Prevenient Grace

Prayer to the Holy Spirit

come Holy Spirit, Fill the hearts of your faithful and kindle in us the fire of your love. Send forth your Spirit, and we shall be created. And you shall renew the face of the earth. O God, who by the light of the Holy Spirit did instruct the hearts of the faithful, grant that by the same Holy Spirit we may be truly wise and ever enjoy your consolations. AMEN

There have been some times in my life that I personally am not very proud of, embarrassed would be a better word to use for the description. There was once a time in my life that certain things was present in my life. I was caught up in worldly things such as drinking.… why oh why did I do this when I was looking back instead of depending upon the Lord God Almighty? We always try to fall back onto something of ourselves to try to cope with all the bad in our lives, do we really think that we are better and stronger than God? I was dealing with some really hard times in my life at this point, I had a brother in-law that moved in and he started great number of worldly things introduced into my houme hold before I even realized what was going on. He brought drugs into my home, he even had introduced them to my wife then things started becoming harder and harder, noting that I was still not aware of what was happening. The bills kept getting too hard to pay and I couldn’t figure out as to why, so I started drowning my troubles into alcohol. Coming into knowledge that there was some drug use and all of the money I had been giving for the bills was squandered on things that should not have been. This made things even harder, I tried everything in my power to try and rectify the problem but to no avail I lost the battle leaving no other choice but to leave my home alone, at first my children were very mad at me, but they finally realized what was happening and they came with me.

My name is Dave Miller, and the title of this talk is Prevenient Grace.

What exactly is prevent grace? I am so glad you have asked this question.

Let us break this down we will start with grace the Greek word for grace is:

(CHARIS) translates to gift Christ gives us all the gift of a relationship which includes salvation,reconciliation and eternal life.

Ephesians 2:4–9 “But God, who is rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in trespasses, made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved), and raised us up together, and made us sit together in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, that in the ages to come He might show the exceeding riches of His grace in His kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God, not of works, lest anyone should boast.”

2 Corinthians 5:18 “Now all things are of God, who has reconciled us to Himself through Jesus Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation,”

God's grace is a grace that has many different avenues.

With grace there is prevenient grace, justifying grace, and sanctification grace. The different forms of grace are experiencedat different times during our walk with Christ or Spiriual journey.

We come to the pont in our lives when we realize the only place that grace comes is through the Lord God Almighty, the nature of grace resembles the mystery of the Trinity. Within God's grace are 2 things unity and diversity.

prevenient Gracesimply is the fact that God is present with us all through our lives, this particular grace is most evident in our lives prior to our conversion to the point when we accept the relationship that God offers us through Christ who sacrificed his life to pay our debt of sin.

The term prevenient comes from the Latin term,

pravenire :which literally means before.

This is actually the grace that is watching over our lives and comes well before we are aware of it. Prevenient Grace is watching over us until the time comes that we accept within our hearts the relationship that God offers us through Jesus Christ and His great sacrifice on Calvary.

You could say that prevenient grace is the wooing of God's love, just like a bridegroom dating his bride God is wooing us showing us His never ending love.

Revelation 22:17 “And the Spirit and the bride say, “Come!” And let him who hears say, “Come!” And let him who thirsts come. Whoever desires, let him take the water of life freely.”

It is most definitely the will of God drawing us toward Him.

John 6:44–47 “No one can come to Me unless the Father who sent Me draws him; and I will raise him up at the last day. It is written in the prophets, ‘And they shall all be taught by God.’ Therefore everyone who has heard and learned from the Father comes to Me. Not that anyone has seen the Father, except He who is from God; He has seen the Father. Most assuredly, I say to you, he who believes in Me has everlasting life.”

I am going to break down Prevenient Grace a little further, this is the desire of God pursuing us, we know the God loves us all beyond measure and His desire are that we all shall come unto Him as little children and drink from the living waters allowing Him to provide for us as a wonderful Father.

Romans 5:8 “But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”

There is a wonderful poem Frances Thompson titled, “The Hound of Heaven” I urge you to read it over when you get a moment of spare time.

It is imperative that you see prevenient grace as the gift of God freeing yousowhen we respond to the offer of a personal relationship God is giving us, we need to place our trust in Christ Jesus.

Romans 8:31–39 “What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all, how shall He not with Him also freely give us all things? Who shall bring a charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies. Who is he who condemns? It is Christ who died, and furthermore is also risen, who is even at the right hand of God, who also makes intercession for us. Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? As it is written: “For Your sake we are killed all day long; We are accounted as sheep for the slaughter.” Yet in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us. For I am persuaded that neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities nor powers, nor things present nor things to come, nor height nor depth, nor any other created thing, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in…”

1 John 4:10 “In this is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins.” “We love Him because He first loved us.”

1 John 4:19 “We love Him because He first loved us.”

It Is the activity of God that empowers us giving us spiritual strength, though Jesus Christ because, He loved us well before we were knit together in our mother’s womb.

Romans 5:6 “For when we were still without strength, in due time Christ died for the ungodly.”

Clear biblical message

We know from Genesis, in the beginning God created the world, the cosmos, and everything in it, God saw it as good.

Next in Genesis 1 & 2 God created human kind in His own likeness or image. We also know that God created male and female In His own image yes that means that we are all created in the likeness of our Heavenly Father, He declared this as good.

Genesis 1:26–31 “Then God said, “Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” So God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them. Then God blessed them, and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it; have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” And God said, “See, I have given you every herb that yields seed which is on the face of all the earth, and every tree whose fruit yields seed; to you it shall be for food. Also, to every beast of the earth, to every bird of the air, and to everything that creeps on the earth, in which there is life, I have given every green herb for food”; and it was so. Then God saw everything that He had made, and indeed it was very good”

It is wonderful news to know that just like Adam and Eve God loves us as a child of God more than we could ever know, with God being love itself, each of us has the capacity to love as the Father does and to be loved.

1 John 4:16 “And we have known and believed the love that God has for us. God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God, and God in him.”

knowing that God created us in Spirit we are a spiritual being wired for God from the very beginning, because we are created in the likeness of God, the deepest most inner portion of us we crave a personal relationship with God. Think back to when we didn't know God as our Savior we all had such an emptiness within us that we couldn't fill for it is The Lord God Almighty that completes us and makes us whole. It is safe and obvious to say we are restless beings until God rests within us. Let that sink in for just a moment.....

The good news of our origin in God precedes the bad news of sin.

Wesee in Genesis 3 and 6 where Adam and Eve made the wrong choices resulting in their expulsion from the Garden of Eden, those choices brought disorder to all of creation. However God still provided for them. Armed with this knowledge we know all of us are born into sin and we equally make bad decisions that ultimately separate us from God and in turn diminishes or our sororities lives, even so God still provides for us. God's love and grace is greater than any wrong or bad choices that we could ever do. God’slove and grace prevails over everything we do, it doesn’tmatter how bad our evil we have become.

Mostof all good wants to have a personal one on one relationship with us so much more than we desire a relationship with God.

Jeremiah 31:3 “The Lord has appeared of old to me, saying: “Yes, I have loved you with an everlasting love; Therefore with lovingkindness I have drawn you.”

what exactly is the nature of God’srelationship? Wow I am so glad you asked me that question. It is through promises called covenants which is the strongest form of relationship identified in the Bible we can see the covenants in the Bible clearly

Noah’s covenant Genesis 9:8-17

Abraham's covenant Genesis 15:18-21

Moses and the Israelites Exodus 19:3-6

David’s covenant 2 Samuel 7:5-16