755 Grace and Peace - Ephesians 1:2

What's the best thing that ever happened to you? And did you deserve it? 

Hey, I'm Mike Henry Sr. with Follower of One. Thanks for joining me again today on the Follower of One Podcast, I'm grateful that you join us for these quick little episodes where we challenge ourselves to go into the workplace every day and live like followers of Jesus.

Today. I want to read from Ephesians 1:2, "Grace to you and peace from God, our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ." Paul begins almost every letter with the words, grace, to you and peace. Grace and peace are in there somewhere. 

And I chose Ephesians because I actually wanted to praise God some this morning, and I came to Ephesians chapter one in my quiet time, and I realized that I had never recorded a podcast about anything in Ephesians chapter one. So I think we'll do that for a few episodes. But today we're recording about grace to you and peace. This phrase, "Grace to you and peace from God, our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ" is  word for word in both letters to the Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, and Thessalonians and Philemon. It's almost the exact same phrase. In first Thessalonians changes around a little bit and also in Colossians. And it's still a little bit different in Romans, but it's there.

This is the way Paul begins every letter, "Grace to you and peace from God, our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ." 

Grace. I don't know if you use that word very often, or if you think about it much. But imagine winning the lottery, but not having purchased a ticket. Imagine the best thing that could possibly happen to you and you don't deserve it at all.

And then God's grace is above and beyond that. God is so wonderful in how he has saved us and how he created us. You wouldn't be breathing today if it wasn't for God, whether you want to believe that or not. And his grace and his piece is being wished upon all these people by the apostle Paul. And I hear this as a challenge to me, and as a challenge to marketplace Christians. I believe we're where we are every day, so that we can be bringing grace and peace from God to our world.

That's our job. We're grace distributors. I've talked about that before. Our job is to ship grace into the world. And when you went to work today, you started to ship grace into the world. The grace given to you is something that we can distribute to people around us. 

We can live as graceful people. How can we do that today? Today, we can be a blessing to others. We can look for ways to do things for other people. We can get outside of our own limitations and our own self focus, and we can pray for those people. We can pray for them and they never know it. We can pray for the people that we work with. You can mentally walk through your office or your workplace today and imagine every conversation that will happen today and pray for those people.

And I want to encourage you to do that. You begin to distribute God's grace in the world by making it available to the people around us. Let's live as people  who are totally filled with and conscious of the grace of God in our lives. Because when we are, it just kind of oozes out into the rest of the world and that's what we want to happen.

We want God's grace and peace to be throughout our world. Not by forcing people to accept something they didn't want; by just living it in such a way that they're drawn to it. And that's our challenge as marketplace Christians today, would you do that? Would you live like a Christian today by looking for ways to give away the grace and the peace that God has given to you?

Thank you for being a marketplace minister and thank you for making a difference with your faith in the world. What you do because you follow Jesus Christ matters. So let's take that seriously today in our jobs and wherever we are. Thanks very much.