Sermon: The Grace of God Has Appeared

Forty years ago this summer, Grace Bible Church held its first worship service.  For forty years, GBC has been worshipping God, discipling believers, evangelizing unbelievers, and sending the gospel through missions to foreign lands.  For forty years we have seen and experienced God’s faithfulness to us.

As we approach the anniversary celebration on August 11, we are going to take three weeks to reflect on and delight in various aspects of God’s faithfulness to us.  We want to be reminded, by looking to the past, that God has been kind, good, and faithful in His care of us.  And remembering His past provision will embolden us with confidence to trust Him to be faithful to us in the future.

As we look to the past, I want to focus our thoughts in the next three weeks around three themes that have identified us as a church body:

• God’s grace — the grace that brings us to salvation and the grace that sanctifies us in salvation. Our vision for ministry is encapsulated by the phrase, “Shepherding God’s people by God’s grace for God’s glory.”  To shepherd God’s people means that we care for them by leading them to the gospel and then discipling them in the gospel.  And we do that by grace — by the empowerment of the Spirit of God.  It’s God’s work and God’s grace that saves and sanctifies.
• God’s Word, the Bible — the Spirit of God is the One who saves and sanctifies, and He does that through the Word of God. So we are committed — in all our ministries — to teaching the Word of God so that the Spirit has a tool to use in people’s lives to change them.
• God’s church — ministry is about God’s people. We need buildings, but ministry is not about buildings; ministry is about the care of souls and the fellowship of the brothers, under our great, older brother and Savior, Jesus Christ.

You might notice a progression in those themes:  Grace…Bible…Church.  Our very name has represented what we are about and what we desire God to do in us.

This morning, we are going to consider the first of these three great themes, God’s grace, through Paul’s letter to his disciple Titus — Titus 2:11-15.  In that passage, we are reminded that,

God’s grace is His provision for our past, our present, and our future.

Let us see, from Paul’s pen and God’s Word, four statements about the sufficiency of God’s grace:

1. God’s Grace is Sufficient for Our Past Life of Sin (v. 11)
2. God’s Grace is Sufficient for Our Present Battle with Sin (v. 12)
3. God’s Grace is Sufficient for Our Future Life with Christ (v. 13)
4. God’s Grace is Sufficient for Our Ongoing Ministry in this World (vv. 14-15)

Download the rest of this sermon on Titus 2:11-15.

The audio will be posted on the GBC website by tomorrow.