Monday, January 22, 2007

Rom 1: 7b-…Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. 

Have you ever noticed that Paul uses this salutation often when addressing the various churches?  Why is that?   
The word “Grace” was a very common greeting among the Greeks.  When you passed someone on the street you would say to them “Grace to you” in the same way we might say “hello”, or ask “how are you?”    The word “Peace” was a very common greeting among the Hebrews.  If you were to travel to Israel today, many of the Jews there would greet you with the term “shalom”, which among other things means Peace.  It was and still is a standard greeting. 

  

The word grace in the Greek society spoke of beauty and favor.  Grace takes on an even more significant meaning when you put it into the Christian context.   

Grace and Peace.  These two words are called the “Siamese twins” of the New Testament because they are almost always coupled together.  The interesting thing is that they are always in the order in which we see them here.  Never do you find them in the reverse order of peace and grace.   

I do not believe that you can really know the peace of God until you have known and experienced and understood the Grace of God.  There are a great deal of Christians today that do not fully understand the grace of God and because of that they truly do not have the peace of God in their daily walk with Him.  Many people today are striving to somehow please God by their devotion to Him.  We seek to gain the acceptance of God by working to stir up fervor, passion and zeal thus somehow proving our dedication to Him.  The more devotion to Him we can gain, the more pleased by God we become, is the thinking of the day.   

Fasting, spending great quantity of time in prayer (regardless of the quality), reading Gods word through yearly without fail, never missing a service, serving in and on everything we can squeeze into our already busy lives, keeping our list of rules that we feel are sin and striving in our own effort to be a good Christian will surly gain us Gods approval.  The problem is, the more we strive to do, the more aware of our failures and shortcoming we become.  We seem to always fall short of our goals.  We’re always setting new ones.  We’re always feeling guilty because we come up short in our attempts for zeal and dedication to our God. We fail to keep our list of rules. We make more vows then fall short again.  Sound familiar? This type of life will rob us of any type of real peace of God.  Why, because we do not understand the real grace of God. 

We’re trying to gain His approval of the basis of our own goodness.  We are trying to prove our worth to Him through our obedience, our dedication, our works and our own efforts.  Do you see a pattern here?  It is “our” commitment to Him, when we should be resting in His commitment to us. 

The greatest day in our Christian walk with God is when somehow we grasp the GRACE of God.  They day we are able to fully rest in the completed work of Jesus Christ in our life.  The day that we can cease from our own labor, and our own effort and our own attempt with pleasing God and trying to become acceptable to Him and we can grasp the GRACE of God that He has given to us.  His complete acceptance of us and the work in our lives that has been granted to us through the effort of what His Son, Jesus has done for us.  The gift of GRACE!  It is not what we can do for God; it is what He has already done for us. 

You have to know His grace before you can have His peace.  Grace and peace to you by God the Father and Christ Jesus.  Not by works of righteousness that we have done.  It’s Gods great work in me, not my feeble little effort for Him that counts.   

Do we quit serving God?  Do we stop praying, do we stop reading His Word?  Absolutely not……God forbid!   But we do it now out of a heart of love and gratitude of God. We rest in God’s grace and pleasure over our lives and we enjoy His love of us.   My prayer for all of us today is that this greeting from Paul of grace and peace will become more than words on a page, but that they become the practical experience of our Christian life.

posted by Crown Pointe Church @ 8:07 AM