Trinity United Methodist Church Daily Scripture Email Devotion for Monday, 5 January 2015 "It's All Grace"

Trinity United Methodist Church Daily Scripture Email Devotion for Monday, 5 January 2015 "It's All Grace"
"For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith - and this not of yourselves, it is the gift of God."  (Ephesians 2:8).
This was one of John Wesley's favorite texts, drawing from it no fewer than 40 times.  It conveys the truth that our life in God, our salvation from sin and death, our intimacy with Christ - are all the gift of God's grace.  Left to our own devices we would never come to the joy of knowing God; rather, it is the result of God's unrelenting love and grace active in our lives.
This week we will be focusing on one of the aspects of Grace that John Wesley rediscovered for the Christian family; it is one of the most profound and uplifting ideas imaginable.  It's called by its Latin related name:  Prevenient Grace.  It is the grace "that goes before."  It is the wooing, seeking, quietly working on us even when we're unaware of it kind of grace.  It's the grace that when we look back on our lives we see the hand of God at work.  It's the kind of grace that is operative in the prayers of parents, Grandparents, aunts and uncles as they pray for family members to come to an intimate relationship with God through Jesus.  
It's the grace that is operative in infant baptism, where the child is known to God and loved by God even though the child doesn't yet know God or God's name.  It's a beautiful thing.  We will celebrate this wondrous expression of God's grace this coming Sunday (Jan. 11) with a service of "Re-affirmation of our Baptism Vows," as each of us will be invited to the front to touch the sacred waters of baptism and then touch the water to our foreheads and remember our baptism (or be baptized for the first time).  In the liturgical calendar, this Sunday is also known as "The Baptism of our Lord," so we will be celebrating Jesus' own baptism as well, by reaffirming our own.
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Dan Johnson. 352-317-4409
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