Grace Blog

The below post is from Justin Holcomb over at The Resurgence. The Resurgence is a church planting ministry and Justin serves as Executive Director of the Resurgence and leads the Leadership Development department and also serves a pastor at Mars Hill Church. 

There was a woman named Kathy who swiped credit cards in a cafeteria at the University of Virginia, where I used to teach. Everyone who ate there knew her, because she emanated enough kindness to cheer up even the most discouraged students. She had a Facebook fan group with over 1400 fans, and people would go to the cafeteria just to hear her comforting words. She always delivered.

Kathy was a hit because she tapped into the human need for a comforting word. People feel tired, ugly, stupid, and unwanted, and they want to hear something different than what they think about themselves or are told by others or culture.

Parenting is hard. The details of daily life with children can quickly become overwhelming, for even the most organized parents. Meals, school projects, and sports practices keep us running around and keep us wondering if we will ever get a break. In all of our running around and busyness are we just checking off tasks or are we giving our kids grace as they live life alongside us?

The Bible has a lot to say about how we parent and what's to be front and center in our parenting. The Bible help us to prioritize what's most important as we parent our children. The Bible even tells us what's to be the centerpiece of our parenting.

Join us as we look at what the Bible has to say about our roles as parents. Hear how the good news of Jesus is central to the way that we teach and train our children. Explore some ways that we can use the gospel as we engage with our children on a daily basis.

Mondays are my day off and I often enjoy long walks in the woods with my dog and reading or memorizing some texts from my Bible. Yesterday, I found an old chair that had been washed down stream. So I cleaned it off, sat down, listened to the babbling brook, watched a young Bald Eagle and read the entire book of 1 Corinthians—it was near heaven!

What struck me on this reading was that God chose to start with their lack of unity and obvious divisions inside of the church—in fact he returns to it in various ways throughout the entire book. The question I kept asking myself is out of all the issues they were having, why did God start with the issue of divisions in the church?

One of my initial thoughts is that it must illustrate their lack of understanding of grace. If they understood God’s undeserved gift of grace to them in Christ, then why weren’t they following Christ rather than human leaders and why wouldn’t they extend the same undeserved grace to their brothers and sisters in Christ? The answer can only be that they did not understand and or live by grace. A church functioning without grace is in a very bad place.

As we start our long series in 1 Corinthians please pray that God would open our eyes to see the connections between the grace given to us by God, in Christ Jesus and the practical effects of that grace that is operating in our lives in the person of Jesus. Through faith in His work done for us on the cross, I pray that many would believe the good news of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection—the Gospel and experience the joy of having their sin’s forgiven. I pray that we would understand how this good news—Jesus, not only saves us from condemnation but how Jesus continues to be an effective work of God’s grace in our lives.

I have called this series Lessons on Grace from a Dysfunctional Church because God wants us to understand from this letter that it is His grace—God’s unmerited favor on us who deserve only His wrath, that saved the Corinthians. I want us to see that it is God’s grace that will keep these Corinthians (1 Cor. 1:7-8) strong to the end and even blameless on the day that our Lord Jesus Christ is revealed—in spite of some severe sin and dysfunction. I want us to see that through faith in the Gospel, the same grace of God is effective in us through Christ Jesus and that grace will keep us until Jesus is revealed—in spite of sin and severe dysfunction in our lives.

One of the things I have discovered about myself is that I am a very poor putter on the golf course. However, I have found out that I almost always do better when I hit a putt for the second time. Although it doesn’t count, I need to prove to myself that I can do better. Unfortunately, we do not always get a “do over” or a “second time” with man.

But fortunately, God often redeems our failures and provides grace for a “second time.” Many of us have found God to be gracious—not holding our initial rebellion against us, but calling us a “second time” to walk in obedience to his calling. Maybe the word of the LORD is coming to you a second time? “For he is our God, and we are the people of his pasture and the sheep of his hand. Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts…” (Psalm 95:7-8).