Grace is a hot topic. Several years ago, I started hearing many preachers speak about grace. The interesting thing is that most of them disagreed with one another. Some preached on “radical grace” and others accused the “radical grace” preachers of allowing people to sin. Both sets of preachers pretended to be nice to each other, but I could tell there was a lot of underlying animosity between the two groups.
What really caught my attention was how the message of radical grace was transforming people’s lives. People who discovered a revelation of grace had a fresh enthusiasm for Jesus. They were excited to talk about the Scriptures. Many of them were reading the epistles of Paul for the first time and were eager to share how their lives were being changed.
I was curious, so I decided to investigate. I started reading books about grace. The more I read, the more enthusiastic I got. I have always preached about grace, but I never really understood it. The more I looked at it, the more I realized that grace is the most important topic in the entire Bible.
When I started studying grace, my motivation was simply to understand the issue. But to my surprise, the message changed my life. It changed my preaching. It changed my relationship with God.
Without meaning to, I had become legalistic in some of my preaching and my thought patterns. I was raised in a Christian home and had attended church services my whole life—over time I had picked up a lot of religious baggage. Legalism was a great weight pressing down on my shoulders, and I did not even know the burden was there until the revelation of grace began to lift it off. The message of grace made me fall in love with Jesus all over again.
As you read my new book, my hope and prayer is that you will have a revelation of how great God’s grace is for you—a grace that saves, that sanctifies, that sustains; a grace that is available to all and denied to none. This Grace: the prophets of the Old Testament dreamed of it; Jesus revealed it; Paul preached it; Martin Luther rediscovered it; and our generation is called to manifest this grace.
