Grace is >

AT THE BEGINNING OF ALMOST EVERY YEAR, YOU CAN

Towards the end of the year there is usually an article or two that tells you about some of the new words that have been added to the dictionary throughout the year

If you want to have some fun with this take the words and try to guess what they mean before reading the defection

Let’s try it this morning

See if you can guess the words

Here’s the first word:

phonesia

What do you think that means?

When I read that word I thought, “Hmmm ... I think that’s probably a noun to describe the phenomenon of forgetting where you place your cell phone on a regular basis.”

But the real definition is even better.

It’s “the act of dialing a phone number and forgetting who you were calling just as they answer.”

Next time you call someone and they say, “Hello,” and you say “Who’s this?” and they say, “You called me,” you can reply, “I’m sorry. It’s just a case of phonesia. Can you help me out here?”

Phonesia. It’s a real word.

Here’s another word:

disconfect

This is a word that you can use around Halloween, when there’s a lot of candy around the house.

It’s a verb.

It is “the attempt to sterilize a piece of candy you dropped on the floor by blowing on it.”

So kids if your mom and dad catch you pick up a piece of candy of the floor on Halloween and eat it tell them it ok I disconfected it

Our next word is

blamestorming

You would here this word in more of a corporate setting.

Instead of “brainstorming,”

it’s “blamestorming.”

It means “sitting in a group and discussing who’s responsible for the company’s problems rather than trying to solve them.”

This is a common phenomenon isn’t it

We sit around in circles, and we’re supposed to be working on fixing the problem, but instead we just blame other people.

That’s blamestorming.

One last word is

intaxication

It’s “the euphoria you get from getting a tax refund, which lasts until you realize it was your money to begin with.”

So here are these new words with new meanings, and they get our attention because we’ve not heard them before.

We’re not sure what they mean.

But when it comes to familiar words with familiar meanings, we tend to overlook them.

We don’t pay much attention to them.

We assume that we understand them because they’ve been around a long time.

And they’ve sat on the shelf, and sure, we know that word.

But here’s what I’m going to ask you to do in this series over the next four weeks:

I want you to approach the word that I will tell you about in a minute as if you’ve never heard it before.

Set aside what you’ve thought about it and hear it for the first time.

Is that a deal

If so say Amen

Anyone remember the Kellogg’s Corn Flakes® commercial that came out years ago.

The Kellogg’s Corn Flakes people had done their research, and they’d found out that a lot of folks had eaten Corn Flakes when they were young, but they hadn’t bought a box and brought it home for quite some time.

And so they came up with a commercial campaign that simply went like this: “Kellogg’s Corn Flakes — Taste them again for the first time.”

And as you guessed it worked sales went through the roof

That’s really what I’d like you to do with this word “grace” that we’re going to be talking about over the next four weeks.

I want you to taste it again for the first time.

I want you to approach it as if you’ve not heard it before and try to receive it new because for many of us, it’s just a word that we’re pretty familiar with.

It’s sat on the shelf.

We use it from time to time, but in my opinion we miss the significance of it

We do not see the real power behind the word

And that word is

Grace

The Bible says in

Hebrews 12:15 NLT

Look after each other so that none of you fails to receive the grace of God. Watch out that no poisonous root of bitterness grows up to trouble you, corrupting many.

It says, “See to it that no one misses the grace of God.”

And this is my prayer as a pastor, that no one here at FBC Lorenzo misses the grace of God.

Because what a tragedy that would be if you could come to this church and be a part of this community and somehow miss the grace of God.

You can miss a lot of things, but don’t miss this.

Don’t miss the grace of God because, as we’re going to see, it’s grace that makes all the difference.

When grace gets missed

when grace isn’t present

when you remove grace or you replace grace with a cheap substitute, do you know what happens?

Things turn toxic.

So if we’re going to understand this word as if hearing it for the first time, one of the things we have to understand is our need for it.

And I really believe that you can’t talk about grace without talking about sin.

Some people try to do that.

But when you approach the idea of grace without understanding and dealing with sin it waters it down

I don’t know how you truly embrace grace without understanding sin.

I don’t know how a church can talk about Jesus as the Savior and that mean anything unless you first talk about what he saved you from

And to do that you have to address

Romans 3:23 NLT

For everyone has sinned; we all fall short of God’s glorious standard.

says, “Everyone.”

says, “Everyone.”

“Everyone has sinned, and we all fall short of God’s glorious standard.”

Did you catch that first part

Everyone

SO who does that include

Everyone is a pretty easy word to understand

That’s you

That’s me.

That’s Johnie

That’s Janice

I know the last to are hard to believe but yes even those two Godly women have fallen short

But here is the thing sometimes when we read a verse like that?

We think, “Well, yeah, I’ve sinned ... but I haven’t sin sinned.”

We compare ourselves to other people, and we think, “Well, I’ve sinned, but hey, have you watched reality TV lately?

I think I’m doing all right.

I think I’m doing pretty well.

What we do is we dismiss our sin by comparing ourselves to others.

But do you know what you’re doing when you compare yourself to other people and feel better than them?

Are you ready for it you are sinning.

The Bible about sin like it’s a sickness or a virus.

And for the most people don’t like to admit that they’re sick.

They live in denial of it.

They think if I don’t acknowledge it then I don’t have to accept it.

And so for as long as they possibly can, they pretend like they’re not.

No one wants to acknowledge their sickness because if they acknowledge that they’re sick then they have to change some things.

No one wants to do that because they have their schedule and their plans for the day, and if they’re sick they can’t do those things.

So we all just pretend like we’re not sick,

but as it turns out, that’s not a very effective way of getting better.

To get better you have to acknowledge that you’re sick so that you can understand what you need to do to get better.

And the Bible tells us that they Grace of God is the cure for our sinning problem,

But you see the problem is that a cure means nothing to a person who is not willing to admit that their have a sickness

So, let em be the first to tell you that you have a problem

You have fallen short of the Glory of God

Scripture diagnosis us all with the sin virus

And here is the the thing

Romans 6:23 NLT

For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life through Christ Jesus our Lord.

sin leads to death

Romans 6:23 NLT

For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life through Christ Jesus our Lord.

“The wages of sin is death.”

We have all heard of the Zika virus right

And what scares us is there’s no known cure for it.

Now most instances of infection have taken place far away from where we live, and the risk of one if us actually contracting the disease in the United States is very low.

But we’ve all heard different doomsday ideas about what would happen if Zika were to spread like wild fire

And the thought of this is pretty scary, even though its spread is hypothetical and more than unlikely.

But the same is not true with Sin

Romans 5:12 NLT

When Adam sinned, sin entered the world. Adam’s sin brought death, so death spread to everyone, for everyone sinned.

says, “When Adam sinned, sin entered the world. Adam’s sin brought death, so death spread to everyone, for everyone sinned.”

It all started with Adam

And since it started with Adam we all have death coming.

We’ve all been diagnosed with death

Not one of us will escape

But there’s an antidote for this infection, this virus that all of us carry.

Romans 5:15 NLT

But there is a great difference between Adam’s sin and God’s gracious gift. For the sin of this one man, Adam, brought death to many. But even greater is God’s wonderful grace and his gift of forgiveness to many through this other man, Jesus Christ.

says, “For the sin of one man, Adam, brought death to many. But even greater is God’s wonderful grace and his gift of forgiveness to many through this other man, Jesus Christ.”

says, “For the sin of one man, Adam, brought death to many. But even greater is God’s wonderful grace and his gift of forgiveness to many through this other man, Jesus Christ.”

Paul essentially says, “Sin is powerful, but God’s grace is greater. It’s greater than sin.”

Has anyone recently tried to help their kids with math homework lately? It’s pretty much impossible.

It’s like a foreign language.

And sometimes I think that is the problem with the word grace today we have taken it and tried to apply our thought process to it an update the formula

The other night I was trying again to help the kids twins with math and they were studying the idea of greater than and less than signs

And I thought finally this is something that I can understand

Here’s the equation that Paul is getting at in :15

And it’s simple

Grace is greater than ... whatever

Grace is greater than … Everything.

Whatever you want to put on the other side of that equation, grace is greater than that.

Whatever sin that comes into your head, whatever mistake that you’ve made, whatever you most regret, whatever season of life you would like to pretend never happened — grace is greater than that.

Grace is greater than our sin.

When we understand the greatness of grace, it makes all the difference.

It gives us freedom.

It gives us hope that is greater than.

And that no matter what you’ve done, no matter how severe the infection or how debilitating the pain of your sin, grace is greater than.

Paul talks more about grace and sin in verse 16. He says,

Romans 5:16 NLT

And the result of God’s gracious gift is very different from the result of that one man’s sin. For Adam’s sin led to condemnation, but God’s free gift leads to our being made right with God, even though we are guilty of many sins.

“The result of God’s gracious gift is very different from the result of that one man’s sin. For Adam’s sin led to condemnation, but God’s free gift leads to our being made right with God.”

That’s what grace does.

Grace makes us right with God “even though we are guilty of sin.”

Romans 5:17 NLT

For the sin of this one man, Adam, caused death to rule over many. But even greater is God’s wonderful grace and his gift of righteousness, for all who receive it will live in triumph over sin and death through this one man, Jesus Christ.

Verse 17 says, “For the sin of this one man, Adam, caused death to rule over many. But even greater is God’s wonderful grace and his gift of righteousness, for all who receive it.”

For all who receive grace through faith in Jesus Christ

For all who receive grace through faith in Jesus Christ

“will live in triumph over sin”

and in triumph over “death through this one man, Jesus Christ.

Yes, Adam’s one sin brings condemnation for everyone, but Christ’s one act of righteousness brings a right relationship with God and new life for everyone. ”

This is what grace does for us.

It “brings a right relationship with God and new life for everyone.”

Don’t miss this.

You can miss a lot, but don’t miss this, that God’s grace is greater than your sin. It makes you right with God, and it gives you a new life.

It gives you a second chance.

And that’s true for everyone.

That means you, and that means me.

Everyone has sinned, but through Jesus everyone can be made right with God and and receive a

new life.

But sometimes grace gets missed.

I think that to understand the word “grace” you have to look at what happens in its absence.

You’ve got to see what things look like when it’s not there.

Leaving out grace when talking about God is man’s attempt to earn God’s favor by adhering to rules and to regulations.

The idea of this is that you can say to yourself, “I can be good enough to balance out the scales.

If My good deeds and acts can be enough then the equation works in my favor.

But don’t you see in the end that does not work

We can not earn favor with God

We are not good enough

And that is the beauty of Grace

Grace, is based on what’s been done for us:

Grace it the finished work of Christ on the cross.

That means that our relationship with God isn’t up in the air every time we make a mistake or every time we sin.

See the problem with trying to be good enough

Is that if Jesus came back right now you might have to say well I did not make the cut

You’re hoping that he’s not going to come back in the middle of your sin.

And you live with this constant fear that you’re not going to be good enough.

Then you have this feeling of frustration because you’re trying to be good enough, but you just never seem to measure up.

And you live in this constant sense of frustration.

But grace gives you the feeling of freedom.

Where there is grace there is freedom.

You feel free from the pressure to measure up because it’s already been taken care of on the cross.

When you try to be good enough you Either sit around, proud and self-righteous, thinking, “I’ve followed the rules and I’ve done everything right,” or you constantly feel guilty because you think, “I haven’t done enough, and I messed up again.”

And in either example you miss out on the love of God

The outcome of grace is love.

The Bible says that “we love God because he first loved us.”

When our focus is on his grace in our lives, we experience love.

He did for us what we can never do for ourselves.

And so the foundation is love,

rule-keeping does not deal with our sin condition.

It is not an effective treatment for the sin virus.

Grace is what we need.

But to truly understand the significance of this antidote called grace, you can’t just listen to me.

What I’ve just grown to understand more and more is that understanding grace isn’t done by explanation but by way of experience.

Now that’s frustrating to me as a preacher, because I have to acknowledge that I can’t explain grace in such a way that you’ll appreciate it; instead, you have to experience it.

Until you experience it, you won’t really understand it.

The most effective way to understand grace is through experience.

E.B. White puts it this way.

He says, “Grace can be dissected like a frog, but the thing dies in the process.” You can take an academic approach to understanding grace and you can read the definition out of a theological dictionary and you can study the word all you want.

And sure, that’s good and that can be helpful.

But if that’s all you do, it’s like dissecting a frog.

You’re going to kill it.

There’s no way to dissect it without killing it in the process.

The power of grace has to be experienced.

An explanation does not do enough.

That’s why the Gospels are mostly stories, because a story is experience.

Here’s an example from John, chapter 8 that we used in the last series as well.

Jesus is teaching in a courtyard early one morning.

We don’t know what he’s teaching about, but it must be pretty good because people have gotten out of bed early to come hear him.

So they’re listening to Jesus teach in the courtyard when all of a sudden he’s interrupted by an angry mob that bursts through the gates.

Everyone turns their attention from Jesus.

They look to this mob, and it’s made up of the spiritual leaders of Jesus’ day.

And being pushed along in front of them is this woman

The mob shoves her to the ground in front of Jesus.

One of the spiritual leaders looks at Jesus and says (and this is from and 5), “Teacher, this woman was caught in the act of adultery. The law tells us to stone such women. What do you say?”

At first he doesn’t say anything — Jesus knows this is a trap.

But he bends down, and he starts to write in the dirt with his fingers.

We don’t know what he was writing. It’s a good question to ask him one day.

Some speculate that maybe he was writing the sins of the accusers because of what he then says, but we don’t know.

One of the religious leaders says to Jesus, “What do you say? What should we do?” And Jesus stands up, and he just looks around, and he says, “Let any one of you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” And he goes back to writing in the dirt.

And one by one the stones are dropped until it’s just Jesus with this woman.

She looks at him, but his eyes are not full of condemnation and judgment. He says to her, “Where are your accusers? Is there no one left to condemn you?”

You’ve got to understand: Jesus knows this woman.

He’s known her since she was knit together in her mother’s womb.

Jesus knows the number of hairs on her head.

Jesus has kept the tears of this woman in a bottle in heaven since the day she was born.

Jesus knows her.

This is his daughter.

He says, “Is there no one left to condemn you?” But then he says, “Neither do I condemn you. Go now and leave your life of sin.”

This is guilt.

This is sin.

She’s caught in the act.

The door is ripped open.

She’s pulled from the bed.

There’s no question about her guilt.

It’s the worst day of her life.

Her darkest secret has been found out.

But the worst day of her life becomes the best day of her life, because in her brokenness she meets Jesus.

Here’s what she learns that a lot of us need to understand when we talk about grace: Grace is greater than your secret.

I think that this woman’s worst fear was that somebody would find out.

And we can all understand that — after all, a lot of us keep secrets from ourselves.

We live in denial of our lust and our pride and our greed and our selfishness.

Or we keep secrets from ourselves by comparing ourselves to other people.

Or we keep secrets from ourselves by justifying what we do or what we’ve done.

And we just don’t want anybody to know and we don’t want our secret to be found out.

But here’s the thing: Your secret is making you sick. You think the worst thing that could ever happen to you is that your secret be found out, but here’s the beautiful truth that you’ll find when your secret is told:

God’s grace is greater than your secret.

You don’t know it until it’s brought from the dark and into the light.

But when it’s exposed you will be met with this beautiful truth: God’s grace is greater than your secret.

This means you may have to drag your secret kicking and screaming out of the darkness and into the light.

It doesn’t want to be exposed.

But listen to me.

Don’t live with it anymore.

It doesn’t mean you need to stand up here and publicly declare it to everyone, but don’t live with your secret.

Bring what’s in the dark into the light and discover this beautiful truth that God’s grace is greater than your secret.

There’s a series of books out called PostSecret.

It’s written by a guy named Frank Warren.

He printed three thousand postcards, and the postcards said, “You’re invited to anonymously contribute a secret to a group art project.

Reveal anything you want as long as it’s true and you’ve never shared it with anyone.”

And then he left these cards in public spaces where anyone could fill them out and mail them in.

He published a book of them.

Some of them are weird, some are funny, and some are kind of disturbing.

One woman wrote, “I think women who don’t wear makeup are lazy.” What? If you’re going to have one secret to tell, really? That’s your big secret?

Another one said, “When I’m mad at my husband I put boogers in his soup.” And, “I’m afraid of women who wear Capri pants.”

But others are more upsetting. “Every time I get my toenails done I want to kick the girl doing them in the face.” And, “I hate people who include me in group texts.”

“I give decaf to customers who are rude to me.”

But many of the secrets are really sad. “I wish my father had forgiven me while he was still alive.” Or, “Sometimes I wish that I was blind just so I wouldn’t have to look at myself every day

in the mirror.”

“My husband doesn’t know he’s raising his best friend’s child.”

“I haven’t spoken to my dad in ten years, and it kills me every day.”

“When I eat I feel like a failure.”

“I’m only happy when I buy things.”

The last one, though, in the book is an interesting one. The last one in the book says, “I told all my secrets. Now I feel free.”

But really there is not freedom without grace.

When you finally confess and you truly repent, you’ll discover this most beautiful thing:

And that is despite how terrible you feel, you’ll discover that through Jesus God’s grace is greater than that secret.

The other thing Jesus teaches the adulterous woman about grace that grace is greater than shame.

Jesus is left alone with this woman, and she is humiliated and ashamed.

But that’s when he says to her, “I don’t condemn you either. Go and leave your life of sin.”

He gives her a second chance and a fresh start.

She’s not just free from her condemnation, not just free from her penalty of death, she’s given this freedom to start anew.

And one of the biggest problems I see for Christians today is that a lot of Christians have been forgiven, they’ve received grace, but they don’t live in it.

So they just feel bad.

They continue to feel guilt and shame for what they’ve done instead of living in the joy and the peace of God’s grace.

But Jesus has made it possible for that sin to removed as far as the east is from the west.

When we accept him as our savior sees us without blemish or defect.”

And the Bible says that Jesus came to set us free not just from sin but from the guilt of sin.

Now that does not mean we should run around lung whatever we want

No in the words of Paul God Forbid

You see Paul understood that when we truly see God’s Grace and how powerful it is

And when we understand what his death on the cross did for us

And we see how great his love is then we will not want to run around and be disobedient children

And so my prayer is that we all encounter God’s grace.

And We experience it for all that it is.

There’s a popular preacher named Matt Chandler. He tells a story about his freshman year in Bible College. He met a young single mom named Kim. And he and some of his friends in seminary wanted to introduce her to God. So one night Matt invites her to go to this Christian concert with them. After the band plays a preacher gets up to talk about sex. Right out of the gate he’s angry, and he starts talking about STDs and statistics. He holds out a red rose, and the rose is new and beautiful and it looked nice. And he sniffs it and talks about how good it smells before throwing it out to the crowd. He says, “I want you to pass that rose around while I’m preaching. Everybody get a chance to pass it and to smell it, and then I’ll have you bring it up to me later.” And so he continues to preach about sex, pointing his finger and raising his voice. And Matt says he just sat next to Kim, this young single mom with a pretty rough past, and she just had her head down in shame.

The preacher concludes his sermon by saying, “Now someone bring that rose back up to me. I need my rose back up here.” Someone brings the rose back up to this preacher onstage, and it’s a mess — completely broken. Half the petals are gone. The preacher holds up the broken flower and says, “Now who would want this? It’s been handled. It’s been broken. It doesn’t even smell like a rose. Who would want this? Nobody wants this. Nobody would buy this.” But Matt’s sitting next to this young lady, and he said that everything in him wanted to just stand up and yell, “Jesus wants that rose! Jesus bought that rose!

That’s the whole point of the Gospel He who knew no sin became sin for us so that in him we could become the righteousness of God.”

That’s the whole reason Jesus came: To make things new.

The whole reason Jesus came was to take what’s broken and turn it into something beautiful.

That’s what the whole message is about: That Jesus wants the broken rose. And there is a word for that. The word is “grace.” Let’s pray.

God, this message is for everyone, because everyone has sinned. And this message is for everyone because you died for everyone, and everyone, when they put their trust in you, can receive this free gift of grace and forgiveness and eternal life. Lord, I know that there are some people in that group of everyone who don’t think they need it. And, Lord, I pray that you help them see that they need it the most. So, God, would you allow us to soften our hearts? Would you allow us to become aware of our sickness and our sin? Not so that we leave here feeling shame and guilt and condemnation, but so that we would experience your grace and your freedom and your forgiveness, so that we receive your gift to us of forgiveness, that we begin, God, to allow grace to be the foundation of our lives and our faith. It’s in Jesus’ name we pray. Amen.

If you want to talk to someone about your relationship with Jesus and what it means to put your trust in Him and to receive God’s free gift of grace, please come talk to me or Maybe you have been saved along time ago but you have lost the grasp on the meaning of grace and there anew somethings that you need to lay at the altar. Some things that are weighing you down. When we accept Jesus as our Lord and savior he cast or sins as far as the east is from the west but sadly our tendency it to weigh ourself down with them and stay trapped to them even though we have been sent free if that is you would you come down and dedicate your life to the Lord