Lighthouse Baptist Church
and Christian Academy

The Bible says in Ephesians 2:8 "You have been saved by grace through believing. You did not save yourselves; it was a gift from God." What is grace? Grace is everything God does for you even though you don't deserve it. Grace is God giving you what you need, not what you deserve. The Bible says that everything you have comes by grace. Everything God does in you and through you and for you and to you and by you is by grace. You don't earn it, you don't deserve it, you don't work for it. It's just a free gift.

In Psalms 103, there's a laundry list of just some of the things God does in our lives by grace. He says, "I will not forget the glorious things God does for me. He forgives all my sins. He heals me. He ransoms me from hell. He surrounds me with love. He fills my life with good things. He is merciful and tender to those who don't deserve it. He is slow to get angry. He never bears a grudge. He has not punished us as we deserve for our sins." Are those things to be thankful for? I'd say so.

Aren't you glad that God doesn't give you what you deserve? Aren't you glad instead that God gives you what you need? If you don't understand grace, and if your heart doesn't explode with gratitude when you understand the grace of God, you have no idea of what bad shape you were in before you met Christ. Let me summarize it in one word - hopeless. You had no meaning, no purpose in your life, guilt, fear, bitterness, worry, regrets. You had nothing you could do to get rid of them. You had no hope for the future. You were headed for hell not heaven. There was nothing you could do about it. You would never be good enough to earn your salvation. But God came along in His wonderful love and said, "I'm just going to show you grace." So this thanksgiving, I am thankful to God for the grace that He has shown me.

Life is not an accident. You were made for a reason. You were made for a purpose. God has a plan for your life. Your parents may not have planned you but God did. No baby is ever born by accident. There are illegitimate parents but there are no illegitimate babies. If you're alive and you're breathing and your heart and pulse are going, that means God has a plan for your life.

Now God's plan is a good plan. It's not a plan we have to worry about, that we have to be afraid of, be anxious about. It's a good plan. God says this in Jeremiah 29 "'I have good plans for you', says the Lord, 'I don't plan to hurt you. I plan to give you hope and a good future.'" Is that something you can thank God for?

God's plan is so good and so great that He even takes our mistakes, our faults, our failures and the things that other people do to hurt us and weaves them in and brings good out of those. God's plan for your life is not all happy, all comfortable. God's plan includes pain in your life. And God's plan includes some disappointments. And God's plan certainly involves some discipline. If you were never disciplined, you would never have any character. God's plan in your life involves some unanswered prayers. Yet He does it all for good. It's for a future.

He has shown me grace and He's given me a plan, a plan that when the more I discover it, the more I get in the center of it, the more my life unfolds and my true potential comes out. He says, I have good plans for you. I'm grateful for the plans He has for me.

2 Corinthians 5:1 "We know that our body will be destroyed. [Some of you think it's been destroyed already!] But when that happens God will have a house for us. It will not be a house made by human hands. Instead it will be a home in heaven that will last forever." Human beings were made to last forever. Every human being that's ever been created, God made them, not for just the time here on earth. God makes human beings to last forever. One day your body is going to die, but that's not going to be the end of you. One day your body will decay and fall apart and cease to exist. But that's not going to be the end of you. The Bible says you were created in God's image and that means you have a soul. You will spend eternity one of two places - heaven or hell, depending on whether you received Christ and trusted His grace or not. Heaven and hell are real places. They're not some figment of somebody's imagination. They're not some symbolism. They are real places. Jesus talked more about heaven and hell than He did about a lot of things. And I guess He knows more about it than you or me. He says they're real places.

As Christians, we don't have to be afraid of the future. Christians, of all people, are the most confident about death because we know where we're going. You're not ready to live until you're ready to die. Are you ready to die? Are you ready to meet your maker? You're not ready to live until you're ready to die.

Only a fool would go all through life totally unprepared for something you know is inevitably going to happen. You know you're going to die. The latest statistic tells us that in America the mortality rate is 100%. Everybody in this room is terminal. Every human being is terminal. It's just a matter of time. But we don't have to be afraid of that. We can actually be thankful to God because He's shown us His grace. And while we're on earth He has a plan for us and when we leave this earth, if we've trusted Christ and His grace, He's going to take us to heaven. And I'm grateful for that. A home in heaven!

What is heaven like? Four words:

Reunited. In heaven we're going to be reunited with loved ones who are believers. We're going to see those again who've known the Lord, who've trusted Christ. We're going to be able to fellowship and love each other there, reunited with those loved ones.

Rewarded. The Bible says in heaven we will be rewarded for our faith, rewarded for our service, rewarded for our trust in Christ, rewarded for our faithfulness in praying and serving and giving and sharing. And there will be eternal rewards. The Bible is very clear about that.

Reassigned. In heaven, we will all be reassigned new tasks to do, new things to do with our lives that keep us occupied. They'll be things that you like to do, not some bad tasks like some bad job here on earth. God understands your shape. He knows how you're wired. You will be reassigned things to do that are fulfilling in heaven. Contrary to popular opinion, when you get to heaven, you're not going to sit on a cloud in a sheet and play a harp. (To me, that would be hell!) I can't think of anything more boring. And this whole thing about heaven being all white... Heaven is going to have lots of color. God invented color. If you think the world is beautiful - and it's an imperfect place - how much more is heaven going to be beautiful. It's going to blow your mind. Your senses will be fully aware because there won't be any sin there to hold them back and harm them. You will be reassigned work to do.

Released. The Bible says that in heaven we will all be released from pain, from fear, from depression, from sorrow, from conflict, from tears, from stress. The Bible says there will be no tears in heaven. There will be no sorrow. They'll be great joy.

Who is heaven made for? The Bible tells us in 1 Peter 1 "God has reserved for His children the priceless gift of eternal life. It's kept in heaven for you, pure and undefiled, beyond the reach of change and decay. And God in His mighty power will make sure you get there safely to receive it because you're trusting Him so be truly glad."

Does everybody go to heaven? Absolutely not. No, everybody does not go to heaven. If God let Hitler and ax murderers and rapists and genocidal dictators into heaven it would be hell. So heaven is only for His children. How do you get to be His child? By asking in faith to become a part of His family, by trusting in His Son, Jesus Christ. You say, "After I become a believer, what if I sin as a Christian? What's going to happen?"

What do you mean "if"? It's not a matter of if, it's when. You will sin. You will blow it. You will make mistakes. Christians aren't perfect. They are forgiven. There will be times in your life that you will want to let go of God's hand. The day when you trusted Christ, you put your hand in the hand of God and He grabbed onto it like a heavenly Father. There are days when you want to let go but He's not going to let go because He loves you too much. There will be days when you say, "God, I don't want to be a Christian today. It's too difficult, too hard, too unpopular. There's too much cost." Or whatever. There will be days when you have doubts. Yet the Bible says, God in His mighty power will make sure you get to heaven safely. Once you put your hand in His hand it's His responsibility to keep the commitment that you made.

Aren't you glad for that one? Aren't you glad that when you doubt God, He doesn't doubt you? Aren't you glad that when you feel far away from God, He still loves you and nothing can ever stop Him from loving you? Aren't you glad that it's His power that keeps you saved, not your own? That's something to be thankful for. Of course, if you had to earn your way to heaven doing good works, then obviously, logically, the moment you stopped doing those good works, you'd lose your salvation. But you're not saved by works so you don't stay saved by works. You're saved by simply accepting God's gracious gift of grace. Once you've accepted that gift, you put your hand in His hand and it is His power not your own power that keeps you saved. I don't care what happens in my life, I know the finish line. I know the end of the story. No matter what happens in the rest of my life, I'm ending up in heaven. I'm thankful for that. I am grateful to God that He didn't put my salvation in my own hands and leave it up to me, because what if I blew it in the last hour before I died? That is great news.

I'm grateful to God for the grace He's shown me. And I'm grateful to God for the plan He has for me. And I'm grateful to God for the home He's prepared for me. But there's one thing that really overwhelms me. My heart explodes when I think about this issue.

I am so glad that I am not the same person I used to be. I am so glad I'm not that same person. God is helping make changes in my life that I could never do on my own. I'm so grateful for that. I'm grateful to God that I'm not the person I'm going to be. But I'm grateful to God that I'm not the person I used to be.

God looks at us and says, "I see that lump of clay. I could do something with that." God saw your potential when nobody else saw it. And when maybe everybody else is writing you off and saying, worthless! God says, "No. I see the diamond in you and I made you and I value you. I'm going to start making some changes in you." The moment you became a believer He started that personal improvement program. He's chipping away at your life, changing you and making you different.

God does love you just the way you are. When you come to him you don't have to say, "God, I promise to clean up my whole act, get it all together." You just come to Him with the good, the bad, the ugly. He loves you just the way you are. He loves you far too much to let you stay that way. So He starts making changes in your life and in my life.

God is working in you, giving you the desire to obey Him and the power to do what pleases Him.

Philippians 2:13

He not only gives you the desire to do the right thing, He gives you the power. God never asks you to do something He doesn't give you the power to do. Many of you have seen radical transformation of your life that no one else could have ever made, no human being, no program, no therapy could have ever possibly done. Changes in your marriage, changes in your relationships, changes in your own life. You ought to be thankful from the bottom of your heart.

I think the problem is that the longer we're Christians, the more we forget what a good deal we've got. We actually forget what it's like to live without hope, to live without help, to live without God's power and presence and peace and protection in our lives. The Bible says that when we come to Christ He starts changing us.

And as the Spirit of the Lord works within us, we become more and more like Him.

2 Corinthians 3:18

This is God's goal for us - to make us godly, to make us Christlike.

This is the purpose of Lighthouse church. The bottom line in everything we do - why we do what we do - is that verse. We are in the life changing business. That's Lighthouse's business. When you boil it all down, it's not buildings, it's not programs, it's not music, it's not message. We are in the life changing business. Jesus has the power to change you that no body else can do. Jesus changes wife beaters into loving husbands and I've seen that happen in this church. Jesus is the power to take addicts in the street and turn them into responsible citizens. I've seen that in this church. He has the responsibility and the power to put marriages back together when there were daggers of hate going in those counseling sessions. I've seen that happen. I've seen lives turned around. I've seen selfish, arrogant, pompous businessmen and businesswomen become loving, humble, unselfish servants of God. Only God can make those kind of changes in our lives. A transforming power. I've seen people who were consumed with worry, consumed with fear, consumed with bitterness, consumed with guilt and low self esteem and depression, seen them blossom in the power of God. That's what I love about this church - this constant parade of changed life after changed life after changed life. In the last six years, people have been baptized here at Lighthouse and every one of them are standup presentations saying, "I am a changed life. I'm not perfect. I don't have it all together. But now my feet are in the right direction. Thank God I'm not what I used to be."

If you have never been baptized you need to be and say to the world, "I will never be the same again. I'm stepping across the line publicly." Say to the world, "I am not going back and to prove that I'm not going back I'm making a public declaration of my faith because I'm grateful for the changes He's making in my life."

How do you give thanks to God? If you'd come to mid week service you'd know. FOUR WAYS TO SAY THANKS TO GOD.

This power of thanksgiving is amazing. There's miracle-working power in the power of praise and thanksgiving. There's a great story in Acts 16 where Paul and Silas had been out talking about the Lord and they were thrown in prison in Philippi. They're in this dark, dank dungeon of a jail and in the middle of the night, at midnight, they decided to start thanking God in their circumstance. They start singing and praising God and God does a miracle. He sends an earthquake the earthquake is so powerful that it rattles all the jail doors loose. It's the original Jailhouse Rock. The jailer goes, "I'm going to kill myself because all the prisoners are loose now and they'll kill me." Paul says, "No, we're all here." The jailer says, "What kind of prisoners are you?" "Christians," Paul says. So the jailer takes Paul and Silas to his home and they pray and they bind up their wounds with bandages and Paul tells them about Christ and that night the jailer's whole family accepts the Lord and are all baptized that night. The prison doors were unlocked when they began to praise and thank God.

What prison are you in this morning? An emotional prison? A financial prison? A relational prison? Are you locked up with guilt? Are you locked up with worry? Are you locked up with discouragement and disappointment? Are you locked up in a habit that you can't break loose from? Conflict? Whatever it is, start thanking God. And watch the prison doors open wide.

The attitude of gratitude can do a miracle in your life. It releases the power of God when we thank Him, when we praise Him. Today, instead of complaining about your problems, start counting your blessings. Instead of looking at what you've lost, start looking at all you have left. Say today, "Dear Jesus Christ, I am so grateful for the grace that You've shown me, for the plan that You have for me, for the home that You've prepared in heaven, and for the changes You're making in me. Help me to show my gratitude by singing, and serving and giving and telling others. In Jesus' name. Amen."