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Great Grace - Clip 3 - Cling & Do Not Depart

By Michael Pearl

Transcription

Michael Pearl: Romans 5:17, “For if by one man’s offence death reigned by one; much more they which receive abundance of grace and of the gift of righteousness shall reign in life by one.” So, it’s an abundance of grace. “Moreover,” verse 20, “the law entered, that the offence might abound. But where sin abounded, grace did much more abound.” So, he said grace out-abounds sin.

When I go to the prisons and I minister to some of those people, I’ve told them, “Don’t tell me what you’ve done; if you did, I might would rather shoot you than preach to you.” Some of those people…Vlad was telling me about going down for a special meet with one of the guys, one of the Spanish fellows, and the guy told him what he’d done to get put in there. This guy loves the Lord, has been saved, and is reading the Bible and ministering the Word to the other guys. And so, to Vlad, he was just another guy, like somebody in the church you’d meet; you’d know nothing about them, [to you] they’re just a born again child of God, a Christian. This guy told Vlad what he had done. Vlad said it nauseated him, made him sick. He just didn’t like the guy anymore, didn’t want to talk to him; he didn’t want to be there, and didn’t want to preach to him, when he’d heard what he’d done! And Vlad told me what he’d done. And I was thinking, “Well, maybe when he gets out, then we can kill him or something,” you know. Now, you say, “But that’s awful!” Yeah, it is. But you know what I tell those guys down there? I tell them, “You’d better receive this grace, because you won’t get it from me, and you won’t get it from the sheriffs, and you won’t get it from the court, you won’t get it from your wife, your kids, or from the world.” I said, “This is a grace bigger than anything I can understand. This is a grace deeper and freer than anything I’d ever give. God gave his son to die for your sin, and it pays for all of it — every one of them. No matter how low and depraved, this great grace comes and sanctifies the worst of sinners.”

I have watched the grace of God save people that I didn’t think were savable. I’ve watched the grace of God transform people that I thought were too far gone. Deb had a nephew that was the lowest of the low. He even got to where he was a fire bug; he’d go around burning people’s houses down. He didn’t seem to be emotionally there. He seemed to be intellectually deficient, as well as just mean and ornery and stupid. He was a total loss. Now, I had witnessed to him years ago when he was sixteen or seventeen years old; then we left and we lost contact with him. We heard about some of his doings at eighteen, nineteen years old. The devil had him, one hundred percent. We went to a Bible conference, and, up walks this guy — I didn’t recognize him, Deb did — and he was a little older then, and he was rejoicing in the Lord. Someone had gotten through to him with the gospel and he had been born again!

Down in the prison there was this queer. I remember the first time I saw it; I was walking down the walk and I looked and I said, “There’s a woman prisoner in here!” It had a woman’s figure and everything; I don’t know if it was stuffing or hormones taken, or injections, or what, but it looked like a woman until it turned around and I saw that it was as ugly as a dog’s hind end; it had these scars. But, it came to some of our meetings, and it never got saved…it never did. It was used by different people and by different groups, different gangs in there, and it was their “girl-boy,” as they would call him. It was probably in there when you were in there, Tremaine — do you remember that pretty queer? It got out [of prison] and went to Hohenwald where it was in a halfway house, and some Pentecostal woman went in there to minister, and it got saved. And it was transformed. Now, I would never send a Pentecostal woman anywhere except to make biscuits. But, you know, I don’t do the sending, do I? I don’t have any control over that stuff. God does what he wants to do and he uses all kinds of crooked sticks to do whatever he chooses to do. And so God used a Pentecostal woman to get that thing saved, and turned it into a human being that loved God, that’s going to go to heaven and rejoice in holiness!

I don’t understand the grace of God. It’s deeper than anything I can fathom. It’s broader than anything I could offer, and it goes where no one would ever go — except the suffering, bleeding Lord Jesus Christ.

So, the Bible speaks of clinging to the grace of God. It warns you not to depart from the grace of God. I think that’s a good exhortation — to cling to the grace of God and not depart.

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