Standing in Grace

One of the most important aspects of the United Methodist Church is its focus on grace. We will be spending the next six weeks allowing Romans and Galatians to show us how we are rooted in grace and what that means for each one of us individually and as the church.

We start this week with what it means for us to “Stand in Grace.” Our scripture comes from Romans 5:1-5.

5 Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, 2 through whom we have gained access by faith into this grace in which we now stand. And we boast in the hope of the glory of God. 3 Not only so, but we also glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; 4 perseverance, character; and character, hope. 5 And hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us.

Please pray with me…

Grace is one of the great mysteries of our faith. It can’t be seen or heard but it can be felt by each person that walks the earth. Grace is defined as a gift that is unearned and undeserved. Grace is a gift given to us by God.

But when we look at this word with this definition it should point out to us that grace does not belong to God alone. We are able to offer grace to those that are around us. We shouldn’t wait for somebody to earn our good actions. We should choose to offer them to those around us.

Jesus reminds us of our need to offer grace when he says for those that are followers of him that they should be willing to forgive their enemies. This would take grace. Forgiveness of those that have done something against us would be unearned and undeserved.

A person may deserve an equal action to their actions, but Jesus says we need to not reward evil for evil. Jesus tells us that those of us that are followers of him should do the opposite of what society would expect from us. We should forgive the one that doesn’t deserve our forgiveness.

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Our scripture for today points out to us that God offers us peace through bringing us into a right relationship with him. First off, we acknowledge that God is attempting to bring us into a relationship with him. We call this prevenient grace. It is God inviting us to join his family.

When we decide to follow him, his grace justifies us towards him. Justifying grace is also known as saving grace. It is God allowing us to have our sins forgiven and to receive the Holy Spirit. We are given this grace only because we have decided we want to be in relationship with our God.

Paul is saying that through our willingness to accept Jesus as our Lord and Savior that we find peace. It is through this peace that even through our suffering we will be able to have hope. A hope so great that our suffering will not put us to shame.

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This sounds good to us but would have probably seemed impossible to the audience that Paul is speaking to in Rome. No matter your god during that time, you believed that when things were good your God was blessing you. The opposite was also true, if you were facing suffering than you must have done something to anger or disappoint your God.

Paul is saying to both Jew and Gentile that when you are a follower of Jesus you are able to find blessings even during your sufferings. You will be able to find peace in your times of trouble which will allow you to find hope no matter what you are facing in life.

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When today’s scripture speaks of us having peace with God we are focusing not on a feeling of peace but more on an understanding of what God is doing in us, through us, and around us.

We should desire to find peace with our past, our present, and our future. We do this when we stand in grace, when we believe that the grace of God was with us, is with us, and will always be with us.

Those that are followers of Jesus will often find it hard to forget about our past. We will want to relive the ways that we have failed God. We will allow guilt and shame to take over. We instead need to have the peace to believe that despite what we have done God has forgiven us and has forgotten. We can begin each day with a clean slate.

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We can find it difficult to live each day remembering that God is with us. He walks with us throughout the good and bad of what we are facing at the moment. We can often get ourselves into the right frame of mind to believe this by beginning our day in some way with God.

We do this through intentionally setting up spiritual exercises, regular ways in which we can connect with God every day. It may mean praying to God to allow you to feel his presence that day.

It could mean reading scripture to remember how God has always been with his people. For you it may mean taking a walk and allowing the presence of God to be felt through his creation around you. You need to discover the best way for you to feel the peace of God each and every day/

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Theologian Linda E Thomas says it this way.

“Real peace with God is a verb. It is more often a sweat-blood-and-tears process that requires of us an active cultivation of our relationship with God. It means having constant contact with God; thus, each person has to construct how she or he will build, maintain, and sustain her or his relationship with God.”

We find peace with God by desiring to be in an intimate, growing relationship with him. We find peace through the constant interaction and remembrance that God was with us before, is with us now.

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We also need to believe that God will be with us in the future. This peace is often the most difficult for us to accept. We are living our lives, and our minds start to look towards the future, we often create scenarios of bad things that might happen to us.

This creates the anxiety that we find so prevalent in society today. We worry about what may happen instead of focusing on what is currently happening around us. Studies have found that most of the time these worries do not come true.

A study published by the National Institute of Health revealed that less than 9 percent of anticipated worries that lead to anxiety actually materialize.  This would point out to us that most of the time we are worrying about nothing.

Christian author, Jim Elliff, says it this way, “Future worry is overwhelming. There’s a reason. We don’t have grace today for tomorrow. One of Satan’s simplest tricks and most effective devices is to draw our attention to things we can do nothing about.

There’s nothing worse than a crisis that can’t be fixed. If our hours are spent with thoughts of tomorrow’s problems, which are not accessible today and which we know we cannot touch with today’s resources, we are doomed to worry.

And worry wears us out… [Yet] our calling is today. It’s not that we don’t think of tomorrow, but it must consistently be filed under “future grace.” The tide of confidence in God’s sufficiency must wash out worry.”

I say this with the realization that there are things for us to worry about, but with the understanding that finding peace through God can help us on that journey. Having the faith that God will face the future with us can sometimes help us overcome the anxiety that we may face.

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Paul doesn’t help our future anxiety by making his audience and us aware that following God and living out peace with God does not mean that life will always be filled with unicorns and rainbows. Meaning, we will face hardships.

This goes back to our earlier part of this scripture, it is through maintaining peace with God that can allow our hardships to bring us closer to God. It is through peace with God that we will not only make it through these sufferings, but these sufferings will bring us closer to God. Peace through suffering leads to hope.

Paul lays out for us not just his understanding but the steps he believes we take that lead us to that hope. He states that suffering leads to perseverance, perseverance leads to character, and character leads to hope.

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Times of suffering can lead us into times of doubt. It is this doubt that can cause us to choose to runaway instead of towards God. We transition from grace, to peace, to hope when we are able to persevere through the struggles that we are facing.

Perseverance is a willingness to continue to move towards God despite a life that for the moment is not perfect. It might be easy for you to follow God during the good times, but it can become a struggle when times get tough.

Jesus speaks of perseverance through his parable of the Sower. He offers to us how the planting of seeds can relate to our spiritual journeys. One group that he focuses on is when the seed lands on rocky places, where it did not have much soil. It sprang up quickly, because the soil was shallow. 6 But when the sun came up, the plants were scorched, and they withered because they had no root.

A faith without depth can lead to a lack of willingness to persevere. The good times lead us to not focus on God and staying connected to God. Therefore, when the bad times come, we aren’t prepared and begin to doubt God and we may find ourselves unwilling to keep asking for help from God and staying connected to God.

Perseverance will often occur due to a willingness to be connected to God. It is through the daily practices I spoke of before that we are ready when we have obstacles that occur in our lives that we need to overcome.

Paul says that perseverance leads to character. This forces us to define what he means by his use of the word “character.” One of the great debates that the church has had for many years is how Christian character should be defined.

Some look towards a moral answer. They look towards the “do nots” offered to us withing scripture and believe that if a person is fulfilling these items, then they have good Christian character and they are being the person that God desires for them to be.

Others would state that the sign of good Christian character comes with a more ethical answer. They would say that God desires for our focus to be more on how we treat people than it does on how good we believe we are.

I believe that Jesus says Yes to both. He focuses on both the importance of having our moral actions live up to God while also he lays out for us the importance of treating our neighbor with love and compassion.

Everything should go back to what Jesus says is the greatest commandment, “love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength and love your neighbor as yourself.” It is through loving God and loving our neighbor that we reflect Christian character.

Jesus is our example. Jesus was without sin. This would mean that Jesus followed the rules as God designed them. At the same time, Jesus shows us how we are to choose to treat those that society has chosen to ignore.

He becomes our example of how to treat those around us. He leads us towards having those that are disenfranchised treated as worthy in our eyes. He should help us see those that need extra help as people that we should choose to help in their time of need.

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Staying connected with God should lead us to living our lives with God in mind, which should offer us a peace that as scripture tells us passes all understanding. We should desire to become more like God each and every day.

This choice in how we live our lives gives us the type of character that leads to hope. We become close enough to God that we brush off the troubles of the world and have hope in what God has planned for us in the future.

We receive an explanation on what hope looks like within this context through our first reading. It begins with the constant recognition that we have been saved. The price has been paid for our failures yesterday, today, and in the future. We have been saved by grace.

We can remember that we are protected by God. Again, this doesn’t mean that bad things are not going to happen. What it means is that through the experiences that we have here on earth God will be walking beside us. He will never leave us alone.

We have a God that through us being connected with him will remain with us. He will be there helping us overcome the sufferings that we face in our lives. We can have hope because we have God there beside us.

In the end we also should have hope in what is to come. We have an “inheritance” that the scripture tells us “Can never perish, spoil, or fade.” We are promised eternal life. We are promised a home with God in Heaven. Our bodies may perish on earth but our souls live forever with God.

Our hope should be in a past that has been forgiven. In the present, in which we recognize we will never be alone. And a future that has us living with our God forever. When we stand with God by believing in the grace given to us by God, we have hope.

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We as a church have a message to share. A message of a God that saves us, sticks by us, and never leaves us. We need to be willing to spread that message to those around us. We do this through both our words and our actions.

How is it said in our mission statement? We will reach out to those in our communities, and we will show love to all people. We don’t care who a person is or what they have done. We need to believe that God has placed me before them for a reason. I am the one who is to tell them about Jesus.

This is why we need to be in prayer. It is through our connection with God both individually and as a church that will allow for us to reach those that are around us. We are to be the hands, and feet, and voice to the world.

We should rejoice that we get to let those around us know about the grace that God has given to us. Let us be willing to share through our words and our actions that God desires to be in a relationship with each person that walks the earth. Thanks be to God.

Let us pray…