Grace in 35 minutes!

Earlier this Spring, a pastor friend in California was doing a series on experiencing God and asked if I would take the message on grace. I was delighted to do so, but the challenge was I had to summarize the grace of God in 35 minutes! Yikes! After pondering this for quite some time, I decided that we would look at three major acts of God's grace and what the implications are of each one for us. Now I had three acts of grace and twenty implications to cover in 35 minutes!

Now you have the road map for the next few weeks...so let's start with just listing the three acts of God's grace that we are going to cover and then in coming blogs we will describe each of these and then look at the implications in our lives. These are radical and life-changing truths -so keep following.

What are the three acts of God's grace that we will unpack? The first is this - that He has imputed His righteousness to us. Hmmm - we'll make this a lot more interesting than it sounds. The second is that He not only views us differently (a slight hint about imputed righteousness), but He has also made us different...He has actually implanted His righteousness in us. The implications of this are key to getting off the treadmill of a performance-based faith. The third act of grace toward us that we will explore is that He adopted us.

In I Cor 15:10 the apostle Paul says, "But by the grace of God I am what I am." In verse 9 he describes himself as a wicked, evil person, killing and persecuting the followers of Jesus. A person to be feared and avoided. But in verse 10 he says, "I am not like that anymore...everything that is now right about me - it is a result of God's grace."

Starting with the next blog, we will look at these three acts of grace and the "rightness" they create in us.