Grace Experienced is Christ Revealed
Saul
of Tarsus, who became Paul the apostle, experienced the mighty work
of God’s Spirit. God brought this rebel sinner to bow before Him in
the dust and revealed Himself in Paul. He gives confession of this in
his letter to the Galatians: “But when it pleased God, who
separated me from my mother’s womb, and called me by His grace,
to reveal His Son in me, that I might preach Him among the
heathen; immediately I conferred not with flesh and blood”.
This all came to pass at God’s appointed time (“when it pleased
God”) and according to His purpose and power of grace (“called me
by His grace”).
But
what did God do in this man and what was the result of this great
work? God revealed the Lord Jesus Christ, as Paul says, “in me.”
The result was that Paul never stopped talking about, believing in,
glorying in and preaching the Lord Jesus Christ. At the center of his
experience was the revelation of Jesus Christ! While his experience
was the same experience for all who are born of God, Paul did not
focus on the experience itself but the One who was revealed to him
and in him. God revealed Christ to Paul as the One who is God
manifest in the flesh. He saw Christ as the true God, as the only
Savior and as the very righteousness of God freely given to him. He
was brought to forsake his old religion, his imagined righteousness
and his own way. Experience for experience sake is nothing.
Only
that experience which leaves a sinner talking about, worshipping,
following, believing, glorifying, trusting in and resting upon the
Lord Jesus Christ is the experience of God’s grace wrought by the
Holy Spirit. The blessed Spirit takes the things of Christ and shows
them to us. Grace experienced is Christ believed on! Balaam also had
a mysterious experience on a road when the ass spoke to him about an
angel but he perished. Balaam experienced an experience, Paul
experienced Christ! Christ revealed is Christ believed on because
both are the work of God’s Spirit. Can we not hear the Savior say,
“Look unto Me and be ye saved”?
-Gospel report by preacher Gary Shepard
Sovereign
Grace Baptist church of Jacksonville, North Carolina USA
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