Ok,
God. I get it. There’s something you want me to know about your grace.
Once again I am covering the topic of grace. God really has
been nailing this to me for the past several weeks as I transition into my
sophomore year of college. Amidst my busy schedule and trying not to forget to
breathe, He shows me a glimpse of His grace.
Almost every event I
have been to over the past month, the topics have, in some form or fashion,
been about grace. I think God is telling me something about grace being the true
heartbeat and drive of a Christian. I will probably be reiterating a lot of
stuff from my last blog post, but I really don’t care. I believe that God
really is pounding this into me, and possibly you, for a very, very distinct
reason. And I want to know why.
Being changed by grace makes you live differently. If you
are pardoned for murder by a judge, you most likely would not live in the same
way. I believe grace is something that RADICALLY and BEAUTIFULLY changes your
life. As I said in the post previous to this one, you cannot truly appreciate
grace until you look at what you have been saved from. I used to have a hard
time with this concept. I was saved when I was 8 years old. What had I been
saved from? I surely wasn’t evil was
I? I was not rolling around with the tricycle gangs and making illegal candy
deals on the playground. I was eight. I obeyed my teachers, did my school work,
only pulled my card ONCE (which was totally unjustified, I might add-I cried
for the rest of the day), and obeyed my parents (well…..not all the time). What
was I saved from?
I still messed up. I still was not holy, righteous, or blameless. I think Ephesians 2 sums up the
doctrine of grace quite well:
And you were dead in your trespasses and sins in which you
previously walked according to this worldly age, according to the ruler of the atmospheric
domain, the spirit now working in the disobedient. We too all previously lived
among them in our fleshly desires, carrying out the inclinations of our flesh
and thoughts, and by nature we were children under wrath, as the others were
also. But God, who is abundant in mercy, because of His great love that He had
for us, made us alive with the Messiah even though we were dead in trespasses.
By grace you are saved. He also raised us up with Him and seated us with Him in
the heaves, in Christ Jesus, who that in the coming ages He might display the
immeasurable riches of His grace in His kindness to us in Christ Jesus. For by
grace you are saved through faith, and this is not from yourselves; it is God’s
gift- not from works, so that no one can boast. For we are His creation-created
in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared ahead of time so that we
should walk in them. –Ephesians 2:1-10
We were DEAD in our sins. Dead: no life. We had no life in
us. Not the inhale, exhale, my heart is beating kind of life, but a spiritual
kind of life. Prior to my encounter with Christ as an eight year-old, I had no
life. I was dead in my sin. Anyone can look at an eight year-old and understand
that they sin. All parents can tell you that. “Clean your room,” says the
parent. “No,” says the child (the story of my entire childhood). For all have
sinned and fallen short of the glory of God (Romans 3:23). So where does grace
come in? Grace comes in when a God, who is justified to punish us for our sins,
decides that He will forgive us. That He will give us, as undeserving as we
are, a way to Him. A way to be justified, and stand before Him, clean, pure,
spotless, and righteous. This is the true beauty of grace.
I am currently reading through my notes from 2011 Super
Summer. The first session of Silver School covered Holiness. While reading, I
found this:
“Do not say ‘I am a
sinner saved by grace,’ but ‘I am a saint by Him.’”
How beautiful is this? That we no longer have to linger on
our sins, but get to focus on our righteousness by GRACE.
Grace gives us something the law could not. Grace gives us
God. The law was so impersonal. Grace is so full. Grace connects us to the
Father. Grace gives us LIFE. We have been given a way to reach our prize-the
Father-through grace. His grace is
displayed to us through Jesus Christ.
I will leave you with this last thing I found in my Super
Summer notes:
Saved by grace, Live
by grace
Has grace changed you? If not, there is something terribly,
terribly wrong. I’m sure this is not the end of the road with God teaching me
about His grace, so I can tell you to look forward to me writing about it more.
