Grace That Keeps Giving: Peace, Identity, Forgiveness
Have you ever received a gift and only later realized how much more it held than you first thought? Pastor Josh opened this message with a picture like that: being handed a book, setting it aside, and then discovering an envelope tucked inside with a check far more valuable than the book itself. You can receive a gift and still not understand or experience its full benefits. That, he said, is exactly how many of us live with the grace of God.
This message kicks off a new series called Grace for You, a verse-by-verse walk through the book of Ephesians. Written by the apostle Paul from prison to a church he had personally planted and loved, Ephesians is often called Paul's masterpiece — three chapters on who God is and what He has done, followed by three chapters on how we should live in light of it. We began at the very start, Ephesians 1:1-8, where Paul bursts into what reads like a single, breathless poem of praise about grace.
Grace gives you peace
Notice how Paul greets nearly every church: "Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ" (Ephesians 1:2). The order matters. Grace always comes before peace, because you cannot have peace with God until you first receive His grace by faith in Jesus.
So what is grace? It is God's unearned love. So much of life teaches us to earn affection — to be attractive enough, successful enough, useful enough to be loved. God is different. As Romans reminds us, "while we were still sinners, Christ died for us." He does not love you because of who you are; He loves you because of who He is. God is love. He loves you because He loves you.
And this grace, though offered to everyone, does not come from everyone. It does not come from any human founder or philosophy. Every other system says, "Do, so that God will accept you." The gospel says, "It is done — now receive it." When you do, you gain peace with God: the barrier of sin is removed, and the relationship is restored. You also gain an inner peace the Bible calls a peace that surpasses understanding — the kind that steadies you in the middle of the storm, even when nothing around you says you should be at rest.
Grace gives you a new identity
Paul keeps going: "For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight. In love he predestined us for adoption to sonship through Jesus Christ" (Ephesians 1:4-5). Through Christ you receive "every spiritual blessing" (1:3) — not necessarily material comfort, but everything your soul actually needs.
Two blessings stand out. First, in Christ you are seen as holy and blameless. None of us can claim that on our own. But Jesus lived the perfect life we never could and took our blame to the cross, so that God now looks at us through the flawless life of His Son. Second, you are adopted into God's family. We were spiritual orphans, but grace brings us home as beloved children with real access to the Father.
This changes how we define ourselves. So many of us build our identity on money, success, sexuality, or worst of all, on our own worst failures. Pastor Josh pointed to the difference between saying "I am an alcoholic" and "I am a child of God who struggles with drinking." One chains you to your struggle; the other equips you to walk in freedom. When you know who you are in Christ, it transforms how you live — not the other way around.
At Jesus' baptism the Father declared over Him, "This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased" — before a single miracle. Through Christ, the Father says something similar over every one of His children.
Grace gives you forgiveness
Finally: "In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins, in accordance with the riches of God's grace that he lavished on us" (Ephesians 1:7-8). Redemption is the language of a debt cancelled. Our sin left us with a debt we could never repay by good behavior, church attendance, or being nice. It was paid in full — not with money, but with the blood of Jesus.
Two things keep believers from experiencing this freedom. The first is constant guilt. There is a godly kind of guilt that leads us to God and then lets us move on; it should not become a rain cloud we carry everywhere. The second is putting limits on His grace, whispering "He can forgive others, but not what I've done." Yet the passage says He forgives according to the riches of His grace, not according to how bad our sin is. You cannot outrun a God who is rich in grace. The only sin that cannot be forgiven is the sin of unbelief — refusing the gift entirely.
A gift that keeps on giving
Grace is not a one-time transaction. Lamentations reminds us His mercies are new every morning. Picture two waterfalls: Yosemite Falls can run dry by late summer, but Niagara never stops pouring. God's grace is like Niagara. You are not asked to work your way up the falls — only to sit beneath them each day and let them fill you, then overflow to bless others, just as Paul blessed the Ephesians with peace while he sat in a prison cell.
A question to sit with this week
When you look in the mirror, do you see yourself the way God sees you — holy, blameless, adopted, and fully forgiven? Where have you been living under guilt or self-made limits that grace already erased?
If you are near Livermore or anywhere in the Tri-Valley, we would love for you to join us in person and keep exploring this series with our church family.