The Grace of God -- By: Richard C. Lucas

Journal: Reformation and Revival
Volume: RAR 03:1 (Winter 1994)
Article: The Grace of God
Author: Richard C. Lucas


The Grace of God

Richard C. Lucas

My theme is “The Grace of God,” and to deal with it I am going to focus on a very short story. It is a moving one, but I do not intend to leave you on an emotional high. That would be bad for you and for me too. To avoid that I want to finish with some applications that will bring us back down to earth.

The text is Mark 2:13–14: “Once again Jesus went out beside the lake. A large crowd came to Him, and He began to teach them. As He walked along, he saw Levi son of Alphaeus sitting at the tax collector’s booth. ‘Follow Me,’ Jesus told him, and Levi got up and followed Him.” That may seem a very small text to study, but I assure you that in those few words there is tremendous spiritual treasure. I passed a shop in Philadelphia which said it had the best counterfeit diamonds in town. I had never seen a shop like that before. But I got to thinking about it, and I want to assure you that our text is not counterfeit treasure. It focuses on the grace of God in the forgiveness of sinners, which is the great theme of the Bible.

So I pray that God will speak through this passage and enable us thus to understand the grace of God more fully.

The Authority of Jesus Christ

First, let me put this in context. In Mark 1, Jesus is presented as One having authority. That is, He has power over all the enemies of mankind.

We have a course at our church in London called “Read Mark, Learn.” We find that most of the young people coming up to London for their studies—largely nurses and young medical students—are totally ignorant of the Gospel record. Sunday schools seemed to have disappeared. Bible classes are not what they were. So we started this course in which we study Mark’s Gospel together. There are sixteen weeks in the first two terms, and since there are sixteen chapters in Mark’s Gospel, we aim to cover this one Gospel in that

time.

November is the most horrible month of the year in London, climate-wise, but I love it, because during November I sometimes slip over to see these young people at the end of their evening study, and I know by the time they have gotten to November they will have gone through chapters 1–3 and will have discovered, to their amazement, a picture of Jesus that they never knew before. No longer is He the gentle Jesus, meek and mild, though that is true in its way. He is now, rather, a figure who has all authority in heaven and on earth. This is because, in these early chapters, Mark puts before us a Jesus who is more powerful than all the...

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