757 Extravagant Grace - Ephesians 1:6-8

Have you ever given so much, you thought it was too much?  Hi, I'm Mike Henry Sr. With Follower of One. Thanks for joining me again today on the Follower of One Podcast. Welcome to episode 757. Today, we're talking about the extravagant grace of God and we're using Ephesians chapter one verses six through eight as our reference.

I'm actually going to start reading though at the end of verse four. "In love he predestined us for adoption to himself as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace, with which he has blessed us in the Beloved. In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of his grace, which he lavished upon us in all wisdom and insight."

The "he's" and "him's" in here were talking about Jesus. And this passage is from the English Standard Version. I read part of this from the New American Standard yesterday's passage. Today, we're talking about God and we're talking about how he has blessed us. And he first blessed us by choosing us. We spoke about that yesterday.

And then what he does is he gives us this grace. He predestined us for this adoption. And then once we're adopted, he gives us his glorious grace. It says, "to the praise of his glorious grace, with which he has blessed us in the Beloved." The "beloved" being Jesus, having looked at other translations. 

In Christ we are blessed with this grace, this glorious grace that Paul is talking about. Grace is unmerited favor. It's like winning the lottery except better. It's getting what you dreamed about and better even than what you dreamed about without having asked, or maybe without having even thought of it. This grace is unbelievable.

And the fact that Jesus would die on the cross for our sins so that we could experience this relationship with God is just a tremendous miracle. So Paul is appreciating the grace of God that we've been given. And we have this redemption we've been redeemed through Christ's blood. 

And the forgiveness of our sins is according to the riches of God's grace. In other words, it's not out of the riches of God's grace. It's not some fraction, but it's in accordance with. God's forgiveness is unlimited and his grace is unlimited. These things are unbelievably special to us and God, the apostle Paul says, lavishes, this grace upon us. He uses this word, that means he extravagantly gave us this.

He's blowing it out. And this blowing it out is for us.  I can go into great detail about this, and I'm not even a biblical scholar. And I also don't want to state things that are in error, but when we concentrate on the unmerited favor of God, his grace, we can be so blessed that we want to give things away and enjoy God as well.

And that's, I think our challenge for today. Let's live in such a way that God's grace to us is visible to the people around us. Let's be people who can give the benefit of the doubt. Let's be people who can let others cut in front of us or go first. I'm talking to myself because I almost never do. I'm one of these people that's always in a hurry.

So today, can I be graceful in the relationships that I have? I believe that's one of the ways that God calls us to make a difference in our world. We can bring the grace of God into every interaction. We're grace distributors. That's our job is to take God's grace and deliver it into the world and "he has lavished it upon us, in his wisdom and insight." We'll talk about this a little more as we go on through the rest of Ephesians chapter one, but today let's make a difference in the lives of the people around us, by finding ways to deliver a little bit of God's grace in every interaction and in every relationship that we have.