During the last debrief we had in Honduras, we all joined together and were enlightened and given new revelation about grace by Deon (one of our squad coaches). Grace never said we can get away with things, it does actually require someone to pay for it, and fortunately for us – Jesus paid that price. Grace is God’s empowerment to do what he asks us to do. There should be no way that we experience grace and remain the same. We have a tendency to confuse grace with mercy – grace requires we turn away and repent from our ways. The story of the prodigal son in Luke is the example Deon used to show infinite and amazing grace. I am going to outline some of the key points he spoke on.
The Lost Son & the 5 keys to grace (Luke 15:11-32)
1) Grace will meet you before you see God – it will meet you and kiss you (in Luke 15:20 it points out that while the son was still at a distance that his father saw him).
2) Grace will meet you before judgement can find you. When we are hard on ourselves we need to realize that grace has already found us and kissed us. We need to also remember this when we want to judge. Run to God, not away from Him.
3) Grace never counts the cost of our restoration – the father never keeps track (in Luke 15:22 the father restores his song with a robe, ring, and sandals)
4) Grace doesn’t demand admittance. The father in the parable of the lost son never asks where the son spent his inheritance or where everything went. This is just like our father – our past is our past. Grace does require repentance and turning from our ways.
5) Once grace finds you, condemnation has no power. Think of condemnation as the older brother in the parable of the lost son – it wants to find us and condemn us but this is not what the father wants. The father tells the older son when he is condemning the younger brother that all he has is already his, just as it was the younger brothers.
A question that Deon gave us to ponder was this: Who really is the bigger prodigal – the one who takes and wastes or the one who has and doesn’t use. Grace is God’s empowerment for you to be someone. If we know we have the power – why are we scared to change?
Onto another topic: what God is teaching me right now. God has given me some words to focus on for the transition into this new season for myself: steadfast and self-control.
Jesus is revealing areas in my life where I lack in steadfastness and self-control. I spent some time in prayer about this and he was showing me traits that are by products in my life of lacking these qualities and that the areas I immediately recognized were merely physical manifestations and not the root. He showed me that for this time I really need to apply these two things to my prayer life. I am specifically asking for prayers in this area from you. I have felt stronger urges than ever before to pray and believe this has a lot to do with moving into a leadership role that requires more steadfastness in my prayer life. There have been times where I haven’t been able to sleep or wake up with an urgency to pray without knowing what specifically to pray for and have to learn to be self-controlled enough to do what I feel the Holy Spirit is putting on my heart. So you may be wondering how this ties in with what I earlier talked about… Well in Luke 15:12 it says, “The younger son said to his father, ‘Father, give me my share of the property.’” This is the first problem with prodigal thinking! We want to be given everything. Our prayer actually needs to be more like Luke 15:19 where he asks “make me” rather than just “give me”. I am not going to ask Jesus to give me self-control or give me steadfastness but I am going to pray that he would make me a woman of these things. This is a prayer for true transformation and growth rather than just simply being given something with no growth coming from that process. I will end this blog with a challenge to you to also change your prayers from “give me” to “make me”.
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