Grace Blog

We had the priviledge of hearing from guest preacher Matthew Maka on the topic, The Gospel and Parenting from Luke chapter 6. You can listen to the sermon below or even download it from this post as well.

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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 difficult- maybe the hardest task any of us will ever engage in. No step-by-step manual. No diagrams. No warnings for upcoming challenges. No way to gauge our progress. No crystal ball to tell us the future. If you're like me then you are often far more aware of your failures as a parent than you are of any grace for parenting. Sometimes we are left wondering how God can work in our children's lives when our efforts seem so ineffective. Below is some rich encouragement from the book "Give Them Grace" (Fitzpatrick & Thompson) that reminds us God is not limited even by our errors in parenting:

The disciples couldn't hinder the children from coming to him even though they tried.

When God calls our children to come to him, even if we haven't gotten it all right, even if we've trained little Pharisees or have a house full of prodigals, nothing is impossible for him. He can break through all our flawed methods and redeem all our frail errors.

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Like I promised Sunday, here is a message to listen to detailing why the Gospel is for Christians and how to think about the Gospel more fully. Mike Bullmore has been extremely instrumental for many Christians so they can walk in and enjoy the ongoing grace that came to us, through Christ's sacrifice. I am not sure I could find a more helpful "ground floor" resource for you to listen to, in order to grasp these important truths.

 
The Functional Centrality of The Gospel in The Life of The Local Church | Mike Bullmore

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Merritt Anderson is a friend that I admire and respect - he has spoken extensively about living in the gospel every day. But I still struggle to understand how to practically live every day in my belief of the good news of Jesus dying in my place, for my sin, and granting eternal life. I understand that because of my belief in the gospel, one day heaven, and not hell will be my home. But all of that is in the future—or is it? Maybe that is the source of my struggle. Maybe the good news of the gospel is as much for the present as the future?

I took a couple of days off this week to go turkey hunting with my dad and my son. Sitting in the woods gives me a lot of time to read my Bible and think. I struggle to realize I was moved from one Kingdom to another—from Satan to Christ, from death to life, upon believing in Christ to be my only savior. I know with my head that I was placed into Christ and sealed by the Holy Spirit for the day when my redemption will be made complete. But I forget that my redemption has already begun. I am already in Christ and I am already in Christ’s kingdom. Eternal life has already begun! So, yes, the good news is both for now and the future! Yet, while this good news is unrealized in my physical body, I must take it by faith. Perhaps that is why over and over the Apostles kept reminding us that the “justified ones must continue to live by faith” (Rom.1:17; Gal. 2:20; Col.2:6; Heb. 11:6). I reread The Revelation To John to remind me of my future hope—although it may have distracted me from a successful hunt, it encouraged me to live by faith in the gospel until then!

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.

While the analogy between our forgiveness and God’s is far from exact, there seems to be a connection. Jesus taught his disciples to pray and ask for forgiveness from their sin 'as they forgive those who sin against them' in Matthew 6. And in Matthew 18 the servant didn’t make the connection between the King’s pardon of his great debt and his refusal to pardon a very small debt in comparison.

We are to forgive others not because it is best for a society (which it is), not because it is better for our own mental state (which it is), not because it will release our desire for vengeance (which it does), but simply because God has forgiven us. Our forgiveness of others is rooted in the gospel and it illustrates the gospel—God forgives the sin debt of those who ask to be forgiven! When we fail to forgive those who sin against us, we fail to preach the gospel—either because we really do not understand the gospel or we have forgotten the gospel. We certainly don’t understand how great of a debt we have been forgiven or we have simply forgotten the enormity of our sin debt. How well are you preaching the gospel? What is the extent of your forgiveness?

I am in a reading group that is wading through a deep but fascinating book called The Nature and Destiny of Man by Reinhold Niebuhr. Among the many things he is observing in the significant writers throughout human history is how man views himself. He observes that man’s continued inability to recognize that he is morally broken and not virtuous has caused him to be overly optimistic in his ability to be personally or socially just.

I wholeheartedly concur with Reinhold Niebuhr. However, I also have observed that most men recognize that people in general and institutions in particular are broken; some recognize that they are personally broken, but almost no one recognizes that they are personally liable for their own brokenness. Since someone else is to blame for their brokenness, they are broken, but not liable.