Whosoever is Entitled to Grace
Yesterday, my blog was about our speech being infused with God’s grace to others. But I realized I needed to back up and put an emphasis on the unmerited favor and grace of God to my readers today.
No matter who you are or where you come from; no matter what you’ve done or how many times you’ve done it – there is grace for you. If you live under a constant sense of unworthiness, feeling like you never quite measure up – there is grace for you.
If you struggle with always trying to earn God’s approval, or someone else’s, for that matter – there is grace for you.
If you struggle to let go of the past, to let go of some hurt that was inflicted on you or to forgive the person who inflicted the damage – there is grace for you.
If you are fighting with an addiction or some habitual, besetting sin – there is grace for you.
There is grace for everyone if we will open our eyes and our hearts to it!
Some people are concerned that what I might be saying about God’s grace, is a license to sin. Truth is we all mess up. We have all done things we aren’t proud of. But in all of that, there is a loving God who keeps moving us forward.
Once we understand God’s amazing grace really does cover us in all the ways we need to be covered – we will come to see that this grace that covers us also empowers us to change, to grow, even to be formed into the likeness of Christ.
Grace doesn’t just cover us – grace transforms us. Knowing how much God loves us makes all the difference in the world in the kind of people we will become.
This is the grace that swept up a ragtag collection of saints and sinners throughout the ages. It is the same grace that “fallen” pastors and leaders can grasp for themselves. No matter who we are or our social or economic status, when we get hold of it – or better yet, when it gets hold of us – we will feel like a prisoner set free.
I don’t want to wear the old skin of joyless Christianity. I shed that skin a long time ago. And, how sweet it is to be wearing joy-filled, grace-filled Christianity.
My simple hope and prayer is that we love God more because we more fully understand how much God loves us. St. Paul’s closing prayer for Ephesus’ believers was that they “may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that they may be filled with all the fullness of God” (Ephesians 3:18-19).
That’s quite a prayer – to comprehend the incomprehensible, to know the unknowable. That is why I join Paul in making this my prayer: because I know the things you need to see are above my pay grade to show you.
But I also know God who delights in you, Who hovers over you even now; Who desperately longs to open your eyes to see AMAZING grace. When you understand how loved you are, it changes how you love others and you learn how to extend the same grace that is constantly extended to you.
No matter how much you grasp the beauty of God’s love for you in any given minute, there is always more. That is God’s amazing grace.