The Grace of God and the Gospel

A reflection and summary of Trae's message  last Tuesday.

    God is slowly perfecting us throughout our lives.  It doesn't just happen over night.  In a society like this we want things to happen for us quickly and when they don't we start to doubt that they will ever happen.  For example when we're younger we all want to be something.  We want to be a professional athlete, a dancer, or an actor.  For most of us sometime in our life we give up on that dream, we start doubting we can actually do it, so other people pursue our dreams instead because we gave up.  This is kind of how it's like when we pray.  We expect our prayers to be answered immediately, some miraculously heal right away.  That's why they are called miracles though, they are rare and don't happen a lot.  God takes awhile to fix things in our lives but he does, or he gives us something we need verse something we may ask for.  He slowly perfects us throughout our lives so we can be our best self later.

     To not go to far from God we need to live a gospel-centered life.  God tells us in "The Bible"  that there is nothing we can do to escape his love.  There's nothing we have to do to make God fully accept us because he already does.  "We don't change until we realize we don't have to."

    There's a lot of false perceptions on the gospel.  People like to put conditions on God's unconditional love, like in order to go to heaven we must go to church every Sunday, or read "The Bible" everyday, or become a ministry leader.  Adding these conditions to "The Bible" makes Jesus of no value to us.  Suddenly God's unconditional love doesn't matter to us and the fact that he sacrificed his son so we would be forgiven of all our sins.  Jesus said "It is finished"  meaning there is nothing for us left to do, he has done everything for us already.

     Through people adding to the gospel we feel like we need to earn God's favor otherwise God will be mad at us but that is not true.  Through God's grace we are turned into new creatures in the righteousness of God.  God's grace allows us to turn our desires of our flesh into the desires of our heart.  We respond to God in love through our freedom after receiving his spirit.  After being filled with the Holy Spirit sinning keeps us from doing what we want to do because we desire the things of the Spirit.  We choose to go to church and read "The Bible" because of our hunger to God and freely pursue righteousness we are not being forced to.  God can never be mad at us if we press into his love and trust in him.