What Are The Means of Grace? | ask Theocast

The Means of Grace and Why Spiritual Disciplines Are Not the Primary Path to Maturity

Hey everyone, this is John, and I'll be answering the question, what are the means of grace? If you've grown up in a traditional evangelical church, you've been taught that the way in which that you mature or you grow is by disciplining yourself through certain spiritual acts.

Bible memorization, daily devotions, prayer, journaling, fasting. The better you get at these, the more mature you'll become. Paul speaks to the Christians in Galatians 3, and he warns them and says, why are you so foolish to think that you've begun by the Spirit, receiving a gift of grace, faith, that you are now going to perfect yourself by use of the law or disciplining yourself through the flesh?

He says the way in which you've begun, which is by the Spirit through faith, is the way in which you're going to continue. So he is encouraging them that you are both saved and sanctified or matured by faith.

Word, Sacraments, and Prayer as the Means of Grace

So this is what the Reformers refer to as the means of grace. God gives us means to strengthen our faith because our faith is what sustains us and is what grows us or sanctifies us. So there are means that God has promised that if we use those means, the means of grace, then God is going to strengthen and bolster our faith.

The Confessions describe these as the word sacraments and prayer. The sacraments meaning the Lord's table and baptism. If you look at Ephesians chapter four, you'll notice that Paul hands the church, after this glorious gospel message, he hands the church a very important instruction.

He says that God, through the Spirit, has gifted many of you to be teachers and preachers, and that when the church functions properly, it builds itself up in love. And the instructions to the believer after receiving the gospel is to come together in a corporate reality and receive the gifts that God has given the church, which is the preaching and teaching of God's word.

And so it's through the corporate preaching and teaching God's word that he strengthens our faith. So can you read God's word individually by yourself? Yes, but that's a new reality. 1700 years of church past acts, they didn't have personal Bibles.

They used the public preaching of God's and teaching of God's word to strengthen their faith. So it doesn't necessarily work for a large section of history. When it comes also to baptism and the Lord's table, these are what we would call physical means, where we actually taste and feel and see.

Baptism, Union with Christ, and the Lord's Table

So we hear God's word in the preached word, and then we actually physically interact with the means of grace. When we think about baptism, we are buried into the likeness of his death and raised in the likeness of his resurrection.

We are experiencing physically what happens to us spiritually, and we look back to our baptism to remind us that we are one with Christ because we've been cleansed and we've been united. We're in common union with Christ, and this is what communion means.

Those believers who are in common union, we come together in communion and receive from Christ his body and his blood so that we can have our faith strengthened. We're looking to the cross for what Christ has done every time we take communion, not to what we have done, not our faithfulness, but Christ's faithfulness to us.

Prayer, Dependence, and Other Secondary Means

And then in prayer, what are you doing in prayer? You're depending upon God, because every time that you go to him confessing your sin, go to him with a need, or even praise for who he is, you are depending on God outside of yourself.

So prayer is another form of dependence. We receive God's word to strengthen us, we receive the sacraments to encourage and strengthen us, and we also pray to receive his grace to strengthen us. It's through these primary means that God uses to strengthen and mature us.

So God can and does use other means throughout Scripture. Even fellowship is an important means by which God uses, but they are not the primary means by which God has promised to strengthen our faith.

So that's where we want to focus our attention, trusting in what Scripture has handed us to be the primary means in which God will fulfill his promises and maturing and strengthening our faith.