Grace does not merely forgive us. It forms us. Grace That Forms is here to help ordinary Christians, and the church, become like Jesus, not by trying harder but by the grace that turns restless hearts into a quiet home for God.
Why This Exists
I am Matthew, vision pastor at Falcon Community Church in Falcon, Colorado, a church where people are finding Jesus, family, and purpose.
Grace That Forms began with a question.
Like a lot of pastors, I was handed some excellent material on spiritual formation, and I watched it do real good in the people I pastor. But it came from another tradition, and the longer I used it the more one question kept surfacing: what do we have?
We belong to the Church of the Nazarene, the largest Wesleyan-Holiness family in the world. If holiness by grace is what God entrusted to us, then we have something to give a church that is hungry to be formed.
That question turned into a calling.
Grace That Forms is my attempt to put the practices of following Jesus into the language of our own tradition, the language of grace, of holiness, of a heart made whole. Not to compete with anyone. To contribute what the holiness movement has always believed: that the grace that forgives and the grace that forms are one grace, and were never meant to be cut in half. Grace does not stop at pardon. It goes on to power, doing its slow and certain work of making us like Christ.
There is a second reason this site exists.
Somewhere along the way I went looking for our material online, and I could not find much of it. Other movements have built something: books, theologians, writers, study Bibles, pastors who can tell you what to read next. We are the largest holiness denomination in the world, and online we are mostly just there.
I do not think that is because we have nothing to say. I think it is because no one has gathered it.
So this is a beginning. Sermon manuscripts, written out and given away. Formation material in our own language. And, Lord willing, a team of writers, pastors, and thinkers from across this tradition who will build what the next generation will need.
Grace that forgives. Grace that forms. One grace, for the age that is coming.
Core Values
01 — One Grace
Titus 2:11-14; Articles VII, VIII, IX, X, XVI
This tradition has never spoken of grace as a single transaction, and this site will not either. Our own discipleship framework, Way, Truth, Life, names the shape of it. There is seeking grace, which goes ahead of us and stirs a desire for God in people who were not looking for him. There is saving grace, which pardons, justifies, regenerates and adopts. There is sanctifying grace, which cleanses the heart and consecrates a whole life to God. There is sustaining grace, which does the long and unglamorous work of keeping a person faithful. And there is sufficient grace, which arrives as strength at the exact place a person has none left. These are not five graces competing for attention. They are one grace moving through a life, and much of what passes for preaching today stops after the second and leaves people believing the rest is up to them.
02 — A Heart Made Whole
Deuteronomy 30:6; Acts 15:8-9; Article X
We believe what this tradition has always believed, that God cleanses the heart, and we will say it plainly rather than softening it to keep the peace. A great many Christians have been told to expect a lifelong stalemate with sin and have never once been told that God offers something better. We also refuse the opposite error, because a pure heart is given in a moment and a mature character is grown across years, and confusing the two has done real harm to people who were promised the wrong thing.
03 — The Manuscript Given Away
2 Corinthians 4:2
Everything preached here is published here, in full and for free. Not outlines, not highlights, not a sample of something you have to buy, but the manuscript as it was actually preached. Pastors in small churches rarely have a budget for resources and almost never have anyone handing them anything, and writing that stays in a drawer has never formed anybody.
04 — Our Own Language
1 Corinthians 2:13; Article X
Other traditions have written beautifully about formation and we have learned from them without apology. But we have our own words, and they are good words. Grace. Holiness. A heart made whole. Perfect love. We use them rather than borrowing, not because anyone else’s are wrong, but because a tradition that stops speaking its own language will eventually stop believing the thing the language was protecting.
05 — Formed in a Church, Not on a Website
Hebrews 10:24-25
Nothing here is a substitute for a congregation. Reading is not discipleship, and a person can spend years consuming excellent material about formation while being formed by nothing at all. If what you find here makes you more content to be alone, it has failed. It exists to send you back into a room with people who know your name and can tell when you are not well.
06 — Honest About the Middle
Philippians 3:12-14
We will not write as though the Christian life were tidier than it is. Grace is certain and the middle is slow, and both of those are true on the same morning. A testimony is meant to give hope to the person who is not there yet, and the moment it is used to shame them instead it has stopped being a testimony.
07 — For the Next Generation
Psalm 78:4-7
We are the largest Wesleyan-Holiness family in the world and we have left very little behind that the people coming after us can actually read. This work is a small beginning on that debt. So anything published here may be preached, taught, adapted and handed out by any pastor, teacher or group leader, with attribution, without payment and without asking permission. The only request is that it not be sold. What this tradition needs is not another catalog. It needs material in circulation.
08 — Still Being Formed
Philippians 1:6
This site carries the name of the work it describes, and that includes the person writing it. I am not published here as someone who has arrived at a settled position and is now explaining it to everyone else. My own understanding is still moving, my writing is still learning, and some of what is posted here I will see differently in ten years. That is not a disclaimer, it is the thing itself. Grace forms the writer or it was never grace.
What We Believe
This site stands inside the Church of the Nazarene. It holds without reservation to her sixteen Articles of Faith, published in full at nazarene.org. Nothing written here is offered as a revision of them.
Two of those articles carry most of the weight of what gets written on this site, so they are worth saying plainly.
Prevenient Grace
Article VII
Grace is already at work in a person long before that person has a word for it. The first movement toward God is never ours alone. It is grace going out ahead of us, waking a desire we did not manufacture and could not sustain on our own. This is why nobody here is treated as a project. The Spirit is already there, and has been for a while.
Entire Sanctification
Article X
After a person is made right with God there is still a work God intends to do in them. This tradition calls it entire sanctification: the heart cleansed of the divided love that keeps pulling us back toward ourselves, and filled instead with a single love for God and neighbor. It is received by faith. It is not earned, and it is not the end of growth. It is the beginning of a life that keeps being formed.
The Journey of Grace
John 14:6
The Church of the Nazarene calls discipleship a journey of grace, and lays it over the sentence Jesus said about himself. The Way is seeking grace, where God goes ahead of a person and makes a road. The Truth is saving grace, where Christ frees us from sin. The Life is everything after: sanctifying grace that consecrates the heart, sustaining grace that carries a person through the ordinary years, and sufficient grace that becomes strength in weakness. That framework comes from Way, Truth, Life by David A. Busic, written for this denomination, and it is the spine of what gets published on this site.
The Mission
Church of the Nazarene
To make Christlike disciples in the nations. The values underneath that sentence are the ground under everything published here: we are a Christian people, we are a holiness people, we are a missional people.
About Matthew
Matthew S.E. Waggoner
Vision Pastor, Falcon Community Church
Matthew Waggoner is the vision pastor of Falcon Community Church in Falcon, Colorado, and the founder of Grace That Forms. He preaches and writes to put the practices of following Jesus back into the language of his own tradition: grace, holiness, and a heart made whole.
He was not raised in a Christian home. He came to faith in Colorado after a flyer for a Christmas Eve service reached the family mailbox, and he began the journey of pastoral ministry at Thorn Creek Church. His first appointment came in 2010, as a youth pastor in West Virginia, where an older pastor told him he needed a life verse, something to cling to. The one that found him is the one nobody chooses: Depart from me, I never knew you. The question it left behind, how does anybody get known, is the seed of everything on this site.
He served five years at a church in Pennsylvania before relocating to Colorado in 2024, and he is in the ordination process toward Elder on the Colorado District. He preaches from the CSB and has been shaped by Tozer, Nouwen, Murray, Chambers, Lewis, and Bonhoeffer as much as by anyone in his own tradition.
He is the author of Grace That Forms: Transforming Our Restless Lives into the Quiet Home of God, The Wound of Compassion: Learning to Bear the Marks of Love, and Bearing the Marks. He volunteers as a tour guide at Glen Eyrie Castle and Conference Center.
Matthew and Alicia have been married more than twenty years and have three children.
Notable Messages
Where to start