During the 9:30 Bible Hour Pastor Matt is teaching on the four key components in our church name: Grace Atlanta Bible Church.
First, we were reminded that we are people of grace. We need grace, the undeserved blessing freely bestowed on a person by God for salvation, sanctification, and glorification. We looked at the different kinds of grace in the Bible, like common universal grace, special saving grace and sustaining sanctification grace. Now we are discussing how to contextualize the gospel, “helping the components of the Gospel be better understood in specific contexts where there may otherwise be barriers to understanding.” Contextualizing is not compromising the gospel in anyway. We looked at examples in Scripture including Stephen in Acts 7, Paul and Barnabas in Acts 13 and Paul on Mars Hill in Acts 17. We can be strategic with the gospel to capitalize on elements of the gospel for maximum connection. The Gospel is always relevant with its discussion of sin, our individual need for a savior and where we spend eternity. Join us as we continue this topical study.
During the 11 am Corporate Worship Service Pastor Matt continues to preach through 1 Thessalonians. From chapter 1 we see that we need to pursue high quality Christian service in order to impact the world with Biblically based truth and grace. Paul was thankful for the fellow believers and mentioned their faith, love, and hope, commending their endurance. Our labor should be motivated not by obligation or fear, but our growing love for God and for others.
From chapter 2 we saw Paul appealing to his integrity in his dealing with the Christians in Thessalonica. We studied his two analogies of being gentle like a nursing mother (2:7) as well as like a father (2:11-12) in encouraging, comforting, and urging them to live in a way pleasing to God. The transfer of nutrients from mother to baby remind us that Paul, too, intentionally and strategically provided care and Biblical nutrition in a loving and graceful way. Also, the Biblical nutrition that you pass along is only as good as what you receive, so our distribution of Biblical truth will never be better than our input. As Pastor Matt summarized, “An impactful recipe for the dissemination of the Gospel and of Biblical truth today is a combination of relationship, time, compassion and content (2:12-13).”