Blessed: Drenched In Grace

Have you ever been in a situation where you had just enough?

Not too much, but not too little.

Like you had just enough to get by.

Sometimes those situations are the most miraculous experiences we have in life.

I know a few months ago I turned my car on and uh and it started making a bunch of weird noises.

A bunch of things started to beep.

All kinds of lights came on the dash that I had never even seen before.

It was very, very informative.

I was like, wow, look at all these things.

Um, my car has what you might call character, so it makes a lot of noises.

There's a lot of things that happen with my car, and I go, should I get that checked out?

And I probably should, but I like to ride that line between optimism and ignorance.

It's a good, it's a good line to ride.

Like, it's fine, I'm sure it's fine, you know?

But it was pretty clear when I started my car this day, it was not fine.

And I thought I should probably detour on my way to the office and take this to the shop.

And so I went out of my way.

I went to the shop where I usually take our cars, and the second I pulled into the parking spot and put my car in park, it died.

And it died completely.

I couldn't even, I couldn't even get the engine to turn over after that.

But it waited until I put it in park at the shop.

I was like, God, this is awesome.

I viewed it as a miracle, like a minor miracle, because I had just enough juice to get me to the shop, not an ounce more.

It's great when we have just enough.

And I'm sure we've had situations in life where you had just enough money or you had just enough time or just enough patience, whatever it might be.

It's awesome when God gives us just enough.

But you know what's better than just enough?

More than enough, right?

It's weird if you ever go to websites where you can like read reviews of restaurants.

Sometimes people will negatively rate a restaurant because they'll say the portions are too big.

And I always look at that and go, they make boxes for that very reason.

Like, that's not, to me, that's where you you give a rating up.

You go up a star.

If you're like the portions are so big, you get to take some.

But some people, I don't know what it is.

I don't know if it's just like the whole foodie culture where it's like the portions were too big.

I'm like, that's a good thing.

I mean, praise God for leftovers.

Am I the only one that enjoys a box of food to eat later?

Am I the only one who says, I'll eat this tomorrow, but then I go ahead and eat it an hour later?

Am I the only one?

You know?

Good.

It's awesome when we have just enough, but it is absolutely better when we have an abundance.

Just enough is good.

More than enough is better.

And today we're gonna talk about something that God has given us more than enough of.

We're gonna talk about something that God has given us in abundance, but it's something that we often don't think of in that way.

Now, for some context, if you're here for the first time or if you haven't been here in a while, we're in a series right now called Blessed.

What we're doing is we're studying Ephesians chapter 1, verses 3 through 14.

Ephesians 1:3–14

We love to study the Bible here.

Sometimes in church culture, especially as churches get bigger, there's this idea, I hear it communicated by pastors sometimes, that you want to go easy on scripture because it's boring.

You know, you don't want to bore people.

I don't know if you've read the Bible.

There's a lot of words I would use to describe the Bible.

Boring is not one of them.

There are a few sections that are boring, and they happen to be pretty early on, so a lot of people get tripped up in like numbers and Deuteronomy, but if you can blow past that, right?

You could call the Bible scandalous, you could call it shocking, you can call it outrageous, you could even call it unbelievable, but boring, you cannot call it.

If you want to make the Bible into a movie and do it accurately, you're not even gonna get an R rating.

I mean, it is, it's intense.

The Bible is anything but boring, and so I love to just dive into scripture, and we love to do that here.

We think it's important that you you not settle for what a person observes when you can have what God reveals.

So that's why we study the word.

And we're gonna be going through the entire book of Ephesians over the course of the next year, but breaking that into some smaller little series.

This one's called blessed because in Ephesians 1, 3 through 14, the author, Paul, is describing for us the blessings that come from knowing Jesus.

He says in verse 3, to get things started, blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly realms.

So blessed be God who has blessed us with blessings.

Okay?

And these are spiritual blessings.

These are not your really short-lived, small, circumstantial blessings where something good happens to you and you're like, that was great, but ten minutes later, it doesn't matter.

These are deep, powerful personal spiritual blessings.

These are the kind of blessings that if you grab a hold of, if you if you take in and if you live in light of, you will have an entirely different perspective than 99% of the people living in this world.

You will have joy when it does not make sense.

You will have the ability to endure situations that the average person would say, I couldn't even begin to handle that.

To follow Jesus is to live a blessed life, but sometimes we lose sight of what the blessings actually are.

And Paul does an amazing job in Ephesians 1, in these verses, of getting us aligned with our blessings.

And so we're studying these blessings, and we've looked at the blessing of being made holy by God, just like the song we sung a second ago, blameless.

We've been made holy.

He sees us as spotless, he sees the righteousness of Jesus when he looks at us.

So we don't stand in front of God based on our own merit.

We don't have to worry about standing in front of God and hoping that we've done well enough.

We're holy.

Last week we talked about the fact that we've been made family.

God has adopted us into his family.

It's not a metaphor, it's not an analogy.

We are literally the sons and the daughters of God in his eyes if we've given ourselves to Jesus.

That's a blessing.

I don't know if you're from an important family, but there's no family more important than that one, right?

Makes you royalty.

Today we're going to talk about another blessing, this blessing that God has given us in abundance.

But let's start by just reading through what we've covered so far so that we're all on the same page.

Ephesians 1, starting in verse 3, slightly different translation than I read a moment ago.

All praise to God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly realms, because we are united with Christ.

Even before he made the world, God loved us and chose us in Christ to be holy and without fault in his eyes.

God decided in advance to adopt us into his own family by bringing us to himself through Jesus Christ.

This is what he wanted to do, and it gave him great pleasure.

And we continue on to the scripture we're covering today, verses six through eight.

It says, So we praise God for the glorious grace he has poured out on us who belong to his dear son.

He is so rich in kindness and grace that he purchased our freedom with the blood of his son, and he forgave our sins.

He has showered his kindness on us, along with all wisdom and understanding.

So obviously, there's a lot we could dive into there.

When you read the writings of Paul in the New Testament, he is very dense.

Every sentence is jam-packed with all this meaning.

It's deep stuff.

And so we have to sort of pick and choose what we're gonna focus on.

And as I prayed and prepared this week, the word grace just kept coming up.

And so we're gonna talk this morning about the blessing of grace.

Now you might say, hey, I feel like we've talked about this recently.

And that would sort of be like you saying, hey, I feel like we've talked about Jesus recently, because if you read the Bible, grace is a constant theme.

So you actually can't get very far in Scripture without covering the concept of grace.

And I'll go ahead and say this: grace is as central, it is as core to our faith as Jesus followers, as any concept.

There's really not one idea that is as foundational when it comes to our faith and what it means to be a Jesus follower as the idea of grace.

But it's also one of those concepts that oftentimes we sort of get.

Like we understand it in a hazy way, we get the gist of it, but we don't fully comprehend what it actually means to have the grace of God.

And if we don't fully comprehend what it means to have the grace of God, we don't get to live in light of the grace that we've been given.

And so that's why you see so many Christians whose lives are not very graceful.

They don't have a lot of grace for themselves, they don't have a lot of grace for the world around them, they don't have a lot of grace for the people they love, they have no grace for the people they disagree with.

But if you fully comprehend grace, you will live a life that is graceful.

So it's important for us to understand grace.

That's what we're here to do today.

More than anything else, I want us to understand grace.

And in order to help us understand grace, there's three words we're gonna look at that describe grace conveniently.

They all begin with the letters UN, like the word understand, behind me.

That's how alliteration works, and it helps you remember things.

It's wonderful.

I had to double check that it was behind me.

We're good.

Okay.

Number one, if you want to understand grace, you need to understand that grace is undeserved.

Grace is completely undeserved.

I'm gonna fast forward in Ephesians to chapter two, verses eight and nine.

God saved you by his grace when you believed.

And by the way, it doesn't say when you performed.

When you believed, he saved you.

When we say the word saved, we're talking about this concept called salvation.

Salvation in the Bible is very simple.

It's a process in which you give your life to Jesus, you put your faith in him, and when that happens, God justifies you.

Justifies you.

That means that he completely and totally forgives every sin in your life, past, present, future, done.

In one instance, you are forgiven.

And he begins a process where he gives you the Holy Spirit and you begin to be made new into the image of God, like he created you to be.

That's salvation.

And it says that we are saved when we believe, and then it goes on.

And you can't take credit for this.

It is a gift from God.

So all of you overachievers and teachers' pets in the room, you're out of luck.

Like you can't, you can't take any credit for this whatsoever.

It is a gift from God.

Salvation is not a reward for good things we have done, so none of us can boast about it.

That's so important.

I love it when there's a scripture that just makes it so clear.

Because sometimes there are verses in the Bible that are open to interpretation, and you can have one person take it one way, another person take it another way.

That's why it's really important that we have well-informed interpretations of scripture.

Otherwise, it can be misused.

But then there are scriptures that just make it really clear.

And there's there's no way, like there's no way to read that and go, you know, I think you can earn your way to heaven.

You know, I think you can do just enough good for God to go, I like you.

No way.

It says, look, this is a gift from God.

It has nothing to do with you, it has nothing to do with your performance, your track record, your ability, anything at all.

Salvation is a gift from God.

It's by grace that we've been saved.

None of us can boast about it.

So if you've ever met someone who's a Jesus follower and they're proud and they have this holier than thou attitude, and they make others around them feel inferior to them spiritually, they don't comprehend grace.

Because if you fully comprehend grace, if you understand how undeserved we are of God's grace, you are you are so completely in awe of the fact that He has accepted you that you don't have time to point out the faults in others.

Grace is undeserved.

Have you ever been given a gift and you did not deserve it and you knew it?

Like you knew I do not deserve this.

I have not earned this.

You can usually take that one of two ways.

You can feel guilty, or you can feel blessed.

I have a lot in my life that I don't deserve.

I think about my wife, and I'm not saying this because I need brownie points.

Okay?

I do need brownie points.

I'm a man, I'm married.

If you're a man and you're married, you need brownie points.

Like, let's all be, we are at a deficit of brownie points at any given moment, right, guys?

But yeah, praise God.

I'm just saying, yes, I need the brownie points.

I'm not saying this to get the brownie points.

I just want to make that clear, but I don't deserve my wife.

Like at all.

My wife, Megan, is she is creative, she's intelligent, she's beautiful, she's the most spiritually consistent person I've ever met in my life.

I've had whole seasons of my life where I basically said, hey God, I love you, but I got stuff to do.

You know, I have weeks in my life where I'm like, hey God, you know, obviously I'm I'm all about you, you know, I am a pastor, but like I uh I got a lot on my plate this week.

Sometimes I tell God, well, I don't use these words, but it's my attitude, it's my heart, hey God, I'm too busy serving you to spend time with you.

Which is crazy.

Megan is the most spiritually consistent person I know.

She she's just there with God.

Being married to her spiritually is like it's like going on a jog with a marathon runner.

You know?

It's it's challenging, but it's also incredibly effective for pushing you forward.

I don't deserve my wife.

She is a gift.

And it's so nice to be given something you don't deserve.

If we want to understand grace, we've got to understand that it is entirely undeserved.

It is a gift from God.

Number two, grace is underestimated.

Anyone here have a have an easy time underestimating how much time it's gonna take to do something?

Like you're someone who always underestimates how much time something is going to take.

I I am with you.

I struggle so much getting to places on time because when I wake up in the morning, I underestimate how long it takes me to shower.

I underestimate how long it takes me to get my children ready.

I underestimate how long it's gonna take me to drive somewhere because I live in Atlanta and I like forget, oh yeah, traffic.

I just I underestimate time.

There are certain things that are very easy to underestimate.

Grace is very, very easy to underestimate.

See, when we talk about grace, we often talk about it like it's a synonym of other words.

So we'll talk about grace, and it's almost like we can replace the word forgiveness with grace.

So we see grace and forgiveness as one and the same.

Grace is so much more than forgiveness.

We we use grace as a synonym for mercy.

So in our minds, mercy and grace, it's like the same thing, just descriptive in a different way.

No, no, no.

Grace is so much more than mercy.

Forgiveness and mercy are aspects of grace, they exist under the umbrella of grace, but grace is so much greater and more than any of those.

Take mercy, for example.

The word mercy means you don't get what you deserve.

You do not get what you actually deserve.

That's mercy.

And trust me, God is merciful, and he's given all of us mercy.

But grace means you get what you don't deserve.

And they may sound very similar, the semantics are important here, but they're actually very, very different.

Think about it this way: let's say you're someone who is the head of an organization or you're very high up in your organization, so you have the power to hire, to fire, to demote, to promote, to give raises.

You have that authority.

And I'm sure many of us in the room, that is our situation.

Many of us in the room would like that to be our situation.

It's good to have something to strive for.

Go for it.

But let's say you're that person and you've got an employee and they are not good.

Like they're just they're late all the time, they're always missing their deadlines, their work is sloppy.

You can tell they do not give it their all.

They put no passion, no effort, no care in their work.

And maybe you could overlook some of that if they had an amazing attitude and were a joy to work with, but they're not, they're rude, they're not kind.

No one who works with them enjoys working with them, and they're they're flat out disrespectful to authority.

If that person works at your company and you have the authority to fire them, you might need to do that.

Someone else may need that job, you know.

But if you decided not to fire that person, even though they deserve to be fired, they deserve to be let go.

You deciding not to fire that person would be mercy.

Because they deserve it.

But you're merciful, so you you let them stay on.

You give them another year, whatever that looks like.

Mercy would be not firing them.

Grace would be giving them a promotion and a raise and some extra time off.

See?

Mercy is not getting what you deserve.

Grace is getting what you do not deserve.

See the difference there?

It's it's vast.

There is a wide gap between grace and mercy, but we often see them as the same thing because we underestimate grace.

And if we underestimate grace, we believe that we need grace and that in order to be right with God, we need grace and obedience.

We need grace and performance.

But that's not how it works.

It's so hard for us to remember this because we live in a performance-oriented society.

How you do in your career will greatly depend on how you perform, how you do in school will greatly depend on how you perform.

That's the way this world works.

But God's kingdom is different.

And so the apostle Paul, who wrote Ephesians, he battled this at the same as we might.

He battled this desire to have to do enough to make sure that God was pleased with me, even though he knew that he was covered by grace, and he had this one experience that's recorded for us in 2 Corinthians chapter 12.

2 Corinthians 12 · chapter mention

And he's describing this problem that he has.

He calls it a thorn in his flesh.

And we don't know what it is, we don't know if it's a behavior in his life, we don't know if it's some other person that's just driving him crazy.

But this thorn in his flesh, it's getting in his way, and he prays for God to remove it.

And we see Paul describe this in 2 Corinthians 12, uh, starting in verse 8.

Let's see here.

I don't have it in my notes, so we're gonna read it from the screen.

Uh, three different times I beg the Lord to take it away.

And each time he said, My grace is all you need, my power works best in weakness.

So now I'm glad to boast about my weaknesses so that the power of Christ can work through me.

He says, My grace is all you need.

So Paul's going, Hey God, take this away from me because this is keeping me from performing at optimal level.

Hey God, take this away from me because this is keeping me from being able to pursue you with all my heart.

And God just says, you know, my grace is all you need.

My grace is sufficient.

You don't need grace, and you need grace.

We can never ever underestimate grace.

Because it's all we need.

The love that God has given us, the righteousness, the holiness, the right standing with Him, it's a gift from God.

So the only thing we have to boast about is our weakness.

If anything, we should boast about how unworthy we are so that other people can see that God would take them the same as He'd take us.

That's why we say at His hands, we love messy people.

If you're willing to admit that you're a mess, you belong here.

We'll take you if you don't, because you're still messy, you're just good at hiding it.

But you know, we'll get there.

We'll get there.

Grace is undeserved, grace is underestimated.

The third, and this is the one I would I would hope that if you remember one, you remember this one.

Grace is unlimited.

It is completely and totally unlimited.

I want to go back to the first scripture that we looked at, the focus of the morning rather.

Ephesians chapter 1, 6 through 8.

Ephesians 1 · chapter mention

So we praise God for the glorious grace he has poured out on us, who belong to his dear son.

He is so rich in kindness and grace that he purchased our freedom with the blood of his son and he forgave us our sins.

He has showered his kindness on us along with all wisdom and understanding.

I love the language that Paul uses.

God has poured out his grace.

He has showered his kindness and his grace on us.

He is rich in kindness and in grace.

I love that language.

And when I read this scripture, I always get the same picture in my mind.

It's a picture that comes from a memory of when I was in college.

I waited tables in college.

Anyone here either currently or have ever waited tables?

It's a noble profession.

It's good to learn how to serve people, it really is.

I'm grateful for the time that I spent doing that.

I worked at this one restaurant and we were required to serve our tables with what they called tray service, which meant if you even had one drink that you had to take to a table, it had to be on a tray.

It was fancy, you know?

And it was kind of annoying because the place I'd worked before was Chili's, and Chili's is laid back.

Like my managers at Chili's, they kind of didn't care anymore.

They were like, whatever, we work at Chili's and we're good with it.

And so, you know, it was fine.

They were fun people.

So they didn't care.

Trays, they're like, just take the drink out.

Heck, pour the drink at the table.

I don't care.

Um, you know, super laid back.

This other restaurant, no, no, no, put it on a tray.

And so we had these little trays, and and the cups that we had that carried our drinks, number one, way huge.

They were 24-ounce glasses.

24 ounces is a lot.

That's a lot of liquid to consume at one time.

It's just short of those cups at Quick Trip where you're like, I don't even think a bladder can hold that much liquid at one time.

Why does that even why is that even a thing?

You know, there's no cup holder on earth that can fit those cups.

You need like a seat and a seat belt for some of those cups.

But we like that, you know?

This place we had 24-ounce cups, and they weren't weighted properly on the bottom, and they got bigger as they went up, so they were top heavy.

So it made it really easy for them to tip over, and you had to get really good at using your tray correctly.

So, as a general rule, we were not supposed to put more than four cups in the middle of our tray.

You wouldn't put the drinks on the outside of the tray, you're just asking for it then.

You put the cups in the middle, you line the other things around it, the things that aren't quite as tall, and that's how you did it.

But sometimes you'd be in a rush.

I remember this one night I had a table of six.

It was one family, one of those annoyingly large families, six people.

That's our family now.

Just had our fourth.

Like, we don't go out to eat anymore because it's paying like going out to eat for us is paying$100 to have a terrible time.

That's what it means.

We pick food up, we take it home, but we don't do this whole restaurant thing anymore.

It's just we ruin everyone else's day and our own, and then we pay for it.

Doesn't make any sense at all.

They should pay us to leave.

That's how it should work.

Like, hey, comp this food, we're out of here.

How fast do you want us gone?

You know?

That's what we should do.

But this family of six sits down, and I'm busy, and so I went ahead and I put all six of their drinks on the tray.

And I come back out, and you know, I already know that I'm borderline, but I've done this before.

You know, I'm I'm a pro at this point, I think.

And so I end up reaching down and I hand one of the people at the table their drink, and I feel I feel the tray starting to tilt, and I go, oh no.

So I I try to compensate.

And you know how it is when you're driving a car and you try to compensate, but you overcompensate, you make it worse.

That's what I did.

So I decided to compensate by raising my hand up high.

In my mind, it was like, get it away from the people, you know?

But what I actually Did was I raised it right above the head of a 10-year-old boy?

And it just so happened that the drink, it was a Dr.

Pepper, I'll never forget, the drink tilted over and it landed in such a way that it just directly poured all over his head.

The entire 24 ounces.

It would not have, I'm not joking, it would not have been any different at all if I had just walked out with the glass and gone, here you go.

You know?

Ironically, the Dr.

Pepper is what he ordered.

So he got it, you know?

Like, he got his drink delivered directly to him, just not in the way that he would prefer.

And I'm sitting there, I'm mortified, like, what do you do?

Because I have I brought food out to people and it was wrong.

I'd taken their order wrong, and you can fix that.

You can go, I'm so sorry, I'll go have the chef fix that.

By the way, if you ever go to a restaurant, there's this word that waiters use, it's they, and that's who they blame everything on.

Did they did they make this wrong?

I'm so sorry.

I'll go talk to them.

There's no them, there's no they, it's the person, okay?

I am they.

But I I can't look at this family and go, did they did they just pour Dr.

Pepper on your child?

I am so so.

I'm gonna go, I'm gonna go take what do you do?

You're just sitting there, and this is the beginning of the meal, and this child is sopping wet, just dripping all over him, all over his hair.

It was cold.

He screamed, his parents didn't see it happen because they're paying attention to their stuff.

They just hear him squeal, they look up, and they're trying to figure it out, and he's just drenched, and I'm like, I am so sorry.

Man, they probably didn't come back, but they left me a nice tip.

It's called a pity tip when you do so bad, it's a brilliant picture of grace, to be honest with you.

You know, when I when I read this scripture about God pouring his grace out on us, that's what I visualize.

You know?

Like he's just poured it out.

Here you go.

And it's actually really important for us to let that imagery sink in because we so often think of grace as something that God has given us just enough of.

Have you ever heard the phrase enough grace for today?

It's like a phrase in Christianity, like just enough grace for the day.

You heard that phrase?

It's garbage.

It is not biblical at all.

It probably comes from the verse that says, His mercies are new every morning, okay?

In other words, every morning you wake up, God's mercy is just as strong as it was yesterday.

It doesn't run out.

But there is no scripture that says God has given you just enough mercy.

God has given you just enough grace.

That story that I told at the beginning, where we we have situations in life where we have just enough to get by, that's not how it works with grace.

He has not given you grace like a prescription.

Or, hey, here's the grace that'll get you through the next 12 hours, and then here's a little bit more.

And I'm just gonna dole this out in little doses so that you have enough grace for the 12 hours that you're going through.

That's not how it works.

He has poured out his grace all over you.

He's poured it out.

You are sopping wet, you are drenched with grace, completely and totally drenched.

You have enough grace for today, you have enough grace for tomorrow, you have enough grace for the rest of your life, you have enough grace for all of eternity because he has poured out his grace and it is all over you.

It is all over you.

That's how his grace works.

It's been poured out from his riches.

It says that some translations say that he has given us his grace according to his riches, and it's very different to give something from your riches versus giving something in accordance to your riches.

Because if you're rich, you can give someone ten dollars from your riches.

But if you give in accordance to your riches, that means you are giving everything.

He has given you grace in accordance to the wealth of grace that he has.

And it's it's everything.

It's funny when Paul would teach on grace, it was so scandalous, it was so complete that people would almost always walk away, and their conclusion would be, sweet, I can get away with anything now.

Like that happened a lot.

That's why you see Paul talk about that a lot when he writes.

For example, Romans chapter 5.

Romans 5 · chapter mention

Paul's describing grace.

It says, God's law was given so that all people could see how sinful they were.

But as people sinned more and more, God's wonderful grace became more abundant.

So just as sin ruled over all people and brought them to death, now God's wonderful grace rules instead, giving us right standing with God and resulting in eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Then the very next verse is Romans 6:1, and Paul says, Well then, should we keep on sinning so that God can show us more and more of his wonderful grace?

Romans 6:1

He asked that question because people would respond to the way he taught grace that way.

It wasn't just the Romans, it happened in Corinth as well.

In 1 Corinthians 10 23, Paul is responding to the attitude some people have regarding the grace they've been given.

And he says, You say I'm allowed to do anything, but not everything's good for you.

You say I'm allowed to do anything, but not everything is beneficial.

And here's what's what's crazy: these people were responding to grace the wrong way.

Because the right way to respond to grace would be you're so overwhelmed by the grace that He's given you that you're even more motivated to live the life he's calling you to live than ever before.

You're saying, hey, you know what?

I'll put my own desires aside and do whatever it is you call me to do because I'm so in awe of how much you've forgiven me.

So their response to grace wasn't accurate, but their understanding of grace was.

Number one, just soak in it.

You know, it's kind of funny when I think back to that family, everyone else was shocked, but the kid thought it was cool.

You know, he's a 10-year-old kid and he loves attention, so he's like, Yes, Dr.

Pepper, you know.

He was laughing, he was enjoying it.

Like everyone else was freaking out.

His mom was like, I'm so sorry.

He's like, No, it's cool.

You've been drenched in grace.

Stop acting like you're you feel bad that God's given it to you.

Don't worry about the fact that it's happened.

Sometimes people live like, oh God, I'm so sorry that you had to do this, and God's not sorry.

He's not sorry.

We read earlier just a few verses ago that it's what he wanted to do, and it gave him great pleasure.

Stop apologizing in your heart for something God wanted to give you.

Soak in it.

When you mess up, because you will and you do, when you mess up, the first words out of your mouth should not be I'm sorry, they should be thank you.

Because you are drenched in grace.

So soak in it.

Enjoy it.

Live free because of that.

Number two, like squeeze some out for the people around you.

You know?

I mean, if you actually believe, if you actually believe that you are soaked in grace, then it should be dripping off of you everywhere you go.

Then when you interact with people, you should be so hard to offend, so hard to get hot and bothered.

Like there's this perception of Christians, and it it exists because it was real for a season, but I believe it's changing and it needs to.

There's this idea of Christians that there are people who are easy to offend.

You know, the church really messed up generations ago when it stopped caring whether or not people actually knew Jesus and just told the world, hey, act like you do.

Because you're offending us.

You know?

I don't expect people who don't know Jesus to act like they know Jesus.

I want them to know Jesus.

And then you let the Holy Spirit take care of most of that.

But we should be people who are so hard to offend because we have so much grace.

Like we're sitting here soaked in grace.

He's poured it out all over us so we can go, hey, you want some?

You know, when when someone does something and it offends you, stop and realize the offense that God has wiped out.

Like Ephesians, we read a lot from Ephesians chapter 4.

Ephesians 4 · chapter mention

Get rid of all bitterness, rage, anger, harsh words, slander, as well as all types of evil behavior.

Instead, be kind to each other, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, just as God through Christ has forgiven you.

If you want to know what to do with this grace you've been given, give it away.

If you want to know what to do with Jesus, give him away, because he doesn't belong to you.

Not to hoard.

He's ours to share.

And this grace that he's given you, every sin, every mistake, every failure, gone.

Like you could walk up to God and say, hey God, I'm really sorry for last Tuesday, you know, last Tuesday.

And God would go, I don't actually know last Tuesday.

What are you talking about?

All I see when I look at you is the righteousness of Jesus.

So I'll say this there's probably someone in your life who annoys you.

Amen?

One person, right?

Obviously, no one you're sitting next to.

Those people are the best.

Right?

Yeah.

But no, seriously, and look, I'm not I'm not trying to oversimplify things, but oftentimes we have situations, we have people who drive us crazy.

I'm a pastor.

Some of you are awesome.

You know?

Some of you can find me.

I don't know how you do it.

I can be anywhere, and all of a sudden I turn the corner and there, there you are.

Like, so I guess we're talking now.

But it's all good.

It's my job.

It's my job.

But sometimes we we live and we have people that are just getting they're getting to us and they they drive us crazy.

And obviously, there might be a multitude of reasons why, and I'm not trying to oversimplify it, because maybe there's there's a lot of things that need to change, but I will say that the one thing you have in your control is the ability to give grace.

You cannot control another person, you cannot control what they do, what they say, how they act, how they behave.

You have no idea what happened in their life that's brought them to this point, but you have complete ability to give them grace because it is dripping off of you.

Because it's been poured out over you.

And you might find that just the simple act of going, here's some grace, takes a lot of that frustration away.

We have been drenched in grace.

So, as a church, as a group of people, let's just soak in it, let's enjoy it, and then let's squeeze some out for the world around us when we leave here today.

Okay, please pray with me.

Jesus, thank you for grace.

Thank you for this undeserved and underestimated and unlimited gift that you've given us.

And Lord, help us live in light of the grace that you've given.

As we leave here today, Lord, as we interact with the world around us, as we talk to one another, as we go back home to our families, as we get in our cars and we drive and we sit in lines and at red lights, God, as we go to restaurants where they get our order wrong or whatever happens.

As we work for people who we feel like don't understand us and don't understand our abilities and they don't appreciate us, whatever we're dealing with right now, Lord, I ask that you give us the ability to squeeze some of the grace that you've poured onto us out for the world.

That we would be the hardest people to offend, the quickest people to forgive, the most patient, the most endearing, the most charming people that live, because we live in light of the grace you have poured out.

You haven't given us just enough grace.

You've given us enough for ourselves and enough for the world around us.

So, Lord, help us use that.

Help us give that, help us live in it.

We love you, we thank you for it, Jesus.

It's in your name we pray.

Amen.