Identifying Grace

Scripture Reading

Acts 11:19–24 ESV

19 Now those who were scattered because of the persecution that arose over Stephen traveled as far as Phoenicia and Cyprus and Antioch, speaking the word to no one except Jews. 20 But there were some of them, men of Cyprus and Cyrene, who on coming to Antioch spoke to the Hellenists also, preaching the Lord Jesus. 21 And the hand of the Lord was with them, and a great number who believed turned to the Lord. 22 The report of this came to the ears of the church in Jerusalem, and they sent Barnabas to Antioch. 23 When he came and saw the grace of God, he was glad, and he exhorted them all to remain faithful to the Lord with steadfast purpose, 24 for he was a good man, full of the Holy Spirit and of faith. And a great many people were added to the Lord.

Acts 11:19-

Introduction

As you remember, a few weeks ago I was blessed to be able to attend the Freed-Hardeman Lectureships, and while I was there I was able to hear a series of Lessons on Grace by brother Dan Winkler. As I sat and listened to these lessons, I was so incredibly encouraged and enriched by his helping me to obtain a better understanding of Grace that I immediately decided that I would do the same kind of lessons when I had the opportunity here.

So what you are going to hear from me today is information that I have borrowed from brother Winkler, who derived his thoughts from scripture. I’m not going to steal his lesson word for word, illustration for illustration, if you want to hear that you can go to the link I posted on the church FB group and check it out, I highly recommend doing so. But I have adapted his main points and attempted to make them my own.

Brother Winkler titled his first lesson on grace “The face of Grace”

Which is an appropriate name because people are extremely good at recognizing faces. Studies have shown that humans can remember anywhere between 5,000 - 10,000 faces. And while you might not remember all of their names, you might remember them as the Janitor, or the waitress.

Actually studies show that all social animals are extremely good at recognizing faces. Dogs, sheep, and monkeys were all shown to be able to recognize faces. Cats however were not which actually explains a lot.

All social living creatures are extremely good at recognizing faces.

The point is, we are really good at distinguishing different faces from one another, even though they typically all contain the same elements. It is actually still something that our brains are better at than computers.

In the same way we can recognize faces based on the defining characteristics of a face, we can identify grace by it’s defining characteristics.

In the scripture reading that has been read from

Barnabas is sent to Antioch and the text tells us that when Barnabas arrived there that he “Saw the grace of God. Meaning, that within the church there in Antioch, he was able to recognize the grace of God being present among them.

In

Ephesians 2:4–7 ESV

4 But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, 5 even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved— 6 and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, 7 so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.

Would we know what grace looked like when we saw it?

More importantly, would we be able to describe grace to someone else who desired to know more about it?

In our discussion about hope over the last few months, we wrapped up with , that we should always be

“prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you with gentleness and respect.”

As our hope is absolutely rooted in the grace of God, as states,

Ephesians 2:8–9 ESV

8 For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, 9 not a result of works, so that no one may boast.

It seems essential to me that we as Christians ought to be able to clearly distinguish and describe grace to the world around us. Not only that, but we are called to be representatives of that grace to everyone in our lives.

Our text this morning comes from 8

As we read through this short section of scripture, I want us to pay special attention to how many times we see the word “Grace” in this brief passage of scripture.

Ephesians 2:4–8 ESV

4 But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, 5 even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved— 6 and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, 7 so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. 8 For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God,

Three times here in Paul makes a special emphasis on the grace of God, and within these mentions of God’s grace I believe we can discover three identifying ingredients, or distinguishing features by which we can identify GRACE.

These three features that help us understand and recognize GRACE are MERCY, LOVE, AND KINDNESS.

Mercy

If you have been joining us on Sunday nights you know that we’ve been going through the book of Genesis and over the past several months we have been stepping chapter by chapter thorugh the story of the sons of Jacob and the account of Joseph being sold into slavery by his brothers, and then being elevated by the providence of God to the position of second in command of all of Egypt and ultimately finding himself in a position of power over his brothers with the opportunity to exact justice on them for what they had done to him.

But instead we see that Joseph doesn’t do that at all. Rather than the story being one of punishment the story becomes a story of forgiveness and of reconciliation between brothers.

We talked about last week how the story of Joseph and his brothers is a great display of mercy in that the brothers were not held responsible for the wrong that they had committed against Joseph. They didn’t get what they deserved, instead they recieved mercy.

The first identifying feature to the face of grace is Mercy.

Ephesians 2:4a ESV

4 But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us,

Eph 2:

The New Testament has several words to that are translated Mercy in English.

But the word here “Eleos” is not one that’s associated with a mere head knowledge of forgiveness, but is closely tied to other English words that help us to understand the richness of the biblical meaning of Mercy.

These words include “Goodness, favor, pity, and compassion”

And the word here in shares the meaning with pity and compassion.

And the text says that this quality, this ability to have pity and compassion is something that God is rich in, that he has in abundance.

Now as students of the Bible, this should not surprise us at all should it?

If you have been paying attention to many of the things we’ve studied over the past year, you’ll recall that I’ve often referred to Exodus chapter 34 when God uses his own words to define exactly who he is and among those words that he chooses to identify himself as he proclaims that he is “The LORD, THE LORD, A GOD MERCIFUL AND GRACIOUS.”

And I’ve often stated that we see this theme of God’s self identity all throughout the old and new Testaments.

Which is why it drives me crazy when people say things like they love the God of the New Testament but they don’t really care for the God of the Old Testament. HE’S THE SAME GOD AND WE SEE HIS MERCY ALL THROUGHOUT THE OLD TESTAMENT.

And throughout both the New and Old testaments we see mercy being present not only in the dealings of God with his people, but also within God’s people with one another.

If you have been joining us on Sunday nights you know that we’ve been going through the book of Genesis and over the past several months we have been stepping chapter by chapter thorugh the story of the sons of Jacob and the account of Joseph being sold into slavery by his brothers, and then being elevated by the providence of God to the position of second in command of all of Egypt and ultimately finding himself in a position of power over his brothers with the opportunity to exact justice on them for what they had done to him.

Yet what we see throughout the story is that Joseph is moved to tears in the presence of his brothers.

In fact in after Joseph sees his brother Benjamin, the text says that his compassion grew warm for his brother and he sought a place to weep.

The Hebrew word that is translated as compassion here is

Rahameem - which is also often translated as Mercy, and this Hebrew word carries with it the meaning of a feeling coming from the pit of ones stomach, from within the very core of our being.

The greek has a word that means very much the same thing, the word is

Splanchnizomai - If you were here when Cameron John spoke last summer over the parable of the unforgiving servant from , you’ll remember the way that he said it, and how he said that it come from the gut. That the pity that the king had for the debtor came from a place from within, that he not only felt for the man, but he in a way felt with him within himself.

But instead we see that Joseph doesn’t do that at all. Rather than the story being one of punishment the story becomes a story of forgiveness and of reconciliation between brothers.

We talked about last week how the story of Joseph and his brothers is a great display of mercy in that the brothers were not held responsible for the wrong that they had committed against Joseph. They didn’t get what they deserved, instead they recieved mercy.

We have a an idiom in the English language that conveys this level of compassion, mercy, and pity.

Have you ever heard someone say, or maybe you’ve said it yourself, Upon receiving bad news “When I heard the news it was like a punch in the gut.”

We’ve had some news like that recently haven’t we? When we feel that way, that sinking compassion that we feel deep inside, that is the kind of rich mercy that God has toward us when we fail.

Isn’t that great to know? But why does he feel that way?

Well Paul goes on to say that It’s because of the Love that he feels for us.

Love

So of course the next identifying feature of grace is Love.

Now we talk quite a bit about love, so I am not going to spend as much time on it as we did Mercy, but we do need to understand the kind of Love that God has for us.

And of course any time we talk about love in the Greek language we have to distinguish the 4 types of love reflected in the greek

First is eros, which is the physical sensual love that the scriptures never use.

then there is Phileo, which is a friendship type of love, or a love between equals.

Storge - is a familial love that was most often used of love for parents or children.

But the word used here and the word that is most often employed by the writers of the NT is Agape - A love that is deep and constant, that longs for the well being of those who are loved. This is the kind of divine love that God has for us, and results in our loving Him in return.

Paul says that this Agape love that God has for us is what drives God’s mercy toward us.

Now there are many things relating to God that we often have a hard time making sense of, but I don’t think that this is one of them.

We too have love for others, and our love too drives a desire for their wellbeing. That’s why tragic news such as a cancer diagnosis or a car accident feels like we’ve been punched in the gut. It’s why we desperately want to do something to help. It is why during times of hardship we go up to someone and tell them, “if there is anything we can do, please let us know.”

Our love for others, drives compassion-pity-mercy, for them and is identified by our acts of our third distinctive feature of grace, KINDNESS towards others.

Kindness

Paul says in v7,

Ephesians 2:7 ESV

7 so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.

I’ve mentioned before that I believe that mankind is universally able to recognize acts of kindness.

When we see someone take time out of their day to bring food to someone who is hungry, we know that is kindness.

When we hear news of a stranger paying off someone elses debts or medical bills, we understand that as kindness.

We don’t have a hard time understanding kindness, and we as followers of Christ certainly understand what Paul is saying here when he declares that what God has given us through the life, death, and resurrection of Christ Jesus is an incredible kindness.

He paid the debt for our sins that we could never pay.

Not only has he forgiven us our past debts, he continues to cover us from our sins as we walk in the light confessing our sins to him.

But not only that, He made right a relationship that we could never make right on our own.

Not only that, through Christ he has made us more than conquerors. He has made us sons of God and co-heirs with Christ.

So what was it that Barnabas saw in Antioch that proved to him the distinctive features of Grace?

I believe that what he saw was a group of people following the example that Christ set for them and left for all of us to follow

When Jesus came across people who were hungry, when he people came to him in need of healing, when they were possessed by demons, when they mourned the loss of their loved ones, the great love that Jesus had for people caused him to be stirred up deeply and caused feelings of compassion-pity-mercy which were then manifested in actions of kindness.

Take for example the healing of the leper in Matthew chapter 8.

Conclusion

Church, the scriptures show us that GRACE is identified by three recognizable attributes. LOVE, MERCY, AND KINDNESS.

Or as brother Winkler put it “LOVE + MERCY + KINDNESS = GRACE”

For God so loved the world - We see love don’t we?

That he sent his only son - We see an act of kindness don’t we?

That whoever believes in him shall not perish - we discover the implied mercy don’t we?

God’s Love for us led to his mercy because he knew we were in a situation we couldn’t recover from, and in response he sent us kindness in the form of Jesus Christ so that we could not only not perish, but have eternal life.

That is GRACE. RECEIVING KINDNESS THAT WE HAVEN’T EARNED AND COULD NEVER EARN.

Church the question is this morning, if Barnabas was to be able to check in on the church that meets in Fort Cobb, would he be able to see the Grace of God that he saw in Antioch?

If he looked into each one of our lives, in the way that we work, the way that we are at home, the way we are around our friends and neighbors, the way we interact with the the world, would he recognize the grace of God in our lives? Would he see Love, Mercy, and Kindness? Or would he see something else?

Let’s all be encouraged to love the way that Jesus loved, The feel compassion and mercy the way Jesus felt compassion and mercy, and to perform acts of kindness the way that Jesus demonstrated acts of kindness.

Perhaps you are here this morning, and you believe that Jesus is the son of God, but you have yet to accept God’s free gift of grace by repenting of your sins, confessing him before men, and being baptized for the remission of your sins. We want to invite you to come forward now, don’t leave here today doubting. If you are doubting, we love you, and our hearts go out to you and want you to know that you are a child of God, You can leave here this morning knowing for certain that you have obeyed the gospel and are now a child of God. The invitation is always open, and you can come now as we stand and sing.