I’ve been introducing mgpc to the biblical concept of ‘means of grace’ over the last few weeks. This has also involved reminding them that the salvation the Bible teaches is a corporate experience with individual implications, not an individual experience with corporate implications.
Some folk think that Christian growth primarily should take place in personal or small group contexts.
This could lead Christians to identify private devotional activity, one on one discipling or small groups as the place where they grow as Christians and corporate worship as the place where, responding to that growth, they bring something to God.
Such a view undermines the true significance and meaning of corporate worship, for it is the primary place where God grows Christians.
David Wayne reflects on the biblical and confessing position that God’s grace is ordinarily dispensed through particular means in the context of corporate gathering.
The good news in all of this is that if you go to a church that preaches the Word of God in it’s integrity, meaning it rightly preaches law and gospel, and that offers the sacraments in their integrity, then you have come within the circle of God’s means of grace. Think of the means of grace as a water sprinkler – as the Word is preached and the sacraments are administered they are like water going out from a sprinkler and every blade of grass, or individual, who falls within the circle of that preaching and administration of the sacraments gets dripped on and soaked by the grace of God.
Now, you may be wearing a raincoat when you come to church, doing your best to make sure the water doesn’t get you wet. But that doesn’t change the fact that the grace of God is being poured out.
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