Pages

Monday 9 March 2015

It's all about Grace


A mate of mine is a Senior Minster of a church that was thinking about changing its name to “Grace Church”.  

He wisely carried out some focus groups in his community and found that almost everyone thought it was referring to a woman’s name.  Very few outside the church community had any idea that it might be referring to God doing us a favour.

As I was preparing some talks on how to live God’s way as we looked at our five purposes as a church it struck me how easy it is even for us regular church goers to fall back in to trying to earn God’s approval. 

We know that we join God’s family by God’s free gift but then we assume that we continue in his favour by our good life, and it’s all too easy to fall into that trap in the pulpit.  The truth is that we enter God’s family by His free gift and we continue to stay in His family by His free gift. It’s all about grace. Thank God for that otherwise we’d all be in strife.

So where does the “living a good life” thing fit in? Well, to go back to the family analogy, in my better moments I want to do things to serve my family because I love them.  It’s a joy to serve them. I get so disappointed when I realise that I’ve failed them, or when my failure is pointed out to me. 

Likewise it is a joy to obey our God. David put it so well in Psalm 19:8 “The precepts of the LORD are right, giving joy to the heart.”

By Bruce Dingwall, Senior Minister

No comments:

Post a Comment