•The Theme --> Living as Exiles and Aliens

•The Context --> Suffering

•TheCrux --> Jesus has been raised from the Dead

•Certain and imperishable Inheritance to come (We are protected in order to receive this)

•Basis for Joy & Hope in the midst of suffering

•New Identity in Christ

•Therefore: Actions—How then shall we live?

•To be a witness to the world

•

https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/essay/saving-grace/

Saving Grace by Sam Storms

Dutch Reformed theologian Herman Bavinck defined the saving grace of God as “his voluntary, unrestrained, unmerited favor toward guilty sinners, granting them justification and life instead of the penalty of death, which they deserved” (see Bavinck, The Doctrine of God, 208).

Louis Berkhof defined it as “the free bestowal of kindness on one who has no claim to it” (Berkhof, Systematic Theology, 71).

J.I. Packer put it this way: “The grace of God is love freely shown towards guilty sinners, contrary to their merit and indeed in defiance of their demerit. It is God showing goodness to persons who deserve only severity and who had no reason to expect anything but severity” (see Packer, Knowing God, 120).

Grace always presupposes sin and guilt (what follows is adapted from Sam Storms, The Grandeur of God: A Theological and Devotional Study of the Divine Attributes, 124–27). Grace has meaning only when men are seen as fallen, unworthy of salvation, and liable to eternal wrath. What makes Paul’s declaration that we are saved “by grace” so significant is his earlier declaration that we were “dead” in trespasses and sins, living “in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind,” and were “by nature children of [God’s] wrath (Eph. 2:1–3).

Or to put it in slightly different terms, grace does not contemplate sinners merely as undeserving, but as ill-deserving. It is not simply that we do not deserve grace: we do deserve hell. Fallen and unredeemed humanity is not to be conceived as merely helpless or neutral, but as openly and vehemently hostile toward God. It is one thing to be without a God-approved righteousness. It is altogether another thing to be wholly unrighteous and thus the object of divine wrath. It is, then, against the background of having been at one time the enemies of God that divine grace must be understood (Rom. 5:10).

1.Receive the Gospel

2.Lean into God’s Grace & Course Correct

3.Live with your end (andThe End) in mind

-Pray

-Love and Forgive

-Pursue Hospitality

-Serve in Your Giftedness