Grace Received, Grace Returned

Introduction

Good morning. I want to begin a series of sermons on grace this morning. It’s been quite a while since I’ve gone through this concept, and I thought it would be rather important for especially some of our young people who will be leaving soon to make sure they’ve heard some things about this idea of grace, particularly because of much of the misunderstanding in the world around us about this concept. So I want to spend at least three sermons working through the idea of grace. I’ve done this before, and I’m kind of adapting some of my material. I don’t like to just do the same thing over again, so I’m gonna adjust it a little bit. And I hope that it’ll be beneficial in the way that we go through this.

I’m still going to do quite a bit of appealing to ancient sources because part of what I want us to see is how they viewed grace in the ancient world, which is not much like how people today view grace. And that’s one of the main points that I want us to see as we work through this material. What’s a little different about how I want to start is I want to begin in Luke 17, and I’ll look at a story there, and I hope this story will be helpful in sort of laying the foundation of how grace was understood. How they would have understood this kind of relationship that existed between individuals when someone is blessed by someone else, and then there is a return of grace that is essentially expected in that scenario.

So let’s read this text together, and then I want to talk a little bit about grace, and I want to go through the story itself and kind of let that lead us through this concept. And then we’re gonna spend some time in Ephesians in the next sermon, and then we’ll go to Titus in the last sermon. So we’re gonna kind of move through scripture a little bit, looking at different phrases and concepts about grace that I hope will be helpful for us. Good to see some of our college students back with us. Glad you had safe trips, and we welcome you back. We’re glad that you are here. Begin reading with me in Luke 17 and verse 11. Luke 17, verse 11 beginning. It says, On the way to Jerusalem, he was passing along between Samaria and Galilee.

And as he entered a village, he was met by ten lepers who stood at a distance, and lifting up their voices, saying, Jesus, Master, have mercy on us. When he saw them, he said to them, Go and show yourselves to the priest. And as they went, they were cleansed. Then one of them, when he saw that he was healed, turned back, praising God with a loud voice, and he fell on his face at Jesus’ feet, giving him thanks. Now he was a Samaritan. Then Jesus answered, Were not ten cleansed? Where are the nine? Was no one found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner? And he said to him, Rise and go your way.

Clearly, Luke wants to do something there with the Samaritan. It wasn’t too much earlier in chapter 10 that you had the story of the good Samaritan. He likes to highlight people who were on the margins, and he does that again here in this story, showing this one that others would have looked down on, particularly Jewish people would have looked down on the Samaritans, which is why he does this. It’s a message to them about examining their own heart. And yet this Samaritan is actually the one, as we’re going to see, who responds properly to grace.

It is this Samaritan, this foreigner that they would have looked down on.

If not physically, leprosy in the ancient world could refer to many things, but it certainly could refer and probably did here to the worst kind that we would imagine, which is where your body is disfigured and those sorts of things. But it could be other things like exema or impetigo or those types of things, which some of us have dealt with or have seen. Even that would have caused you to be distanced from people, at least for a time. But it seems these men are in a desperate situation. If not physically, then emotionally, psychologically, dealing with something like leprosy, it was considered living death in the ancient world, which makes it a nap metaphor for sin, which we should remember. They were not merely sick, they were unclean, or as we just sang about, defiled.

That’s their scenario here. They are unclean, they’re separated from family, from worship, they could not enter the synagogue, they could not enter the temple. They’re separated from community, from ordinary life. They lived in shame at a distance because of their condition. They were not allowed to touch or be touched by another human. If they were to walk through a group like this, their clothes had to be torn, they had to cry out unclean as they walked, they had to be disheveled, they couldn’t do their hair. All of these outward physical signs to let you know you shouldn’t get close to them. I just want us to think about for a moment. Can you imagine living years of your life without being touched by another person?

I mean, some of you may be introverted people. You may not like to be in crowds. And maybe that sounds good on the surface. But you think about going years without another person touching you at all, without a hug, without a handshake, without a pat on the back. Nothing. That’s the situation that these ten lepers lived in. For our young people, let me just clear up. We’re not talking about leopards, the animal. These are lepers. It’s a disease. It’s a skin disease. It was something that was terrible to live with and to deal with. And these people had to live on the outskirts of society. And what is equally shocking in all of this is when they cry out in desperation to Jesus, in a moment he cleanses them.

He says, go to the priest. And as they’re going, they’re cleansed on the way, we’re told. This terrible disease, this disease that for some of them, maybe for years, had separated from everything we’ve just talked about, and yet Jesus says, go. You’re healed. Amazing. But the story isn’t even actually fully about the healing. The healing’s part of it, and the healing is important. But it’s what comes after the healing that Luke actually means to emphasize. It is a story not about healing lepers, but about God’s grace. It’s about mercy being extended and what ought to come after that, what is expected, or maybe you would even say required, particularly within the ancient world, what they would have just assumed would naturally be the case. And yet what we see with most of these men, these lepers, is that they do not do it.

And so the story of these ten lepers, it really helps us in a few ways in thinking about grace, thinking about God’s mercy. And by the way, there’s a close relationship between even the Greek terms mercy and grace and how they are used interchangeably, particularly by Paul. But the concepts themselves are very close as well. And so we may use them somewhat interchangeably here. But the story helps us in a few different ways. First, it helps us consider how would I react if this was me. I mean, if I was found in this scenario, if I was dealing with this debilitating disease, and just in a moment someone healed me, how would I feel about that? How would I react? What would I do in that moment?

Second, I think it’s a good gateway into understanding grace and how it was understood in the ancient world. And I think actually Luke is pivoting on this concept to tell the story. He understands the ancient convention of grace, and so do the people who are listening to the story, and they would have been appalled. They would be appalled by reading that someone had been blessed these people so much, and yet nine of them don’t even come back to say thank you. What a horrific thing to imagine. And then finally, it helps us see the flaw in modern superficial ideas about grace. I really want to spend some time on all three of those. Hopefully, some of this will happen naturally as we just talk through the idea of what grace is.

We’ll consider if this was me, and by the way, it is me, because the concept of leprosy as it’s used frequently within scripture, is meant to portray the human condition, that we are defiled, we are unclean, and the only way that we can be cleansed is by the grace of God. And so while we may not have some physical ailment that we’re being healed from, certainly the concept of leprosy is to make us think about the problem of sin and how it defiles us in our life and how we are in such a desperate situation when it comes to our relationship with God. You’ve probably heard the definition about grace, which I’m not going to say is wrong, that it’s unmerited favor. That is not a wrong definition.

It is just incomplete. In Scripture, grace was never meant to stop with the receiver. It was never meant to just be a gift that you take, and then nothing else happens after that. That’s not the idea of grace in the ancient world. Grace received rightly becomes grace returned. It’s returned in gratitude and repentance and worship and loyalty and obedience, or particularly within the ancient world, and be returned through honor. And we’ll talk some more about this here in just a few minutes, about the way their world worked. And to neglect that would have been seen as utterly shameful. To not do those things, to have someone bless you or take care of you or benefit you in some way, and for you to turn and walk away and not return that, and that was seen as one of the worst actions that you could take in the ancient world.

1. Grace Begins With Helplessness

And this is what Luke 17 illustrates. Jesus gives grace to those who are crying out in mercy. These ten lepers receive his grace, but only one returns. Only one responds properly to Jesus’ mercy. So when we think about grace, I want us to just first begin with what I think is probably maybe the most obvious part of this. And that is that grace begins with helplessness. That’s what’s portrayed in the story and portrayed well. And it’s meant to help us think about our own helplessness in the face of Jesus and our relationship and our standing before God. When we realize who we are as sinners and what that means and how it breaches our relationship with God, just like these lepers who had to stand at a distance and they couldn’t have contact and they had no interaction, that’s essentially where we are.

Our sins have separated us from our God, Isaiah says in Isaiah 59. And when we live in sin, we live separated from Him, defiled, just like these ten lepers were physically. And that’s how grace begins to heal this in our helplessness. These lepers don’t come bargaining. They don’t come boasting, hey, we found Jesus, we got the answer. Look at us. They don’t come with some kind of merit. They are helpless men begging for mercy. There’s absolutely no way they can take care of this themselves. If they could, they already would have.

2. Doing What the Lord Requires Is Still Grace

She gives to doctors trying to fix this situation, and yet she comes to Jesus healed in a moment. That’s the power of Jesus. That’s what these kinds of stories show us. We are helpless, we are needy, there’s nothing that we can do for ourselves to fix this problem. So let me ask you this. Did going to the priests earn the lepers their cleansing? Well, it sounds like a ridiculous question, and it is. But I feel the need to bring it up because of what I talked about earlier, flawed superficial ideas about grace in our modern world. The idea that if you take some kind of action or you do something, well, that’s just works trying to merit your salvation somehow. You know, they had to go to the priest.

This is how the logic would actually flow if we take modern logic and put it back there. So they went to the priest. If they wouldn’t have done that, then they wouldn’t have been healed. And so they earned this.

So if you do anything, if you obey any command, you listen to anything God tells you, well, you’re just denying the grace of God. It’s a work of merit. I’ll invite you to read with me a few verses before this story. Where Jesus actually deals with this conceptually. It says in verse 7, this is Luke 17 in verse 7 will any one of you who has a servant ploughing or keeping sheep say to him when he has come in from the field, come at once and recline at table? Will he not rather say to him, Prepare supper for me and dress properly and serve me while I eat and drink, and afterward you will eat and drink. Does he thank the servant because he did what was commanded?

So you also, when you have done all that you were commanded, say, We are unworthy servants. We have only done what was our duty. And then he tells the story. We’ve only done what was expected.

So the things that Jesus tells us, the things that are revealed to us in Scripture about how we properly respond to grace, they are in no way anywhere close to somehow meriting salvation. In what world could we ever imagine that’s the simplicity of the gospel message and hearing what we’re told and receiving that and being baptized into Christ and then living a life of faithfulness, somehow that’s going to earn us or obligate God to save us. That makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. A few years ago, right after Xander was diagnosed with bone cancer, one of my good friends, Reagan McClaney, some of you may know him, he saw this thing. He follows a guy, which I do now too. We’re both big time golfers.

We love golf. We golf together. He’s a good friend. Monday Q, which you probably don’t know what that is, that’s okay. it’s a Twitter guy, and he had this competition. It was a father-son thing. You put your name in, and he was going to send somebody to the masters. Reagan saw that. so February, into February, Xander was diagnosed. If you know golf, you know, April comes pretty quickly after that, and the masters come pretty quickly after that. He put our name in. It was only supposed to be for people in Georgia. But when they saw the story, they expanded it and they chose us and they got us plane tickets, they got us a hotel, a rental car, they paid for us to get souvenirs while we were there, took care of all of our food, pay for our gas, and said, all you have to do is just go to the airport.

Would we ever say that because we went to the airport and we flew to Georgia, that we somehow earned that? I mean, that’s ridiculous. That would make there’s such a gap in reasoning here. We were just given all of this stuff, generosity. My friend who thought about us and generously did this, and he planned some of it with this guy as well. I mean, we literally had to do almost nothing. But we did have to get ourselves to the airport. And we had to go to the rental place and get the car, and then we had to drive to Augusta. I mean, did we earn that trip because we did those things? Oh, how ridiculous is that. That is nothing. It’s not even remotely close to something like this.

Where Jesus saved their lives. He delivered them from living death from leprosy. And the message that we understand is the gospel is that he saves us from our sin. As great as that disparity is between what we had to do and what they did for us in this trip to the Masters, it’s not even remotely close to the disparity between what God offers us and the grace that He has bestowed upon us and what He now tells us, this is the way to respond to that. This is how you receive the grace that God is offering. But what I even more so want us to understand, even beyond just the flawed concepts of modern ideas about grace, I really just want us to see the weight that comes down and understanding what true grace is actually about.

It’s not even all of that, it’s just the complete shame of not appreciating what is done for you. That’s the real point. Grace is a two-way street. It begins in need, but it doesn’t just stop there. Grace is not just giving a gift, and then there’s just nothing else that has to happen. Doing what the Lord requires to be saved from death is still completely grace. God is gracious.

When we are completely helpless. You know so many verses that show this. I’ll give you a couple examples. We read this one frequently when we before we take the Lord’s Supper and we commune together in the Lord’s death, memorial of that. Romans 5, verse 6. While we were still weak at the right time, Christ died for the ungodly. He didn’t die for us because we were so worthy and we had made so many good decisions. He didn’t die for us because we were so obedient and we did so many things right.

While we were sinners at the right time, he died for us. Ephesians chapter 2 and verse 8 and 9. By grace you have been saved through faith, not a result of works, not anything I could have done.

I put my faith in Jesus Christ. Putting my faith in him doesn’t mean I earned anything. It means I trusted him. He said, This is what you got to do. I’m offering this to you. I’m blessing you. I’m going to bestow grace upon you. Here’s how you receive it. And in doing so, he delivers us from our sin. Titus 3 5, we’ll talk more about this text later on. It says, He saved us not because of works done by us in righteousness, but according to his own mercy. These lepers are the same way.

3. Grace Rightly Received Is Returned to the Giver

They didn’t cleanse themselves by something they did. They didn’t earn their cleansing. They did not obligate Jesus to heal them because of some actions they took. This is not transactional, it’s relational. They responded in faith to Jesus’ words, and they did what he said. But the story doesn’t stop there because there’s more to grace than just that. Why does the Samaritan leper returning matter so much? No, it’s grace, right? I mean, Jesus just heals these guys. He blesses them. Why is there anything else that goes into this story? Because in true grace, in biblical grace, there’s two sides to it. It’s not just a free gift with no other obligations or requirements that come afterward. It’s not just a free gift where nothing else has to happen.

Nothing else matters. That’s not what grace really is. In the reality, in the ancient world, the world that Jesus lived in, and that the lepers lived in, that the apostles lived in, everything in Scripture lived in. This is ancient, even going back to Old Testament times, all the way through the time of Jesus, grace is understood this way. Grace rightly received or properly or correctly responded to means grace is then returned to the giver. It’s interesting. LSJ, which is the leading Greek lexicon. The entire Greek language, not just Koine Greek, which is biblical Greek, but complete Greek language, LSJ, Liddell Scott Jones, if you want to look it up. It talks about the word chorus, which is the word grace. Did you know that this word is more often used for a response to a favor than it is for the bestowing of a favor.

See, this is where we sometimes miss the concept of grace in our culture and the way it’s thought about today. We think it’s all about someone giving a gift, unmerited favor. They just give you something, you don’t have to do anything in return. That is not biblical grace. The term is used much more frequently for how you respond to the gift given. The idea of blessing God or giving thanks to God. That’s the word chorus. That’s the word grace, actually, often in your Bibles. If you wouldn’t knew what the Greek was behind those terms. The word Eucharisteo is the word to give thanks. It’s actually in our text. He returned to Jesus and he fell at his feet and he gave him thanks.

He gave him good grace. He returned grace to him. This is so well understood. It’s talked about hundreds of years before the time of Jesus by Sophocles. Grace, he said, is always giving birth to grace. Or you may have heard it said, favor is always giving birth to favor. What the idea is that grace doesn’t end with you. Someone blesses you. It doesn’t just stop there. Right? This ought to continue. That’s the way that grace should work. And this is the way they conceptualized it in the ancient world. They thought of it as a circle. So there’s these three graces. These are the daughters of Zeus. This is from Hesiod, 8th century BC. Seneca is more along the times of the first century. But he’s speaking about this ancient concept that is written really in the beginning of written record, at least how most people would see it.

I think the Bible is earlier, but Homer and Hesiod or 8th century BC, some of the earliest writings, and part of those writings talks about these three daughters of Zeus and it talks about this concept, their connection. And this is what Seneca has to say with this about this. Why do these sisters hand in hand dance in a ring which returns upon itself? A benefit passing in its course from hand to hand returns to the giver. The beauty of the whole is destroyed if the course is anywhere broken. So someone benefits you in some way, you take that and you never respond. You’re breaking that course. Now that response can happen a variety of ways. It may be that you are blessed by someone and you bless somebody else.

You ought to also return thanks, which is returning grace. Thanks and grace are the same term in Greek.

Some of you who are older, you remember, I remember when I was a kid, with prayers like say grace, or return thanks for us. Those are sometimes how we talk about prayer. Well, it’s because of this. It’s because of this concept. It’s a concept of when you are blessed or you receive grace, you should then return that grace. You should return honor and praise and glory, and there’s a whole language of grace, and we can’t get into that this morning, but there’s a bunch of terms that are within kind of the semantic domain of the idea of grace and how it all works with honor and shame and all of that. But when I don’t respond properly to that, here’s what Seneca’s saying you’re breaking this sacred circle.

4. Grace in an Honor and Shame Culture

The circle that happens when someone blesses another, and then they say, I’m just gonna take that to myself and stop it there. And I want us to understand essentially that is what modern grace theory is. That God blesses you and you don’t have to do anything else. Not only is it completely unbiblical from a conceptual standpoint anyway, it’s completely against the concept of grace in ancient times. It doesn’t fit at all with what we even see in scripture, but also what we see in the ancient world about how all of this works. The biblical context of grace is embedded within some things that are very different than our world. They lived in what was called an honor and shame culture. I think the best way to explain how we are not that is the fact that people will get on reality TV or they’ll get on Instagram or whatever and make fools of themselves.

You wouldn’t do that in an honor-shame culture. You would embarrass your family to do that. There are maybe bits and pieces of that remain within our culture. Maybe I think within like military. There’s a lot of honor within military code and those, and I’m not super familiar with that, but I know that is reality. There is an honorable way to do things. So there’s still certain segments of our culture that has some of this. But for the most part, people will get on TV and do humiliating things to win a million dollars. I mean, no one seems to care. We live in a guilt culture. So that means people do things till they get caught and then they’re embarrassed. And we have a hard time, for example, not that I’m condoning this, but we have a hard time thinking of like honor killings.

I mean, how could people do that? Well, because our culture has no inkling of that concept, really. But there are cultures that still exist that are honor shame cultures, and if you do something that embarrasses your family, and that is a shameful thing to your whole family. I mean, think of Old Testament scripture. If your son is a drunkard, right? Or he is he is disobedient. What is it in the Old Testament scriptures? There’s civil law. They’re supposed to take it to the to the leaders and they stone this child. That’s an honor killing.

Honor and shame matter. They’re a big deal. And just because they don’t matter in our culture doesn’t mean we can just neglect the concept of how this shapes scripture and what is being said there. Connected with that is the sort of thing we’ve already talked about, really, is the patron client relationships. This is all over Scripture, if not outright directly, indirectly, particularly like in a book like 1 Corinthians, where you have wealthy people who are helping sometimes the poorer people within a congregation, and sometimes they’re lining up behind certain people because they’re probably their patrons, and they are supporting their life. And what do you do with someone who supports your life? You are very careful. Are you going to get on social media or social media culture too?

Are you going to get on social media and dog your employer? Talk about how horrible they are and how you hate working for them. Why would you not do that? I hope you wouldn’t do that. But why would you not do that? We have a saying, don’t bite the hand that feeds you, right? This is the idea. You have a patron-client relationship. There is a reciprocal nature to what’s happening. This benefit this system of benefaction and reciprocity stands behind this whole concept of grace that everybody in scripture would have understood because it’s how their economy works. Just a system of networks of people you are connected to and relationships you have. Maybe we’ll talk more about that next week in that sermon. But I’ll just conclude some of these sources.

David DeSilva is not an ancient source, but he’s an expert in these ancient sources. And here’s what he says about this idea. Today, grace is primarily a religious word, heard only in churches and Christian circles. For the actual writers of the New Testament, grace was not primarily a religious word, rather, it was used to speak of reciprocity among human beings. This single word encapsulated the entire ethos of the relationships we have been describing. So those relationships are the ones we just talked about patron client, the system of benefaction and reciprocity. This is grace is embedded in all of that. And it’s how their economy, it’s how their culture worked. And so for someone to do something for you, and then you just walk away and never come back and show any kind of regard or honor for that’s a breaking down of their whole system.

And so when I say the idea here that grace, rightly received, returns honor to the giver, that is the concept I’m getting at. This is something that is embedded in everything that has to do with their culture. Grace can be the favor given, it can be the gift received, but it can also be the gratitude returned or the honor rendered. It is all of those things in one term. And it depends on the context, how it’s being used. But clearly they are connected as well. The leper perfectly illustrates a proper response to grace.

5. We Give Ourselves Back to God

But we can give ourselves back to God.

How many people does Jesus heal and they want to go with him? Right? They let me come with you. Sometimes he lets them, other times he says, No, you go home and either don’t tell people yet or go tell others what I’ve done for you. Right? He has instructions for them. But this is what Paul has to say about this relationship in Galatians 2 20. He says, I have been crucified with Christ. It’s no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me in the life that I now live in the flesh, I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me. You see grace in all of that? Christ gave himself for me, and so now the life that I live in the flesh, I live in the Son of God.

I give myself to him. This is what Paul’s trying to tell us, right? The one who wishes to save his life will lose it, Jesus says. He who loses his life for my sake shall find it. Take up your cross and follow me. Why? Because Jesus took up his cross and he died for me. And so he’s calling me to do the same, to die with him. And over and over again in scripture, it tells us that we need to die with Christ. We give up the old man and we’re buried with him in baptism, and we come up a new man out of this water. That whole picture is one of responding to the grace of God, to what God has done for us. We don’t repay grace.

6. Where Are the Nine?

There’s no way to do that, but we return it through obedience and honor and praise. And what I want us to understand is the ancient world would have understood this very easily. And Luke’s entire story hinges on this concept. When Jesus makes this statement, where are the nine? It has everything to do with what we just talked about. It’s a question that still should be biding to us. The one Samaritan leper shows what grace should look like. The other nine show us what one-sided, shameful grace looks like. And unfortunately, as I’ve argued already, this is often how grace is understood in our world. Jesus asks a question to the leper and to whoever else is there that I think still exposes the human heart. We’re not ten cleansed.

Where are the nine? Where’d they go? I mean, I saved their life. I did all this for them. I blessed them in such a great way, and only one comes back to say thank you.

One of them is The Cost of Discipleship. I think it’s a pretty good book overall. You may know he was a victim of World War II and Hitler’s chaos and tyranny. But he made this statement.

Which I agree with Bonhoeffer on this. I think what I want us to see when I’m presenting this morning is that actually the correct preaching of grace implies repentance. It’s built into it. If grace is not changing me, if it’s not causing me to turn, if it’s not producing something, then it has not been responded to properly.

But I mean, this is the concept he’s saying in Romans 2, the very beginning of this book. He’s like, are you going to presume on the riches of his kindness? God has been so gracious, he’s been so loving and merciful and showed so much forbearance, and you’re just going to say, doesn’t matter. Nothing I can do about it now. No, that is not how you respond to grace. He says God’s kindness is meant to lead you to repentance. A turning. When we are blessed, we are benefited. The idea is that then we return that blessing. We return that grace. Bonhoeffer goes on to say, cheap grace is the grace we bestow upon ourselves. And let me just stop here and say that is modern grace idea.

To the extent that we feel like that God graces us, and we just don’t have to do anything. We’re just bestowing grace on ourselves without any obligation or any requirement or any expectation that we actually have to do anything in this. Cheap grace is the grace we bestow upon ourselves. Preaching of forgiveness without repentance, baptism without church discipline, communion without confession. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship. I think that’s pretty well said. It only wants one side of the equation, but not the other. Is a very empty concept of grace. It’s not a biblical grace. It’s as Bonhoeffer says, a cheap, empty grace. So the question that grace asks us, if we understand it properly, is not just, are you cleansed? That’s good. I’m happy for these lepers that they were cleansed and that they were able to live a better life because Jesus blessed them physically.

Conclusion

But the question is also, have you returned? Have you returned honor to the one who blessed you? To the one who cleansed you, to the one who is given mercy. And so as we end this morning, I want us to think about this. Whenever people talk about grace, when we hear discussions about grace, I want to embed Luke 17 in our minds. And people will say all sorts of things about grace and the grace of God, and God’s grace is amazing. Paul spends three chapters in Ephesians talking all about the grace of God. And this is what we’re going to work on next week. And so God’s grace is unimaginable. It’s hard for us to fathom how great God’s grace is. But I want us to think whenever we hear people talking about grace, Jesus’ words.

Where are the nine? Not just have we been blessed, not just have we been cleansed, but have we returned honor back to the giver? Maybe this morning you realize your need to do that. I hope if you’re sitting here this morning, you realize God has blessed us in so many ways. Not just with salvation, but just the things that happen in daily life. I mean, he has given us so much. But the greatest blessings are those that are found in Christ Jesus, as Ephesians 1 talks about, and you only have those if you’re in Christ. And he tells us the way that we need to be in Christ. We have to die with him. We have to enter the waters of baptism and the death like his and be resurrected and a resurrection like his.

So we can walk in newness of life. We can have our sins washed away. We can receive the blessing that God has offered by the grace that has appeared. And if you know that you need to do that this morning, don’t wait another moment. Don’t neglect to receive the amazing grace that God has offered you through his son, Jesus Christ. We would love to help you do that. Because many of us here this morning have enjoyed that blessing ourselves, and we want you to enjoy it too. Can we help you? Why don’t you come as we stand and we sing?