New Life Baptist Church, College Station Texas

In last night’s ser­mon on Exo­dus 19 (“The Holi­ness of God”), we learned that God is the stan­dard of holi­ness, and when we com­pare His per­fect holi­ness to our unho­li­ness, we are left despair­ing of any attempts to make our­selves holy. This real­iza­tion causes us to stop attempt­ing to jus­tify our­selves before God and does not allow for us to com­pare our­selves favor­ably with oth­ers. What does it mat­ter if I am more holy than another sin­ful per­son? God, and not any other cre­ated being, is the standard.

But the rev­e­la­tion of God’s holi­ness is not meant to merely drive us to despair of our attempts to make our­selves holy; it is meant to lead us to see our need for God’s grace. In his study, “The Gospel-Centered Life,” Bob Thune gives us the chart below:

If we start at the far left (the straight line), Bob is illus­trat­ing the fact that every one of us goes through a time in life where we are not con­sciously aware of God’s holi­ness or our own sin­ful­ness. At this point, we have no healthy fear of God and thus do not seek God for His grace.

At some point, though, God begins to open our eyes to the truth that He is holy and we are sin­ful. Now we begin to see the truth that we are sep­a­rated from God because of our sin and rebel­lion. This is where the two lines diverge.

Some time after this ini­tial rev­e­la­tion from God, we rec­og­nize that there is no way for us to make our­selves holy enough to please God, no way to make up for the sins we’ve com­mit­ted. It is at this point God brings us to repen­tance and faith in Him. We are con­verted by His Holy Spirit when, by His grace, we repent of our sin and place our faith in Jesus — the one who lived, died, and rose again on our behalf.

Our aware­ness of God’s grace at this point, though, is fairly small. This real­ity is cap­tured by the first cross. But as we come to learn more about God’s holi­ness and our own sin­ful­ness through the Word of God, the Spirit of God, and aware­ness of our own hearts, we see a greater and greater need for the grace of God — rep­re­sented by the larger and larger crosses. It’s not that we need more of God’s grace later in life, but that we are more aware of our need for God’s grace the more we grow in faith. We need the grace of God just as much the day we were con­verted as we do on the day we die.

Have you rec­og­nized God’s holi­ness, your own sin­ful­ness, and your need for His grace? If so, would you say that you are more aware of your need for God’s grace today than yes­ter­day? Than last month? Than when you were converted?

We invite you to join the con­ver­sa­tion on Face­book and Twit­ter.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 20th, 2012 at 6:00 am and is filed under Elder Blog, Exodus, Sermon Applications. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.