In every believer, there is a defining moment that forever changes our lives. We encounter a living Person, bringing all that He is as the substance of faith to us. Yet, what is it that anchors a person to be solidified in faith? What does faith look like after that defining moment?
The Bible presents a key in the life of Abraham. Abraham encountered that living Person, revealing love and grace to him through His presence. But this encounter was not an end to itself; it was to accomplish the Lord’s purpose in time, to be a living testimony of His called-out ones on the earth (Heb. 11:8). Abraham’s faith was solidified through an accumulation of grace — not just through those moments of “instant grace” — by encountering the Lord over time. Even in Abraham’s failures, unfaithfulness, calculations, and faulty reliance on his own strength, he gained a spiritual maturity from the Lord. Abraham responded to the Lord throughout all types of encounters, a lifelong “accumulating” process to become a person with a powerful testimony richly constituted with grace: someone with substance, with purpose, with understanding, with faith. He gained the One pursuing him in love and mercy as his rich supply — accumulating grace for a life of tenting, being transformed by the work of the Spirit from an “exalted father” to a true pattern, the “father of a multitude.”
Just like Abraham, we have our beginning in the Lord, and, in this age, the reality of a life of tenting as the church. We may also have miracles — specific moments of the Lord coming to us as grace in our lives. But do we recognize those moments to constitute and accumulate in us? Today, we need to move beyond seeking special, private feelings. Instead, we must receive and gather the grace hidden in each sovereign encounter so that we are equipped, constituted with the wealth of Christ, ready to feed, minister, and deposit the richness of Christ that’s been stored up in us into others. Grace, issuing from His love, is not just for the moment, but for the multiplication of life in hope. This life in hope is for something much greater, much grander than we once knew:
But as it is, they long after a better country, that is, a heavenly one. (Heb. 11:16a)
(Above are notes of fellowship taken from a gathering on 7/14/2024, not reviewed by the speaker.)