Grace Tasters

This Sunday I have the great pleasure of preaching one of the sermons in our series Town Takers. It feels like forever since I preached; it isn't but when you always want to do it every extended period when one doesn't get a chance can feel an age. It is critical for our church and for the ongoing development of the brilliant guys brought here to us at X1 that others get to preach (or learn to preach, or teach - long discussion!).

I am preaching on Grace with this fundamental premise: Grace Tasted is Grace Treasured is Grace Transferred. Sadly there can be a vicious disconnect between those three or between two of the the three at the very least. As part of my exhortation that Grace must be tasted I felt it helpful to expose us to the glorious articulation - the effusive overflow really - of several of my 'Giants of Faith" as they tasted grace. So without further ado, ingest these delights!
(Note Jonathan Edwards has an obligatory feature!)

"But where was my free will during all those years and from what deep and secret retreat was it called forth in a single moment, so I gave my neck to your "easy yoke" and my shoulders to your "light burden," O Christ Jesus, "my Strength and my Redeemer"? How sweet did it suddenly become to me to be without the sweetness of petty things! And it was now a joy to put away what I formerly feared to lose. For you cast them away from me, O true and highest Sweetness. You cast them away, and in their place you entered in yourself -- sweeter than all pleasure, though not to flesh and blood; brighter than all light, but more veiled than all mystery; more exalted than all honor, though not to them that are exalted in their own eyes. Now was my soul free from the gnawing cares of seeking and getting, of wallowing in the mire and scratching the itch of lust. And I talked like a child to You, O Lord my God -- my light, my riches, and my salvation." - St. Augustine

“One day as I was passing into the field, with some dashes on my conscience, fearing yet that all was not right, suddenly this sentence fell upon my soul, “Your righteousness is in heaven.” I thought I saw with the eyes of my soul Jesus Christ at God’s right hand. There was my righteousness. Wherever I was, or whatever I was doing, God could not say of me that I lacked His righteousness, for that was ever before Him. Moreover, I saw that it was not my good frame of heart that made my righteousness better, nor yet my bad frame that made my righteousness worse, for my righteousness was Jesus Christ Himself, “the same yesterday, today, and for ever”.
“Now did my chains fall off my legs indeed. I was loosed from my afflictions and irons, my temptations also fled away.” - John Bunyan

"I remember that sort of inward, sweet delight in God and divine things that I have lived much in since, was on reading those words, I Tim. 1:17. Now unto the King eternal, immortal, invisible, the only wise God, be honour and glory for ever and ever, Amen. As I read the words, there came into my soul, and was as it were diffused through it, a sense of the glory of the Divine Being; a new sense, quite different from any thing I ever experienced before ... I thought with myself, how excellent a Being that was, and how happy I should be, if I might enjoy that God, and be rapt up to him in heaven, and be as it were swallowed up in him for ever! ...
From about that time, I began to have a new kind of apprehensions and ideas of Christ. and the work of redemption, and the glorious way of salvation by him. An inward, sweet sense of these things, at times, came into my heart; and my soul was led away in pleasant views and contemplations of them. ... The sense I had of divine things, would often of a sudden kindle up, as it were, a sweet burning in my heart; an ardor of soul, that I know not how to express." - Jonathan Edwards

You tasted grace, can you articulate it, does it look like you have?

Simon