I'd like to begin with a word of prayer if you bow with me.

My heart's desire, Lord, is that my words might come like the rain,

that they might fall like the rain, that they might fall like do upon the tender shoots, for I declare your name, O God, and describe greatness to you.

I pray that you would fill me with the Holy Spirit right now.

I pray that you protect us from the evil one who is a God of deceit and confusion and distraction. And I pray that you would transform lives and cause us to be besotted with your greatness.

In Jesus, I pray, amen.

In the material that I got to give me guidance in preparation, there was one sentence that

leaped off the page, I don't know who wrote it, I assume it may have come from Dr Sprawl.

And the sentence was this.

Our goal in the conference is to examine the nature of God as evidenced through his bountiful grace.

Now what was so characteristically

ligandere and biblical about that was the order of things. We are here to examine God through grace through grace, not grace through God.

I don't know if the order grips you or sounds significant to you in our cultural context like it does me,

but for me it's tremendously important. Is God made a means to grace in your life or is grace made a means to God? Does the quest of your life, the passion of your heart, the labor of your mind, terminate on God in whom we live and move and have our being so that grace becomes unspeakably

precious because it carries us safe to God, or is God brought in alongside your planning and

your techniques and your strategies? your means of some manifold graces in your church and in your life.

I want to press this because I think it makes a tremendous difference whether the ultimate treasure in your life is the grace of God or the God of Grace.

I think the most fundamental question standing before American evangelicalism today is whether we will put God or ourselves at the center of grace.

And my passion this morning is to press with all my might the God-centeredness of saving grace.

That we cherish saving grace because it brings us to God.

We do not cherish God because he brings us grace. Now the way I want to do this

is to take about 10 illustrations from the Bible and I don't have

...