God’s Ways of Grace – Foundations of a Worldview

God’s Ways of Grace
Foundations of a Worldview

“Now therefore, I pray, if I have found grace in Your sight, show me now Your way, that I may know You and that I may find grace in Your sight.” Exodus 33:13

Where would the people of Israel learn the disciplines necessary to enable them to overcome their sinful inclinations and keep focused on God and His vision for them?

They were not to invent practices that seemed like good ideas to them. The incident of the golden calf, followed by the tragedy of Aaron’s sons, would have made that abundantly clear.

Nor were they to borrow ideas from the surrounding pagan nations. Indeed, God insisted that they must not seek or worship Him like the pagans did, for their ways were abominable to Him.

So what should they do? Where should they look? If they could not rely on their own best thinking and were forbidden from borrowing practices from unbelieving peoples, how would they know how to seek the Lord and gain His promises?

Moses understood. If you need something in order to do what God has required of you, go to Him to get it. God in His grace has saved us; in His grace He will lead us into even greater grace as we seek to know His ways.

God would explain to His people everything they needed to know and do in order to enter His glory and achieve His promises. All they had to do was listen to Him and do what He said.

This may seem obvious; however, it was not at all obvious to Israel, recently delivered from slavery. And apparently it’s not all that obvious to many believers today, given the sad state of the practice of spiritual disciplines in the lives of so many of the followers of Christ. We have some sense that we should be doing something to get to know the Lord, but have we really sought out God’s will for our disciplines, as He makes it plain in His Word?

Spiritual disciplines are indispensable to knowing the Lord and gaining His promises. But we must apply ourselves only to those disciplines which God has shown us, and to all the disciplines He has provided, in just the way He intends for us to use them. Then the blessings of His covenant will begin to be ours with greater consistency and power.

If we would advance toward God’s vision and lay hold on His promises, we must commit to doing so in His way, using the disciplines He prescribes as the ways into deeper and greater measures of His grace.

The book of Ecclesiastes is a crucial resource for understanding the Biblical worldview against the backdrop of our secular age. Follow T. M.’s studies in Ecclesiastes by downloading the free, weekly studies available in our Scriptorium Resources page at The Fellowship of Ailbe. Click here to see the weekly studies available thus far.

Want to grow your own spiritual disciplines as you learn more about the unseen realm? Order a copy of The Landscape of Unseen Things, T. M.’s 24-lesson study of that realm which anchors our Christian worldview.

Except as indicated, Scripture taken from the New King James Version. © Copyright 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

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In the Gates is a devotional series on the Law of God by Rev. T. M. Moore, editor of the Worldview Church. He serves as dean of the Centurions Program of the Wilberforce Forum and principal of The Fellowship of Ailbe, a spiritual fellowship in the Celtic Christian tradition. He is the author or editor of twenty books, and has contributed chapters to four others. His essays, reviews, articles, papers, and poetry have appeared in dozens of national and international journals, and on a wide range of websites. His most recent books are The Ailbe Psalter and The Ground for Christian Ethics (Waxed Tablet).