The Grace of God and the Wrath of God: Interviews With Steve McVey

By Steve McVey

Steve McVey, founder of GraceWalk Ministries and author of numerous books, talks with us about the grace of God, the love of the Father, and the often-misunderstood topic of God's wrath. Updated in 2015 with a fifth interview.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Grace Communion International
• Release date: Sep 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9781476481210

Steve McVey

Steve McVey is the President of Grace Walk Ministries, a discipleship training ministry located in the metro Atlanta, Georgia area. He is the author of the books Grace Walk, (Harvest House, 1995); Grace Rules, (Harvest House, 1998); Grace Amazing, (Harvest House, January, 2001); A Divine Invitation, (Harvest House, July, 2002); The Godward Gaze, (Harvest House, 2003); The Grace Walk Experience, (Harvest House Publishers 2009); Walking in The Will of God, (Harvest House, 2009); Journey Into Intimacy (Grace Walk Resources, LLC 2008); 52 Lies Heard in Church Every Sunday, (Harvest House 2011); Helping Others Overcome Addiction, (co-authored with Mike Quarles – Harvest House 2012); Getting Past the Hurt When Others Have Wronged Us, 2013; Unlock Your Bible, 2013; The Grace Walk Devotional (Harvest House, 2013); Grace Walk Moments a Devotional (Harvest House, 2014); The Secret of Grace (Harvest House, 2014); and Beyond an Angry God ( Harvest House, 2014). Over 550,000 copies of Steve’s books have been published in fifteen languages. He and his wife, Melanie live in Atlanta. They have four adult children and four grandchildren.

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The Grace of God and the Wrath of God:

Interviews With Steve McVey

Copyright 2015 Grace Communion International

Minor edits 2016

Published by Grace Communion International

Table of Contents

Introduction

The Grace Walk

We Will Never Overestimate God’s Grace

The Father Gets a Bad Rap

What Is God’s Wrath?

The Grace Walk Revisited

About the Publisher

Grace Communion Seminary

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Introduction

This is a transcript of interviews conducted as part of the You’re Included series, sponsored by Grace Communion International. We have more than 130 interviews available. You may watch them or download video or audio at https://learn.gcs.edu/course/view.php?id=58. Donations in support of this ministry may be made at https://www.gci.org/online-giving/.

Grace Communion International is in broad agreement with the theology of the people we interview, but GCI does not endorse every detail of every interview. The opinions expressed are those of the interviewees. We thank them for their time and their willingness to participate.

Please understand that when people speak, thoughts are not always put into well-formed sentences, and sometimes thoughts are not completed. In the following transcripts, we have removed occasional words that did not seem to contribute any meaning to the sentence. In some cases we could not figure out what word was intended. We apologize for any transcription errors, and if you notice any, we welcome your assistance.

Our guest in the following interviews is Steve McVey, founder of GraceWalk Ministries. He is the author of 

52 Lies Heard in Church Every Sunday

A Divine Invitation

Anchored: Five Keys to a Secure Faith

Beyond an Angry God

Getting Past the Hurt: When Others Have Wronged Us

Grace Amazing (a.k.a. Grace Land)

Grace Rules

Grace Walk

Helping Others Overcome Addiction (with Mike Quarles)

Journey Into Intimacy

The God That Grace Kills: Exchanging Religion’s God for the Real One

The Godward Gaze

The Grace Walk Devotional

The Grace Walk Experience 

The Secret of Grace

Walking in the Will of God

When Wives Walk in Grace: Resting in Christ While God Works in Your Marriage

The first four interviews were conducted by Michael Morrison, PhD, Professor of New Testament at Grace Communion Seminary. The fifth interview was conducted by J. Michael Feazell, D.Min., former vice president of Grace Communion International.

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The Grace Walk

Michael Morrison: Steve, you’ve written a book called Grace Walk. It’s sold quite a few copies now, and in the book you describe the story of how you came to an understanding of grace, and I wondered if we could start today by rehearsing that story as to what motivated you to write this book.

Steve McVey: Sure. I grew up in a Christian home. My parents were Christians; they’re both in heaven now. I was taught about the Lord from the time I was a small child. I understood the gospel when I was 8 years old, and by the time I was 16, I was preaching. I preached my first sermon at 16 years old and was very sincere….became a senior pastor at 19. Can you believe that? 19 years old and I was a senior pastor of a church with about 100 people — about 80 of them were over 65, which seemed old to me back then. It doesn’t seem so old these days.

I was sincere in my Christian walk, but little by little I found happening to me what I think happens to a lot of people: my focus began to move, in small increments, away from being on Jesus and began to be more directed toward my own performance — how well I was doing and living the Christian life.

The essence of legalism is thinking that somehow we can make spiritual progress or gain God’s blessings based on what we do, making sure that we do the right things, making sure that we’re keeping all the rules. In the modern church, I think we get grace when it comes to evangelism for unbelievers, but then once people believe, it’s like bait and switch — we turn the tables on them. It’s like "OK, it was grace for you to understand the gospel, but now that you’re a believer, everything’s changed. Now it’s all about you and what you do." I lived that way for the first 29 years of my Christian life. 17 of those years I was a senior pastor.

In my first book, Grace Walk, which was published in 1995, I described how the Lord brought me to a place where I realized that although my heart had been in the right place, my head was in the wrong place. That book starts out with me lying on my face in the middle of the night at 2:00 a.m. crying in my office, as a pastor, saying, If this is the Christian life, it’s overrated, and if this is the ministry, I want out. How’s that for sort of a tease introduction to a book? A pastor who wanted to quit.

MM: It sounds like you’d been a successful pastor, if you had 17 years, and if you then continued to focus on performance, perhaps that’s because you were performing well.

SM: Right. It’s interesting. I write about it in the book, that for many years as a pastor I felt successful. I felt that way. I got that from accolades of other people, the affirmation of my ministry and those kinds of things.

But I began to pray a prayer, and I tell you this is a prayer that the Lord takes seriously. I began to pray a prayer, and I said, Father, I want to know you more intimately than I’ve ever known you. I want to be used by you. I want you to work through my life to impact people with your love, your life, more than I could even imagine it. Then I said this: And whatever it takes, I want you to do it to bring me to that place.

He heard that prayer. I’m making a long story short…I wrote a whole book about it. Shortly after that, I moved from a church where I served as senior pastor in the state of Alabama to Atlanta, Georgia. I moved to Atlanta anticipating that I was going there to build a megachurch, and that I would see unprecedented success in my ministry. The church I was going to had been dying in every measurable way for five years before I got there, but I thought when I got there, things would turn around.

But to my surprise, things didn’t turn around. The church just kept dying, right out from under me. After I had been there a year, that’s when, as I mentioned a moment ago, I was approaching the first anniversary date of my tenure as pastor, and I found myself lying on my face, and I said, If this is the ministry, I want out. If this is Christian living, it’s overrated.

But the ironic thing is that what the Lord used in my life (as he does in all of our lives when he wants to bring us up to a deeper or higher understanding of grace), is he had to bring me to the place where I had discovered my need for grace. You see?

We get grace [i.e., understand it] for unbelievers. But sometimes as pastors, especially, we don’t get it. We think, I’m preaching the Bible, I’m counseling, I’m doing all the things a pastor should be doing. I’m having success with it. The Lord has to work in our lives to bring us to the place where we say, I can’t do what I thought I could do, so that we’ll be open to what he wants to teach us.

MM: So in some ways, failure was good.

SM: Failure is always good, because failure is not the end. Suffering and pain and what we interpret