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1 If you are a guest today I want to welcome you here today. I am really glad that you have come regardless of how you ended up here or your motivation. Maybe someone who cares about you told you we are starting a new series on grace. You thought, How bad could that be? and so you came today. I m really glad that you are here. If you have been visiting over the summer and we have not had a chance to meet yet, I want to ask you to sometime today or in the coming month to find me and come and introduce yourself to me. I would love to be able to meet you. I am really excited because we are starting a brand new series today called Oceans of Grace. I have a question. How many of you over the course of the summer spent any time in water at all? Maybe you went to the neighborhood pool, been at the lake, canoe trip, houseboat trip. Maybe you got to go to the ocean or played in a puddle. Most of us in this room have and are probably not done yet. Our family went to the neighborhood pool quite a bit. We went to the lake and to a water park. I am kind of bummed because we haven t had a chance yet to make it out to the ocean. Because we like the lake but we love the ocean. Is anybody with me in that? Wow, applause. You guys are really excited you had a lot of caffeine today already. But we love the smell and we love the sounds and we love the feel of the sand between our toes. I love everything about the ocean. Do you know the ocean covers about 71% of the surface of the earth? More than half of it is over 9,800 feet deep. It covers 139 million square miles and there are over 230,000 different types of marine species that live in the ocean. I just pulled all of those stats out my head right there in that moment because I am a walking encyclopedia. I just know that stuff. How many of you saw this picture this last summer? It was on the front page of Yahoo News this picture of a diver that is swimming with a whale. Did any of you see this? I saw this and it was really stunning as I looked at it. How many of you would be willing to bet that he just messed his diver suit? I mean he would never admit it but I bet you it happened. I saw it this summer and it is amazing to me; that the ocean is home to species that are that big. I mean, have you ever been on a cruise or in the middle of the ocean somewhere and you stand out on the deck and you look out and there is ocean as far as you can see? The ocean is wide and it is deep and it is expansive. The ocean is an awful lot like the grace of God. As I have been studying the middle part of the book of Romans - what we are going to be studying together in this series - as I have been listening to Paul write about God s grace, the analogy that comes to mind, the analogy that isn t quite sufficient enough but it is about the best thing that I can come up with is that the grace of God is an awful lot like an ocean. We live in a grace deficient society and culture. What I mean by that is that grace is not usually our first impulse or natural reaction to a difficult set of circumstances is it? Now I would say that everybody in here including myself you can kind of get your senses after a while and then give grace but it is usually not immediate in the moment when the stress is on, when you are anxiety ridden, just your natural over flow I ll just be gracious. That Traders Point Christian Church. All rights reserved.

2 usually doesn t happen. If I royally mess up and blow my top Lindsay might come in and say, You royally messed up, you big dummy, you need to go in and give grace. And I would say yes ma am and I would go give grace. If you blow it at work or in a conversation where ever you are and you sleep on it when you have time to think about it and maybe 24 hours go by you might muster up grace because it is the right thing to do and you would go and give grace. But for how many of us, is grace our natural reaction? You are in traffic, somebody cuts you off and you roll down the window grace to you. I ll turn the other bumper, that s alright. You are in my lane and I ll give you the shoulder as well just here to serve. How many of you go to a professional baseball game and the umpire really misses it and it is very clear the guy should have been safe and he called him out or vice versa. All of the fans around you are half inebriated anyway how many of them look down and say grace to you Mr. Umpire. This is no time for us to judge. You have a lot of pressure, you have an angle we don t have, you are close up and we are far away. Now that doesn t happen, right? We live in a grace deficient culture even for the most gracious people in this room. You know who you are. We are glad for you and thankful that you are here. Even in your best moments grace isn t automatically a first response because we get stressed and we get angry and we get irritated and we all are just craving this sort of grace in our lives. See Paul was really taken with the whole concept of grace and he does such a masterful job of communicating the grace of God for us. I think this series is really important because we live in a grace deficient society. We don t spend enough time here is the phrase that I want you to become more familiar with in the next four weeks we don t spend enough time marinating in grace. So we hear the term, maybe you heard a sermon on it one time that was really good and helped explain some things. Maybe you have done your own study on it and say I really like the whole concept of grace. We have a tendency to move past it and say I have that lesson done, now let s go onto the next lesson. Well, grace is the lesson and grace is the point. If you don t continue to reside in grace here is the big thing that I want you to know today and throughout this series your faith and my faith becomes toxic. That is not too strong of a word. Toxic is the accurate word. It becomes toxic when we get saved by grace yet we fail to reside in grace. Here is my story. I got saved at an early age and I knew all the answers. I treated grace like a thing new Christians needed. Somebody that just gives their life to Christ and it is all new to them they need grace. They need grace to be introduced to God. Once you get past that it is kind of up to me. It is kind of up to me to get in church and attend the Bible study and maintain my faith and continue to grow. Here are the theological terms for it: we are justified to grace but sanctification, our growth as Christ followers, is impossible without residing or marinating in that same grace. We have to continue to come back to it. I am wondering if there is anybody here that sometime in their life someone or something stepped on the air hose of grace. And maybe it was a sickness or a financial thing or a spouse that hurt you or a pastor or a bad church experience or maybe it was religious parents that kind of pushed you away. They stepped on the air hose of grace and you spiritually suffocated. What I want to do in this Traders Point Christian Church. All rights reserved. 2

3 series is remove whatever is stepping on that air hose of grace and let it flow back into your spiritual lungs once again and for us to sit and marinade with this. Paul used the word grace more than any other New Testament author. He used it more than 100 times. In all of his letters we call those Epistles in the New Testament Paul always begins a letter this way: Grace to you. Grace to you. I love the word grace. Do you like it? Maybe I am the only one in the room. At the count of three, I just want us to say the word grace together. Can we do that? On the count of three one, two, three: grace. Now, if you say that and a little bit of stress doesn t leak out of you or a little bit of anxiety doesn t leave you, then you are saying it wrong. If a smile doesn t begin to form on your mouth when you say the word grace then you are saying it wrong. Some of you did you managed to say the word grace with a frown on your face. I have a lot of work to do this month. It takes a lot to blast through the crud and the junk we have around our hearts to let grace really sink in and penetrate our lives. In Greek writing there was a word they would often use at the beginning of a letter. It was the word greetings it was the word caran and it was the Greek word for greetings. It was a throwaway word. Kind of like our word dear. When we write a letter to someone we say Dear Tommy or Dear Sally even though this person is not dear to us at all we will still use the word dear. It is a throwaway word. Oftentimes in Greek writing they would use that same word. It is a word for greetings and Paul just ditched it. He said I don t want to use greetings anymore so he changed it to charis, which is the Greek word for grace. So he always uses, he figures out a way to interject grace at the beginning of his letter. He always figures out a way to interject grace at the very end of the letter. The word charis, the Greek word for grace is linked to the word chara, which is the Greek word for joy. And the implication is that you can t be saved by grace through faith and not have joy well up within you. Joy is one of the manifestations of the gospel. That a church that is continuing to teach and preach and most importantly live out the gospel one of the manifestations of a church like that is that there will be joy. That a healthy church laughs. A healthy church doesn t take itself so seriously. All of you just witnessed me royally mess up in the Baptistry, right? That is embarrassing and is one of my fears and I just did it. I got the guys name wrong. It doesn t even count after that, right? I got the guys name wrong and as we were walking out of the Baptistry I hugged him and said I really am sorry about that. You know what he said to me? He said thanks a lot... Probably going to hell now because of that. No he didn t say that. He looked at me and got a smile on his face and said, That doesn t matter. That is not what is important. There is joy that wells up within each one of us because of the gospel message. If you don t have joy now I am not saying that life is perfect and I am not saying that all of your circumstances line up. I am just saying that in the face of some of that difficulty if joy has not manifested itself there - I wonder if you passed too quickly beyond grace. You are trying to live this Christian life without it and in the absence of it and that always becomes toxic. Let s look together at Romans 5:1. I want to study through the bulk of this chapter this morning. We are not going to get to all of the verses but we are going to get to much of it. I want to make some observations here about Paul s writing. If you didn t bring a Bible with you we will throw some of these passages on the screen but bring a Bible or a Bible app with you next Sunday because we are going to studying through Romans together. This is what Paul writes in chapter 5 verse 1: Therefore I want to Traders Point Christian Church. All rights reserved. 3

4 stop here just a real quick. I realize we didn t make it too far. The word therefore is mentioned three times here during this chapter. Anytime you see the word therefore, it is always an indication we are coming in mid-stream into a conversation. In this instance Paul just built up a pretty significant case, he clarified some things and then when he says therefore that is basically whenever I am preaching I usually say hey, here is the application it is a very similar term. He says therefore, or this is the action step for you. Then he goes on to explain here. Your homework assignment this week is to go home and read Romans 1-4. If you don t understand Romans 1-4, if that doesn t get in and sink in, then chapter 5 has no power at all. Some of you are pretty familiar with the first part of Romans. It may not necessarily be your favorite part of scripture because it is pretty sobering what Paul does there. He kind of strips us down and he breaks down a muscle like you do when you go to a gym and then you build it back up. Here is what is important about that. Grace is not transformational until you and I come face to face with the extent and the damage of our sin. We have to realize that our sin is way more destructive, it is way more damaging and way more serious than even the best of us in this room give it credit for. Paul says because of your sin you are an enemy with God. You are on the opposite side of the field from Him. Then he kind of illustrates this by talking about Abraham. He says hey, Abraham wasn t justified because he was obedient; he was justified by grace that came through his faith. He goes into this lengthy discussion about law and he says that the only reason the law exists isn t because you get saved by it. That is the biggest mistake that most of us make. We take the law or we take morality or we take these to do lists or the things we have to do and we try to grow closer to God through those things we do and nobody sets out to be a Pharisee. We slip into it. It is what analytical to do list practical people do, right? We didn t marinade in grace long enough. So he says hey Abraham wasn t justified by his obedience, he was justified by grace through faith. And then he says this at the very end of chapter 4. Look back there if you would. Romans 4:16. I love the way Paul phrases this. That is why it depends on faith (not your works, not the things you do). That is why it depends on faith, in order that the promise may rest on grace It rests on grace; that is the point he makes in the first four chapters. So we get into chapter 5. Let s pick it up again in verse 1. Romans 5:1: Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have (what is the word there - peace) peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. Through Him we have also obtained access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and we rejoice in hope of the glory of God. So there are two big things I want you to get. You can write it down, underline it, or highlight it in your Bible. The first thing that Paul says here is that grace gives us peace with God. I think peace with God is very rare. Even in the church. Even with us who have been walking with Jesus for a long, long time. Here is what I mean by that. If I were to sit down with you let s say we go to lunch after the service today. We go to lunch and I sit across the table from you and I look at you and say hey, do you believe in God? I realize not everybody here today might even say that but the majority of you would probably say yeah, I believe in God. If I were to say have you accepted Jesus into your life as your Savior you would say yes, I made that decision. I accepted Him into my life. If I were to ask you this third question if I were to say right now do you have peace with God? My feeling is that the majority of you would hesitate. I probably would. You have to stop and think about that for a minute. Here is the thing we have a tendency to confuse peace with peacefulness. Those are not the same. So we confuse peacefulness with peace or Traders Point Christian Church. All rights reserved. 4

5 vice versa and we get upset with God and walk around with this thing - God, I can t believe you allow this to happen to me or to somebody that I love. Or it is paranoia. I know you tell me that God loves me but I m not really convinced that He likes me. I kind of think He tolerates me because He has to. He s already made the deal hey, I ll give you my Son; Jesus, you accept Him and I love you. But I don t really like you you just stay out of my line of vision please. It s almost like I have thought this at times for the longest time when I was growing up I had this warped understanding of salvation. I could be saved but that didn t necessarily mean that God wanted to spend any time with me. So every time He heard my name He would just roll his eyes. Like pffff that guy. Do you know how many promises he has broken? Do you know how many good intentions he failed to follow up on? It is almost like God gets a gag reflex when He hears your name. You disgust me, right? So just stay out of my line of vision. Paul says we are saved by grace not to be tolerated but we have been received as sons and daughters. We have been adopted as full heirs. We can have peace with God. The second thing he says in these few verses is that because of grace we can have access to God. That word access a more accurate word there that can be translated would be the word introduction. Access almost gives us this idea that we can have access to God if we follow the right formula or punch in the right code, but introduction says you can t do anything about it but you have to be introduced to God. It is kind of like when you are out with a friend and they see somebody at a restaurant; maybe somebody that is pretty important. You wait for them to introduce you. By that introduction you get access; you get a conversation started with that other person. Paul says we got access to God through Jesus Christ. This got illustrated for me unintentionally the first week that Lindsay and I got married twelve years ago. Her dad came over to our house and he handed me a copy of the key to their house. He said you never know when you might need this. You might be in town and we are gone and here is the key to the house. I don t think he meant for that to be anything. I wasn t some symbolic gesture, it was just practical. Hey here is the key to the house and in case you are ever in town you won t get locked out. But I really it meant something to me because I knew just a week before the wedding there is no way that guy would have given me a key to the house. I m pretty confident that he was even praying up to the day of that Lindsay would have a change of heart. That didn t happen and we get married and through that relationship with his daughter I had full access into the family. That is what Paul is saying. You are not just some house guest. You are not just some outsider intruding. But through Jesus Christ you have full access to God. I love how Paul says that to the Ephesians in chapter 3:12. We are saved by grace so we can have boldness and access with confidence. That you can be bold in your faith that you can be confident on where you stand with God and the byproduct of that is peace. Now I am going to ask you this question and you can reflect on it internally. I am not going to ask anyone to raise your hands but you can just kind of think through this. Has there ever been a time in any of your lives where you just doubted your salvation? Maybe it is not even seriously doubted but maybe you just Traders Point Christian Church. All rights reserved. 5

6 kind of questioned, kind of wondered, did I do it the right way? Did I do all the things that God asked me to do? Or, here is where I struggled, you say man, some of the things that I ve allowed to dwell in my mind and in my heart some of the things I ve said and done since the day of my salvation are pretty wretched. Am I sure I am really saved? Am I sure the Holy Spirit really resides in me? Has there ever been a time when you have really questioned that? Maybe you are in that position right now where you are wrestling through stuff and you are just wondering; Am I really saved? I remember when I was 13 years old. I m going to tell you something that I ve not told many people so let s just not let it leave this room. When I was 13 years old I went through one of those seasons where I really wrestled and I really wondered am I saved or did I miss something? It is kind of like how many of you ever closed on a house and you go to the Title Company and you have to sign that mountain of paperwork and then the Title Company calls you right back and says you missed a signature? Or you missed this form and it is not going to go through until you get it? I think I can t even buy a house right. What if I go to Heaven and God is standing up there in front of the Lamb s Book of Life and He is kind of reviewing everything and he goes pffffff? You do not want to hear God do that on judgment day. What if He is like you missed form 45A and I am really sorry but there is nothing we can do here. Better take that coat off. It s going to get a little stuffy where you are going, right? So I am kind of wondering and tormented by that. I remember I was 13 and it was a hot summer night. I have a key to the neighborhood pool. I go down to the pool just to take a dip and I am standing there in waist deep of water and I am really wrestling with this. I think hey, what would it hurt? I am right here in water. Why don t I just go ahead and baptize myself just in case the first one didn t take? I am not exaggerating. I am telling you the truth. This is how messed up of a kid I was and still am to a certain degree. I said Aaron, you believe that Jesus is the Christ I am like, yeah I do. Ok, you, me we, me myself and I am going to baptize you now in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. I m like all right. So I lean myself back and came up and I was like was the form good? So I did it again and the tip of my nose was hanging out. So I am like I want to make sure I have a nose in Heaven so I went back down and tried to get all of the way under. I did that not once and not twice but five times that night. I am praying and hoping that none of you have ever been in that position because that is really humiliating and you need psychological help like I do. But listen to me. Some of you are there right now. Look at me right here. You are saved by grace. You can be saved by grace through faith and you can stand on that with boldness and confidence. And you analytical types are saying Aaron, what about this and this and this. Yeah the other things that we can talk about are important things but for right now could you just marinade in grace. If you don t, here is my concern about modern day church in America and I am the pastor of one so I am in the scope of this. When we go through many of you are in that right now or you have gone through it a membership process, sometimes it becomes almost like a system and we move people so fast. The thing that keeps me awake at night is I wonder at times are you really marinating in grace or are you looking at this to do list of things you have to get checked off the list? Because if you are not marinating in grace, your faith - if it hasn t already - will become toxic both to you and to others. If you get saved by grace, you get converted by grace, but if you don t continue to reside in grace. Let s go on in verse 3. More than even that (I love how Paul writes; he always builds on previous statements. More than that ), we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and Traders Point Christian Church. All rights reserved. 6

7 character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us. Now this is not a very popular message because we live in a society where we try to insulate ourselves from suffering. So we don t like this but understand there is a correct way to interpret this and an incorrect way to interpret this. Paul is not talking about fatalism here. He is not saying hey, just enjoy pain and just get pleasure out of pain. That is not what he is saying. He is saying that what grace does when we put on the lenses of grace, it gives us a long term perspective. That we are spiritually nearsighted and we put these lenses on and we say hey, wait a second. There is actually a lot more going on here in my life than what I even fully recognize. It gives us this long term perspective that God may use even our suffering to produce these things in our life. Let s be honest, there is a lot of suffering that goes on in the world that is not God s fault. It is my fault. I love what John Wayne says about this. He says, Life is tough, tougher when you are stupid. Right? And that sometimes I suffer because of my own stupidity and sometimes I suffer because of circumstances that are out of my control. Here is the principle that I want you to catch in this section of the Scripture. What makes suffering painful is our perspective. What makes suffering really painful is our perspective; it s not the thing you are going through. How many of you like right now I know two people who are suffering from the same form of cancer one of them is joyful and the other one is bitter. It is the same cancer; same physical pain. What makes suffering painful is the perspective we have on it. Paul says grace gives us a different perspective. Let s go on in verse 6, For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. One will scarcely die for a righteous person - but perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die - but God shows His love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. When I was 17 years old, that was the verse the penetrated my heart and changed me. I grew up in church and so did maybe even many of you and I kind of knew all the answers and I kind of knew all the routines and I knew what I should say and what I should stay away from. I remember reading that passage and it jumped off the page and hit me between the eyes. It was written in a language that I could understand. Because I understood that I would loan $10 to my best friend because he was my best friend and he would probably loan me $10 and he always had my back and he would always do good things for me. I had no problem loaning him $10 because I felt good about him. But I would never loan $10 to Brad because Brad was an idiot and Brad made fun of me because I ran like a girl. So I would never give $10 to Brad. Here Paul says in such vivid language while you were an enemy of God and while you were outside of a relationship or connection to God. He gave everything. He sent His Son to die for you and I remember up unto that point I was oblivious to that fact. I had no idea how offensive my sin was. I had no idea to the extent that God was trying to save me or the sacrifices He would make. Last week it was our first day back into town and I was out running errands trying to play catch up. Did you ever do that when you had been out of town for a while? I am out running around. I have places to go and I am coming out of a store into a parking lot it is one of those hundred degree days and I Traders Point Christian Church. All rights reserved. 7

8 noticed off to my right there was a young mom and she was on the phone and I think she was on the phone with her husband. She was buckling her two year old son in her SUV and she ended up shutting the door. As soon as she shut the door she realized that she d locked the keys in the car and the windows were up. So, immediately as you might understand she began to panic and her voice got really loud and she started to yell into the phone that she d locked him in the car and she didn t have another set of keys. There weren t many people in the parking lot and I was about 20 or 30 yards from her so I turned and started walking towards her just to see if I could comfort her or help in any way I could. I had my phone and was going to offer to help her out. I walked up to her and as soon as she saw me she looked right at me. She started walking towards me and looked at me with as much intensity as a young mother could muster. She said, You ve got to punch the window out! Now, I am a guy, alright? I ve always had kind of a secret fantasy of punching the window out but not in public because I could fail. Ok, I am honored that by looking at this physique you think I could do that but I m not fully confident I could do that. My first reaction is to look around for a rock or something it was a parking lot and there didn t seem to be one. Let s think this through, all right? So we went over and I said he has only been in there for a couple of minutes, right? I think he is fine. Is there someone you could call? She said her husband but he was on the other side of town and she didn t have an extra key. I said maybe we can call 911 and get the fire department out here. She starts dialing and I look through the window of this SUV and her two year old was having a blast. He was oblivious to what is going on he has no idea the kind of danger he is in and has no idea of the concern of his mom. He is just playing with a little toy and probably filling his diaper just completely oblivious in the car. We ended up a few minutes later getting the car unlocked and she reached in there and hugged him. He is like: Mom, why are you so excited? He had no idea. There are some of you here today and you have no idea you have no idea the love God has for you and the extent He would go to for you. I am praying here today and throughout this series that you come to see it. Let me finish this out in verse 18. Paul gives his third therefore here in this passage. He is wrapping some things up, he is concluding. He says, Therefore, as one trespass led to condemnation for all men, so one act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all men. Verse 19: For as by the one man s disobedience the many were made sinners, so by one man s obedience the many will be made righteous. (I want to ask you to go back this afternoon and read the passages we weren t able to get to because he is talking about how just as sin came into the world through Adam s trespass, righteousness came into the world through Jesus self sacrifice.) I love Paul. Paul gives that analogy and he immediately realizes how insufficient it is. So he says actually the righteousness that comes through Jesus is so much greater and so much broader than the death and the trespass that came through Adam s sin. In verse 20: Now the law came in to increase the trespass (That just means it became more visible to us. We begin to see our offense in the eyes of God), but where sin increased, grace abounded all the more, so that as sin reigned in death, grace also might reign through righteousness leading to eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord. You can underline or write that down I love when he said grace abounded all the more. One of the objections that I ve already pre-meditated for many of you in this room how do you keep from Traders Point Christian Church. All rights reserved. 8

9 taking advantage of grace? How do you keep that from just being a license to doing whatever you want? I d say this. Do you ever find yourself premeditating your sin and saying well, God will forgive me, that s His job? God will forgive me because He has to give me grace grace abounds all the more. Then you haven t experienced grace because grace gives us this joyful, grateful heart to say, You know what God, I m going to die to myself in order to have a relationship with You. Jesus told a parable in Matthew 13:44 about a guy that says the Kingdom of God is like a man who finds a treasure in a field and then he realizes it s infinite worth. He didn t do anything to deserve it, he didn t do anything to earn it so he covers it back up and he goes and sells everything he has and he goes and buys the field. That is grace. To say God, everything I have is yours. You have given me this free gift of grace and I can t do anything to earn it, I can t do anything to work for it, I can t do anything to maintain it and hold onto it. You ve given it to me and I want to continue just to abide and reside in that grace. Here is why this teaching series is so important both to us as individuals and to the life of our church. We live in a culture where the gospel is assumed so we think we know it, especially those who grew up in church. So yes I know Jesus died on the cross to save me from my sins. But we haven t really let it penetrate our hearts to sink in and instead of living out the Gospel message we have a tendency to live therapeutic, moralistic deism. It s kind of this idea that I don t come to church to get the Gospel, I come to church to get therapy. Like I really hope Aaron keeps my attention today and I hope Aaron says something that is slightly humorous today and I hope that he says something that makes my life better today. That is therapy, not the Gospel. And moralism is this idea that I can do this on my own, I can just keep the checklist. And deism is this idea that God s no longer involved and He is up there doing whatever He is doing and it is up to me to continue to gain access to Him. I want to challenge you today to take a break from all that and to just sit and marinade in the grace of God. This is what I want to ask you to do. I don t ask you to do this that often. I want to ask you to close your eyes. Can you do that? Just close your eyes. And if there is somebody that is here today and you are not confident in your salvation and you are not ready to become a full-blown, card carrying Christian and you are not ready for that at all. But this whole idea of grace is intriguing to you and you say you know what, I don t know about becoming a Christian. I am not sure what all that carries with it. But I am interested in knowing more and what it would mean to accept the grace of God. If that is you and you have that question, will you raise up your hand really quick. And say I am interested in knowing about the grace of God and what that would mean for my life. Yes, there are a few of you. You can put your hands down and if that was one of you that did that I would ask you to let me know this week or follow up with one of our pastors and say I was one of those who raised their hands and I just want to talk about what that means. What does it mean to respond to the grace of God? Here is the next question I want to ask you. If you are here today and you have been a Christian for a long time but you know you are not residing in grace. You know you have tried to do this thing on your own and you have become distant from the heart of God and you might even use the word toxic in your faith. You are going through this kind of spiritual depression or valley and you say I just want to breathe the fresh air of grace once again into my life. Will you just raise up your hand? You can put your hand Traders Point Christian Church. All rights reserved. 9

10 down. What I want to do as we conclude today is that I want to pray a prayer for us asking that we would experience that fresh wind, that fresh grace of God in our lives. And that we not be tempted to move past that too quickly but that we would sit and marinade it in it for a while. Father we come to You right now grateful for your grace. Forgive us God when we move past it too quickly onto other things and we move on from it and we are not changed. God I pray today that as we seek to know You and as we seek to walk with You that we continue to reside in that same grace that You offered to save us from our sins. That it will transform us and change us as people. We love You and thank You and we ask this in Jesus name. Amen. Traders Point Christian Church. All rights reserved. 10