Fathom His Grace

You are listening to a message from Thrive Community Church, a church located in Southwest Florida. For more info, visit us at thrive-fl.org. We're in our second in the series called Fathom, which is a study in the letter of Ephesians, and we're trying to fathom the height and depth and breadth and width of the love of God. It's like trying to measure that is almost like trying to measure the ocean, or better, the universe. It's really not possible, but you can be in awe of it more and more, and I'm hoping today, in chapter 2 of Ephesians, as we look at the first 10 verses, you will be able to be more in awe of God's grace. I believe Helen was someone, if you knew her, you would say she got it. She understood what grace was for herself, as well as how she would share it with others. That was what was behind the whole message of Mission Haiti as well. We're going to look at what grace means today, and one of the questions is, do you fathom it? Do you get it? If you think grace is just a nice little attribute on kind of the side light, kind of with God's omniscience and omnipotence, and oh, I guess he's gracious too, you probably aren't understanding the depth of it. If you think it's just a nice thing that God is gracious, or that it's nice to be kind of nice to other people, I don't think you're getting it. When we read in Ephesians chapter 2 what grace all means and what it means, we're going to see these three different points that are going to come up. I'm just praying that we all really fully kind of appropriate this, to grasp it. That's kind of the word, to understand grace, because without grace, there's nothing to Christianity, by the way. And with grace, we can change the world. Let's read Ephesians 2, 1 through 10. And you were dead in your trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedient, among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath like the rest of mankind. But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ, by grace you have been saved, and raised us up with him, and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing, it is the gift of God, not of results of work, so that no one may boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them. Grace. I said we need to fathom the height and breadth and width and depth of what this is. And when you do, I think the response is going to be just awe and wonder. Awe and wonder and gratitude and joy. But what is grace? How do you define that word? I mean, we probably use it in a million different ways. And in Ephesians 2.8.9, I think it comes up with part of the best definition in this passage. It is for by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing, it is a gift of God, not a result of works. So right there you kind of get the definition that grace is gift. It's free. You don't earn it. You can't deserve it. It's given. But you get a lot of free things in life. You probably got a lot of free advice, and that's about what it's worth, right? Or you can get a lot of gifts in life, but they don't necessarily change your life. For instance, your child might have gotten a Nintendo Switch at Christmas or maybe birthday. You got one? Yeah, did it change your life? Not really. No, it's just more of the same, by the way. I know, it might have been really cool for like a week. Yeah, right? Just like everything else. But you had many other ways to entertain yourself, many other things to do with your time. It didn't really change anything. So think of the gifts in your life that actually changed you. Do you understand what I mean by that? Not the things that are, you know, you go up to a conference or a convocation or something like that, you're going to get probably free T-shirts and notepads and pencils, right? But you have plenty of others. And they don't change your life. They're free. Now imagine this. You are a poor person in Haiti. And you kind of heard a little about that in this video. You're a poor person in Haiti. No running water, no electricity, absolutely no job because the economy there is just in shambles. And you need an operation to save your life. But the medical care is not there even in the entire nation of Haiti. And you couldn't afford it even if it were. And there's no way to get there from here, et cetera. I mean, your whole life and you're going like, well, I'm going to die. But then somebody comes a...