Grace And Holiness Series

But For The Grace Of God, Part 3

Scripture: Eph. 2:8; Heb. 4:16; Exo. 3:5; 15:11; 1 Peter 1:6-7, 13-16

When I was a child, a church group held open tent revivals up the street from my home during the summer. These tent revivals were conducted by the “holiness” Church denomination. I am not 100% sure which denomination they were a part of but what I do know is that they praised God with songs and shouting and the preacher preached on holiness. In his messages he preached that everyone who was not a part of them (their Church) and not living holy was going to hell. He would yell out things that people were doing that was sending them to hell – often targeting people on the street who were not attending the revival. If you smoked, you were going to hell. If you consumed alcohol as a beverage, you were going to hell. If you had or were having sex outside of marriage, you were going straight to hell. If you watched the “one-eyed devil” (the TV) you were going to hell. If you skipped Church – next stop hell. If you sinned and died before you repented – you woke up in hell. All of these things according to that preacher gave you a first-class, non-stop ticket to hell. And I did not mention the dress code and makeup requirements. Men could dress however they chose but the women had to dress modestly so that men wouldn’t lust after them. You see, it was believed that if a man lusted after a woman based on how she was dressed it was the woman’s fault.

Let me say up front that the Bible supports some of what they were teaching as it relates to sin, but there were also a lot of “man’s requirements” included in that would put a person on the “train to hell.” As a young person I just knew that either they were wrong or a lot of people I knew and went to Church with were on their way to hell – me included. Imagine a child looking forward to Saturday morning cartoons (which were very popular when I was a child) and hearing the preacher shout through the amplifier that if you watched TV you were going to hell and then hearing people clapping and shouting “Amen!” Can you see how scared and confused that child would be? This is the point of my message this morning. I want to clarify what it means to live and be holy because of the grace of God. You see, we can sound holy and look holy on the outside but be unholy on the inside. However, when we are holy on the inside, the outside takes care of itself.

This morning we’re going to look at Grace and Holiness. This will be the third and final message in my brief series “But for the Grace of God.” In the first two messages, we looked at how grace impacts sin, our justification, our salvation, our righteousness and our faith. The reason we are talking about the “impact” of grace is because what grace actually is. While most define grace as God’s unmerited favor to those who don’t deserve it, others, as we’ve seen in this series, define it as God treating some in a special way when others are not. However, what we’ve seen in this series is that God’s grace is more than that. God’s grace is like an empowerment to help us deal with the challenging situations and circumstances that we face while living on this earth. If you recall, we saw an example of that last week when we looked at Paul’s thorn in the flesh. When he prayed to God three times for God to remove it, God told him that everything he needed to deal with the thorn was found in His grace. And the point that I emphasized over and over again was that God’s grace is always flowing. As Christians we just need to learn how to tap into that grace and the primary way we do that through our faith. Ephesians 2:8 says “For by grace you have been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God.” Paul tells us that the salvation we received was available only because we put our faith in God’s grace.

As I closed last week’s message, I said that in order for us to have access to God’s grace, we need to understand that access to God’s grace is not automatic. Access to God’s grace is granted or given to His children whose lives reflect them living by His standards and not their own. And, New Light, that is so critically important. Christians cannot live according to what they believe is right and wrong and expect God to give them, as Hebrew 4:16 says, “mercy and grace to help in time of need,” if what they believe disagrees with what He believes. There is a lifestyle that we are called to live by and that lifestyle is one of holiness. I want to mention First Peter 1:15-16 which says, “But as He who has called you is holy, so be holy in all manner of conduct. Because it is written, ‘You will be holy; for I am holy.’” (1 Peter 1:15-16) We will dig deeper into these verses later, but I want to set the expectation for what is coming – that God commands that we be holy as He is holy! In other words, we should be living a life that is dedicated to God and set apart (separated) from the world!