Grace - #34

Summary:

Most Christians feel like God gives grace to them mainly when they are in trouble. In truth, grace is always available to us, but it doesn’t always come in just to bail us out of negative circumstances. The true purpose of grace is to help grow us into mature sons and daughters of God.

 

Show Notes:

• Grace is there for you. It’s there in every situation in your life, whether you are going through a bad situation, or if you are going through some very good times.

• Most Christians have the concept that grace is for our hard times, to make things better. What about the times He shows you grace by seemingly making your situation worse? That’s what Paul experienced when Jesus struck him with blindness on the road. God used Paul’s blindness to change him from being a law man into the greatest proponent of grace in all the Bible.

• To makes things worse, God gave Paul a thorn in the flesh to buffet him, and help him not to get proud because of all that God had shown him. Believe it or not, that’s real grace.

• If you are being taught a mixture of law and grace, you aren’t being taught grace at all. Law and grace are like oil and water. They don’t mix.

• If God had fixed Paul’s problem right away, we might never have had the depth of message on grace that we now have, or the relationship with God that is available to us.

 

Quotes:

• For those who have never actually experienced grace personally, it’s an easy word to define. But for those of us who have received a lot of it, we’re still looking for the words that can adequately explain it to someone else.

• Which is the greatest manifestation of grace? The guy who prays and gets healed immediately, or the guy who is like Paul, who prayed three times and went through, maybe for the rest of his life, and never got healed or fixed from his problem, but endured and experienced a deeper level of relationship with the Father, which showed him another side of God.

 

References:

2 Corinthians 12:1-10

 

Takeaways:

Grace, in spite of what most Christians feel that it is, can be the most transformative thing that God could ever do with you. It can become a profound treasure of a deep relationship with the Father, brought on only by Him taking us through things that take out the impurities in our nature, so that He can use us as we have been destined to be used by Him. When Grace has produced it’s fruit, the power, favor and presence of God will be able to come through in its fullness. Let’s all open up to the Grace of God, as Paul did.