God is Gracious is What the Older One Knows

The Lord is gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and great in faithful love.

Wisdom is found with the elderly, and understanding comes with long life.

-Psalm 145:8, Job 12:12 (HCSB)

I have a message for people who are older, likely in their second half of life.  Here it is:

God is Gracious is What You Know.

Based on that fact, there is a right way to live.  For the righteous shall live by faith.  The ones made righteous by God will live through the faithfulness of God.

We live through and by grace.  Grace saves us and grace keeps us.  And that grace is costly grace.  That grace was purchased by the blood of Jesus.  And we should always be filled with awe in regards to God's grace.

The older ones ought to know God's grace.  That is what our lives speak and transmit to the younger ones.  God's grace saves us and God's grace keeps us is what we pass on.

By the time that you are one of the older ones, your life is a testimony that God is gracious.  Younger Christians are learning that God is gracious.  Older ones know it.

Grace from God is always available, but we must appropriate it.  God has paid for it, but we must receive it, take it, walk in it, and work it out in our lives.  It is free, but we must come and buy it, like the term "buy in".

To appropriate means to take, devote, and assign something.  We take God's grace, the same grace that got us saved, and work it into our whole lives.  How is this done?  By courage and perseverance.

See James 5:7-11 and Hebrews 3:6 & 6:11-12.

Older people have learned courage or valor and perseverance or constancy in grace throughout seasons of life.  That's a "seasoned" person.  You get experience through experience.

The older Christian has lived through God's grace and has the testimony of grace woven into their lives.  That fruitfulness comes from walking close to God through life.  Fruit comes from obedience to Jesus words.

We are saved by grace and grace is received by faith.  Grace transforms a life through courageously and perseveringly walking in it through obedience to Christ and dying to self, as his disciple.

_____________________________________________________
The painting above is: Thomas Gainsborough:Peasant Smoking at a Cottage Door