Grace Abounding

On New Year’s Day, to help us remember God will be gracious to us in this current year, I preached from Psalm 136 about how God has continually poured out ongoing grace for his people, and specifically in the life of our church family in Northern Virginia. I listed several works of God that we saw do in our midst in 2011. I’d like to share these answers to prayer in this post, as testimonies of God’s goodness to his people.

• Conversions: We asked the Lord for conversions in 2011, and the Lord opened one business professional’s eyes and she gladly received Christ as Savior and Lord! Numerous others have heard the gospel through evangelistic Bible studies;

• Mercy: A year ago we asked the Lord to provide one of our unemployed senior citizens a job and a good place to live instead of her flooded, mold-filled rental home. He provided a great place for her to stay & remarkably, a job at the front desk of her building. She’s got the shortest commute of anyone at Grace Church!

• Commitment: Here’s a neat statistic–in the last twelve months Grace Church of Alexandria’s membership has grown by 60%, for a total of 61 members. And our new members have been a tremendous blessing to the body, by the ways they love and serve others and by their enthusiasm for the gospel and God’s work in this congregation;

• Healing: We asked for to give healing to a baby boy adopted from China so he could walk, and now he’s tooling around here on his feet every Sunday after successful medical treatment;

• Maturity: Since we are a young congregation, we asked the Lord for families & leaders with more life experience than Garrett or me (we pastors of GCA are in our 30′s). The Lord provided several couples in answer to our prayer, and the church’s demographics have grown by adding mature and seasoned families;

• Relationships with Other Churches: We asked God to provide our church good relationships with other gospel-affirming churches in the community. And so Franconia Baptist Church is now letting us meet in their building as needed with no charge for rent, Engleside Baptist Church invited our lead pastor to present at their annual Missions Conference, and our pastors have been able to preach at several other local churches inside the Beltway;

• Financial Independence: As a church plant, we asked the Lord to give us progress to becoming financially independent from our sponsoring church, Heritage Bible Church. Offerings have just about doubled– we’re just a few months away from becoming a self-supporting local church;

• Adoption: We asked the Lord to open the door by Christmas Day for a member family to be granted permission from the Chinese government to travel to China and pick up the daughter they were adopting. God answered and opened the door for them to pick her up over the holiday and add her to their family!

The blessings of the Lord are too numerous to recount them all. Truly, God is good to his people!

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