You could say, grace is God's immense and undeserved favor freely given to the helpless and woefully undeserving. Grace is God's immense and undeserving favor freely given to the helpless and woefully undeserving, the condemned.

Grace is simply defined as unmerited favor. God favors or gives us good things that we do not deserve and could never earn. Rescued from judgment by God's mercy, grace is anything and everything we receive beyond that mercy.

Grace is receiving something. We don't deserve. It's a gift and Like you said because it's not deserved. We would call it unmerited. That's where the term you use Frank. Unmerited means it's undeserved so When we talk about salvation We deserve Justice we deserve God's wrath.

When we don't get what we deserve, which is that eternal punishment, that is God showing his grace. Grace is giving good things from God to man when man has no way of deserving it or meriting it. Grace is often referred to as a gift in scripture.

Well, to get back to grace alone specifically, when we say, you know, demerited favor, basically what we're saying is, you come to God, not empty -handed. I mean, we like to say we come empty -handed, but we come with our hands full, full of sin.

So grace is not just holding back punishment. That's mercy. Grace is giving the undeserved gift the sometimes defined as undeserved favor and. So when we talk about grace tonight. Understand that everything we're going to talk about either common grace or saving special grace either way.

Have you discarded grace in other words? You've put faith in a prayer a church or a pastor.

Grace is gift. Grace is not giving you what you deserve that's justice and it's not holding back what you deserve which is mercy but it's giving you something that you don't deserve. It's giving you something that you have not earned.

The term used by the people who advocate that is pure grace. They call it pure grace. And it comes in all kinds of packages. But basically what they're, basically they're saying grace is so much grace that if you put anything into salvation at all, you have fouled up grace.

To fully understand grace, we need to consider who we were without Christ and who we become with Christ. We were born in sin and guilty of breaking God's holy laws. As his enemies, we deserved death. We were unrighteous and without means of justifying ourselves.

Grace amazing or is it a custom? What do you suppose? He means by a customed grace taken for granted expected Grace. It's boring and I came up with a third category, which I call presumed grace, which is you know what we so often see you know it's a salvation or grace by death.

Well, to get back to grace alone specifically, when we say, you know, demerited favor, basically what we�re saying is you come to God, not empty -handed. I mean, we like to say we come empty -handed, but we come with our hands full, full of sin.

Concept of grace you have on one hand if You're talking about the legalist and if you're talking about the Roman Catholic and the Eastern Orthodox and you have Even in an existence in some Pentecostal circles especially old -school Pentecostals you have a grace That merely gives people a jumpstart and a clean slate to work with you have people Getting saved and lost sometimes every week in certain circles and The grace itself Does not transform the lost sinner then on the other end of the spectrum an equally dangerous heresy Is the idea that all grace is intended to do? is to forgive the sinner and this the Unrepentant sinner who? raises his hand and goes forward at an altar call or Any way that he is invited to receive Christ into his heart by reciting a prayer.

You might not accept it. But you'll only prove my point if you resist. Irresistible grace is that special grace of God which comes to dead sinners and creates in them a new desire, a new will, a new hope, a new principle.

goodwill, creates love for good, creates the capacity to do good, and then Augustine also said of God's grace

What blasphemy, what arrogance. And this is why we might define grace as demerited favor, because what did we really deserve? Nothing from God, but his judgment. As Jonathan Edwards had said, you've contributed nothing to your salvation, but the sin that made it necessary.

Because grace is such a central theme of the Bible, telling someone that they lack grace is like one of the ultimate insults a Christian can offer, and so often, you see it. People will use that phrase.

If you think you've been graced and you couldn't possibly handle any more grace, God saved you, He graced you. He then gave you spiritual gifts and graced you more. There's more grace coming, and that grace is later.

So grace would be God's benevolent favor towards us, which allows us to transcend nature in order to participate in God through Christ mediating work because God who is the eternal transcending God joined himself to creation in order to bridge the gap.

And so the outline for our text this morning is verses one through five is the rejected grace.