Amazing Grace
by Joey Carroll Corinth Missionary Baptist Church
For the last couple of weeks, we have been talking about the resurrection of Jesus Christ and the gospel of God. Without question, it is the good news of the gospel that God has made a remedy for our sin since the judgment of death is what our sin deserves.
And He did so through the substitutionary sacrifice of God the Son, Jesus.
Through faith in who Jesus is and what Jesus has done as necessary and sufficient for the forgiveness of our sins, we have life everlasting.
As Jesus told Martha on the day He raised her brother Lazarus from the dead, “I am the resurrection and the life; he who believes in Me will live even if he dies, and everyone who lives and believes in Me will never die.
Do you believe this?” (John 11:25-26, NAS95).\
After Jesus rose from the dead on the third day, He appeared to His disciples and to many others.
Last week we looked at how He appeared to more than 500 individuals, most of whom were still alive when Paul made that statement to the Corinthians (1 Corinthians 15:6).
But one particular individual whom Jesus appeared to after His resurrection is really quite surprising.
Unfortunately, many people today still believe that God saves good people and condemns only the really bad ones.
Of course, we place ourselves in that “good” category, and the people we greatly dislike deserve hell.
We ignore Jesus words about no one being good or being able to do good (Mark 10:18).
But, we would all agree that when Paul was introduced in the Bible, he was definitely no good whatsoever.
He was so zealous in his works-based religion, he saw Jesus as the arch enemy of everything he was so committed to and sought to destroy all those who had put their faith in Jesus.
Acts 9 records one of the most amazing stories of God’s grace in the Bible.
It is there that we find Paul (or Saul) on his way to the city of Damascus to secure the imprisonment and death of the followers of Jesus.
But it was on that same journey that the resurrected Jesus appeared to him.
The one who was on his way to kill Christians met the risen Christ and was marvelously saved by grace.
What follows next is a changed man who preaches the gospel of grace to all who will listen.
One of our most popular songs as Christians goes like this, “Amazing grace! how sweet the sound, That saved a wretch; like me! I once was lost, but now am found, Was blind, but now I see.”
Now we can certainly see how those words apply to the Apostle Paul, but can we see how those same words apply to each one of us.
If you have yet to put your faith in Jesus, you should know that everyone around you, no matter how “good” they appear on the outside or how much they seem to have it together, are each and every one worthy of the judgment and condemnation of God.
So you are not alone in sin; we all belong in the same category as sinners in need of a Savior.
In fact, until a person understands God’s just punishment on them for their sin, they will never understand this gospel of grace.
If you have trusted in who Jesus is as the Holy Son of God and what He did as a substitute on the cross for your sins, then you know well of saving grace.
But are you continuing to understand God’s grace?
Paul understood and taught that his whole Christian life and duty was a product of God’s grace.
“But by the grace of God I am what I am, and His grace toward me did not prove vain; but I labored even more than all of them, yet not I, but the grace of God with me,” (1 Corinthians 15:10, NAS95).
The grace of God always bears fruit. It is grace that produces salvation.
It is grace that matures us as followers of Jesus.
It is grace that produces genuine worship, and it is grace that produces works of service in our lives that honor Jesus. So yes, grace is amazing!
