There’s a connection between praise and power.

Steve Brown:
There’s a connection between praise and power. Let’s talk about it on Key Life.

Matthew Porter:
Key Life exists to communicate that the deepest message of Jesus and the Bible is the radical grace of God to sinners and sufferers, because life’s hard for everyone, grace is for all of us. Our host is seminary professor and author, Steve Brown.

Steve Brown:
Thank you Matthew. I hope you guys had a great weekend and I hope your pastor’s sermon was as good as my pastor’s sermon. We are, if you’re just joining us involved in a study of a Biblical book and the name of the book is Galatians. And it is a good news book. Some of these series that I do on Key Life are just no fun. Can we talk? I mean, they can ruin your day if you listen to them, but not Galatians. Galatians is a fun book. It talks about our freedom, about God’s grace, about the imputation of the righteousness of Christ to our account, about how we can be sure that we’re going to get home before the dark. And that’s good news. Of course, there’s some bad news, because Paul is dealing with turkeys and they started right and went in the wrong direction and move back to the prison where they were before Jesus found them. And so throughout this book of Galatians, Paul is admonishing, he’s reaching out, he’s correcting and he’s doing it with good news. The good news of the gospel of Jesus Christ. If you have, I’ve been with us, you know, that we’re up to the fourth chapter of this book. And we’re looking at the first 11 verses of the fourth chapter. If you have a Bible and you’re in a place where you can do it, or you have a phone or an iPad or whatever, turn to Galatians, and we’ll be referring to that as we go along. It’s our practice on Mondays to pray before we preach. Well, it’s not exactly preaching, but study. Let’s do that. Father as we come into your presence, we come as always a little bit nervous. After all you’re God and you’re big and we’re little, you’re pure and we’re not, you’re sovereign and we don’t control hardly anything. You know, everything, even the secrets we’ve hidden from everybody else. And so, and so when we come into your presence at the beginning, we’re a little bit nervous until you say, welcome child. And you’ve always said that and we praise you and thank you for it. Father, you know the people who are listening to this broadcast and some are going through really dark times. Father, we don’t understand those times or why we’re there or why it hurts so much, but we know that you’re good, that you’re God, that you’re in charge and you’re all of those things all of the time. And so in the middle of the darkness, we praise you, because you are the light. And Father, some of us are doing fine, just fine. The laughter comes easily, the joy that we feel, the things that are working out, Father you’re the God of that too. And so we’re yours and we praise you for both. And then father is always, we pray for the one who teaches on this broadcast, forgive him his sins, because there are many, we would see Jesus and him only. And we pray in Jesus name. Amen. Alright, I’m going to start reading at the first verse of the fourth chapter of the book of Galatians, where my friend Paul says this.

I mean that the heir, as long as he is a child, is no better than a slave, though he is the owner, the owner of all the estate, but he is under guardians and trustees until the date set by the father. So with us, when we were children, we were slaves to the elemental spirits of the universe. But when the time had fully come, God sent forth his son, born of a woman, born under the law law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons. And because you are sons, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying “Abba! Father!”. So through God you are no longer a slave, but a son,

Parenthetically and a daughter.

and if a son or a daughter, then an heir. Formerly, when you did not know God, you were in bondage to beings that by nature are no gods. But now that you have come to know God, or rather be known by God, how can you turn back again to the weak and beggarly elemental spirits, whose slaves you want to be once more? You observe days and months and seasons and years! I’m afraid that I have labored over you in vain.

You know what we’d been doing yesterday on the day when we’re recording this, yesterday, Zach and I sat down here in the studio and we began to record a series and I have no idea when it’s going to be, when it’s going to be aired, we’re going to kind of put it in the vault. And when either I drool or die or Zach decides he doesn’t want to do it anymore, we’ll bring it out of the vault, and air it, but it’s from the Born Free Seminar that I wrote and we taught years ago all over the country and a lot of different venues and it opens with 12 common prisons where Christians find themselves. And as we talked about that yesterday. We talked about how those prisons are in our minds and we don’t have to live there anymore. And then this subject came up. Why do we stay there? Why do we go there? Because there is a proclivity on the part of those of us who were believers. To reject the good news, except the bad news. And to run back into the prison from which Jesus came and got us out. Is that weird? Or what? Why, why do you do that? Why do I do that? When Martin Luther said to the people, we got to preach the gospel to each other or we’ll become discouraged. What he was saying is there something in the DNA of human beings and it likes rules and obligations and bad news and bad stuff. Because that’s religious and that’s what religious people are into. It’s a lie. It’s from the pit of hell and it smells like smoke, but we all do it. Me too. And so I thought I have, and I’ve got a wonderful staff around this place. I mean, everybody gets it and we preach the gospel to each other all the time. And you need to find somebody to do that. Because as Paul says, and that’s kind of a side observation to what we’re going to see, Paul says, why do you go back to the prison? Are you crazy? Or what? Well, he says the same thing to us. And every time you go back to that person, you go on a guilt trip. You feel like you want to jump off a bridge, everything is dark and you feel like you deserve it. Stop it, and find somebody who will tell you the truth, that we have a great savior and we’re great sinners. And we’re covered. That is so good. Well, let me kind of introduce what we’re going to be talking about the rest of this week and probably into next week, depending on how verbose I get. As we go through this material, we’re going to, we’re going to do something that doesn’t sound like fun. We’re going to praise God. We’re going to brag on the Father. You know, there’s a connection between praise and power. We never think there is, but just this morning I was miserable. Generally. I’m happy in the morning cause I haven’t missed anything up. But this morning we’ve got a hurricane as I’m recording this, moving in our direction and we’re going to get a lot of rain and wind and it’s just going to be awful. And I was miserable and down and I went to my regular prayers and I said, God, I don’t like this at all, but you’re still God. And I’m glad for you. And then I started praising him, and you know what happened, a whole change in my attitude and things have looked better ever since. Why is that? Because I bragged on the Father. Cause I had a season of praise. So that’s what we’re going to do from this chapter in Galatians. We’re going to see how Paul and frankly he wasn’t that happy and he was going through some really rough stuff. How he praises God. And what he says about God. And when we finish this, you’ll be better for it. Don’t thank me. You think about that. Amen.

Matthew Porter:
Thanks Steve. That was Steve Brown, resuming our exploration of the book of Galatians today, turning the corner to get into chapter four and touching on the relationship between power and praise. More good stuff to dig into here. And we will do exactly that at this time tomorrow. Hope you’ll join us then. Now, if I may, I’d like to address our male listeners for a moment. Were you born to be a King? Can you be trusted with real power? Well, those are the weighty questions that we considered as we chatted with speaker and author Morgan Snyder on a recent episode of Steve Brown Etc. If you’re a man trying to better understand the role God has designed for you, I think you’d really enjoy hearing it. We’ve now put the entire show on a CD that we’d love to send you today for free. Get yours right now by calling 1-800-KEY-LIFE. That’s 1-800-539-5433. You can also email your request to [email protected]. By mail, write us at

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