Living In 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 Chapter 6 in a series called Vulnerability. And the word vulnerability doesn't actually show up necessarily in the book, and yet I think it ties all sorts of things together. Today, again, Paul talks very openly about how he wants the Corinthians to open up. And what we've seen is vulnerability is really openness. It's not weakness. It's not, you know, it's not exposing everything that you've ever done in your life to someone. It is really openness to learn, to grow, and to connect. And it is so essential that we do that. And I think more so today than ever before. And yes, that does sometimes mean sharing the weaknesses and the foils and the foibles and all that stuff. But it's the openness that really matters. And today we're going to get a warning from Paul in Chapter 6, which is rather fascinating. A warning about how he's worried about the Corinthians, that they might be receiving the grace of God as he puts it, in vain. So let's read this from 2 Corinthians Chapter 6. Working together with him then, we appeal to you not to receive the grace of God in vain. So that's kind of the key I saw in this text. For he says, in a favorable time I listened to you, and in a day of salvation I have helped you. Behold, now is the favorable time. Behold, now is the day of salvation. We put no obstacle in anyone's way, so that no fault may be found with our ministry. But as servants of God, we commend ourselves in every way. By great endurance in afflictions, hardships, calamities, beatings, imprisonments, riots, labors, sleepless nights, hunger. By purity, knowledge, patience, kindness, the Holy Spirit, genuine love. By truthful speech and the power of God, with the weapons of righteousness for the right hand and for the left, through honor and dishonor, through slander and praise, we are treated as impostors and yet are true, as unknown and yet known. As dying and behold we live, as punished and yet not killed, as sorrowful yet always rejoicing, as poor yet making many rich, as having nothing yet possessing everything. We have spoken freely to you, Corinthians. Our heart is wide open. You are not restricted by us, but you are restricted in your own affections. In return, I speak as to children. Widen your hearts also. So that first phrase, he warns against receiving God's grace in vain. Now the word for vanity here, or vain, is the Greek word kenos, which means basically empty, void, of no profit, amounting to zero. There's nothing to it. It means nullifying somehow the grace of God. It means emptying of its intentions, its purpose in our lives, its content. It means grace becomes just a thing, rather than what it actually is. So today we're going to look at these points, because I think his warning to the Corinthians, if we could have this happen, maybe we better watch out too. It might be able to happen in our lives, right? So we're going to look at these points, receiving the grace of God in vain, what are grace's characteristics from this text, and then living grace-filled lives. Now, the Corinthians were filled with a lot of knowledge, right? You might know this. They were know-it-all Christians. Do we have any of those these days? Yeah, I probably am one. It's just like, well, yeah, I can give you an answer to almost anything. I can fake it if I don't know it. So often, like I said, when you're reading a Bible passage and you stumble across a name that you have no idea how to pronounce, just say it with confidence and nobody else will know. You can get it, right? So they had a lot of knowledge. In fact, that was one of their dangers. Paul says in 1 Corinthians 8, we know that all of us possess knowledge, this knowledge puffs up, but love builds up. If anyone imagines that he knows something, he does not yet know as he ought to know, but if anyone loves God, he is known by God. I believe what happens when we receive the Gospel as an information, as just knowledge, as a formula, that's when we are receiving God's grace in vain. And that happens. God knows that happens too easily. It becomes just kind of this plus sign, the cross, and I just add it into my life. I remember as a teenager, we went through the Kennedy evangelism explosion method, and you basically have this wonderful little outline of things, and you tell people, point one, do this, point two, do that, point three, do this, boom, you're there. Somehow we reduced the Gospel, the good news of Jesus Christ, to a little formula, a couple of rules, a couple of things to follow, you add it in, you're there, you've made it. The Gospel is good news, but it's not simply information. It's really a life-changing, status-changing, future-changing, present-impacting good news. It's not something you just memorize. It's not something you just kind of add up in your mind. It's not like memorizing the formula for com...