Priscilla Shirer || Unlocking The Impact Of Grace.

February 23, 2024 christiandailypost

Priscilla Shirer: Grace is God’s unmerited favour on your life, that’s what it is. It is God being free to do everything he wants to do for you because of what Christ has already done for you. Grace is the goodness of God dispensed to you, that you do not deserve, that you could not repay and that you cannot earn. Grace is of course the basis of our faith. But there is not only a grace that saves you, there is also a grace that sustains you. This is what I call a grace for grown-ups.
This multiplied grace is the grace for grown-ups, it’s the grace that actually meets you in the details of your days and the darkest hours of your night, it meets you in your struggles and your strife and your difficulties and your daily decisions.

If peace anchors you, grace is actually an engine that motivates you and encourages you and sustains you, it’s an uplifter and a keeper, it’s a second wind that keeps you moving forward with honestly, you would have caved a long time ago. Grace gives you inspiration to keep going, it sustains you when everything around you is not changing the difficulty, is staying the same but somehow God gives you a grace that keeps you moving forward. When the marriage is still hard and the finances are still low and the babies are still not sleeping through the night and the adult children are still living in a way that is outside of the way that you raise them to live and the relationship with that person is still strained or your heart is still broken or the business is still frailing, when your needs are still seemingly unmet and unattended, there is a grace for grown-ups that can be your keeper.

I don’t know that I have ever in my life had personal testimony of this quite the same way I do now. We’ve all, as I said corporately been through a whole lot of stuff but the last two years of our life as a family has been devastating. We have lost eight family members back to back, it started off with the loss of one of my closest friends and my biological cousin, she actually was a member of this church.

And one day we were planning to go to the movies, I still have the voicemails from her trying to organize her kids coming to my house to hang out with their cousins while we went to the movies that’s what we did together, hang out at the movies over hot buttery salty popcorn and a good coke. And one day, we’re planning to go to the movies and the next day at 38 years old, her heart just stopped and that loss started a string of losses in our family one after the other, ending with December 2019 right before the pandemic began in December, the same month my grandfather died, my father’s father, the beginning of the month and at the end of the month December 30th my mother died, eight months later my mother-in-law died. In between those two deaths, the doctor saw something on my left lung that needed to be removed and the only way they could remove it was to actually take out the entire upper left lobe of my lung. So a week after my mother’s funeral, I had to go have that surgery. One thing after the other.

And I don’t know if you’ve ever had a season of your life where you look back on it and you realize grace sustained me through that.
That it had to be grace, that it had to be something supernatural, that we’ve still had our minds regulated, that we have still kept our faith and our trust and our hope in him, he is indeed a grace giver and he extends grace for folks going through grown-up situations like you and I are facing, he gives a grace for grown-ups.
So I want you to know that there is a multiplied peace and I want you to know from my own personal testimony that there is a multiplied grace that has been extended to you.

Paul the Apostle talked about it, a little bit in 2 Corinthians 12, he said there’s this thorn in my flesh, if I could get rid of this thorn, my life would be so much easier and better. And he prays, he asked the Lord to get rid of the thorn because that’s what we do(Lord if you can change this situation, this thing that’s poking me, it’s uncomfortable, it’s bothering me, if you could get this out of my life, then everything would be fine).
Jesus, a God heard the prayer, he prayed three times that the thorn would be removed and God in his sovereignty and his goodness and his grace to us, sometimes does not remove the thorn.

That God’s sovereignty, that God’s goodness, that God’s love for you has not been misplaced just because the thorn remains in your life. He said to Paul “no, I’m not taking away the thorn because it’s by this thorn, that you’re getting ready to learn that my grace is sufficient for you. In other words, the multiplication of grace is tied to the hard things that we are facing, that sometimes the Lord allows it because you’ll never see the multiplication without it, so if you’re praying “Lord take away this thorn, Lord change this difficulty the thing” and the Lord in his goodness and sovereignty chooses not to take away the thorn, then we begin to know we are growing up in our faith and maturing a little bit spiritually, when instead of completely caving in hopelessness or bitterness and resentment against the Lord that the thorn remains we instead, sit on the edge of our seat with our chin in our hands in holy anticipation that if he allowed the thorn to remain, that must mean there is a multiplication of grace that’s on the way.