by Glenn Barteau
Notes:
Sin does not define our value and our place with God.
Grace is the thing that determines our value.
I don’t want us to be a church that where it comes to temptation, we just get better at hiding. I want us to be a church that get better at overcoming and growing.
Our value is in the grace we exhibit.
We can become bound up trying to protect ourselves.
What is it that has you bound up?
Jesus releases the hostility that divides.
What would happen if we focus our energy with our Christian brothers and sisters more on acceptance? Because we follow Jesus’s lead of bringing down of wall and unbinding the fences that create hostility? We might find more power. Live this out.
Find Jesus in their hearts. Exercise acceptance over a grievance… and watch grace flow.
~ Pastor Glenn Barteau
Reference passage:
So then, remember that at one time you Gentiles by birth, called “the uncircumcision” by those who are called “the circumcision”—a physical circumcision made in the flesh by human hands — remember that you were at that time without Christ, being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world. ~ Ephesians 11-12
For he is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us. He has abolished the law with its commandments and ordinances, that he might create in himself one new humanity in place of the two, thus making peace, and might reconcile both groups to God in one body through the cross, thus putting to death that hostility through it. So he came and proclaimed peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near; for through him both of us have access in one Spirit to the Father. ~ Ephesians 14-17 (NRSV)
