Sanctifying Grace Talk

Go to next slide

Sanctifying Grace Talk

Good morning gentlemen. Please turn in you purple Worship book to page 48 and join me in the Prayer to the Holy Spirit.

Come, Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of your faithful and kindle in them the fire of your love. Send forth Your Spirit, and they 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 every enjoy your consolations.

Through Christ our Lord. Amen.

I heard the sound of grinding gears, trying desperately to engage. Then the scream of tires on pavement. Followed by the ear piecing sound of crumpling steal. The next sensation I felt was bouncing around like the metal ball in a pin ball machine. When the Mach One finally came to a sudden halt, my left arm was hanging out the remains of the back windshield.

Hi, this talk is about Sanctifying Grace and my name is Terry Cavanaugh

I was seventeen. It was a hot August day, you know the kind, were the sweat trickles down your back, and your T-shirt clings to you like a second skin.

My buddies and I had been shooting hoops, really we had been playing horse for hours, but shooting hoops sounds so much cooler.

Not only were we playing basketball, but we were cooling down with a beer or two, at least that is what we kept telling ourselves. About five that evening we came up with the brilliant idea of going night fishing. Never mind the fact the four of us had put away four twelve packs in the last three hours. We were O.K.

We loaded all our fishing equipment and supplies for the trip into my neighbors 1970 black Mach one, the supplies were another twenty-four pack, did I tell you it was hot out. We each popped a cold one, and began the drive to our fishing hole.

We were cruising down an old country road, and I was watching the tree flash by when I realized they were not tree but telephone poles. The next thing I remember was the scream of tires on pavement, and then I was floating, followed by pain like I had never known before.

When the car stopped rolling I was half in and half out the back window.

It is all a little fussy after that, I remember the ambulance ride to Ball Memorial hospital, in truth I remember opening my eyes in the emergency room surrounded by men and women in white clothes, and standing out from them was an Indiana State patrolman watching me.

The guys in white began to pick the broken shards of glass from my arm. One of the them ask what happened, the officer said; we estimate they were traveling well over a hundred miles an hour when they lost control. The car looks like it rolled several times before ending on its hood. This one came out the back window. Someone else said, “He is here Only by the grace of God.” I faded out about that time, but those words came back to me later. “Only by the grace of God.”

You too, are here today, only by the grace of God.

I experienced God’s grace that day, but we all experience God’s grace in different ways as we continue our walk with God.

This weekend you have heard about Prevenient Grace, or God’s grace that draws you. It was Prevenient grace that place that unknown person in the emergency room that hot August night. God was drawing me to him. I had been raised in the church, but, in that moment God’s grace was overwhelming.

Later you heard about Justifying grace, how God invites us into a relationship Him.

A relationship not complicated by all our past baggage. Instead, God looks at us as if we have never sinned.

Then you heard about the means of grace, how they help us to celebrate and grow in our relationship with God.

You also heard about the Obstacles to grace. Our attitudes and actions that obstruct our relationship with god

This morning I am here to tell you as Paul Harvey puts it, “The rest of the story.”

Sanctifying grace is, like all grace, a gift from God, but it is a gift that keeps on giving.

Just as physical birth begins the process of growth, so spiritual birth begins our spiritual growth.

This spiritual birth has many names.

Being born again.

Salvation

Conversion

But this weekend you have heard it referred to as Justifying grace.

With your spiritual birth you begin to grow; this growth is called Sanctifying grace. Here is the really cool part. This is how the dynamic power of the Holy Spirit is working in and through you.

Are you ready for some really good news?

Grace is God’s active love toward you. That is right, but that is not all.

Grace is God’s love in action toward others, and toward all creation through you. You are an agent of God here on earth. You are God’s, “James Bond” carrying out His will

Therefore, our response to God’s grace involves both our love and our action.

That is why Jesus said, in John 14:15 “If you love Me, keep My commandments.” Do you see it, love calls for action.

Are you ready for even more good news?

Sanctifying grace is God’s Holy Spirit at work in our hearts and mind making us

RIPE for glory.

Here is the good news: God wants a relationship with you. The bad news is: you cannot do anything to earn it. Changing your way will not get you an att-boy from God.

Nothing you or I can do will restore our relationship with God, only God could do it, and he did through the death of His only Son on the cross.

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

See we cannot earn God’s love by what we do or don’t do, we were still sinners. Instead, we change what we do, not to make God love us, we change because God already loves us. God gives us a fresh start, day by day.

Listen to 2 Corinthians 4:16 “ Therefore we do not lose heart. Even though our outward man is perishing, yet the inward man is being renewed day by day.

You see gentlemen God’s Holy Spirit is “bearing witness with our spirit” that we are beloved children of God according to Romans 8:15-17.

Not only does God long to restore our broken relationship with Him.

God wants to impart to us life, new strength, and a new heart.

That’s right, God wants to do a heart transplant for you.

Ezekiel 36:26 says, I will take the heart of stone out of your flesh and give you a heart of flesh.

God wants to give us a new heart.

Sanctifying grace is how God gives us this new heart. God does not knock us out and do surgery, no, he begins a process in our lives that day-by-day, decision by decision God begins to change us from the inside. He works on our attitudes and our actions until we are more and more like Christ. I don’t have time to do it now, but look up Ephesians 3:14-19 to learn more about this amazing process.

But God does not stop with imparting new life, no He begins a process of perfecting us, or growing us up. When we Grow up we grow up into the likeness of Christ Jesus.

You see conversion is a process, yes you accept Jesus in one moment, but our growth does not happen all at once. Ginny and I have been married for 38 year. I remember the day we were married in Muncie. But for 38 years our marriage has been growing. Just like a person is married in a moment, but it takes a lifetime to experience marriage. So conversion is life long process.

But God does not leave up adrift on the sea of confusion as we are going through this growing up process. In fact He gives us tools to help us to grow up. These tools are called Spiritual gifts. Spiritual gifts help us to grow up, but they also help others in the body of Christ or the church to grow up. To learn more about Spiritual gifts look at Ephesians 4, Romans 12, and 1 Corinthians 12.

But as all of you know, growth requires pruning.

My wife and I moved recently. We decided to bring our rose plants from our old home in Jackson, Ohio to our new home in Ithaca, OH. We planted our roses. But, just this summer, we noticed a few of the branches are turning brown. Ginny told me she was going to cut off the damaged branches. I am sure if the roses had a vote, they would say, “NO DON’T CUT ON ME. I AM FINE JUST THE WAY I AM.” But Ginny and I know something the roses don’t know, the only way for the rose bushes to produce the beautiful roses is for the branches sucking life from them to be cut off. And roses only grow on the new branches.

The same is true of us, we need to be pruned, cut back, and it is painful. But for us to produce the awesome life God has for us, He may need to cut off those things that are draining your spiritual energy.

God has begun an amazing process in your life, he is perfecting you. When the Bible used the perfecting they used a Greek word that means to mature. Do you ever really completely mature. I know people in their teens who are mature, but in the forties they will be more mature, and if they live to be a hundred I would hope they would be even more mature.

Sanctifying grace is God’s way of saying, I have more for you. I have more love, more power, more peace, more joy, and more growth.

You might be saying, this is unbelievable, God wants to restore His relationship with me, He wishes to impart his grace and his love to me, He longs to perfect me, by growing and pruning me.

But that is not all God wants to Equip you to do work for Christ in our world. God trust you so much, he wants you to be the hands and feet of His son here on earth.

God is committed to seeing us serving the least and lost in our community, in our state, and in our world.

We are privileged, according to Matthew 25, to feed the hungry, to give water to the thirsty, to welcome the stranger, cloth the naked, care for the sick, and visit those in prison. It is our right and our joy as God’s children, to carry on the work of Jesus here on this earth.

Jesus challenged us with these words from Matthew 22:37 “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all soul, and with all your mind… love your neighbor as yourself.”

So, how will you continue to grow in sanctifying grace?

Jesus tells us the only way to continue to grow is to stay connected to Him. Just like grapes can only continue to grow as they to stay connected to vine, we can only grow connected to Jesus. What will keep us connected?

Prayer: We stay connected to Christ through prayer.

John 15:4 “ Abide in Me, and I in you.”

Prayer help us to connect, but so does Bible Study. God wants to renew our mind through study.

Roman 12:2 “do not be conformed to this world, but d be transformed by the renewing of your mind.”

The way our mind is renewed is through study.

Prayer is important, and study is important, but it is not enough. You need to take the next step into action. In Christian action we surrender our hands and feet to God. We give them to Him to use to change our world.

Gentlemen in short we response to all that God has done for us by participating in the mission of Christ in our world.

As I bring this talk to a close let me just talk to you for a moment. For three days you have prayed for the Holy Spirit to fill you with the fire of his love. You have discovered God wants a relationship with you.

God’s role in this relationship is to fill you with the Holy Spirit, our role is to open our hearts and walk with Christ day-by-day.

In Emmaus a part of the walk with God is small groups called group reunions. When we meet in these small groups, we follow the order on the group reunion card, which is on your tables. At the meeting you will review many of the things you have had explained to you about piety, study and action.

So lets wrap this thing up.

In Prevenient grace God is calling to us. And God will never stop calling us.

In Justify grace we make a decision to follow Jesus. This is when he claims us. Some call this:

Being born again.

Salvation

Conversion

In Sanctifying Grace God begins the process of cleaning us. He begins through prayer, Bible study, and Christian Action to change who we really are on the inside.

Remember Gentlemen, God loves you just the way you are, but he loves you too much to leave you there.

De Colores!

d Eph. 4:23; [Titus 3:5]