Grace to You and Peace

The point: Recognize that the grace of God does not make us inhuman or discourteous; there is a realm of common human decency that grace does not negate.

Compares the common practice of writing 'Dear Henry' with personal updates to the structured, yet common, form of greeting Paul uses, showing how Paul adapts cultural forms for divine communication.

This very familiar greeting occurs some 15 times in the New Testament. There are some minor variations, but for the most part, these words grace and peace to you occur in almost all of the epistles. And the basic structure of this greeting was just, just a slight variation of the kind of greeting that was in common usage in Bible days. Instead of writing dear Henry and telling all about the kids and signing it yours truly or affectionately, just as those patterns of communication are common to us in our society in our day, so there was a form of communication that was common to the people of t...

4:48 - 5:31 Read in full sermon

Driving home: Grace is not a negative polarity waiting for some positive polarity in its object to draw it out like a magnet reaches out to draw steel. No, no. It flows out like the artesian well.

Explains that grace flows from God's heart without being conditioned by anything in its object, like an artesian well that flows spontaneously, not drawn by external forces.

So you see, in all of these attempts to define the word grace, there is an effort to bring into focus that grace has to do with a disposition in God's heart which moves him to show favor to sinners. But it's a disposition that proceeds entirely from within himself and is no way conditioned by anything in the object of his favor. You must think of those elements if you're to understand the word grace. It is a disposition in the heart of God and it proceeds out of his heart toward its objects with no regard to anything in that object. Grace is not a negative polarity waiting for some positive po...

9:54 - 10:57 Read in full sermon

In this part of the sermon: Martin defines 'grace' as God's undeserved favor, existing in His heart and conveying all its gifts. He emphasizes that grace is the mainspring of all God's saving acts, from…

Illustrates the impossibility of encountering God's salvation without grace, comparing it to encountering air without oxygen.

Acts 20.32 So my friend, if you're a stranger to the meaning of grace, you're ignorant of one of the great things of Scripture. And if you're a stranger to the experience of grace, you know nothing of God and His salvation. You cannot no more come into any kind of contact with God's salvation and miss grace than you can come into contact with the air and miss oxygen.

15:24 - 15:52 Read in full sermon

The point: Evaluate your reaction to the word 'grace' as a rule of thumb for your spiritual standing.

Recounts a personal evangelism encounter where a woman reacted with anger to being called a 'guilty, hell-deserving, wretched sinner,' demonstrating how many resist the biblical understanding of sin, which is prerequisite to appreciating grace.

I don't like those words. Wretched. Like the woman one time I was witnessing to on my doorstep who came pedaling to the church and came pedaling to the church. And I said, look, let's not talk about Jesus being the eternal word or anything.

17:09 - 17:20 Read in full sermon

Driving home: Peace describes the condition which exists when God is our friend and all is well between ourselves and God.

Compares the removal of enmity between a sinner and God to a person who once snarled and clenched a fist now approaching with smiles and outstretched arms, illustrating the objective change in relationship.

Peace describes the condition which exists when God is our friend and all is well between ourselves and God. And then it describes that tranquil state of soul which comes when one is assured of salvation through Christ and hence fearing nothing from God and content with one's present earthly lot. You see, peace in the biblical sense is rooted primarily in an objective situation and out of it flows subjective attitudes. Peace has to do with the condition where the enmity between a sinner and God is removed objectively, really just as much as if someone used to look at you and say look at me and...

21:08 - 22:32 Read in full sermon

Driving home: You know what this prayer is when you boil it all down it's a prayer to man that man may be able to help himself to be his own savior to live happily ever after without God that's exactly that's not a misinterpretation o…

Quotes a 'Christmas prayer' from Time Magazine, using it as an example of a humanistic, Christ-less understanding of peace that focuses on man's inherent goodness and horizontal relationships, contrasting it with the biblical gospel of peace.

Listen to this prayer that appeared in the first page of Time Magazine a week ago. A Christmas prayer. And so a lot of unthinking people say isn't that nice? People put in religion back into Christmas.

30:45 - 30:55 Read in full sermon