Happy New Year Folks!
God bless you this fine morning of 2009. If your reading this Pastor's Heart
letter then you can praise the Lord for His gracious kindness and love
toward you, because you have made it through another year! Our God by nature
is good... extremely good! He is also very gracious and quite often gives us
more than we deserve. So I can say with confidence that God was very good to
each of us in 2008 and that He will be that way also in 2009. People may not
always be good to you and I, nor does life always seem to deal us a fair
hand, but one thing is for sure - God is good to us always. I love this
portion of scripture...
The Lord is gracious and full of compassion, slow to anger and great in
mercy. The Lord is good to all, and His tender mercies are over all His
works.
Psalm 145:8-9
I love God's Word. I can understand His nature and His attitude toward me by
what He has revealed to me through His unchanging Word. Our view of the
Lord's character needs to be coloured by what the Word says about Him, not
by the way we think or believe. His Word is rock solid and is unchanging
just like His character is rock solid and unchanging. If the Bible says God
is good to all, then He "is" good to all. That means the Lord is
good to
"everybody" on this planet. If the Bible says the Lord is gracious
and full
of compassion toward us, then He is. God "is" gracious and kind.
God's
grace, or His graciousness toward the human race is awesome.
If it weren't for the grace of our God, us as humans would have perished by
now. If it weren't for the grace of my Lord Jesus Christ, I would still be a
sinner serving Satan, or worse still I would have died a sinners death and
would be living in eternal torment right now. I have much to be thankful to
God for and so do you my brother and sister. The more I learn about the
grace of God the more thankful I am becoming. This is the subject I would
like to be sharing with you in the months ahead. I do not pretend to know
all there is to know about God's grace, in fact I feel I understand very
little about such a huge subject. There are some things that I am beginning
to understand though that I would like to share with you. If the Lord has
not yet revealed these things to you in this way before, I believe they will
be life changing to you.
I must apologise for not being more diligent in getting these Pastor's Heart
letters to you more often than I have. I don't know about you but the last
12 months has seemed to fly by so fast that I struggled to accomplish many
things that I would have liked to in 2008. I am making a New Years
Resolution to be more faithful in writing these letters to you :) I
believe
by the grace of God that I will be able to do this, please agree with me if
you will. thanks...
Before closing today lets have a quick look at our foundation scripture for
this series.
For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves;
it is the gift of God, not of works, lest anyone should boast Ephesians
2:8-9
I'm sure you realise this, but we could do nothing to save ourselves. There
is nothing you or I will ever be able to boast in concerning our eternal
salvation from sin. We were unworthy of God's glory and only through Jesus'
spotless sinless life did we have an avenue to be saved from our sins. By
grace you have been saved. We were saved by the graciousness of our God. But
we did have to do something... through faith. Yes, we had to believe. But
even the faith to believe was grace from God. We would not even had known
our need of salvation except the Lord revealed it to us by His grace. By
grace are you saved, through faith... but not of yourselves...
But do you realise there are multitudes of people around the world that know
and believe Jesus came to die for their sins, but are still not born again.
If they were to die right now they would still be in their sins and would
eternally perish. Why is that? There may be many reasons, but the big one is
pride. They are yet to humble themselves before almighty God and make the
life change through repentance. They, through pride, are resisting the free
Gift of God's grace that can save them.
God is gracious and kind, but each person has to humble themselves through
repentance and believe, for the grace of God to be received. God's grace is
extended to all who will believe. It takes humility to admit that I have
sinned against God and am in need of His forgiveness and mercy. True faith
is always humble and never is it prideful.
For God resists the proud, but gives grace to the humble James 4:6
It takes both faith and humility for a person to receive the grace of God,
not only for the new birth, but for anything else we need from the Lord.
Interested? Then stay tuned for the days to come and we'll share the victory
promised to all who will believe - through His awesome grace toward us in
Christ Jesus! From the Pearce family to you we wish you and your loved ones
a happy God filled new year!
David
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For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God, not of works, lest anyone should boast.
Ephesians 2:8-9