Evidences of Grace #1

As I shared at the devotional for our annual meeting, the first evidence of grace that I have seen is that over the past two years, our church family has seen at least 5 professions of faith in Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour. I define a conversion as a genuine understanding of what it means to be a sinner and a genuine understanding of what it means to need a Saviour who not only forgives sinners of sin, but provides for them new hearts that they serve Jesus and His mission with (Jeremiah 31:33,34 & Matthew 28:19,20) I am not by nature a pessimist and reading Canadian sociologist Reginald Bibby reminded me that the Christian horizon in Canada is not as bad as one might think (read his short article here).  However, statistically, most churches that are over 25 years old have a very difficult time growing via new conversions. Statistics Canada says that while Protestant Christianity is growing, it is not quite keeping up with the population growth, and thereby losing ground slowly. This means that some, if not many churches will eventually die without conversion growth. All of this to say, 5 genuine conversions in the past year is evidence that God works through His Word, He has been answering our prayers, and it is possible for churches that are almost 50 years old to experience new believers who freshly understand and experience the power of the gospel. This has been a great encouragement to me and is one of the evidences of the grace of Jesus in our church family in 2008.

It's been a long time.

I know, I know, a blog is supposed to be updated regularly, but the truth of it is, I haven't been totally sure what to write about these past couple of weeks, well months. It has been a good season of ministry over the holidays and now in the new year, although it is hard to believe that February is almost gone. I thought I would start everything up with the fact that over the last few months I have been reflecting much on evidences of God's grace. About this time last year I was at a conference where one of my favourite preacher's, C.J. Mahaney challenged us with something out of 1 Corinthians. He described the Corinthian church as it is described in that letter--messed up. However, something about the way that the book is introduced that is striking; Paul refers to the Corinthian church as, ' . . . called to be saints together with all those who in every place call upon the name of our LORD Jesus Christ . . .', and Paul always, ' . . . gives thanks to my God for you because of the grace of God that was given you in Christ Jesus'. (1 Corinthians 1:2,4) If you read the rest of the book, it hardly feels like this is a church that is worthy of these kind of statements. That's because, as Mahaney so passionately points out, Paul trained himself to look for evidences of God's grace. If you were at the BEMC annual meeting this past February, you know that I pointed out a number of evidences of grace that I have seen in this church family in the past year. Over the next couple of days I will try to share with you some of these evidences that I have seen. Stay posted.

Here's C.J.'s message.