Grace Breakthrough: Exploding the Lies that Wound Your Confidence and Joy

By Bill Giovannetti

The Fall put scar tissue over our hearts. It reversed our polarities. It inflicted the human race with the most deadly malady in the world of mankind: Grace Deficit Disorder. 
The only way grace gets through is by breaking through. 
Grace must pierce the scar tissue. It must explode the lies. It has to punch the devil in th

• Language: English
• Publisher: Endurant Press
• Release date: Oct 16, 2016
• ISBN: 9780983681274

Bill Giovannetti

Dr. Bill Giovannetti serves as Senior Pastor of Neighborhood Church in northern California and teaches at A.W. Tower Theological Seminary. A popular speaker and author, this is Bill's 5th book.

Book preview

Introduction

The ultimate test of our spirituality is the measure of our amazement at the grace of God. ~ D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones

But none of these things move me; nor do I count my life dear to myself, so that I may finish my race with joy, and the ministry which I received from the Lord Jesus, to testify to the gospel of the grace of God. (Acts 20:24)

The Mother of All the Devil’s Lies:

God is less than he says he is.

It was a dark and stormy night.

A Wednesday night, to be exact. I had finished teaching a Bible class at my church, and people were filtering out to head home. One newcomer left the building and returned a few minutes later. Raindrops speckled his shoulders and glasses.

My battery died, he said. Anybody have cables?

Sure, I said. I figured it would be a good way to get to know the new guy. I followed him into the steady drizzle, glad that my jacket had a hood.

I pulled my car next to his, fished out my cables, and handed them over. While he hooked up to his dead battery, I opened my hood. Cold rain splatted our backs and thunder rumbled in the distance. A few dim parking lot lights punctuated the darkness.

Not much chatting happened. We just wanted to be done. New Guy handed me the rain-slickened cables.

Before I attached them, I double-checked: Red to positive, right?

Yes, red to positive.

Seconds later, a sizzle, snap, spark, blinding flash, and near hygienic indiscretion on my end told me one of us was wrong.

I took a deep breath and checked his set-up. He’d attached his cables red to negative.

Yep.

We were reverse polarized.

The Fall

So is the human heart. The Fall—that dark day when the world plunged into sin—reversed our polarities. It inverted our instincts. It wrecked our thoughts about God.

The message of grace crackles and sparks when it touches our innately legalistic spirit.

The Fall made grace feel like a lie, like a big joke on unsuspecting sinners. Too easy. Too good to be true. Too costly to be free.

Grace does not compute.

We might say it does. We might speak of it, sing of it, write of it, and feel goose-bumps over it, but there’s little amazement left. On our bad days, the devil has a field-day convincing us that God is less than he says he is. He’s less loving, less faithful, less forgiving, and less fatherly.

It’s just grace—a song lyric, a passing emotion, a spiritual-sounding word to say when we don’t know what to say.

It’s just a bland niceness on the part of God. A wink and a nod at the bad people. Moral laxity. God, the Heavenly, cookie-dispensing, owie-soothing, hand-patting Grandmother.

Or God the Big Meanie in the sky who grudgingly doles out smidgens of grace on the well-deserving.

In either case, we have made God less than he is, and by so doing, have embraced the mother of all the devil’s lies.

We’ve too often demoted grace to anything but the tough, exacting, profound, complex, interlocking web of ultimate truths that give meaning and depth to our existence. We’ve squeezed it out of its lofty position as the guiding star of all our thoughts about God.

We’ve lost the wonder of grace.

How did this happen?

The Lies

It happened because we’ve swallowed a lie.

The devil is a liar, Jesus said. He’s the father of the whole world’s lying operation (John 8:44).

Truth is reality. Truth is reality as God experiences it, and God reveals it.

Lies are unreality.

Anything in line with God’s reality is truth.

Anything out of line is a falsehood or a lie.

The devil specializes in unreality.

This is a book about the devil’s lies, especially his lies against grace.

Because of the Fall, we are natural born suckers for these lies. The Fall put scar tissue over our hearts. It reversed our polarities. It inflicted the human race with the most deadly malady in the world of mankind: Grace Deficit Disorder.

Grace Deficit Disorder leads its sufferers down the pretty little path of joy-killing, self-hating, God-slandering unreality. It infects the soul’s operating system. It installs the doctrines of demons into the software (1 Timothy 4:1). It blinds the eyes and clouds the mind.

The devil hacks the soul with lies, especially about who God is, and about who you are.

And, because the devil is so subtle, you don’t even know its happening. The lies have been installed, and now you’ve swallowed the ultimate lie, the one that makes God less than he is.

You’ve embraced the lie that makes grace not grace.

The only way grace gets through is by breaking through.

Grace must explode the lies. It must pierce the scar tissue. It has to punch the devil in the gut and penetrate the dark and stormy night of the soul with the bright light of Calvary Love.

Only this trauma of grace has the power to correct the backwards polarity of the fallen human heart.

Only an encounter with the realities of grace can purge the system of the unrealities of legalism.

A grace breakthrough is the desperate need of every Christian. It is the desperate need of the Church. It is the pressing and urgent need of the world. This recovery of grace—true, deep, scandalous, utterly free grace—is the precursor to revival, and the only hope of a world gone mad.

And, in an irony that has the devil laughing up his crisply-pressed sleeve, it is the one thing our hearts resist most.

Welcome to the journey you need most and want least.

The Spirit’s Sword

For the word of God is living and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the division of soul and spirit, and of joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart. (Hebrews 4:12)

The Word of God is the Spirit’s sword to slice and dice the devil’s lies. When you expose yourself to Scripture’s truth, the Spirit of God wields his trusty sword to slice through the thickest callous on the hardest heart.

The Word is the tip of your grace breakthrough’s spear. It is your ultimate reality check.

Please do not read this book with the thought that you will muscle-up your own grace breakthrough. You’d have an easier time doing cartwheels on the surface of the sun. It requires the supernatural agency of the Holy Spirit coupled with the supernatural instrument of the Word of God to cut through the legalism that smothers your joy.

Your grace breakthrough is God’s work, God’s responsibility, and God’s burden alone. God’s job is to do all the work. Your job is to hear the truth and believe it. Your job is the faith to put yourself in a position to grow deeper in God’s grace and truth (2 Peter 3:18). God’s job is the breakthrough that happens to you as the result.

At the end of the day, grace makes its own way. Only grace can make grace break through.

God is eager for this. Eager for you. He is the ideal Dad cheering you on.

God is better than you think he is. He’s infinitely better than what that old, ugly, beautiful, subtle, lying serpent tells you he is.

It’s time to shed your distorted perceptions of God. It’s time to exit the land of unreality. It’s time to escape to reality. It’s time to rest from your labors. It’s time to heal the fearsome wounds of Grace Deficit Disorder.

So brew up some coffee—or tea if you’re extra fussy—or pour yourself a nice cup of wine. Put your feet up. Open your heart. And expose your mind to nine grace breakthroughs in Scripture. I pray that God will bring you to that golden moment when you’re tapped into his still-amazing grace, and you’ve actually got red to positive.

Prayer

Gracious Father,

Bring me to a place where your grace so fills my horizon that the devil’s death-dealing lies are all crowded out. Teach me to believe that you are who you say you are—that you are immeasurably better to me than I can ask or think. Break through whatever lies I believe about you. Pierce the dark night of my soul with the dawn of Calvary’s love. Open my eyes to see never-failing streams of abundant grace all around. And create in me the confidence of a firstborn child of a Great King.

Through Christ, the fountain of all grace, I pray,

Amen

One

The Grace Breakthrough

But even if our gospel is veiled, it is veiled to those who are perishing, whose minds the god of this age has blinded, who do not believe, lest the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God, should shine on them. (2 Corinthians 4:3,4)

Amazing grace! How sweet the sound, / That saved a wretch like me! / I once was lost but now am found, / Was blind but now I see. ~John Newton, 1700s

Big Lie #1: I’ve got GRACE all figured out.

It’s just a word… GRACE. A simple word. A common word. Everybody says it. Every religion claims it. The most widely sung lyric in all the world exalts it: Amazing Grace.

The Bible says,

For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though He was rich, yet for your sakes He became poor, that you through His poverty might become rich. (2 Corinthians 8:9)

If you know Christ, you are, by definition, rich. This verse says so. Which leads to what might be the most common problem among Christians today: Most of God’s children limp beneath their true riches in grace.

Grace makes every child of God rich in blessings money can’t buy.

It’s time to start believing that. It’s time to start feeling that too.

Grace theology needs to become grace psychology. That’s one of Scripture’s big ideas. More than a doctrine. More than mental assent. More than a passing emotion. Grace can become a deeply-rooted, Scripture-based, trouble-hardened instinctive way of taking on every day by the power and love of God.

What’s in a Word?

A word is a place-holder for an idea.

I’m from Chicago, the pizza capital of the galaxy.

If I say the word pizza, certain ideas come into your mind. Certain images. Certain smells and tastes and memories. Those ideas fire off a memo to your salivary glands, and soon you’re drooling. I would bet that what comes into my mind with the word pizza is a whole lot different than what comes into your mind.

An old time pastor named A.W. Tozer once said, "What comes into your mind when you hear the word God is the most important thing about you."

He was saying that a word is a place-holder for an idea, a reality, a truth, a concept, a person. He was saying your thoughts about God define you.

Tozer was right.

I would add that, "What comes into your mind when you hear the word grace is the second most important thing about you."

I’m on a mission to help make sure that what comes into people’s minds when they hear the word grace is supremely biblical and utterly exalted.

I pray that your idea of grace matches the Bible’s idea of grace. God’s idea of grace. The exact meaning of the word grace should be crystal clear to every child of God.

Let’s launch an awakening around the country and around the world in our generation.

It’s time to explode the lies that wound your confidence and kill your joy. The lie that you’ve got grace all figured out.

It’s time to shake off the shackles of other people’s rules.

It’s time to break free from dark forces that hold your life in depression, discouragement, disillusionment, guilt, shame, and defeat.

It’s time to smash into a gooey mess the forces that stink up our testimony and make unbelieving friends completely disinterested in our gospel.

And it’s time for you and me and all of us to step into the sunny highlands of the glittering, glorious grace of Almighty God.

You are ready for this.

Grace Breakthrough

I’ve used the word breakthrough on purpose. Our inbred legalism calls for nothing less than a traumatic encounter with a force beyond our understanding. Only a breakthrough can challenge a person’s status quo. Legalism is the ultimate blind spot, and it wrecks our joy and our walk with God.

Nobody in the Bible ever understood grace without a breakthrough. They needed a smack upside the head, or a kick in the seat of the pants.

Grace is traumatic. Grace is a crisis. It’s a total reversal of everything you thought you knew about about God.

It’s the opposite of everything you’re sure about.

There’s a simple reason why we all need a Grace Breakthrough: The unrenewed heart is terminally infected with a built-in resistance to the grace of God.

We’re naturally blind to it. Hardened against it.

…[H]aving their understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God, because of the ignorance that is in them, because of the blindness [callous] of their heart. (Ephesians 4:18)

By nature, people are blind to grace. There’s a grace-blackout in the soul.

My wife, Margi was talking with an old friend a little while ago. He said, I’m reading one of Bill’s books on legalism and grace, but it really doesn’t apply to me. He said, "I didn’t come