Book: The Character of God

“If someone were to ask you to define the most important thing you do as a Christian, what would you answer? There is obviously no simple answer. But the one answer that might be most conspicuous by its absence would be – worship. The cardinal calling of the Christian is to worship.”

“We study the nature of God because it is His character infused in us that allows us to be transformed. Have you ever stopped to realize that every quality that God wants in your life has a corresponding attribute found only in Him? Therefore, if you want to be changed, begin worshiping God for those aspects of His nature that lead to the qualities you are praying for; and specifically ask God, claiming His Word, to change you into His likeness. … Every absolute of Scripture upon which we build our obedience is predicated on one of the aspects of the character of God.”

“Our goal is to come to the reality that the more we study the nature and attributes of God, the more we come to grasp the inevitable fact that it isn’t up to us to be… to do… to become. God lives in us, and God in us can do anything. Therefore, we can be at rest. Therefore, every attribute of His nature gives us new confidence to live the Christian life. He is! And because He is – we are.”

“Man has always wrongfully assumed that because God uses human illustrations and human terminology to describe Himself to man that He is describing the Creator as little more than His creation. Dear God, forgive us. Because we read of the “hand of God”, dare we envision God’s hands as little more than ours? Because we read of the “voice of God”, do we imagine His voice to be like ours, but louder? Beloved, the hand of God is big enough to carve the mountains out of the seas; the voice of God is strong enough to raise the dead. The love of God is deep enough to nail itself to a Roman cross and in agony do what man could never do – die for the sins of the world.”

1- What is the only way to discern who God is?

2- What was prayed for at the beginning of this study? Why?

3- What does personal worship involve that corporate worship doesn’t? Why are both important?

4- Explain what is mean by “real worship is exalting the nature of God” (p. 6).

“The church makes big noises, but lives in anemic fear of the circumstances of life that appear to be crushing it on every side. It is not as though we deny the existence of God. What we deny, by our actions, if not our lofty words, is the awesome acknowledgment of just how powerful, how wonderful, how incredibly beyond understanding our God is. … As we begin looking at the specific attributes of God, our prayer is that our hearts will bow in utter awe at His majesty and His power.”

“Beloved, God cannot be measured on any human scale. It’s much like looking at still photographs of the Grand Canyon – we certainly cannot catch even a tiny fraction of its awesome beauty. … We cannot grasp the magnitude of Who He is, and yet we must not allow the fact that He is incomprehensible to deter us from our search into the vast reaches of Scriptural revelation.”

“You and I belong to a God who only needed to breathe a word and the heavens in all their splendor flowed from His heart into being. He uttered a word and the sun hurled itself forth from the Light of His eyes and became the beacon man would need to distinguish day from night. He moved His hands, and the stars flew from His fingertips into the heavens to become tiny sentinels marking the horizon with an echo of God’s love. He breathed another word and the earth came out of nothing. Think about it, Beloved; all of life came forth from His lips, and yet we have not seen nor even considered a tiny portion of His creative power.”

“The power of His righteous judgment is beyond our understanding, as well. If we fathomed only a tiny, tiny fragment of that power, we would not toy with sin as we do. God is so patient; yet beyond His patience lies judgment. And because His love is so real, we ignore His awesome Righteousness. Oh, but dear one, when His patience has run its course in this world and in our individual lives, He must move His hand of discipline. And were He not to temper that discipline with grace, we would all be destroyed.”

“He is self-sufficient. He does not need us to be complete. He is self-existent. He is sovereign. He is God. … We are always wanting God to reveal Himself in some kind of supernatural way to either excite us or guide us. God wants us to spend such constant, quality time in His presence day by day that we know Him simply from being in His presence. We would rather do almost anything else. He would rather we do almost nothing else. … But though He is God, and we cannot grasp all He is, if we ask, and if we listen to His Word, He will find a place near Him. He will place us on “the Rock”, and He will reveal His goodness and His mercy and His grace to the degree He knows we can appropriate it.”

1- Even though God is incomprehensible, what avenue is open to us to begin knowing God?

2- How did Moses become friends with God?

3- What preceded their friendship?

4- What did Moses ask God to teach him?

5- Why did God say to Moses, “I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy?”

6- Explain Exodus 33:11, “The Lord would speak to Moses face to face” and Exodus 33:20, “You cannot see my face.”

“The power of God! The very words ought to drive us to our knees. At the thought of the magnitude of the energy resident in God’s nature, we as believers ought to be so overcome with awe that we bow in meek submission and worship. Every time the wind blows, every time the thunder rolls, every time the lightning puts its electrical light show on display for planet Earth, we who have experienced a touch of God’s power in our lives ought to hear a clarion call to praise Him.”

“Power! What an active word. It means “authority accompanied by the ability to achieve your objective”. It is “the release of energy in such a way that it accomplishes the purpose for which it is intended”. … Before God revealed Himself by any other name to man, He revealed Himself to be… the Almighty One – the One whose power was unlimited. His very name means “All-mighty”. … God is the possessor of infinite power – not because of something He did, but rather because of Who He is. God, by nature of His being, is the Almighty One. As such, infinite power is the essence of Who He is. He cannot be God and not be omnipotent. It is not an addendum to His nature, but a part of His nature.”

“(1) His power does not need to be replenished. God never gets tired. He never gets weary. His energy is self-contained. (2) He does what He does without effort or difficulty. It did not tax God’s being any more to create the world than it did to create a tiny flower. (3) He needs no matter or material to convert to power. Because His power is self-contained, God does not need something to make something or do something. God spoke and it happened. (4) He is not bound by time to release His power. If need be, God will extend the window of opportunity in your life to best conform to His goal of glorifying His Name. But He is not bound by time. Time is His creation. (5) He needs no outside aid to accomplish His purposes. He does not need men nor angels to make it happen. (6) God’s power knows no bounds – not in time, not in space, not in intensity. Whatever He wills is done. And should what needs to be done require ten million times the power of what He’s done before, it matters not. Ten million times ten million times the power of what He’s done before are nothing to Him.”

“Absolute power is that which God could do should He choose to. Ordinate power is that which God is free to do based on His will. His ordinate power is subject to His wisdom. Therefore, while He is able to do certain things, the doing of those things would violate other aspects of His nature, and thus, in His wisdom, He cannot do what He is able to do. Our problem, however, is that we see His inactivity as weakness rather than strength, because we forget that He is omnipotent.”

“The Holy Spirit is the vehicle by which the power of God is released into the life of the Christian. What we so often miss, however, is that the Spirit has a specific conduit through which that power must flow. Anytime we expect power but utilize the wrong source, we ask for warfare and ultimate defeat. It is one thing to have electricity in a house; it is still another to plug into the receptacle and draw on the power you possess. Having it is of no value until you appropriate what you have.”

“So our God, in love, knowing the pressures and the problems we would face on planet Earth on our way to heaven, determined to make that same kind of power available to us on a minute-by-minute, life-changing basis. He took the vehicle of His power, His spoken Word, and made it available to each of us. He gave us His Spirit to interpret it, to apply it, to transmit it, and to internalize it. But the secret to the Spirit’s work in our lives is the freedom He has to take the Word and make the Word come alive. That is up to us. The power we will have … will be proportionate to the degree we have engraved that Word – that essence of God’s power imputed to us – on our hearts.”

1- Do natural disasters, such as tornadoes and hurricanes demonstrate God’s power?

2- What is the proper response to acts of nature?

3- Why does God choose to limit His infinite power?

4- How is God’s power appropriated?

5- What limits our ability to receive God’s power?

“God knows. He knows everything. Everything that ever happened, He knows as though it is happening. Everything that ever will happen, He knows as though it is in the present tense. Everything that is being thought in the secret recesses of the mind is as clear to God as if it is being shouted from the rooftops or broadcast by satellite around the world. Every motive is as clear to God as the deed itself. He is never fooled by hypocrisy.”

“He is omniscient. Therefore, the lives you and I live ought to be lived in that context. Instead of deceiving ourselves into thinking we are who we appear to be, we need to realize that we are who we are in our secret hearts; nothing more. Never at any time does our God see us as anything else. What a relief! We can begin to be honest with ourselves, with God and with others.”

“God knows our rebellion. He knows we are not what we claim to be. He sees that temper tantrum you throw in the car when another car cuts in front of you.  God sees our fits of anger that we think are confined to the private places no one else sees. God knows all about the sins we commit in the darkness of our private lives. Why prolong your agony and His grief by pretending He didn’t see? Why not “confess your sin” so He “that is faithful and just can forgive your sin and cleanse you of all unrighteousness”?”

“God not only knows everything we do, but Scripture is just as clear that He knows everything we think. God’s concept of who you are is nothing like man’s. Man judges you by how you look, how you perform, how you measure up according to the standards of acceptable behavior. God looks beneath the surface to the heart. When our minds are conjuring up thoughts of immorality or revenge or anger, God sees it as though those thoughts were being acted upon at that moment. He is not as interested in your performance as He is with your heart. He judges you not by your religious activities, but by the movies that play on the screen of your mind when you think the theater is closed for repairs.”

“God’s knowledge is eternal. It is not affected by time. He knows the past as clearly as the present; He has no memory loss. He knows the present in relation to the past, not just as information. He knows the future as though it has happened, and yet His knowledge of the future is not a hindrance to His accomplishing His will in the present. It means that what has happened to you, tragic though it may be, did not catch God unawares. He knew about it in eternity past, and He designed in eternity past a way to make it work together for your good and for His Glory.”

“God knows the deepest needs of our hearts long before we even ask. He knows. And, oh, how much He cares. God isn’t sitting in an insulated booth in the heavenlies separated from our grief and our sorrow. God knows our deepest pains and sorrows. He knows them before they happen; He knows how they will affect us; and He knows when we will cry out to Him in anguish for comfort. He knows. He has prepared in eternity past all of the mercy and all of the grace and all of the comfort we will ever need. God knows. Everything. All things. Always. Forever. And because He knows, we can be at rest.”

1- Why is it a comfort to know that God knows our every thought?

2- What makes us hide who we are from others?

3- When we are angry, complaining, dishonest, etc., what are we saying about God?

4- How do you explain that God knows the future but doesn’t make it happen?

5- How does God respond to the deepest needs of our hearts?

“God never changes. He is eternal. He is immutable. He is constant. He is God. Were He to change, He could not be God. Were He to be bound by time, He could not be God. The very essence of His being demands that He be eternal and immutable. Understanding what that means to us can literally transform our lives.”

“God has always been. There never has been a time when there was no God. Before anything was, He is. As the Creator God, nothing could have existed before He existed. He, then, has always existed. But that’s not all. Not only has God always been, He always will be. Time will end when God speaks it so, but God will live forever and ever. God is eternal. He had no beginning. He will have no ending. And while He created time, He is unaffected by time. He sees yesterday as though it were today. He sees tomorrow as though it were happening. He sees the millennium as though it were present tense.”

“God is not changing, and God cannot change. He is both unchanging and unchangeable. Therefore, whatever was true a thousand years ago, is true today. Whatever He promised in eternity past will come to pass. He cannot change His standards, His principles, His character, or His plan. Whatever He promised in eternity past will come to pass. He cannot change His standards, His principles, His character, or His plan. He cannot age or diminish in any aspect of His being. He cannot alter His counsel or vary His absolutes. … Just as the fact that He is eternal gives us a new perspective of time and priorities, so His immutability gives us a totally different perspective of the constancy of our hope and the resting place of our faith.”

“We live in a world that is trying to redefine the basic truths of Scripture to accommodate a declining society. By twisting and ignoring Scripture, there is a new theology” sweeping the world that is nothing more than an affront to the immutability of God. God hasn’t “slightly altered” His concepts of marriage or holiness or morality or honesty to accommodate the shadows of this world. He is the LORD. He changes not. In Him is no variableness. What He said four thousand years ago, He means today.”

“God cannot change His mind and cannot change His nature; therefore, He cannot change His Word. As He is immutable, so is His Word. Our salvation and our assurance of God’s deliverance and His protection and His fulfillment of all He has promised rests totally on whether or not His Word is true. If it can change, it cannot be true to His nature and thus cannot be true. … His Word will never diminish in power or in truth or in holiness. It will not become weak with age or one iota less effective with the changing of times or the declining of moral values on planet Earth.”

“We have an unchanging, unchangeable Word in a changeable world. Therefore, we must never forget that our testimony to the world is not how quickly we can change to conform to its standards, but rather how faithfully we can demonstrate the unchanging absolutes of an unchanging God.”

“If the church is going to impact our world permanently in these last days, then thousands of churches are going to have to rethink their philosophy of reaching a lost world. It will not come from a lukewarm message that gives no real distinction between the saved and the lost and imagines everyone a child of God who remotely acts religious. It will not come from a pulpit that minimizes the cost of commitment and overlooks the absolutes in order to be heard. If you must eliminate truth to be heard, what has man heard? The power of the gospel came not in its likeness to the words of the world, but in the fact that there were no similarities to the world.”

1- Why does God see pain as an ally, not an enemy (p.5)?

2- If God is not impressed with buildings, plans, performances, messages, where do these things fit in? What does impress God?

3- What does “with God there is no variableness” mean? Does God respond to everyone the same way? Is that fair?

4- What are some things we accept now that were not acceptable in the past? Which are good? Which violate God’s absolutes?

5- God is dependable, trustworthy, unchangeable. Should we be, as well? What hinders us?

“We live in a world where the very term “holiness” is a laughing matter. The intensity of God’s purity and His design for the Christian are masked behind a horrible commodity called conformity. The world is laughing and deriding the church – not for its holiness, but rather for its hypocrisy. Ours is a Holy God. He hates sin, and He hates it no less today than He did that fateful day in the garden when man first tasted of its vial of death. If we are to recapture the awesome “fear of God” we were meant to have, we must recapture the concept of God’s Holiness.”

“The name of God which denotes the character of God is “holy”. He is referred to as “The Holy One”, “The Holy One of Jacob”, “The Holy One of Israel”. In fact, He is called “holy” more often even than “almighty”. The holiness of God actually means is that He, and He alone, lives completely above and apart from sin. So totally set apart is He that He cannot look upon sin without deep grief and a broken heart. So pure is the heart of God that it is referred to as “His beauty”.”

“(1) Only God is independently holy. It is part of His divine nature. While we, in the flesh, naturally sin, God naturally is pure. (2) God has never sinned, can never sin, will never sin, and cannot so much as think a sinful thought. All that He is, is holy and pure. (3) God’s holiness is immutable. It cannot and could not from the foundation of the world change in context or degree or perfection. What He is, He will always be, and each of His attributes are immutable. His standards of holiness, therefore, are eternal, as is His nature. (4) Every attribute of God is holy. His holiness is not a separate part of His being. All that He is, is holy. All that He does is holy. All of His decrees are holy. (5) Nowhere is the holiness of God more evident than at the Cross [where] at the moment of His separation from the Father, the Master instinctively cried out in anguish. God separated from His own Son by our sins – what grief! The holiness of God came to all of its fullness at Calvary. That is why, when we are tempted to take His holiness lightly, we ought to fall before that Cross and worship and repent.”

“Since God is holy, and we were created to reflect His likeness, then His children must be holy. No, we cannot become as holy as He is while living in this body of sin, but we can become progressively more like Him, thus we must be becoming increasingly holy in all our behavior. … The depth of the magnitude of how sin affects God is no longer clear in the average church. Thus, without an emphasis on holiness, the world cannot see the difference between the behavior of the believer and the lifestyles of its own.”

“There is no longer awe in the presence of God. We stroll into His chambers with the same kind of attitude we show as we walk into a movie theatre. We do not grasp that the perfect, sinless, Creator God, Maker of heaven and earth, the One who cannot look upon sin, has agreed by divine decree to accept the death of His Son as propitiation for our sins, and allowed us the awesome right to come boldly into His presence and find grace to help in time of need. Yes, He is our best friend. But, Beloved, He is God! … We confuse the freedom to be casual with the responsibility to be awe-struck in the presence of our God.”

“When we recover the awe at the presence of God and His response to our sins, then we will have at last begun to return to the sanctuary of holiness wherein we see our God as He is, our sins as they are, and our hearts as broken in the process. He Who has called us is holy. By His grace, may His holiness become ours.”

1- Why was Paul able to understand grace so well?

2- Why might it be hard for a “good” person to appreciate grace?

3- What is the difference in the grace offered to unbelievers and that offered to believers?

4- What does it mean to be “made alive”?

5- As long as you think you can do something for God, can you receive grace?

“Mercy. It defies every basic characteristic of the natural man. It takes the lightning of God’s wrath and wraps it in a blanket of love. It takes the laws of sowing and reaping and, without repealing them, cloaks them in an umbrella of unwarranted, undeserved relief. It is the other side of the holiness of God. It allows Him to exercise His love without compromising His righteousness. It makes allowances for the frailty of man without making a shambles of the grandeur of God. No other attribute of His Being more greatly benefits sinful man than this one.”

“The mercy of God is that aspect of God’s nature that allows Him to temper His wrath without compromising His holiness. His mercy is that attribute of His being that chooses not to give us what we deserve. It is the opposite of God’s grace. His grace gives us the good we do not deserve; His mercy refrains from giving us the evil we do deserve. Packaged together in Christ, the grace and the mercy of God form an anthem of love that fills the courts of Heaven with joy at what God gives His rebellious creation just for letting Him save them.”

“(1) God’s mercy forgives: By forgive, He means He will give-for. He will give His righteousness for you to satisfy His holiness, thus giving His wrath its rightful expression, but not at your expense. (2) God’s mercy redeems: Mercy allowed Him to transfer your sins to His own Son, and let His death be the propitiation for your transgressions. His wrath was satisfied, your sins were pardoned, and you were “saved”. (3) God’s mercy shortens His wrath: Not only does He withhold His anger for a season, He shortens His anger, lest He destroy us. That aspect of His being that allows Him to do that, yea that draws Him to do that, is His mercy. (4) God’s mercy overlooks the past: Were it not for His mercy, the account of our past infractions would form such a wall of evidence against us that any one tiny act of disobedience would be the end. Every time we confess our sins, He is not only “faithful and just to forgive us our sins”, but to “cleanse us of all unrighteousness.” (5) God’s mercy comforts in adversity: The mercy of God causes the heart of God to reach out to the children of God in their hour of need, not because we deserve it, or even because we appreciate it, but rather because His nature requires it. Picture Jesus weeping over Jerusalem.”

“Why does He have mercy? (1) He understands our weakness: God does not deal with us as though we were gods. He deals with us as sinful, frail, unfaithful flesh. (2) He has a plan for us: He has a plan for our lives, and the fulfillment of that plan is often contingent on His overlooking our faults and using our mistakes to further glorify Himself. (3) He loves it when we repent and return: He longs for us to enjoy His fellowship. And when He shows mercy upon us because we repent, He is encouraging that fellowship.”

“That we would be given by a loving God the priceless gift of His sovereign mercy is, of itself, more than the mind can grasp; but, in addition to that, we would be given the right to boldly approach Him and actually ask that His mercy be further extended, is totally beyond comprehension. The very act of asking presumes that: (a) We do not deserve it. (b) We are asking only because He gave us the right. (c) We understand that His sovereign knowledge alone knows what we need and when we need it.”

1- We often hear and say, Almighty God, but rarely use the name, Holy God. Why?

2- On what basis are Christians called saints? Why is that term rarely used?

3- Why would an unbeliever never be called holy?

4- We are commanded in Scripture to “be holy for God is holy”. How is holiness achieved?

5- Have you ever praised God for His wrath? Why would you?

“God is perfect love. But that love takes two forms: a negative form, His mercy, and a positive form, His grace. His mercy is that aspect of His love that withholds from us the judgment we deserve. His grace grants to us enablement we do not deserve. His grace literally allows us to experience the life of God in our sinful bodies. Mercy is His love revealed. Grace is His love bestowed. Mercy is “deliverance from”. Grace is “freedom in”. … Every time you presume upon grace, you lose it. Because the moment grace appears deserved, it disappears. The moment grace is co-sponsored, it dies. It is more than unmerited favor. It is unmerited power! It is the energy of God enabling man by doing for man what man cannot do.”

“(1) Grace is undeserved. If you deserve it, it’s not grace. To the degree that you think you deserve it even a little, you lose it. You steal God’s glory when you claim God’s grace by merit. (2) Grace is free. If you try to earn it or pay God back for it, you defile His Holiness. You cannot earn a gift; once you do, it becomes wages, not a gift. Grace is free. Always free. (3) Grace is eternal and supernatural. It always works in the spirit realm for spiritual purposes with eternal consequences. Even when God provides grace in the physical realm, it is always for God’s glory and the kingdom’s good. (4) Grace is sovereign. That is, God gives it to whomsoever He wills, whenever He wills, regardless of whether or not we feel they are deserving. If they were deserving, it wouldn’t be grace.”

“First, there is the Calvary side of grace. That is the grace that God offers to unbelievers allowing them to come to Him. It is free, eternal, supernatural, undeserved, and sovereign. But it is offered to men and women as a means to enter into the grace life that will forever thereafter be theirs for the taking. The grace that follows salvation is available only to believers. It is offered to lead us into God’s Kingdom, and it is offered thereafter as a seal of God’s presence in our lives which will never depart. The non-Christian has no grace, except the grace that is available for him to receive Christ. So when you pray for grace for your unbelieving friends, you are asking God to save them.”

“The grace of God was given to us at Calvary. If we are not brought to our knees in utter awe that God would save the likes of us, we have not come to understand grace. If we feel in any way that God saved us because He needed us, or because we, by our works, could add anything to what He has done, we are so far removed from grace that we do not have the right even to use the word. He unfolded the two-edged sword of His love and with it slew the enemy of death. In mercy, He forgave your sins, satisfying His holiness by the death of His Son, and then He imparted to you divine grace, enabling you to be saved. It was not by works of righteousness which you had done. It was free. It was not because of your worthiness; it was unmerited. It was not because you did something; it was eternal and supernatural. All you did was let Him.”

“There are four enemies of grace: (1) Pride: To the degree that you feel that anything you receive from God is deserved, it is not of grace. Your only value is found in Christ. Whatever you have, He gave you. (2) Works: Works are things the world considers “good” done apart from God. They inflate the ego, draw attention to self, and imply that God is impressed because man is. But grace is free. You can’t work for it. Not Calvary grace. Not living grace. And the more you think you can, the less you receive. (3) Religion: Religion teaches that man can do in the natural realm, things that please God. Religion is man’s way of reaching God. Grace is God’s way of reaching man. Religion is the world’s way of performing for God. Grace is God’s way of performing in man. (4) Presumption: It says to God, “You did this the last time; now You’re obligated.” Or it says “God, You perform based on my faith.” God says, “No, I’ll perform based on My sovereignty; and I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy; and I will have compassion on whom I will.” Presumption demands grace. Grace is sovereign and cannot be either presumed upon or demanded.”

1- Why do the consequences of sin continue after God forgives us?

2- If we continue to bear the guilt of sin after seeking forgiveness, what are we saying to God?

3- Why does God choose to extend some mercy to some and more mercy to others?

4- Since God “forgets” our past sins, why do we often remember them?

5- Why does God encourage us to ask for mercy? What is the proper response when we receive it?

“[Spiritual] growth is of grace. It is never deserved, never repayable, never temporal, never of man’s doing. By grace you grow; even from grace to grace; even from one degree of glory to another. Grace is the energy of the Creator poured through the vessel He created in order to return to the Creator glory that is rightfully His. It is the life of God giving life to man, so man’s life can give honor to God. It is the transparent power of the Father poured through the Spirit to those who belong to the Son.”

“We can, by doing certain things, enhance or allow [spiritual] growth to take place. However, even when we do our part, we are not responsible for the growth; God is. Never forget that. Growth will always be supernatural, eternal, undeserved and free. To sit and struggle and worry over whether or not we are growing, provided we are doing the things God called us to do, is sin. The Christian process of spiritual growth is a parallel to the physical illustration of growth from childhood to adulthood. Physical growth was given to us to teach us how the spirit grows in Christ.”

“Christians have for years developed formulas for growth, measuring sticks for growth, and finally categories for those who meet their man-made criteria. What they fail to count on is the sovereignty of God, and thus the grace of God. If you have an abnormal hunger for spiritual things, thank God; don’t glory in it. He placed it there. If you are being mightily used as a young Christian, don’t compare yourself with others and exalt yourself as though God has chosen you because you are so special. Oh, you are accountable to do what the Scripture commands. But God is accountable for the results – and you cannot always see growth.”

“God decided to place in each of us, at birth, a unique measure of grace, peculiar to us. Through it we would grow, and through it we would minister. He called it our “spiritual gift”. God gives them as He pleases to whom He pleases for the purposes that please His heart. Each has a supernatural result: Prophecy: Supernatural discernment; Service: Supernatural availability to meet needs; Exhortation: Supernatural encouragement of believers; Teaching: Supernatural insight into Scripture; Giving: Supernatural generosity and stewardship; Administration: Supernatural oversight of details; Mercy: Supernatural compassion and love. These are seven channels through which His grace flows into the church, but they are all of grace.”

“Grace is a gift from God that takes knowledge (an understanding of the Word) and enriches you by it. To the degree you revel in the knowledge, or to the degree that you believe the knowledge itself enriches you, you frustrate the grace of God. Beloved, knowledge is a tool which a sovereign God uses to enrich your soul. By the sovereign grace of God, it works its way into your experience and changes you. Grace without knowledge has little to work with. Knowledge without grace destroys it and you.”

“By His grace alone, we begin to grow. And suddenly, we begin to think we deserve His grace. Having begun in grace, we come back under the law and assume that God’s favor is relative to what we do, rather than Who He is. The very moment we do, Paul says, we “fall from practicing grace”. We don’t fall from God’s favor. We can’t. It’s all of grace; we will fall from the joy of living the grace life. … All you can do is practice the process of humbling yourself and casting all your cares upon Him, letting Him take your knowledge of God’s Word, and by His grace alone, turn it into spiritual maturity.”

“God will not share His glory with another. That is why you see church after church, denomination after denomination, leader after leader, Christian after Christian begin in grace, humbled by the very fact that God could use the likes of them, and end up on the scrap heap of religious uselessness because as they experienced His grace, they began to take it for granted or assumed they deserved it. The moment they did – the moment we do – the glory departs, and the grace diminishes; and we are left to live in our own energy to try to accomplish the things we have claimed credit for.”

1- What is our part in growing to maturity?

2- What is God’s part in our growth?

3- Spiritual growth is compared to growth from childhood to adulthood. How long would we expect it to take for spiritual growth to take place?

4- How do spiritual, i.e., grace, gifts show the sovereignty of God?

5- How does submission to authority reveal humility in the believer?

“On occasion, the grace of God means the power to remain in place when there is no earthly reason to do so. At still other times, it is the quiet courage to take a stand when no one else is willing. Sometimes it is the ability to endure that which is crippling, debilitating, or humiliating without giving in to the defeats of self-pity or bitterness or addiction. Sometimes God’s grace steals ever so silently into our souls and takes us out of the storm. More often, God’s grace allows the storm to rage, even intensify, while giving us a kind of quiet calm in the midst of the storm that no one can explain.”

“Man, in his natural state, looks for supernatural acts of God in the natural realm, the results of which will alter his circumstances or ease his burdens. And so he begins to see God as a kind of genie that pops out of His eternal bottle on call, in order to serve us by doing our will. And so we see people looking not for internal strength, but external deliverance; not for internal comfort, but for external authority. And God does, on occasion, provide that deliverance and authority. But unless that deliverance brings God ultimate glory, it does not come from Him at all.”

“The problem is that we need to be dependent to receive grace, and often God’s solution is to take away what we think we have to have in order to give us what we need. But once He has done that, He reminds us that He has enough grace to be sufficient for everything that might ever come our way. [We] must come progressively to see life’s circumstances simply as vehicles to release the grace of God, and must also gradually come to the inescapable conclusion that the tougher the circumstance, the greater the grace.”

“In addition to what God wants to do in you, His grace through you is like a projector displaying His nature to those who are lost and to those who are believers seeking to grow. So He puts men and women in tough places in order for their testimony through the storms to radiate the nature of God. … That is His divine purpose for filling you with His grace and for allowing the situations in the first place that require that grace to flow.”

“Some illustrations: (1) You are trying to obey God when what He is asking you to do is contrary to human reasoning (e.g. Abraham’s sacrificing Isaac). (2) There seems to be no answer to what lies before you (e.g. Moses before the Red Sea was parted). (3) You’ve failed and you cannot see how God could ever use you again (e.g. Peter denying Jesus). (4) You are facing undeserved humiliation and persecution for having done the will of God (e.g. the stoning of Stephen). (5) You are grieving over the loss of a loved one, and are not sure you can go on. (6) You are lonely and weary, and wonder if God has forsaken you (e.g. Elijah fed by ravens). (7) The enemy is attacking from every direction. There appears to be no way to withstand his onslaught (e.g. Jehoshaphat facing a vast army.)”

“[When God] is about to come on stage and do something special, we have two choices: We can drown in the circumstances and complain because we have no answers, or we can rejoice in the circumstances, knowing that the fact that we have no answers leaves Jesus room to demonstrate His mighty grace on our behalf.”

1- What does it mean to “wait on the Lord”? (Isaiah 40:31)

2- Why could having an extraordinary spiritual experience lead to pride? What was God’s solution in Paul’s case?

3- What often has to happen before we understand we are not sufficient of ourselves? Why is it difficult to admit we can’t do an anything on our own?

4- How is it possible to rejoice, like Paul, in tribulation?

5- In a crisis do you pray for deliverance or extra grace?

“We believe that once and for all at Calvary, His mercy forgave us, and His grace enabled us to be born again. But somehow, once we have been born into the Kingdom by His blood, we often fail to believe that the same quality of grace that saved us is able to deliver us from bondage to the same enemy who once held us captive. So we walk this Earth in constant defeat, all the while proclaiming a God of constant victory. … What seems to be difficult is for us to rightfully lay hold of God’s indwelling grace, that supernatural, free, undeserved, sovereign expression of His power that sustains us when we are tempted, convicts us when we are sinning, and delivers us when we choose to be delivered from the clutches of the evil one.”

“At the moment of conversion, God looks down and sees us as though we had not sinned. If, however, the believer cannot accept the forgiveness of God internally because he feels unworthy, or unable to repay God for His mercy, or unable to understand how a Holy God could instantly forgive such grievous offenses, he is, in that moment, sinning against the grace of God. It is true that he is unworthy. It is true that he cannot pay God back. It is true that it is beyond comprehension that a holy God could look with favor upon sinful men who have wallowed in the very depths of degradation. But grace is supernatural, so it must be beyond our comprehension or it is not of grace. … Some of the most spiritually impotent saints are those who cannot or will not accept the grace God has given them to experience His mercy [although] they have been forgiven. When you know you have sinned, but you are unwilling to confess that sin, you frustrate the grace of God by not receiving God’s free gift.”

“If you are trying to see strongholds broken down that have held you captive for a long time, it is especially important that as you yield to the Word, you surrender to God’s marvelous grace and quietly say to God, “I choose to obey, but I can’t – I hereby come boldly to the throne of grace and ask for the enabling power to overcome the devil.” You don’t need to rebuke the devil. That’s not your job. Ask God to. Otherwise, after a few times, you’ll forget that the power comes from God alone.”

“The grace of God cannot be presumed upon – not ever. And if you even subconsciously assume that because God’s grace has enabled you in the past to overcome or gain victory that He is obligated to do so again, you trample underfoot the awesome grace of God. You are taking sin lightly because of grace, and to take sin lightly implies that God owes you forgiveness and mercy and grace – and God will have none of it. If you’re dead and Christ is alive in you and Christ cannot tolerate sin, then how can you take His body which He now inhabits and pretend that sin does not alienate Him? If God chooses to empower you, it is because you have humbled yourself, and knowing you do not deserve God’s grace, you have meekly asked God to do in you what you cannot.”

“The enemy will try to tell you that you cannot be forgiven. He’s a liar. God’s grace is greater than all our sin. He will tell us we cannot help but yield to temptation. That’s a lie. God’s grace is greater than all our sin. He will whisper that it is simply “the way we are” or “the way we were raised”, but that’s a lie. There is no temptation taken us but such as is common to man, but God is faithful; He will never let us be tempted beyond our ability to bear it, because our ability to bear it is limited only to what Christ in us can handle. So always there is a way of escape. Always. Through His amazing grace.”

1- How is it that after God has forgiven a sin, a believer could still be in bondage?

2- What is the value of a “quiet time”?

3- How soon should one confess a sin?

4- When we are tempted, how easy is it to find the way out promised by God?

5- What is the logic behind “keep on sinning that grace may abound”? What is the response to that argument?

“Having, to a large degree, adapted the world’s concepts of success, churches now gauge their progress not by transformed lives, but by dollars spent, buildings built, and numbers enrolled. Catchy slogans form the basis for facility campaigns and enlistment drives that say, in essence, “we can do it.” The whole mentality of the body of Christ has shifted from one of humility and dependence to one of promotion and self-motivation. We talk as if our job were to build the church and to serve God by “doing things for Him”. The problem is, it’s not our job to build the church. Unless this “can do” generation of evangelicals returns to its knees in humility and abandonment before an omnipotent God, we are heaping on ourselves the fires of judgment.”

“The secret to a successful ministry is not organization, talent, advertising, or funding. The secret is the supernatural, undeserved, free, sovereign grace of God. It is His grace that prepares the hearts of those to whom you will minister. It is His grace that removes the obstacles that Satan has thrown in your path to prevent you from ministering. It is His grace that gives you the words to speak, places you where you need to be, and makes a person’s heart receptive to the gospel. It is grace that allows the seed of the Word to take root in the soil of a soul and bring forth fruit to everlasting life. It is His grace alone.”

“The degree to which we set up our church, our group, our system, or our plan to receive glory for winning souls, or growing saints, or doing anything else eternal, to that degree we frustrate the grace of God. We train, we study, we plan, but to the end that we bring tools to lay at the feet of our God and ask Him to use them as He sees fit, and to remove them if they get in His way. One way God gets glorified; the other way He doesn’t. One way you lay up treasures in heaven; the other way you don’t. The difference is between operating in the realm of the Spirit or in the realm of the flesh. The end result of man trying to do what only God can do is that men give glory to anything else but God.”

“The greatest single issue in the Christian ministry is whether or not the one doing the ministering understands that it is “God Who works in us”, not we who work for Him. Until we realize that we can’t, we cannot fully grasp that only He can. …  If God is using us, it is because we are the least likely candidates He has to succeed on our own. And if He blesses what He does in spite of us, what right have we to claim title to His victories? … No man and no woman is fit to be in the ministry – except for God’s amazing grace.”

“(1) God does not need us to win the world. (2) We are not qualified even to be used. (3) Nevertheless, that His strength might be made perfect in weakness, He has called us to do what only His amazing grace can do. (4) Seeing the miracle of His grace each time He uses us, we ought to fall on our faces before Him in utter awe. (5) And seeing that He can use even us, we ought to be so thrilled at the miracle that we labor even more, that His grace be not extended in vain. (6) Realizing even as we do, that it is not us – it is His grace working through us that even motivates us to labor so diligently.”

“So go about your ministering filled with utter awe that God would so much as let you be a part of something so grand as the church of Jesus Christ. Humbly bow your head before God and whisper, “Yet not I, Lord, yet not I”. As you do, the pride will vanish and the applause of men will cease ringing in your ears; the titles you have heaped upon yourself or that others have heaped upon you will dissolve in an ocean of humility. You will once again be amazed that the God of Glory who framed the worlds would even inhabit your sinful life, let alone use it for His glory.”

1- Are campaigns for church buildings dishonoring to God? a) Are church buildings sinful? b) Why did the early church not have this problem? c) What would honor God in this area?

2- Is it possible to have a “mega-church” and understand it is God who builds the church? Do we mistake the church (believers) for the church building?

3- What prompted early Christians to sell things and give the money to the apostles? What is the application for us today?

4- If doing things man’s way or God’s way both are successful, why does it matter?

5- Why was Paul so overwhelmed by receiving God’s grace? How do we get to that point?