history of grace

At ANC Ottawa, we have been talking a lot about grace. I am still asking God to really get this into me. We have also had a number of evangelists around, who are doing their thing, stirring up and equipping the body to evangelize.

These two things combined for me last week, when Orlando was teaching our life group, in detail, about how to plant a house church (Cuban style). The question came up about those who are gifted as evangelists (and those who are not!) This is how he responded:

Every one of us has a responsibility to share our history of grace in a really natural way with the people we interact with everyday. Some people also have a gift of evangelism, or a ministry of evangelism...

It could be how it came across in translation, but I like the way he phrased it. Each of us has a responsibility to share our "history of grace". That is, our story about the grace of God in our lives.

Trent Anderson preached yesterday about the implications of a grace-based Kingdom (as opposed to the kingdom of the world which is performance-based). One of the implications is that the grace we find in Jesus Christ is our power and our strength (2 Tim 2:1). Trent pointed out that our power, as Christians, is not based on our gifts. It is not based on what we have done. It is based only on His grace. This is what will change situations and lives - when we rely on the power of grace in our lives.