Video coming soon. The video teaching for Day 5 is still in production. Read the full lesson below, it will be added here as soon as it is ready.
Over the last couple of days, we've been circling around one word: grace. Today let's actually unpack it, because most of us carry a smaller idea of grace than what the Bible actually teaches. And when your idea of grace is too small, you'll either take it for granted or stop believing it applies to you.
Grace is two things
Most people only know half of it. They know grace means God is kind to you even when you don't deserve it. And that's true. But grace is also enabling power. Grace isn't just God looking at you with compassion. Grace is God actually coming in and doing something in you and through you.
Here's what's remarkable about it: grace starts before you even turn to God, and it doesn't stop until eternity. Paul says in Ephesians that in heaven, God is going to spend ages showing us the riches of His grace. Even there (where there's no more sin, no more struggle, no more failure) you will never start deserving His kindness. You'll never outgrow grace. It will still be overflowing. Still unearned.
Three kinds of grace (and where you fit in each)
Common grace
This is the kindness God shows to every human being, believer or not. The sun rises on the wicked and the righteous. The rain falls on both. God gives all of us life, beauty, some measure of joy, and a restraint on how wicked we could actually be. Left completely to ourselves, without His hand holding things back, we'd go further and darker than we can imagine. Common grace is what keeps that from happening.
Preventing (prevenient) grace
This is the grace that goes before you, before you ever believe. It's the undeserved kindness that shows you your sin, makes you uneasy in it, plants a longing in you for something better. It's what Paul is describing in Romans 7: "I want to do what is right, but I cannot."
Here's the thing to notice: the very fact that Paul knew what was right, that he wanted what was right: that itself is grace. He didn't generate that longing himself. God was already at work in him.
"For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation for all people, training us to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions."
Grace is your teacher. Grace is the thing that made you uncomfortable enough to be here right now, reading this.
Grace isn't a side note. It's the foundation of every level.
The full six-level program is built on exactly this kind of grace, not performance.
Saving grace
This is the grace to actually believe. The ability to put your faith in Jesus Christ isn't something you manufactured on your own: the Bible says even faith is a gift. Nobody saves themselves. Nobody pulls themselves up by their own spiritual bootstraps into the Kingdom of God.
"For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast."
Not one person who has ever come to God in repentance and faith did it entirely on their own steam. God made a way. And then God gave you the ability to walk through it.
Why this matters for the fight you're in
If you get grace right (if you truly understand that God's acceptance of you isn't based on your performance), two enemies get defeated at once:
- When you're winning, you don't get proud, because you know it was never about you.
- When you're losing, you don't despair, because you know it was never all on you either.
The gospel of grace through faith removes both pride and despair at the same time. That's not an accident. That's the design.
Tomorrow, we go one level higher, because the grace of God doesn't stop at saving you. It keeps going. And that's where things start to get really good.
This is Day 5 of Victory Over Pornography. Continue to Day 6 →