values me so very much as a creature in His image, made for friendship and camaraderie.
The point is, God wants you to embrace this peace. If you don’t you’ll never communicate peace to people. You’ll always transmit, in your witness, some kind of snag or doubt or slant that will keep Christians uneasy in their faith and frighten them. And some Ministers feel like they have to do that in order to keep people walking straight, and that’s a false idea.
We want to bring people to a place of oneness with God. Where they can stand tall, and look up to Heaven without shame, without a thought of guilt or inferiority.
I’m God’s partner. Thank you Lord. I’m touched to think that you’re thrilled to be my partner. You honour me, you believe in me.
You believe in God? Big deal. That don’t impress me at all. What impresses me is how much God believes in you! Even when you were so sinful; Christ died for us. That’s how much God believes in you, and He still does.
He’s believing you’ll embrace this peace. He’s invested an enormous amount in you. He’s depending on you right now.
Your ministry depends on your comprehension of the message of peace through faith in Christ.
Being justified by faith we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. Ro. 5:1 KJV
Justified, Just-as-if-I’d never done it. That’s peace!
I live with God as though there had never been any sin in my past. There is nothing that can stand and condemn me before God. You say, You’re bragging!
No. That’s not because I’m good, but because He’s good. He believes in me, He fixed me, and I won’t deny it. I refuse to deny the peace that He paid so much to give me. I refuse to cry and whine trying to drag up something to accuse myself, and endlessly and forever confessing sins over and over, denying the peace of Christ all the time and rendering the sacrifice of the Lamb of God on the Cross ineffective for me. I won’t do that!
I will not utter perverseness. I will not. He paid too great a price for me. I will stand up and say, I am righteous in God’s eyes. I am redeemed, I’m bought and paid for. Therefore, no devil can make me question my right standing through Jesus Christ.
And today, I’m saved. Alleluia. Poor Devil. Poor Devil. Alleluia!
I believe that. We’ve got to embrace that. If we embrace that, we’ll preach Good News. If we don’t we’ll preach, frightening news, have people running from devils, and believing in curses, and all kinds of nonsense. No devil in Hell can bother anybody who’s come to the Cross of Jesus Christ! Forever you are free. Poor Devil. He’s out of business. Yes. Yes Yes!
If you don’t believe that, you’ll communicate doubt. You’ll communicate insecurity, and people will never feel love in you. When you get a vision of the love that moved God to pay for us when we were worthless and no good. Then, when you get the chance to report some of this Good News, you’ll be so thankful to God, who, in His immeasurable love, paid everyone out of debt.
And all we’ve got to do is report it. And get people to embrace it, and confess it. Get them to understand that they receive it when they do this. Then nourish that faith by re-reading the Scriptures.
Colossians 1:20-22 Living Bible. Just enjoy it;
It was through what his Son did that God cleared a path for us all to come to him. For Christ’s death on the Cross has made peace with God for all.
All, even you who haven’t embraced it yet. You will today. And you’ll have it from now on.
This includes you who were once so far away from God. You were His enemies and hated him, and were separated from him by your evil thoughts and actions. But now, he has brought you back as his friend.
I love that.
He has done this through the death on the Cross of his own human body; and now as a result, Christ has brought you into the very presence of God.
This is formidable, nobody ever had this before Jesus came.
And there you are standing there before him with nothing left against you.
Isn’t that beautiful? Do you believe that? How can you go out, and be afraid of the Devil, and believe that? How can you go to pray for something, and begin to search your heart for all the unrighteousness that’s in you. Listing sins of omission, or sins of commission. For ever begging, a waste of time and a waste of tears.
We must embrace what He has done for us and stop trying to pay for it with our tears.
We can’t pay for it, we can only embrace it.
The only condition is that you fully believe the truth, convinced of the good news that Jesus died for you, and never shifting from trusting him to save you.
Peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ! Peace means you’re okay.
Peace means when you go to cast a devil out of some demon-possessed person you’re not going to stand there in front of the devil and start begging God to forgive you for some mistakes you’ve made.
You do that, and you might as well pack up and go home, because the Devil will take over. You better run from him. But the Bible don’t tell me to run from the Devil. It tells me, he runs from me.
Because when I walk in there I am clothed in the righteousness of God in Jesus Christ, and he knows it. He can smell that from across town.
You bet. How come? Because of what God did in lifting me out of the devil’s realm, and bringing me into the Jesus realm. And there I am with the Kingdom of God as big as it gets inside me, and the devil’s got a problem, and I’m it. Alleluia! Peace with God!
Continue Reading Dr. T.L. Osborn’s: Peace With God…
You can be Born Again today: Start your New Life
Transcript made by Colin Melbourne with permission of T.L.Osborn in Kuala Lumpur 1-2nd. July ’93
© 93 Born-Again-Christian.Org