1) You did not Come here by Chance
You did not come through this year by accident. Because there is a testimony you are going to have about the faithfulness of God. Your father, with the seven billion plus people that are on the planet, just happened to intersect lives with the woman who would be your mother, and then the two of them came together, and they created you. There ain’t nothing chance about that. That is the divine hand of God orchestrating circumstances and orchestrating scenarios to make sure that you would be born for such a time as this.
God made the first move. He put Adam and Eve, perfect people, in a perfect environment and relationship with himself, and the perfect opportunity to have rapport and cultivate a deepening friendship with God. The enemy made a move as well. He slithered into the garden and introduced sin. Culture devolved to such an extent that Cain ended up killing Abel.
The perfect relationship was infringed upon because sin was introduced in the garden. They were separated in relationship with God. And it seemed like all hope was lost. But our God, never to be outdone, made another move. He caused Adam and Eve to come back together again. They had a baby boy named Seth. And Seth gave birth to Enoch. When Enoch was born, everybody started to worship God again.
But then the enemy made another move. He introduced sin back into the equation, and it proliferated so much so that the entire earth had to be destroyed by a flood. And this time, it seemed like for sure the enemy had won. But our God, never to be outdone, made another move on the cosmic chessboard and brought forth Noah. And he said, “Noah, I need you to go build me an ark.” And through one man’s obedience mankind was preserved.
The enemy made another move so that sin and rebellion proliferated through the hearts of mankind once again, even after the flood. And it seemed like all hope was lost.
But then God made another move. He went to a little pagan town called Err, and he plucked out of it a man named Abram. And he said, “Abram, I am going to change your name, and I am going to change the GPS coordinates on your destiny. I will make your descendants numerous like the stars in the sky.”
Then, the enemy made another move. God’s people went down into Egypt and were captured 400 years into brutal slavery. But then God made another move and brought forth Moses. He raised Moses as the Prince of Egypt. God told Moses, “Go tell Pharaoh, let my people go.”
And after ten miraculous plagues and 40 years in the wilderness, they came into the Promised Land. At the end of the book of Judges, the enemy has now introduced idolatry, so much so that the children of Israel did not have to turn their back completely on Yahweh. They just set idol worship alongside their worship of Yahweh. They had one foot in idol worship–the idols of the culture, and one foot of allegiance in the worship of God.
And it seemed like all hope was lost. But then God made another move. Ruth’s story got off to a rough start, but then, at the right time, Ruth met her kinsman redeemer, and the two of them came together and had a little baby boy named Obed. Obed gave birth to Jesse, and Jesse gave birth to a little baby boy named David.
And then the Old Testament closes, and there’s 400 years of silence. God was on one side of the cosmic chessboard. The enemy was on the other side, and nobody had made a move for 400 years. All of history and humanity was hanging in the balance, waiting to see who was going to make the next move.
And then, the New Testament opens. God made a move, the likes of which the enemy still to this day has never had a response for. He basically puts on flesh and says, let me come down here and take care of this myself. He lived a perfect life, and he died a substitutionary death. And three days later, he resurrected from the grave and offered salvation once for you and me.
3) Do not Forget the Faith that has Come through Christ
Do you realize what he went through for us? Do not dare be ashamed of your salvation. This note has come to stir you up by way of a reminder that you will never forget the faith that comes through the righteousness of Christ Jesus.
4) There is another Reminder: he Reminds us, “Grace and Peace be Multiplied to you.”
God is working in a completely different set of metrics. He is going to multiply to you. They are not added. They are multiplied. Peter said, “Add to our faith moral excellence, add godliness, add kindness, and add love.” But God’s peace and grace are not to be added but multiplied by God himself. I like God’s mathematics. There will be an exponential explosion of peace and grace to you.
I cannot imagine anything we need more right now than peace and grace. We do not need it in measures that we can provide for ourselves. We need it in divine proportions that only God himself can pour out upon us.
Do you know what peace is? Peace is the capacity and the potential for calm in the midst of chaos. Peace is an internal anchor of stability in the midst of unhindered instability that swirls all around you. Peace is the capacity to remain steady when everything around us is completely unsteady. God will provide peace in the midst of a storm.
There is a storm that is raging around us. And it does not matter what your personal concerns may be. If you are personally not going through a storm, I just want to tell you how happy I am for you. But for the vast majority of people, either they are smack dab in the middle of a storm, on their way into a storm, or on their way out of a storm. It is the nature of the life in which we live.
John 16:33 “I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.”
You do not have to go looking for storms. Just keep living. The storm is eventually going to come and find you in one way or another. Your storms will always know where to find you. All of us collectively have been in a storm. Either we have been through, or we are still going through a pandemic. There have been layers of pandemics upon pandemics. There’s been a medical one, political and racial one.
For us not to succumb to anxiety and fear or cave to hopelessness and despair, there must be an anchor in our souls. The peace of God anchors you in your soul. It’s a supernatural peace that he multiplies to you.
John 14:27 “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid.”
This is the kind of peace where you will go through challenges, financial struggles, and doctors’ diagnoses but keep showing up with a sense of calm. It is God who makes us smile in our misery. We will never ignore reality nor deny it but steadfast will be our nature.
It says, “I am going to multiply grace to you.” Grace is God’s unmerited favor in your life. Grace is the goodness of God dispensed to you that you do not deserve and that you cannot repay and cannot earn.
5) God’s Grace is Sufficient for you
Grace is, of course, the basis of our faith. But there is not only a grace that saves you. There is also a grace that sustains you. This is what I call “a grace for grownups.” It is the grace that meets you in the details of your days and the darkest hours of your night. It meets you in your struggles and your strife and your difficulties and your daily decisions.
You would have caved a long time ago, but God’s grace gives you inspiration to keep going. God gives you a grace that keeps you moving forward when the marriage is still hard, finances are low, babies still not sleeping through the night, and the adult children still living in a way that is outside of the way that you raise them to live and the relationship with your spouse is still strained or your heart is still broken or the business is still failing. There is a grace for grownups that can be your keeper.
In the last two years of my life, our life as a family has been devastating. We have lost eight family members back-to-back. We started off with the loss of one of my closest friends and my biological cousin.
December ending 2019, right before the pandemic began, in December, the same month my grandfather died. At the end of the month, December 30th, my mother died. Eight months later, my mother-in-law died. In between those two deaths, the doctor saw something on my left lung that needed to be removed. And the only way they could remove it was to actually take out the entire left lobe, the upper lobe of my lung. So, a week after my mother’s funeral, I had to go have that surgery.
I do not know if you have ever had a season of your life where you look back on it and you realize grace sustained you through that. It had to be something supernatural that we have still had our minds regulated and that we have still kept our faith and our trust and our hope in Him. He is indeed a grace giver. He extends grace for folks going through grown-up situations like you and I are facing.
From my own personal testimony, there is a multiplied grace that has been extended to us.
2 Corinthians 12:8-9 “Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from me. But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me.”
6) God’s Sovereignty, Goodness, and Love is still with You
God’s sovereignty, goodness, and love for you have not been misplaced just because the thorn remains in your life. He said to Paul, no, I’m not taking away the thorn. It is because of this thorn that you are getting ready to learn that my grace is sufficient for you. The multiplication of grace is tied to the hard things that we are facing. The Lord allows it because you will never see the multiplication without it.
It is through these bad situations that we begin to know we are growing up in our faith and spiritual maturity. Instead of completely caving in hopelessness or bitterness and resentment against the Lord that the thorn remains, we instead sit on the edge of our seats with our chin and our hands in holy anticipation that if He has allowed the thorn to remain, that must mean there is a multiplication of grace that’s on the way.
2 Corinthians 9:8 “And God is able to bless you abundantly, so that in all things at all times, having all that you need, you will abound in every good work.”
7) There are Magnificent Promises for anything
And finally, Apostle Peter reminds us that there are magnificent promises for anything and everything that you face.
2 Peter 1:3 “seeing that His divine power has granted to us everything pertaining to life and godliness, through the true knowledge of Him who called us by His own glory and excellence.”
He has given you enough grace, not just to live but to live in a way that honors God. Not just to keep getting up out of bed in the morning but actually to walk in a manner worthy of the calling by which you have been called.
Honor God in your living. Face your day with a measure of faith, hope, and spiritual maturity. You have enough grace already.
My boys are getting huge every day. I watch their muscles popping out and their voices getting deep, and that shocks me. Everything that they needed to become who they are currently, they already had at the moment of conception. When they were in my womb, we did that first ultrasound at six weeks, and it just looked like a little nut. Everything that they would develop into was already there to the extent that I cultivated and took care of the new life that was on the inside of me.
Everything you need, you already have. The new life of God is on the inside of you in the person of the Holy Spirit. The DNA of God himself is pulsing on the inside of you.
Everything that you will become, everything that you need to be sustained through the hardships and the joys of life, you already have.
In the scriptures, there are over 8,000 promises that sons, and daughters of God have been given access to. But most of them he did not put in our hand. He put them in our reach. Which means you have the opportunity to experience God. As you believe him, walk with him, remain connected to him, and you will begin to see that outworked in your life.
Colossians 2:10 “And in Christ you have been brought to fullness. He is the head over every power and authority.”
You are complete in him. The enemy wants to dull you in that regard. He wants to make us think that we need to go outside of Christ, outside of what he has given, to find completion.
And so we become co-dependent in relationships, and we become addicted to substances, and we go outside of our relationship to God to find stuff that he has already given us access to.
But every treasure that you need is already there if you will just open the book.
Peter says, “I just stopped by to stir you up by way of reminder, to remind you of the power and the purity of our faith, to remind you of the multiplication of peace and grace, and to remind you that the magnificent promises of God are yours for anything and everything that you face.”
