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Living Grace

Christ in me, the hope of glory

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Grace is the Realization that Everything is a Gift from Christ

“I tell you the truth, you will ask the Father directly, and he will grant your request because you use my name. You haven’t done this before. Ask, using my name, and you will receive, and you will have abundant joy.” – John 16 : 23-24

When you dig down into the very foundations of God, you will discover in the depths of his eternal character that God really is a good gift giver.

He gives gifts with no strings attached. Regardless of our performance, our actions, our works, our effort, no matter how disconnected we feel,  he even doesn’t require us to do anything after we get them either, like improve or pray more or sacrifice all our plans and desires and commit ourselves to his cause or do good things to show how thankful we really are. His gifts are given free.

The most awesome gift that we have been given is eternal life.

This eternal life is ours in his son.  When we receive the son, we automatically have eternal life, and this life is made manifest inside of us, as the very life of Christ comes and dwells within us. This life is Christ’s life in all its fullness.

God who was before time, immeasurable and infinite the source of all life, the everlasting creator, the fountain of eternal life was glorified in the resurrected Christ and because God’s life is eternal, receiving the son is receiving eternal life.

The essence of God’s eternal life knows Christ. Our fragile, dust frames have become the home of the vast, glorious God. We have been made alive by the Holy Spirit and our finite frame is now immersed into the infinite God.

This gift of eternal life is the imparting of all the son is, not just living forever but joy, holiness, peace, hope, love, faith, strength, freedom, authority, kindness, wholeness, security, long-suffering, faithfulness, goodness, righteousness, purity, everything that is of Christ is now made in me.

How do I receive this free gift by simply seeing what is true and saying thank you.  Thanking God for all he has done for me makes it come alive in my experience and makes me come alive to God’s reality.

Grace is the realization that everything is a gift from Christ, given because he loves me, because he is a good giver and he takes pleasure and delight in overwhelming his children with every good gift from his heart of love.

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Grace is Flourishing in Christ.

“But the godly will flourish like palm trees and grow strong like the cedars of Lebanon.” – Psalm 92:12

God created you to flourish – and ransomed you to set you free to flourish – so you could be a living, vibrant, remarkable shining light in a world of blindness and darkness.

All creation is waiting for the sons and daughters of the Father of creation to display their glorious, wonderful, beautiful, pure new creation life.

Christ’s wonderful sacrifice at the cross made it possible for the living powerful, resurrected Spirit of Christ to dwell inside us. The passion of His heart is to see everything in creation flourish in new creation life birthed within each redeemed heart.

King David expressed it well when he wrote from the overflow of his heart in Psalm 92 – “But the godly will flourish like palm trees and grow strong like the cedars of Lebanon.”

As the Psalmist sings in this verse about the abundant strength and magnificence, he paints a picture of fruitfulness, uprightness, steadfastness, health and longevity.

The significance of the Palm Tree lies in the fact that a palm has only one, above ground growing point. This is located at the top of its trunk, and if this terminal bud is injured, the palm often dies. This deep rooted tree is able to withstand the most violent storms and blossom, bud and produce fruit all the year in the most arid of deserts. We are being reminded in this beautiful, creative picture of all God has made available and provided for us, and what will inevitably take place when we are rooted and established in him.

We can flourish in him because our new creation life inside us is rooted in the finished work of Christ. Christ now is our one and only growing point, and because He won the victory over death in His resurrection, we will never stop growing and blossoming into all He dreams for us.

When God wanted to grip the hearts of the Children of Israel, He gave them a portrait of his overwhelming love and goodness. He wanted to change how they thought and felt and lived, he wanted to captivate their entire individual existence with the wonder and majesty of his passionate love for them. He wanted them to believe in Him and all he could accomplish for them. Their liberation from Egypt into the glorious freedom of the Promised Land, a land so lavishly abundant he described it as overflowing with “milk and honey”, was a journey of discovery into the grip of His grace.

Palm trees flourish by the grace of God, and from the dates of the tree, dark brown syrup is harvested that is rich and sweet. It was this preserved syrup that was also referred to the “honey” of the Promised Land. God’s promise of honey was open for all to see in the comprehensive blessing of every Palm Tree established throughout the land. When hearts started to question, just looking and focusing on a flourishing tree reminded every soul that God is faithful and is to be trusted.

The vastness of God’s love is contained in His promises and sometimes it feels like these are beyond our human understanding and experience. But they are all there, they are all ours, they have all been showered upon us in Christ and God wants us to encounter him, be immersed in him, be filled with the abundance of him and like Palm Trees in the desert, be rooted and flourish.

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Grace is God’s Orchestrated Provision.

Now the Lord had arranged for a great fish to swallow Jonah. And Jonah was inside the fish for three days and three nights. – Jonah 1:17

Here in the book of Jonah is a remarkable outpouring of the heart of God. Within these few short chapters you can witness the compassion of God for his children and his overwhelming love for his creation.

In the story of Jonah, he ran away from the task God had given him, caught a boat in the opposite direction and completely disobeyed the commandment of God.  God however in a show of unfailing love orchestrated the fish of the sea to become a source of unmerited favour and Jonah’s salvation. God moved in love and provided a fish of grace.  In the midst of disobedience God acted in grace. For deep within his heart Jonah trusted in the goodness of God, “I cried out to the Lord in my great trouble, and he answered me, I cried to you from the land of the dead and Lord, you heard me.”  Jonah 2 : 1

A powerless and helpless man, unable to do anything for himself, at the lowest point of his life, tossed into an ocean of despair, death and desperation encountered the overwhelming grace of God. His rescue had already been orchestrated and provided by God.

Christ is our fish of grace.  For while we were sinners, ungodly, he died for us, he died in our place. He entered our world of despair, death and desperation and rescued us, before we even took our first breath or our heart took its first beat.

We were running away, going in the opposite direction, but God in Christ had orchestrated and provided our eternal redemption.

God has demonstrated to us, the helpless and the ungodly his infinite unconditional love. For his love is bigger, more self-sacrificing, more amazing and more abundant than any other love. His love found us at our worst and does not condemn us but rescues us and places us into Christ.

Just as Jonah was placed into the fish, you have been placed into Christ. You are now totally covered, totally safe, totally secure and supernaturally sustained in the embrace of Christ. Before you were born, God provided his son to die in your place so that you could receive the fullness of God and live in the embrace of Father and receive all the riches of heaven.

God is for you, He has already moved to help you, He loves you unconditionally, and you are the treasure of heaven.

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Grace is being grafted into Christ.

“But some of these branches from Abraham’s tree—some of the people of Israel—have been broken off.  And you Gentiles, who were branches from a wild olive tree, have been grafted in. So now you also receive the blessing God has promised Abraham and his children, sharing in the rich nourishment from the root of God’s special olive tree. “ –  Romans 11:17

Since you have been grafted into Christ the fullness of Christ has been deposited inside you and the Holy Spirit resides in you.

That is an amazing truth to take in. The life of Christ, his spirit is now the power which flows in your veins.  You now draw your life from His roots, you draw from His life. His infinite roots are established in eternity, intertwined in the plans and purposes of the Father, filled with the power of heaven, alive with divine glory and are secured in the will of the God.

Life now becomes a realisation of all that you are. As the life of Christ flows inside you, your heart finds its anchor in the foundations of the divine influence of God. This amazing deep bond brings an eternal perspective to your life.  Little by little it dawns on you that no effort, no work, no selfless acts can make you any closer to Christ, you just receive because he abides in you.

I know from personal experience how amazing it is when I realised that it was not up to me to abide in Christ, because he had already taken up permanent residence in me.  I remained in him because he remained in me. And unlike all other relationships, this was eternal; it would last through the limitless, boundless ages of time.

Having his life poured into us means that we are united into the glory of God and as we delight, acknowledge, revel in his presence his power ignites our souls and burns away all the stubble of the world that tries to weigh us down.

The wonderful thing is that this is effortless, because he has aligned us to heaven and devoted himself to our fulfilment and joy. He has placed a banquet inside us and has invited us to join in with the party.

You are never the same again, when you discover that you have been rooted and grounded through Christ into the eternal destiny of God.

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Egypt

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Grace is Christ’s Abundance.

“And God is able to make all grace [every favor and earthly blessing] come in abundance to you, so that you may always [under all circumstances, regardless of the need] have complete sufficiency in everything [being completely self-sufficient in Him], and have an abundance for every good work and act of charity.” – 2 Corinthians 9:8

The secret to living in the fullness of God’s grace is to first realise that God is a fountain of abundance. If you associate grace with just carrying on as you are, then you will look at life from a different perspective to the one God created for you. But if you stop and look through God’s eyes and his loving heart, everything begins to change.

The reality is that God is rich and he has an abundance of treasure. This verse in 2 Corinthians 9:8 “God is able to make all grace, every favour and earthly blessing come to you in abundance,”  is a fantastic affirmation of the overflowing heart of God to his children.

God has provided all we will ever need to live each day in an abundant wonderful and intimate relationship. We can take full advantage of living out our eternal life right now.

God’s loving heart was intended to overflow into all his creation. We are his special delight and Christ’s finished work has overflowed into each of us when we are united with his spirit.

God’s desire was that we would neither lack anything nor be poor, all heaven cries out for us to possess the land that flows with milk and honey, to eat of the lavish fruit and to graze in the fertile, lush green pastures.

To flourish in the land God has provided for us, is to enjoy the abundance of every blessing bestowed on us.

Carrying on just as you are is a lost opportunity to enjoy the rich delight of daily feasting on the banqueting table of heaven. Christ gave up the riches of heaven; he entered into this world of dust and ashes to ransom you from the poverty of separation. His motivation was love, his expression was kindness, and his gift was grace.

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Grace is a Person

“And now, dear brothers and sisters, one final thing. Fix your thoughts on what is true, and honourable, and right, and pure, and lovely, and admirable. Think about things that are excellent and worthy of praise. “ Philippians 4:8

Our impressions of who God is and all that he has accomplished for us is built up over many years of listening, studying, discovering, soaking in the revelation imparted into us. Every revelation we experience influences our vision of the world around us and the God who created it. The more we connect with that revelation the more profound the impact inside our souls.

Take for example a space rocket. If a rocket suffers a course alteration by just a fraction of a degree it could miss its destination in the stars by millions of miles.

As Christians we have a similar scenario, all those beliefs that we inherit from our teachers, pastors, speakers filter into our minds and those words shape our thinking. Everything that goes into our minds, through our senses, whether we like it or not alters our perception of our world and slowly over time we become moulded into who we are, how we perceive and where we are going. The world in which we live in bombards us through its media and we act and live according to the information we are fed, receive and believe.

To know who God is and how he views us, it is imperative that our basis of revelation is set on the correct course and is locked into the right destination. We need to let God fill our life, our minds, our souls with his truth, and see him in all his wonderful goodness.

If you want to describe God, you need to look to Jesus, for Jesus was God revealed in flesh. And Jesus is the embodiment of grace and the extender of grace to everyone. For God loves us so fully, so passionately, so intensely, so completely that He gave us his son in grace so that no one born of woman ever needed to be separated from God ever again.

Grace is unmerited, unearned and undeserved favour of God in Christ Jesus, a Person not a doctrine nor a teaching but Someone who died, rose and is now seated at the right hand of the Father who is continually and consistently praying and advocating for us.

Grace brings freedom, liberty, joy, peace, righteousness and most of all intimacy with our Abba Father, it is not something we neither possess nor take hold of but someone who has caught us by His loving arms and warm embrace.

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Grace is God’s Nature

“God saved you by his grace when you believed. And you can’t take credit for this; it is a gift from God.” Ephesians 2:8

Grace is who God is, Grace is God’s nature

This is the most amazing revelation, that grace and God cannot be separated.

God is an infinite, complete, unending, unfailing, overflowing ocean of goodness.

God is love, God is compassion, and he is an everlasting river of power devoted to us with a passion to awaken us to all Christ abundantly provided for each of us at the cross.

God saved you by his love for you. Love defines God, he always loves and he acts only through love. He never fails, he never wavers, his plans and dreams are always carried out.

God’s love means that you are accepted, loved and included into the family of heaven. His grace qualifies you, his grace freely given, has no requirements, no stipulations, no obligations, it is free with no strings attached, all you have to do, is say thank you, receive it and live in it.

God’s love keeps no record of wrongs, is patient, does no harm, thinks no evil, never gives up on you, believes all things, endures all things and will never fail you.

You can never extinguish or come to the end of his infinite love.

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The Grace of God

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