Grace Bible Church, Moore, SC

Experiencing God

At Grace we like to remind each other that, “Life is about God.”

That means that we don’t just experience God at special services or on Sundays. All of life is about what He is doing. We see and experience God most clearly in His Word, the Bible.

We also experience God by trying to see what He is doing in our lives. Each week we take time to tell each other how God has been working. Sometimes it has been painful or stressful. Other times it has been thrilling and full of joy. Regardless of how the week has gone, we don’t have to ask, “Has God been at work?” The real question is, “How has God been at work?”

If life is about God, then we need to keep our eyes alert to see and hearts tender to experience Him in all of life and especially in the Bible. The English poet, George Herbert said that you can look at everything in life the way you look at a pane of glass. You can either look at the glass or look through it to see the sky behind it. You can focus on life itself or see God through life. So, all of life should be a worship service.

Life is all about God and what He is doing.

Authentic Relationships

In this kind of living, first and foremost is each person’s individual relationship with God. This relationship is made possible by living with Jesus as your king and relying on Him to rescue you from your own way.

Next in importance is a person’s relationship with other people. Godwants our relationships with people of all kinds to be marked by loving, knowing, and serving one another.

The Bible’s teaching is critically important—it perfectly helps us know what God wants our relationships to be like. Church programs and activities take a distant second in comparison with cultivating healthy, loving, and biblical relationships with God and people.

Meaningful Living

We exist for one purpose—to magnify God. One pastor has said you can magnify God two different ways—with a telescope or a microscope. A microscope takes something incredibly small and enlarges it for the human eye to better appreciate. A telescope, on the other hand, takes an object staggeringly huge and allows us to see how great and magnificent it is in reality.

Similarly, God is great beyond our imagination—the most important Being in the universe, not some tiny deity we inflate so that we can feel better about life.

Rather, He is supremely valuable, so we must live in a way that magnifies His true worth. The problem is that as humans we all pursue our own agenda. Unfortunately, we want to be king. We want to be magnified, instead of God.

But God won’t tolerate our rebellion. Without God, all of us are destined to die and face God’s judgment. The only person to have truly lived with God as His king was Jesus Christ. He never went His own way. He always magnified God. So, He didn’t deserve death, yet He died in our place as a substitute. He received God’s judgment for humanity’s rebellion. Consequently, there are really only two ways to live. You can live life your own way by making what you want most important and magnifying yourself, or you can live life God’s way by submitting to Jesus as your King and relying on His death as God’s way of forgiving your rebellion.

So, our passion at Grace is to display God by living life His way with Jesus as our king. We want to magnify Jesus by displaying how great and valuable He is.