This week we’re exploring how following Jesus impacts our lifestyle by one principle: grace.  Grace is one of the most important, life-changing aspects of Christian story.  Here’s how the Bible talks about grace:

But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved—and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.

(Ephesians 2:4-10 ESV)

Here is an easy way to remember the meaning:

God’s
Riches
At
Christ’s
Expense

A friend had a young child at home, and a baby on the way and his mother loved to help out by cleaning up the house.  One particularly stressful time she was coming down to decompress the situation by cleaning up the house.  My friend came home that day to find his wife madly cleaning up the house, before the mother in law arrived.  She didn’t want her mother-in-law to see a messy house, even though she was there to clean it as a gift.

We so often we think that we have to have cleaned up our lives before we can accept what God wants to give us.   We don’t have to have sorted ourselves out before we can accept God’s free gift of forgiveness, his grace.

When you ask someone why they don’t like Christianity…you’ll often hear “it’s just a bunch of rules.”  I don’t need a book to tell me how to be a good person.  If that was true, I wouldn’t want to be part of this religion either.

But it’s not true…that’s the religion that Jesus came to get rid of, and not his hope for us.  Here’s the version of Christianity that people are usually describing:

  1. Obey God’s laws
  2. God will accept you
  3. He’ll provide you with loving care
  4. He’ll give you a new status, as a servant of God.

 

This is a law religion, the kind of thing the Pharisees liked to promote.  Jesus didn’t have very nice things to say about that!

The problem is – no one has ever obeyed God’s laws perfectly enough to earn God’s love.  Actually, there was one person – Jesus.  He knew our hopeless situation, and did something about it.  Jesus was all about grace.  This involves the same steps, but in a different order:

  1. God loves and accepts you…unconditionally
  2. God will provide you with loving care.  He wants to be part of your life today, not some day in the future.
  3. God will give you a new status: Child of God adopted into his family
  4. You now return God’s favour with thanksgiving and living in his way.

In grace…we are given God’s love, care and fatherhood as free gifts, even before having proven ourselves worthy, and that gives us a lot to live up to!

Question: Where have you typically seen laws and rules in your faith?  As the way to earn God’s love, or respond to it?  Why?

Reminder:  Last week we talked about worship, and asked you to complete our online survey about worship here: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/8TS7K93

Reminder: Earlier in this series, we saw the importance of reading the Bible together in sync, so our new daily bible readings start today in our mobile app and web site.

Read the Bible in Sync Today

Ryan Sim - January 27, 2014

Monday - A New Idea - Reset Time

Reset

We’re recently started a new series called “reset”. In the first week, we talked about how Jesus makes it possible to reset all of life, giving us a fresh start in life that impacts every key area. We’re going to look at many of these in depth, and this week we see how Jesus resets our use of time. There was a time in my life when I prided myself on never needing a day planner. I remembered everything I signed up for, and never double booked. That was high school. Ever since, I’ve found my time needed to be managed. Through university, I started to rely on a day planner, an old fashioned spiral bound book. I got progressively busier, but could still say yes to pretty much anything I wanted. I would stay up all night getting things done if I needed to. I was young. By the time I started working, I had to start making choices. I can only be in one meeting, one event, or one place at a time. When I first pastored a church, I was still working as a paramedic on the side, until I finally realized I simply didn’t have the time to do both things well. And still today, I find myself constantly choosing between demands on my time. It’s only escalated since having children. I can go on. You probably can, too. Bottom line, unless we’re still kids, time is all about choices. It’s a limited resource – we can’t create it, we can only choose how to use it. The Future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is. ~C.S. Lewis But what if you could reset your clock? That used to be easy – whenever I’ve started a new job, I feel like it’s a chance to structure my time differently, within the constraints of set tasks, family and personal responsibilities. But even then, it’s never clear what’s best. Read one thing that says “say yes to every invitation, you never know who you’ll meet” but then I’ll read something else that says I should learn to say “no” to more invitations to protect my sanity and family. Which is it? With an extra hour, I don’t know whether I should work more, play with my kids, read the Bible, exercise, fix things around the house, or what. Someone will advocate that each one is most important. Time marches on. Closely connected with goals, last week’s topic. Question: What would you do with an extra hour in the day? Why? What would be your goal?

From Series: "Reset"

When our computers get bogged down and unmanageable, we know to hit a reset button to simply start over. Wouldn't a reset button be great in life? We know it would be complicated, with all our responsibilities and routines to consider, but imagine the freedom and refreshment of a new start in life! What would you do differently? What would you pay more attention to, and what would you ignore? How would you avoid getting bogged down and broken again? The great news is, in coming to earth as Jesus Christ, God has begun to "reset" our universe, our world, and even us. We're invited to start over with him, in what he calls his kingdom. We're invited to start a new life with a clean slate. What gets wiped clean, and lived differently, when God resets our lives? We'll explore how God resets these key areas of our lives: Reset: Goals Reset: Time Reset: Money Reset: Work Reset: Body & Food Reset: Sex & Marriage Reset: Family Reset: Compassion Reset: Nature Reset: Society Reset: Death Join us for the next several weeks, and invite God to reset your life.

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