He begins that process initially when you and I are transformed by His grace at the experience which we call salvation or the new birth. That is the beginning of that conforming us to the likeness of Christ and so all the rest of our life, we are moved and directed and influenced in that direction. And there are a lot of things that influence our life, and influences the changes in our life.
For example, our heredity, the way our parents, our grandparents, the way we come along, and then, of course, there’s our environment, the kind of atmosphere which we grow up in. Then there’s the training that we have in school and so forth. And then, of course, the decisions we make. We’re all the composite of all of those things and we’re sort of the sum total of all that: our heredity and our environment, our training, and the decisions that we’ve made.
But the most powerful influence in the life of the believer is not any of those things. The most powerful influence in the life of the believer is the grace of God, the transforming grace of God. As you and I live day by day, by His grace and in His grace, you and I can say with the apostle Paul, “By the grace of God I am what I am.
” I want you to turn, if you will, to 1 Corinthians chapter 15. And this–title of this message is “The Transforming Grace of God,” something that has happened to every single believer and God keeps on working in our life. And in 1 Corinthians chapter 15, the apostle Paul is a good example and I would like to use him as the illustration of this whole idea of the power of God to transform a person’s life from what they were to what they are and what, of course, we’re going to be.
So in this 15th chapter, which is his most complete exposition of what the resurrection is all about, he begins early, talking about what the gospel is and how Jesus Christ appeared to him. In the process of talking about that, he says in verse 9: “For I am the least of the apostles who am not fit to be called an apostle because I persecuted the Church of God.
But by the grace of God I am what I am, and His grace toward me did not prove vain, but I labored even more than all of them, yet not I but the grace of God with me. Whether then it was I or they, so we preach and so you believed.” The apostle Paul says the grace of God was not given to him in vain, that is, it did not–it did not remain barren.
