grace

Grace

/ Neal Embry / Leave a comment

Ironically, “Grace Greater Than All Our Sin” is playing on Spotify as I begin typing this post. Funny how that works.

I’ve been praying lately that God would keep me from just thinking about Him in the abstract.  That the doctrines of salvation and the knowledge of His grace wouldn’t just be something I “understand” in my head, but a very real reality that I rejoice in in my heart.  Theoretical grace doesn’t save anybody.  Understanding the sacrifice of Christ doesn’t mean it’s applied to my heart.  I’m a real sinner with real sins who needs a real Savior and real forgiveness.  Because before I’m a seminary student or a budding theologian, I’m a sinner saved by grace, and a sinner that must live every day trusting in the grace of God to sustain me and keep me in Him.

Do we even understand what grace is?  The downside to talking about it so much is that we lose it’s meaning and significance.  It’s the same thing with the word “saved,” which may be the topic of my next post.  We hear the preacher say “God is gracious,” and go, “Well, yeah, of course He is…duh.”  God, grant us the grace to not be callous to your truth.

Grace: undeserved favor.  Being accepted, declared right with God, forgiven and loved, not because you have done a single thing to deserve it, but because God is gracious enough to send Jesus in your place, and mine.  Even though we deserve nothing from God but wrath and condemnation, in Christ, we are given everything.

But before we get into God’s saving grace, it’s good to look at common grace:

  • You are alive if you’re reading this.  That means that God gave you a mom and a dad, and sovereignly brought you into this world.  He put air into your lungs and gave you a body that’s capable of doing wonderful things.  Being alive is a gift.
  • Love.  Not just His love, but the love of others.  I have a loving mother, grandparents, a dad who I’ve been able to reconnect with by the grace of God, and a whole host of other family members that love and support me.  I have a beautiful, wonderful girlfriend that I don’t deserve, and a group of friends who are truly a gift from God.  I haven’t done a single thing to deserve that.
  • Many of you live in America (or maybe another first-world country).  While the hashtag #firstworldproblems may be slightly humorous, it’s more sad and depressing.  While we complain that our water filter takes five minutes to clean, an eight year old in a third-world country struggles to walk the mile-long trek from her home to the town well, where she’ll have to hope that the water won’t make her and her family sick.  My goal in this is not to produce guilt, but to remind us how thankful we should be that God placed us where He did, and to be reminded that that’s for a reason: Help others.  If you are blessed, it is for the sake of others.  It’s not because you (or I) deserve it.
  • A job.  You may not like what you do, but if you have a job, God has shown grace to you.  And especially if you love what you do.  You’re getting paid to do something you’d do even if you didn’t get paid! That’s grace!

Any and every good thing we have in our lives is a result of grace.  You have earned nothing.  Even what you “earned” was gained because God was gracious enough to cause you to have life, to give you gifts and abilities, to allow you to hold a job.  This doesn’t mean you aren’t intelligent or capable, but that your intelligence and capability comes from God, as a gift.

And that’s just common grace.  Now we embark on the lifelong journey of attempting to see how much grace God has given us in His Son, Jesus.  We have:

  • Been forgiven.  Our sins don’t stand against us.  We are forgiven because God the Son chose to come and die on a cross and effectively take away every sin.  When we confess our sins to Him, trusting His cross for our forgiveness, we’re forgiven, and reconciled to God.  We see this when we first become a Christian, but we also experience His forgiveness every day (1 John 1:9).
  • Been declared righteous.  There’s no way I can be perfect on my own, but I know I am perfect in the eyes of God because Jesus is righteous.  Every believer’s confidence for being declared righteous before God is in the obedience of Jesus Christ.  So when we fall down in sin, we fall down clothed in the righteousness of Christ, so we can get back up, trust in His salvation, and keep following Him, not to earn righteousness and acceptance, but to walk it out, to be who we already are in Christ.
  • Been made alive and placed under the Lordship, authority and care of Jesus (1 Peter 2:25).  We were dead in our sins (Eph. 2:1).  But God graciously opened our eyes to see our depravity and our need for new life, to begin walking with the one true God.  He opened our eyes to Jesus and His work, so that we can declare Him to be Lord.  For whatever reason, we often see repentance as a door we have to pass through to “get grace.”  Is it not grace that God would, instead of condemning us for our sins and throwing us in hell, open our eyes to see that we’ve gone the wrong way, but that we can turn back and be made new?  Is it not grace that the King we have sinned against would, instead of telling us to swim to Him, would come take over our lives and reign as Lord?  Indeed, this is grace!
  • Been given the Holy Spirit.  God lives in you.  He has changed your heart, turning you against your sin, to say that God is God, and that we should trust Him and follow Him.  And He has taken up a home in your heart, and is changing you, day to day, even though we fall many times.  He convicts us of our sin and leads us back to Jesus our Savior.  When we don’t know what we should do, He gives us wisdom.  We cannot, must not, diminish the importance of the Holy Spirit.  The Holy Spirit is not an “it,” but a “he.”  He is God.
  • Been adopted into the family of God.  Honestly, this is one of the more difficult truths for me to accept.  Because when I fail, it’s almost impossible to understand that God doesn’t treat me like an employee who has to be fined and/or fired.  Rather, He treats me as a son, who He disciplines out of love for me and hatred of my sin.  God, grant us the ability to see you as Father, for in Christ, we are your children.
  • Been given an inheritance that does not fail.  You know why you shouldn’t concern yourself with building up treasure here?  Because your treasure is in heaven.  Because the eternal inheritance you have in Christ is better.  You get to be with God, see Him, rest in Him, worship Him, and see His glory revealed, fully, for all eternity.  That’s better than anything this world can provide.
  • Been given eternal life.  Christians will not just live forever, but live forever with God.
  • Been brought into the body of Christ.  Looking around at the church body on Sunday morning and recognizing that this is now my family is one of the most beautiful thoughts I’ll ever have.  It is greater to be an orphan with no family who is a Christian than a non-believer that has an enormous family. 
  • God providing for us.  Why don’t we sin against God and go get what we need however we see fit?  Because we trust God to provide for us.  This is a weapon against sin, particularly greed, lust, anger, jealousy, selfishness and lying.  We trust God to provide our needs, from salvation to breakfast.

This is not an exhaustive list.  I can’t type forever, and by now your attention span is waning.  But I urge you, Christian brothers and sisters, to see all that we have been given, and repent, rejoice, rest and worship God every moment of every day.  If you’re not a Christian, I hope the idea of common grace is clear: that God has even shown grace to you who does not know Him.  I pray you know His saving grace, that you would put your faith in Jesus and start following Him.

Lord, may we never forget grace.  May we trust in you, and may you provide everything that we need.  Thank you for grace.  Amen.

God bless,

Neal E.

Bearing One Another’s Burdens

/ Neal Embry / Leave a comment

As I type this, I’m in the safety of my dorm room, while Hurricane Sandy continues to destroy homes and claim lives across much of the East Coast.  I pray for all those in harm’s way, and ask that you would join me.  God is sovereign, and God is good.  And God is calling us to action.

I recently read through the book of Galatians, and was struck by so many things, but this passage is what is sticking out right now.  It’s Galatians 6:1-5.  Read along with me.

“Brothers, if anyone is caught in any transgression, you who are spiritual should restore him in a spirit of gentleness. Keep watch on yourself, lest you too be tempted. Bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ.  For if anyone thinks he is something, when he is nothing, he deceives himself.  But let each one test his own work, and then his reason to boast will be in himself alone and not in his neighbor.  For each will have to bear his own load.”

There’s a lot in this passage, and I hope to break it down for us in a real, tangible way.  Paul is writing this letter to a church that is struggling to understand the gospel, to understand salvation.  This church has struggled with legalism, false teachings and other sins.  Paul’s encouragement is for them to help each other out.

In verse one, Paul is telling those who see a Christian friend in sin to restore them “in a spirit of gentleness.”  This doesn’t mean that we don’t call sin what it is.  We know from God’s Word that we are to put off sin, trusting that Jesus died for all of our sin.  We know that we are to rebuke one another when necessary.  But we’re called to do this in a way that restores our brother or sister, not in a way that tears them down and makes them feel unloved.  They are never unloved.  We are to go to them and boldly tell them that they need to repent.  They need to confess their sin to Christ and believe the gospel, and through it, seek God’s grace to change.  We are to, at the same time, preach the gravity of sin and its consequences, and also the gospel of God’s grace.  The gospel doesn’t just tell us our sin is paid for and we’re “off the hook.”  The gospel makes our sin look disgusting and paid for, and makes Jesus look beautiful and worthy. 

So, share the gospel with each other, in both rebuking and encouraging.  Do not tear another brother or sister down if they have gone to the Lord for forgiveness.  If God has forgiven them through the cross, we should as well.

We’re also told to watch ourselves, that we don’t fall into temptation.  Restoration takes maturity on the part of the restorer, in that they don’t succumb to the same temptations but instead lend a helping hand to those who are weaker.

“Bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ.  For if anyone thinks he is something, when he is nothing, he deceives himself.”

How often do we bear one another’s burdens?  There’s something about this that seems crazy.  It seems weak.  We live in a society where it’s all about us.  We are extremely “me-centered.”  We don’t want to bear one another’s burdens, and we certainly don’t want anyone else to bear ours.  We can do it on our own, we say.  The truth of the gospel, however, is that we can’t do it.  We couldn’t bear our own sins, and we couldn’t make ourselves right with God.  Apart from God’s grace, we are dead in our sins.  But God comes and tells us what He’s done.  He gives us new hearts to respond to the gospel in faith, believing in His forgiveness and righteousness.  He gives us the Holy Spirit, so that we can begin to obey Him and walk with Him.  We didn’t do any of that.

So what makes us think we can walk each day without Him?  And what makes us think we can walk one day without each other?  Jesus walked each day, while He was on earth, dependent on God the Father’s will, and He actively sought Him.  We are to do the same in our relationship with God, but we’re also told to engage in sacrificial, loving, burden-bearing relationships with one another.

The law of Christ is to love one another.  That’s the new commandment He gives us, is to love one another.  This isn’t some cheesy emotion.  This is real life, everyday encouragement, teaching, correcting, rebuking, reminding, sharing amongst Christian brothers and sisters.  This is praying for each other, reading the Word together, and worshiping together.  We think we’re something, but Paul says that if we think that way, we’re nothing and we’re deceiving ourselves.

We say other people have too much baggage.  Relationships are messy, we say.  We think that we have nothing to offer others, because we’re either so far above them, or so far below them.  Over the past few years, God has shown me some of the most basic truths and lessons through the lives of small children, new believers, and people that I would have never expected to teach me.

Baggage?  Really?  We look at a young girl’s life.  She’s done things with a boyfriend that she’s ashamed of.  She’s tried to find friends in all the wrong places, her parents are angry at her, and she is struggling to find her place in the world.  And our excuse for not befriending her and showing her the love of Christ is that she has too much baggage?  Or that she’s “too far gone?” Again, read Ephesians 2.  Apart from Christ, we’re all DEAD in our sin.  It’s not a matter of being “closer” or “farther” away from God.  Apart from Christ, we are all DEAD in our sin.  How dare we presume to think that someone is too far gone from Christ.  She needs to hear that someone cares about her.  She needs to hear that we love her and want her to turn from sin and turn to Christ, not just so she can be a better person, but so she can receive true joy in knowing Christ and His love.  She does need to hear that she is in sin, but when we preach that, we must quickly preach the gospel of God’s grace in Christ Jesus and be the ministers of reconciliation, as we’re called to be in 2 Corinthians 5.

Jesus went to the outcasts of society.  He went to adulterers, tax collectors, and the sick.  Jesus understood that, yes, these people have baggage, but what they need is for someone to come carry the bags for them.  He did that.  He did that for me.  If you’re a believer, He did that for you.  He did it for that young girl.  What am I called to do in a relationship with someone who may have “baggage?”  Act like Jesus and help them carry their bags.  Help them understand God’s love for them.  Love them like Jesus does.  Help them with their problems.  Encourage them.

Can I fix it all?  No, I cannot.  Look at verses four and five.  We’re told to examine our own work, and that we’ll have to bear our own load.  What the heck, Paul?   Which one is it?  I think the difference Paul makes here is that while we are called to help each other, struggle with each other, and encourage each other, we cannot save each other.  I cannot save the girl with the bags.  Only Jesus can do that.  We can’t live off of another’s faith.  We must have faith ourselves.  But we do not walk the road of faith by ourselves.

Bearing another’s burdens requires time, effort, prayer, love, Godly advice, and sacrifice.  It will be hard, but Jesus never said it would be easy.  Let’s do it.  Our focus is on Him who paid for all of our sin, who is our righteousness before God, the One we believe in.  We can help each other, whether it’s a struggle with sin, the storms of life, or whatever else it may be.  We’re called to do it.  We need to preach love, grace, selflessness, and live these out.  We need to preach the gospel, to the world and to each other.  And through this, we will love each other, honor each other, and obey Christ.

May we bear one another’s burdens.  May we love each other as God loves us.  May we pray for each other.  May we teach each other, and remind one another of the gospel.  May we never forget Him who calls us and loves us.  May we all continue to trust in Jesus.

God bless,

Neal E.

If you have any questions, comments, prayer requests, please email me at rembry@forum.montevallo.edu or comment on this post.  I will respond as quickly as I can.  Hope to write again soon!