Lesson 9 – Day 1

How I am Researching Grace

When many people think about grace, they believe the subject is the prayer that many grew up with at the dinner table, the prayer of grace over the food.  Grace has some powerful anointings in it, and it is much, much more than a prayer, it is an anointing from God.

Grace is a spiritual force to beautify a personality, of a person, of a thing, even of a building or of a piece of land.  Let’s look at the first usage of the word “grace” in the New Testament in Luke 2:39-40,

“When they had performed everything according to the Law of the Lord, they returned to Galilee, to their own city of Nazareth.  The Child continued to grow and become strong, increasing in wisdom; and the grace of God was upon Him.”

The word “grace” here in the Greek text is the word “charis”.  The reason that I want you to know the Greek or Hebrew words behind the English translation, is many thoughts and ideas get lost in translation.  So we want to know the original meaning and intent of the passage that the authors intended.  Both the Greek and the Hebrew writers used “shades of meanings”, to give the reader a specific idea or impression.  We will do this first with this word charis.  To investigate this word charis, we will also refer to what is known as “The Strong’s Concordance”.  To give you understanding as to how I do research using the Strong’s Concordance, here is Wikipedia’s page on the origin and operation of Strong’s.[1]

“The Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible, generally known as Strong’s Concordance, is a Bible concordance, an index of every word in the King James Version (KJV), constructed under the direction of American theologian James Strong. Strong first published his Concordance in 1890, while professor of exegetical theology at Drew Theological Seminary.

Strong’s Concordance provides an index to the Bible. This allows the reader to find words where they appear in the Bible. This allows the reader to find words where they appear in the Bible. It also lets the reader directly compare how the same word may be used elsewhere in the Bible.

Strong’s numbers.  Each original-language word (Hebrew or Greek) is given an entry number in the dictionary of those original language words listed in the back of the concordance. These have become known as the “Strong’s numbers”. The main concordance lists each word that appears in the KJV Bible in alphabetical order with each verse in which it appears listed in order of its appearance in the Bible, with a snippet of the surrounding text (including the word in italics). Appearing to the right of the scripture reference is the Strong’s number. This allows the user of the concordance to look up the meaning of the original language word in the associated dictionary in the back, thereby showing how the original language word was translated into the English word in the KJV Bible.”

This is where my research begins.  Anyone who wants to become a serious student of the Bible, makes the Strong’s Concordance the 2^nd book added to his library, after the Bible. To purchase a copy of the Strong’s, click here[2] 

In later lessons, I will take you behind the scenes, and show you my library and body of work and filing systems, that I have developed over the last 40 years. 

Now that you know why I am referencing “Strong’s”, let’s look at an actual excerpt on this word Grace, in Greek, “charis”.

Our prayer for today,

Father, I thank You today for giving me a spirit of wisdom and show me the deeper things of Your word!  As I study Grace, I know that Your Spirit will reveal Himself to me, in Jesus’ mighty name, amen.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strong%27s_Concordance

[2] https://davidgonzalezministries.org/?product=the-new-strongs-expanded-exhaustive-concordance-of-the-bible-hardcover

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