“But the end of all things is near: so be serious in your behaviour and keep on the watch with prayer; And most of all be warm in your love for one another.”
1 Peter 4:7-8
You may have been taught that the concept of grace is “God being good to us though we do not deserve it.” Or in another way, “Mercy is God withholding from us what we DO deserve; Grace is God giving to us what we DO NOT deserve.”
But that is just God being “nice” to us. That is God's mercy for all people. Do you have a nice God, who looks down on you and smiles when you do good things and gets cross when you do bad things? A bit like a parent who gets angry when you upset him or her? Or do you have the additional Grace of God?
Grace - the empowering presence of God enabling you to be who God created you to be, and to do what God has called you to do – right where you are.
Everything in our reading is impossible without Grace. To be able to be serious in our behaviour is a gift of God. We want to be lighthearted and laugh and enjoy each others company, and there is nothing wrong with that so long as we are serious about our behaviour. And only with the Power of God in us can we be both serious and filled with joy and laughter.
And what of the gift of prayer? So often we don't know what to pray and that great gift of grace, the Spirit, intervenes for us and helps us to pray what is God's will and not our earthly desires. Without God's empowering presence we cannot pray the way God wants us to. We limit ourselves to human desires and dreams, and yet God's empowering presence enables us. It is by His grace that we can come before the throne of God and, with Spirit interceding, pray the prayers that are God's will, and not the prayers of our earthly desires.
And our warmness for each other, if it were totally dependant on our own feelings for each other, would fall way short of God's desire and plan. The only way to be warm for each other is with the empowering grace of God, His presence in us, leading us and enabling us. You know what it is like – sometimes you meet someone who rubs us up the wrong way, or does things that we judge are wrong, but God calls us to still love them, that His love might be known through us.
That is why baptism in the Spirit is so important. We see in Acts 8 verses 14-17: “Now when the apostles at Jerusalem heard that Samaria had received the word of God, they sent to them Peter and John, who came down and prayed for them that they might receive the Holy Spirit, for he had not yet fallen on any of them, but they had only been baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus. Then they laid their hands on them and they received the Holy Spirit.”
Are we today filled with God's Spirit, ready and willing to be led where ever God wants us to be, doing whatever He wants us to do, knowing His empowering presence in us? Let God's Spirit fall on us today ...
Come Holy Spirit, fill us now
We need your presence, O we need your power
Come Holy fire, burn in us we pray
Adrian Burr