Author: williechii4u

Am God fearing man and am also Adventist member. I like being with friends and share the word of God with them. Am black in complexion with black and white eyes.

RELEASED FROM FEAR

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Fear builds around us prisons only we can see. We peer out through the bars of damaged memories and foolish choices—walled in by concrete years of dark regrets. And we assume the sentence is for life. 

But then one day there is a rattling at the door; keys open up a rusty lock. The cell in which we kept ourselves more rigidly than any jail is opened by a word of grace. “Your sins are forgiven you,” says the Lord who vowed to open every prison door. 

The sentence is commuted, and yes, the record is expunged. “As far as the east is from the west so far does he remove our transgressions from us” (Ps 103:12). 

We walk out in the light of grace—amazed at freedom we have never known, and breathing in the oxygen of hope. This is the genius of the gospel, and why this story always liberates. 

Walk out of fear, but stay in grace. 

Read more at: https://adventistreview.org/gracenotes/released-from-fear/

BY GRACE THROUGH FAITHBY GRACE THROUGH FAITH

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We can’t make ourselves more loveable to God by years of good behavior. And yet, because of grace, we seek to do what pleases Him. 

We can’t earn even half an hour in heaven by acts of sympathy or kindness. And yet, because of grace, we spend unnumbered hours caring for the least of all His little ones. 

Those shining moments when we sometimes rise to our potential don’t make us even one bit more beloved by God. His love for us cannot be amplified, expanded, or improved.

Grace cancels everything we think we’ve earned, and makes us utterly rely on everything God gives us. It is the end of all our goodness, and the place where faith begins. 

Abandon hope in all you’ve done, but deeply trust what God has done. 

And stay in grace.

Read more at: https://adventistreview.org/gracenotes/by-grace-through-faith-1/

GRACE UNDER FIRE

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GRACE UNDER FIRE

Even in our ungracious world, there’s persisting admiration for the man or woman who demonstrates “grace under fire”—poised and composed under disheartening provocations. “It’s just a part of her character,” we enviously say, remembering how frequently we’ve fought our fires with fire. 

And while there may be some gallant souls who didn’t consciously learn this grace from God, most we admire act graciously because they know the Giver of this gift. 

Our growing awareness of how much we’ve been broken and how well we’ve been redeemed helps us sympathize with other broken people. It makes us long—yes, ache—to see their lives restored, renewed, rehealed. We live to give away what we’ve been given.

Grace had its origin in a love outside of us. It has its present—and its future—in loving well beyond ourselves. 

So stay in grace.



Read more at: https://adventistreview.org/gracenotes/grace-under-fire/

BETTER THAN WE KNOW

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At the heart of all we call our faith is a deepening trust that God’s heart is kinder than we were taught and more persistent than we ever knew. 

For Him, all comparisons ultimately fall short. He is wiser than the best father; more nurturing than the most empowering mother; more companionable than the closest sibling. “There is a friend who sticks closer than a brother” (Prov 18:34).

And He offers us, both now and in the end, what family never can—a relationship that transcends our relatives’ best moments and redeems their worst dysfunctions. 

God’s grace is the unyielding embrace of One whose love cannot be won, or lost, or altered, or improved. 

Receive the grace you were destined for. And stay in it.

Read more at: https://adventistreview.org/gracenotes/better-than-we-know/

THE CHOICE THAT HEALS

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Grace is always a choice—when God extends it to us, or we extend it to each other.

The decision to forgive, to not hold someone’s sins like death shrouds up against them, is always made in light of other options. No one can require God to love us unconditionally and forgive us unreservedly, for we are the broken, foolish ones who willfully transgressed His law.

And when the broken, foolish people around us disappoint or damage us, grace is a choice we make in echo of God’s kindness.

Only wounded hearts can offer forgiveness: only those with power to mete out penalties and vengeance can pour out grace instead. We are never more like Jesus than when we gift to those who injure us what neither they nor we deserve.

So stay in grace.

Read more at: https://adventistreview.org/gracenotes/the-choice-that-heals/

FULLY IDENTIFIED

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It would have been grace enough if the Father had executively announced from heaven’s throne that He was commuting our deserved sentences and opening all prison doors. That would have been the very definition of unimaginable and unmerited favor. 

But that His Son should condescend to crawl into our hovels, be one of us, experience our dirt and pain, and taste the worst of weakness and of cruelty—that’s more than we dared ask or think. Grace took on flesh and bone, and all the drudgery and mystery of being human, in hope of bonding us forever to the Father. Jesus took no detours around our pain, for “we have One who in every respect has been tested as we are, yet without sin” (Heb 4:15).

Jesus was—and is—the grace of God incarnate, for grace invariably moves toward those who hurt and grieve and sin. Christ passed through our last portal—death—to open up the door to heaven’s deathless throne room. 

Now He has sat down again at the right hand of the Father, awaiting grace’s final chapter, when He says we will share His glory and His throne. There is no finer, better place than wherever Jesus is.

So stay in grace.

Read more at: https://adventistreview.org/gracenotes/fully-identified/

WHEN EVERYTHING CHANGES

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Our pledges of good behavior are only as good as the people who make them—which is to say, not good at all.  The litter of our broken promises to change, reform, and improve ourselves stretches back like resolutions at the end of January. 

      And we aim too low. We have in mind trying to suppress our angry words. Christ has in mind an entirely new vocabulary grounded in the knowledge that we—and all others—are deeply loved by Him. 

      We imagine chocolates as the foible we intend to fix. Jesus knows that fear is at the root of all our failing—fear of the Father, of each other, of the future. And so His first word to us at every moment of doubt and discouragement is an assurance of His care:  “You can stop being afraid now.”  

      Grace always meets us where we are, but never leaves us where we were. The greatest and most joyful change is lived by those who most receive the gift of grace. 

      So stay in grace.

Read more at: https://adventistreview.org/gracenotes/when-everything-changes/

WHEN POLITICS MISLEADS US

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How does God’s grace invade our daily conversations?

Certainly not by retreating to our separate corners and hurling brickbats at each other.  Of all the “stuff” we absorb from our angry culture, the habits of accusing and deriding are undoubtedly the worst.  

But as grace finds a home in us, we grow more willing to admit that we might be mistaken.  Receiving grace requires we confess we are wrong, and always have been.  We’ve misunderstood the love of God, imagining Him as only angry, always disappointed. We’ve wandered into deeds that brought us shame and guilt.  We’ve argued for ideas that were vanquished at the cross.  “All we like sheep have gone astray” (Is 53:6).

So grace prepares us for a new way of talking with each other, even when we disagree—especially when we disagree.  “You could be right”—”I might be wrong”: these are the tools of reconciliation and renewal.  Look carefully at grace before you look your opponent in the eye.  

There is no greater joy than laughing with a former enemy.  So stay in grace.

Read more at: https://adventistreview.org/gracenotes/when-politics-misleads-us/

MORE DAY TO DAWN

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MORE DAY TO DAWN



“Ye fearful saints, fresh courage take;

The clouds ye so much dread

Are big with mercy and shall break

In blessings on your head.”

It’s every believer’s lot to occasionally grow anxious, to lose peace, to doubt that a good God really wants to do good things for us.  We remember all our sins—years after He has chosen to forget them.  We cringe at indiscretions, which in His discretion He has graciously erased from our life record.  And so we crouch into the future, heads down, half-expecting the worst, or at least the very painful.  Surely all our sins will soon catch up with us.

“But surely He has borne our griefs and carried all our sorrows” (Is 53:4). It is to us—those who have taken Jesus as our Lord—the gospel speaks with special, reassuring power. We need not linger in the half-light of our anxious thoughts about our standing with the Saviour:  “Arise, shine; for your light has come, and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you” (Is 60:1).  

Grace is for every moment, even those when memories afflict us.  Christ offers all He is to all who seek His joy and light.

So stay in grace.

Read more at: https://adventistreview.org/gracenotes/more-day-to-dawn/

IS IT TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE?

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IS IT TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE?

If you are truly saved through faith, then you are daily praying grace down into the cracks and crevices of life, into the dim and unlit corners where fear and fate and faithlessness more often hold the keys. 

Understanding—really understanding—grace rarely happens through a flash of intellectual enlightenment: Paul’s own Damascus Road was just the first of many miles spent learning grace.

Each week we find how weak and meager is our faith, how little we actually trust the great bold verities announced by Jesus and His gospel, how much we fear that what He promises to give is too good to be true. 

“Increase our faith” is the most honest prayer we ever murmur—and the one He most delights to answer. 

So stay in grace.

Read more at: https://adventistreview.org/gracenotes/is-it-too-good-to-be-true/