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grace

God's Grace Saves the Unlikely

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God's Grace Saves the Unlikely

Were starting a new series today, Patriarchs: the Faith and Failings of our Fathers. 

I see a four-fold rationale for why this study will be beneficial to our church. 

  • Many in our church and culture suffer from “father wounds” - emotional or psychological distress stemming from the failings of parental figures in their lives. It is all too common to point to the past failings of others as being either an excuse for present behaviour, or to be determinative of future destiny, rather than to soberly examine how God has used both the good and wicked actions of our fathers to bring about His plan in our lives. This is a call to faithfulness rather than victimhood.
  • Many parents in our congregation suffer from the fear that we will mess up our children’s lives or the guilt that we already have. Although God does not excuse wickedness and calls us to repentance of that which is wicked, we can be encouraged in our repentance that God will even use our failings as parents to bring out his purposes. In short, we can learn from the positive and negative examples in scripture, even while trusting God to bring good out of our failings.
  • I have not preached through Old Testament Narrative for some time and thus it is my hope that through this series our congregation will be better equipped to understand how to read, study and teach the Old Testament narrative. 
  • We will grow in our appreciation of the glorious grace of our God and Saviour, Jesus Christ who is able to “draw straight lines from crooked sticks” through the providential working of His will in us.

 

Theological Rationale for Sermon Series: The book of Genesis ends with a statement that well sums up the theme of the book: the words of Joseph to his brothers, “You meant evil against me, but God meant it for good.” The Book of Genesis is an account not only of the “precious and very great promises” God has made to mankind, but also the providential outworking of those promises through the faith and the failings of the family line of Abraham. Although the sermon series will highlight the faith and failings of our fathers, the theological principle underlying every sermon will be God’s providential outworking of his plan through these imperfect and at time corrupted vessels. 

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By Grace Alone

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By Grace Alone

Today we’re looking at a second truth to fix our life on, namely, salvation by grace alone. Ephesians 2:1-4 is one of the most beautiful passages of scripture. It speaks of our complete hopelessness in our state without God - we were dead, we were completely lost following the ways of this world and the desires of our flesh, under the influence of Satan and under the wrath of God. And you have that great contradiction in verse 14: But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, made us alive together - and the entirety of our hope is summed up at the end of verse 5: by grace you have been saved. What a passage! What a promise! What more needs to be said? We can go home!

Yet the powerful truth the resounded out of the reformation was not merely “salvation by grace” but “salvation by grace alone”, and so all week I’ve been trying to understand, what difference does that little word make? and does that little word still matter? And if it does still matter, what does that mean for us?

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