Amazing Grace
2 Corinthians 8:7 KJV
1. God’s Amazing Grace for Spiritual Warfare
We are engaged in a great spiritual battle. Satan’s cannot outright defeat us, but he will work on us until we lose our first love if we allow him.
Great sorrow can stun, and it can make you forget the best source of consolation. A little blow can cause great pain. Extreme distress can rob you of your wits and make you forget your source of relief. Pain is remembered and the healing promise is forgotten.
Has your ear grown dull through grief?
Has your heart forgotten because of heaviness?
Does your affliction seem more real than God?
Does the black sorrow that covers you eclipse all the light of heaven and earth?
Let me remind you that God is still with you. It is written, “We know that all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are the called according to His purpose” (Rom. 8:28). He will keep His Word!
He has also said, “When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and through the rivers, they shall not overflow you. When you walk through the fire, you shall not be burned, nor shall the flame scorch you” (Is. 43:2).
Depend on it; He will sustain you. Brush those tears away, anoint your head, wash you face, and be of good courage (2 Sam. 12:20). The Lord will strengthen your heart.
The truth is this, victory is ours through God who renews, refreshes, and empowers his children with grace.
2 Cor 8:7 KJV
Therefore, as ye abound in every thing, in faith, and utterance, and knowledge, and in all diligence, and in your love to us, see that ye abound in this grace also.
1. Understanding God’s Amazing Grace
A. Essentially, grace is a gift. It is unmerited favor. It is something which we have not earned but is given due to the benevolence of the giver. There is an acronym, which I have seen which is a good way to think of grace.
G- God’s
R-Riches
A-At
C-Christ’s
E-Expense
B. Grace releases divine power from God.
C. Breaks The Chains That Bind your Life Through the Power of Jesus Christ!
D. The grace of God is glue that mends Man’s broken life’s.
2. Grace Gives Life
Great Christians are not the ones who achieve the most, they are the ones who receive the most, from Grace
Renewal, empowered lives, maturity, and growth
A BIG GOD
A little girl, on the way home from church, turned to her mother and said, "Mommy, what the preacher said this morning confuses me." The Mother said, "Oh? Why is that?" The girl replied, "Well, he said that God is bigger than we are. Is that true?" "Yes, that’s true," the mother replied. "He also said that God lives within us. Is that true too?" Again the mother replied, "Yes." "Well," said the girl. "If God is bigger than us and. He lives in us, wouldn’t he show through?"
3. Danger
1. Grace is taken for granted, A hog will eat acorns under a tree day after day, never looking up to see where they came from. Some people are like that
B. Cheap Grace Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Cheap grace is the deadly enemy of our church. Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, without church discipline, communion without confession.
C. Blocked by indifference
An estimated 500,000 tons of water rush over Niagara Falls every minute. On March 29, 1948, the falls suddenly stopped. People living within the sound of the falls were awakened by the overwhelming silence. They believed it was a sign that the world was coming to an end. It was thirty hours before the rush of water resumed.
What happened? Heavy winds had set the ice fields of Lake Erie in motion. Tons of ice jammed the Niagara River entrance near Buffalo and stopped the flow of the river until the ice shifted again.
The flow of God’s grace in our lives can be blocked by cold indifference.
D. FLESH FIGHTS BY INNER STRENGTH ALONE.
Many a person after years of struggle, comes to a point in their lives where, desires resurface, the old nature revives. Sin surfaces. They fall victim to Satan’s suggestions.
Why? Man uses his inner strength instead of God’s empowering grace
Gal 3:3 NIV
Are you so foolish? After beginning with the Spirit, are you now trying to attain your goal by human effort?
4. God Abundant Amazing Grace is available to all
Electricity like grace cannot be stored
First, huge shovels dig house-sized scoops of lignite coal. Pulverized and loaded onto railroad boxcars, the coal travels to a generating plant in east Texas, where it is further crushed into powder. Superheated, this powder ignites like gasoline when blown into the huge furnaces that crank three turbines.
Whirring at 3,600 revolutions per minute, these turbines are housed in concrete-and-steel casings 100 feet long, 10 feet tall and 10 feet across. They generate enough electricity for thousands of people.
A visitor to this plant once asked the chief engineer, "Where do you store the electricity?"
"We don’t store it," the engineer replied. "We just make it."
When a light is flipped on in Dallas one hundred miles west, it literally places a demand on the system, it registers and prompts greater output.
God’s grace and power cannot be stored. Though inexhaustible, they come in the measure required, at the moment of need.
5. God’s Amazing Grace Empowers Lives
God’s grace turns out men and women with a strong family likeness to Jesus Christ, not milksops.
Oswald Chambers (1874-1917)
Paul learned grace is empowerment even in weakness 2 Cor 12:7-10 NIV
7 To keep me from becoming conceited because of these surpassingly great revelations, there was given me a thorn in my flesh, a messenger of Satan, to torment me. 8 Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from me. 9 But he said to me, "My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness." Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me. 10 That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong.
Rose
Rev. Milton Grannum tells of a life-changing event that took place in a Leper colony in South America. He would visit, sing, pray, quote scriptures to the different patients. He came to Rose a women who eyes, had rotted away leaving her blind, in addition her hands and feet had rotted of leaving only stumps. Blood would run down here face from mosquito’s biting her, she couldn’t swat them away. When he was ministering to her, he asked what she would like him do because he was leaving to return home shortly. As tears ran down her cheeks from here rotted out eyes, she asked him to pray for her, so she could show her doctors Christ was alive in her life. She wanted them to know God’s grace.
Her concern was not for her own comfort, but for empowerment her witness
6. God is offering His Amazing Grace today!
Isaiah 40:31: But those who wait on the Lord shall renew their strength; They shall mount up with wings like eagles, They shall run and not be weary, They shall walk and not faint.
“What did Isaiah mean?” “To mount up with wings like eagles? To soar on eagles’ wings?”
Birds fly by flapping their wings. But not eagles. They are built for soaring, not flapping; that allows them to travel much further on less energy. It seems that God built into our planet invisible columns of hot air called thermals, which rise up here and there from the earth’s surface. Eagles know where to find thermals. They fly into these invisible updrafts, stretch out their wings, and are lifted higher and higher into the sky as though ascending on an elevator. They may rise as high as 14,000 feet, so high they can not be seen from earth with the naked eye. When they reach those heights, they emerge from the updraft, their wings still spread, and they soar this way and that way, downward and sideward, traveling for miles with very little exertion of strength.
It is a perfect picture. God himself is an invisible, uplifting thermal current. When we claim His promises and trust His Word, we are spreading out the wings of faith and are caught up to a higher plane. We mount up with wings like eagles. We run without growing weary. We walk and do not faint.
The strength we need for holy, effective, victorious living comes not from frantically flapping through the air like sparrows in distress, but from gliding in the currents of God’s grace.
