GRACE TO YOU AND WITH YOU

“Grace to you…from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ”. (Philippians 1:2 ESV)

When we look at Paul’s greetings at the beginning of his epistles, we are tempted to read right past it and miss the significance of what he is saying. One of the reasons we ignore certain statements in Scripture is our misguided belief that they simply don't apply to us. But what he says here is significant. If you examine this opening phrases you will find that it is not a meaningless pleasantries. Instead, even here Paul is teaching the one’s he is writing to.

Someone has said, rightly so, that whatever Paul touches it turns into the Gospel. Paul profoundly touches this normal greeting of the day and it turns into the Gospel. He can't help it, because the Gospel is just welling up in his heart.

In ancient Greek letters the writer would first identify himself and the recipients of the letter, then he would say Chairein, which means "rejoice," but in a letter “Greetings!” Paul altered chairein to read charis or "grace!" This slight change of letters denotes a significant shift because Paul isn’t just offering cheery pleasantries; he is imparting grace to his hearers.

There is great and glorious encouragement in the fact that Paul begins his letters by blessing his readers with the grace of God. It is as if before Paul can say anything else, he desires God to impart grace to them. It is a sincere prayer for the release of divine favor and power into the lives of those to whom he writes.

Paul wrote 13 letters in our New Testament. He begins and ends each of them with a blessing of grace upon the Christian readers. Nothing else in Paul’s letters comes close to this kind of unbroken focus on grace at the beginning and ending of each letter. I think the Lord has some important things he wants to say to us through this blessing of grace. As Paul blesses his readers he blesses us as well!

This blessing focus’s upon who God is speaking to: You and I, and an appeal to God to do something: Give grace. At the beginning of Paul's letters he says, -Grace [be] to you," while the blessings at the end say, "Grace [be] with you.” Why? Because at the beginning of his letters Paul has in mind that the letter itself is a channel of God's grace to the readers. Grace is about to flow "from God" through Paul's writing to the Christians. So he says, "Grace to you." That is, grace is now active and is about to flow from God through my inspired writing to you as you read—"grace [be] to you." But as the end of the letter approaches, Paul realizes that the reading is almost finished and the question rises, "What becomes of the grace that has been flowing to the readers through the reading of the inspired letter?" He answers with a blessing at the end of every letter: "Grace [be] with you" (Philippians 4:23). May grace be with you as you put the letter away and leave the church. With you as you go home, to work , and your daily life

Paul tells us the divine grace is ready to flow to us every time we take up the inspired Scriptures to read them. And we learn that grace will abide with us when we lay the Bible down and go about our daily living. This as a bracing trumpet call to the centrality of grace in Christianity. You could say the Christian life begins with grace, it is sustained by grace, and it will end with grace. Keep it central in your thinking about life and more specifically, your life.

Paul says that grace is something that comes from God. What makes grace, grace is that it starts "from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ”. The single preposition “from” governs both names, and has the effect of hyphenating them together into one single source of blessing. All the divine greatness of our Lord, all the divine love and saving efficacy of the Father and the Son come together in divine union to pour out upon the sinful saints like you and me whatever grace we need in our life freely, without being merited or earned.

Saying that God is a God of grace is a way of saying that God is God -- that He is the infinite, all-sufficient, self-existent, complete, source and sustainer and owner of all being and all value and all worth in the universe. This grace, however, is not only the divine act by which God initiates our spiritual life, but also the very power by which we are sustained and nourished in, and proceed through, that life. The sanctifying, sin-killing, Christ-exalt­ing, soul-satisfying presence of the Holy Spirit is given to us by grace of God via the instrumentality of Holy Scripture and its inspired truths.

There can be little if any expectation of triumphant Christian living apart from the grace that is mediated to us and diffused throughout our hearts and minds preeminently through the means of grace that God has given to us. Grace comes to us through means, primarily reading, preaching, teaching, and hearing of the Word of God. So Paul is saying : “May God do something gracious now. May God go on being gracious to you, starting now. May God give grace to you through the Word of God and may that grace be with you as you leave after receiving the grace from the Word: Saving grace, sanctifying grace, sustaining grace, serving grace, strengthening grace, enabling grace, empowering grace, healing grace, amazing grace!

Pastor Bill