CRYSTALLIZATION-STUDY OF THE GOSPEL OF GOD
in the Epistle to the Romans

Message Twenty-Two

The Grace of God
(4)

OUTLINE

4. In his writings, Paul unveils to us that the grace of God is:
   50. The grace of the Lord which superabounded with faith and love in Christ to the apostle Paul for his dynamic and excellent salvation that he might be one of the greatest apostles—1 Tim. 1:14.
   51. The grace with Timothy that enabled him to guard the deposit and turn away from profane, vain babblings and antitheses of what was falsely called knowledge, not misaiming concerning the faith—6:20-21.
   52. The grace according to which God had saved the apostles and called them with a holy calling and which was given to them in Christ Jesus before the times of the ages—2 Tim. 1:9.
   53. The grace which is in Christ Jesus and in which Timothy, one of the younger co-workers of the apostle Paul, was empowered in the degradation of the church—2:1.
   54. The grace which was with Timothy through the Lord in his spirit—4:22.
   55. The grace of God which has appeared to bring salvation to all men, training us that, denying ungodliness and worldly lusts, we should live soberly and righteously and godly in the present age, awaiting the blessed hope, even the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ—Titus 2:11-13.
   56. The grace of God by which we have been justified that we might become heirs according to the hope of eternal life—3:7.
   57. The grace which was with the believers who loved the apostles in faith—3:15.
   58. The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ which was in Philemon’s spirit enabling him to receive Onesimus, who was his escaped slave, as a brother—Philem. 25.
   59. The grace of God by which Christ tasted death on behalf of everything (every man)—Heb. 2:9.
   60. The grace that is found for timely help by the believers who come forward to the throne of grace—4:16.
   61. The grace of which the Spirit is and with which the Spirit worked within the staggering Hebrew believers, who were insulting the Spirit by shrinking back to their Judaism from God’s New Testament salvation, trampling underfoot the Son of God and considering the blood of the covenant by which they were sanctified a common thing—10:29.
   62. The grace of God from which the believers fall away because of their not looking carefully—12:15.
   63. The grace which was received by those who had received an unshakable kingdom and through which they might serve God well-pleasingly with piety and fear—12:28.
   64. The grace by which the heart of those who would not be carried away by various strange teachings was confirmed—13:9.
   65. The grace which was with the Hebrew believers to keep them from shrinking back to their old religion from God’s New Testament economy—13:25.

Prayer: Lord, we thank You. What an enjoyment it is that we can come together to study what You are as grace. Lord, You know that we do not have the utterance. In our natural language there is not this kind of utterance. Lord, give us the utterance. We look unto You. Even, Lord, for us to listen, we need You. We need You as our understanding. Have mercy upon us. We should not think that grace is a term known to everybody. We have to realize that hardly any of us fully understands what grace is. O Lord Jesus, help us in this matter. We cannot take Your word for granted. We have to get into it. Lord, we are crystallizing the grace of God in the book of Romans. We need Your utterance. We need Your speaking in our speaking. Be one spirit with us. Amen.

Our general subject is the crystallization of the gospel of God in the Epistle to the Romans. We have studied the verses concerning grace in Romans. Then we have gone on to see more concerning grace in Paul’s Epistles from 1 Corinthians through 2 Thessalonians. Now we want to see the grace of God from 1 Timothy through Hebrews.

We may wonder why we are considering grace in other books of the New Testament, since we are on the crystallization-study of the book of Romans. This is because although all the writers of the New Testament touch the grace of God, except Matthew and Mark, Romans is the center and the framework of God’s grace. It is in Romans that we are told grace is God personified. Romans 5:21 says that grace reigns, and this grace is God. The same verse says that sin reigns. Sin is Satan personified. Sin is an evil person, Satan, and this personified Satan reigns. Now God also reigns in His personification of grace. Romans 5:21 says that grace reigns unto eternal life. The New Jerusalem is grace reigning. Grace as God will reign in the New Jerusalem, so the New Jerusalem is the consummation of God reigning as grace.

The New Testament is a history of grace as God moving and living in and among the believers. The Jews and Muslims think that they understand God, but they do not really know Him. Even though you read the Bible many times, you still cannot fully know God until you get the crystallization of the New Testament. Who can know God to the depths of what He is without knowing the crystallization of the important items in the New Testament? The New Testament shows us that grace first is God conceived in Mary. God came to Mary in visitation as grace, which was the very factor of Mary’s conception of the incarnated God. She found this grace (Luke 1:28, 30). If we do not know all the verses concerning grace in the New Testament in a crystallized sense, we cannot know God in a complete way. The greatest help that the full-time trainees receive is in knowing God. In these messages we are seeing and being perfected to know God as grace.