SUSTAINED BY GRACE

Sermon Summary (9/4/16), “Sustained by Grace.” Job excerpts

We’re concluding a sermon series looking at “grace” in the Old Testament.  As Methodists we believe that grace permeates our relationship with God.  He nudges before we know it (prevenient grace), he saves us (justifying grace), and he makes us grow in love of God and one another (sanctifying grace).  There are an infinite number of ways grace moves us and they are intermingled.  We are continually nudged, continually returned to a saving relationship, continually growing.  Grace is also there to sustain us.  And that is the Old Testament story of Job.

We have been or have seen those sustained by grace.  We say, “There but the grace of God go I”; and we marvel at how some get through life, but they do.  Sustained by grace.  The question in our mind becomes, “How can God let bad things happen to good people?”

Portions of Job are the oldest written passages of the Bible making the question of unfairness in life the oldest dilemma in the human condition.  The question predates the Psalmist who lamented “Why do the wicked prosper.”  It predated Moses who in Deuteronomy might lead us to believe that only the bad suffer.  It predated Abraham.  We find Job predates the Hebrew race.  Why do good people suffer?

The story: Satan tells God his faithful servant Job would not be so if his possessions (a good person rewarded with good things) and his health were taken from him.  God gives Satan permission to test him, “but spare his life.”  Job’s friends insist he has sinned, or has sinned and doesn’t know it, or his children have sinned.  “Confess and repent.”  Job insists in his integrity.  He is blameless and upright, always fearing God and turning from evil.  He says, “If I could only face God I could make my case.”

God appears to him with glorious language seeming to answer no questions at all except creation is a mystery, and Job relents, “Things too wonderful for me.  Things I did not understand.”  Then an amazing thing happens.  God says Job is right!  Bad things do happen to good people!  We come to understand that God has been sustaining Job’s faith all along.

As Christians we come to understand that freewill (God gave Satan permission to exercise his freewill as he does all his creatures including us) permits evil and chaos in this world.  The Almighty God has relinquished a part of his power to us, but he has replaced it with grace.

But when bad things happen to good people, in steps grace, sustaining grace.  In place of all our flaws, God sustains us.  And he gives us friends to walk along side us, to be sustaining grace too.  That’s us.