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Follower of One : Missions For The Rest Of Us


A show for marketplace Christians to energize and encourage you to live out your faith every day, right where you are. Begin your day with Christ-centered ideas to share your joy with those around you. Add in weekly interviews with other like-minded Christians so you can share in their joy and learn how they make Jesus visible in their workplace every day.

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Feb 23, 2022

Often we pursue justice. Jesus brought grace. Let's talk about that today. 

I'm Mike Henry Sr. with Follower of One. Welcome back to the podcast. Today I want to talk about John chapter one, verses 16 and 17. We're continuing our discussion through this introduction, to the book of John. 

"For of His fullness, we have all received, and grace upon grace. For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth were realized through Jesus Christ." Once again, that's John 1:16-17 from the New American Standard Bible. 

As followers of Jesus, we're challenged to bring grace and truth. The word grace here is used three times in these two verses. First grace upon grace is what Jesus brought us and gave us.

And then he points out this conflict that the law was given through Moses, but grace and truth were realized through Jesus Christ. God makes certain things work and other things don't work very well. We choose how we live our lives and we can live according to our understanding of God's way, or we can live our own way.

We can call our own shots. We're free to choose. That freedom of choice, I believe, is the most valuable thing God gave us; this ability to choose. And Erwin McManus even said that "It was the most spiritual action we could take was choosing God." When we choose, we're saying, we decide that we trust God, or we decide that we trust ourselves.

Every choice is to some degree, a decision to trust God. Grace is unexplainable forgiveness. We can live according to this grace and this unexplainable forgiveness, or we can pursue justice. We can pursue justification. But when we have grace, when we have this unexplainable forgiveness, there's no reason for justification. Nothing was done to deserve the forgiveness that we were given.

Freely we have received. It says and freely we are called to give, and that's from Matthew 10 and Romans 8. The grace we received must be shipped. When we get grace from God, our job is to distribute that grace. Our job as believers is to be a distribution point for God's grace. 

I have this theory, "If you don't feel grateful for the grace, you've been given by God, give more away." Jesus doesn't give us grace unless we're shipping it. I believe He fills up our warehouse and often we try and hang on to it and therefore he won't give us anymore until we ship what we have.

He doesn't give us His blessing or provision or anything else without the expectation that we give it away. Jesus's grace wasn't intended to be stored in our warehouse where we can look at it. Think about the rich man in the story about building bigger barns from Luke 12. That man built all these barns and then died.

And he said, who will have your wealth today? We receive more of God's grace when we're actively shipping it. 

Today in your workplace, try to give something away. Everything we ship, everything we give away will be credited to our account and more will be given to us too. When we stop shipping Jesus' grace, Jesus may just stop delivering it to us.

So let's find ways to give away His grace today and be a blessing to the people around us.

Thank you for being a marketplace minister. Thank you for considering the idea that our job today might be to ship some of the grace that Jesus has given us. Let's find a way to ship that grace today.

Also, if you want to share your ideas or learn other ideas, why not join us in our online community? It's https://community.followerofone.org. There we encourage one another to live our lives, shipping Jesus's grace and making a difference in our world because we've been called to follow Jesus. This is our opportunity to re-imagine the idea of missions and become a missionary in our own workplace.

Check it out at https://community.followerofone.org and join us and see what God does is he challenges you to live your life as a full-time minister of his. Thanks very much.