January 24, 2024 - Good Morning! It's Wednesday, January 24.
I love a good word picture. A phrase, carefully crafted, that, when you read it, causes you to think about something in a brand-new way. The apostle Paul paints many of these word pictures for us. In I Corinthians 12 -"What if the ear says, I am not an eye, so I am not a part of the body". In Hebrews 12 - "We are surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses". In I Corinthians 13 - "Now we see through a glass darkly". And he does it again in the first verses of the 5th chapter of Romans -
"Since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have gained access by faith into the grace in which we now stand."
Have you ever thought of grace as something you can "stand" in? What a tremendous picture that is. What a firm foundation. A place where we belong, not because of anything we have done, but by faith in His righteousness. Romans 5:1-2 is one of the great passages in the Bible and it inspired a song that we sang last Sunday morning at First Baptist Center. Here are some lyrics from "The Stand".
You stood before creation, eternity in Your hand
You spoke the earth into motion, my soul now to stand
You stood before my failure and carried the cross for my shame
My sin weighed upon Your shoulders, my soul now to stand
So what can I say? And what can I do?
But offer this heart, O God, completely to you.
So I'll stand with arms high and heart abandoned
In awe of the One who gave it all
I'll stand, my soul, Lord, to You surrendered
All I am is Yours.
Meet you back here tomorrow,
Bro. David
dmathis@fbccenter.org
