I know that I lead everyone to believe that my next post was going to be Mighty Men’s Conference – Part 2; that is still on its way and should be appearing here within this week, hopefully by tomorrow. But this post actually comes out of my Diary, I wrote this down while I was waiting for my washing to finish Monday afternoon, and this is actually something that came about on the way to MMC, so in a sense it is a result of the Conference. On the way to MMC we spoke in the car about being a Christian and our understanding of certain concepts.

Disclaimer

These past couple of weeks I watched various sermons from Mars Hill Church and listened to various messages from Bill Johnson, now just to say that this doesn’t mean that the home brew ULC sermons is unimportant, it’s just that I work for an I.T. company, and hence most of my interaction is with a computer and not with telephones and people, hence I have a lot of opportunity to listen to various sermons and audio-books that covers a wider spectrum of topics that I do by only going to iKaya once a week.

I’m only going to broadly speak about two kinds of grace which I believe is closely intertwined, this is Saving and Sanctifying grace. This is because Sanctifying grace is something that I only started to understand after watching a sermon by Marc Driscoll last week on Grace and henceforth saw it at work in my life, and Saving grace because from my limited understanding of Grace I can’t yet fully see the difference or the borderline between these two kinds…

Some of the things I started experiencing since January last year only started to make sense recently, and what is quite amazing is this whole concept of grace. I posted on Facebook right after I watched the sermon on grace that grace is no excuse for a Christian to be lazy; I still get convicted from this, but Jesus is slowly but surely working in my heart and dealing with it… what do I mean by this?

Saving grace

Many times we sin because we know there is grace to “counter” the sin or even the effects thereof, but even Paul warned us that because we are not under the law that we can’t use this excuse to continue sinning. In fact we should view grace as follow: When we are first saved God starts to change our hearts and He replaces our FLESH nature with a SPIRIT nature. Before we are saved we sin because we want to sin, in fact it is our very nature that drives our need to sin, but after salvation our very nature doesn’t want to sin, there is no drive to sin, it has no hold over us, in fact sin becomes detestable and nasty and we don’t want to commit it.

Temptation will come over our path, and because we still live in a body of flesh this will cause us to sin unless we remember that Jesus is the victor over sin, and that we are strong in Him. This is where God’s grace intervenes and gives us the ability to either run to Jesus before we commit the sin, or to go to Him in repentance when we did it.

Sanctification

So from my understanding of Saving grace is that God chose to free us, and in so doing he gave us a new nature and heart, but this ties in closely to sanctifying grace which is how we deal with sin daily and how God changes our hearts daily to become more like Jesus. I think this is why people say that Salvation is not a once-off event, but a lifestyle…

I will give an example out of my life: It was actually happening throughout the whole of 2009, but I only started noticing it about 4 or 5 weeks ago and only now am I starting to understand it. I have told some people this story already, but many don’t know…

In school, and even after I finished school, I used to spend hours in front of the PC. I would sometimes play games in the morning before I left for school, and then again in the afternoons when I get home I would switch the computer on and play games until (at times) 1 o’clock in the morning. Then I got the Xbox, and the amount of time got divided squarely between the Xbox and the PC.

But what started to happen since little over a year ago is that I would start playing a game, and then after about an hour, or sometimes even less, I would become utterly and completely bored with the game. I wouldn’t completely lose interest because usually the games I play has a quite Epic storyline… but that will be a blog for another day, on where creativity and stories comes from.

So I would switch off the game and just sit there in the living room, and recently I even started reading some books, journal/blog on my experiences or even just listen to some worship music. And even here I can see that the worldly stuff becomes more and more of a bore, and the Kingdom and the Gospel becomes more and more exciting, and what I think is that Holy Spirit will start revealing the Gospel in everything so as to create in us a hunger for a relationship with Him and a hunger for His Word.

Keep an eye on this space, I will be posting Mighty Men’s Conference – Part 2 soon!

I hope you enjoyed this and have a blessed day,

This is Christiaan signing off…

(if you have any queries or requests, please e-mail me at christiaan.nel@bcx.co.za)