Devoted to Fellowship

 Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.   Picking up where we left off...  Have you ever noticed how we, as Christians, will take one solitary verse in Scripture and believe it so deeply that we build entire denominations around it, name our churches after it and teach it a dozen times a year to anyone who will listen?  Have you also ever wondered why there are verses that repeat the same theme, almost word for word, literally dozens of times in our Scriptures and we never use them?  Never teach them?  Never see them on bumper stickers or use them to name our programs or have them at the heads of our websites?  Such is the dilemma of this phrase that was once used every time one believer in Jesus' ability to save met another, and now is rarely used at all. In all my study of the New Testament, I’ve never seen a phrase used more frequently than “Grace and peace to you.”  What is this strange greeting that our apostles and early believers used so often?

Grace and peace to you in the name of God our Father and our Lord Jesus Christ.   If you are a truster of the finished work of our Christ Jesus:  GRACE to you from God the Father and His Son Jesus Christ.  Grace!  Relax and trust Jesus today!  GRACE!  It’s not up to you to earn your own righteousness!  GRACE!  Your life is hidden with Jesus and one day, because of His grace, you and He will be revealed i n perfect glory.  GRACE.  You desperately needed a Savior because you were never going to be good enough and Jesus was everything you needed!  GRACE.   Ever wonder why we struggle so much to wrap our minds and hearts around the gospel of perfect grace?  Perhaps because we are so busy teaching each other everything else while the example set before us was to share the simple gospel with every believer every single day.  We've reserved the gospel for the "lost" and we're losing our faith because of it.  GRACE.   Have you ever noticed how we, as Christians, will take on