Astounding Grace

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Mar 15, 2016 1821

For where sin abounds grace does much more abound (Rom.5:20).

How totally and utterly outrageous the Christian message of God’s love and of His grace! To the human ear so attune to the sounds of “shape up or ship out,” the message of free grace free for all makes us cringe with wary suspicion that this cannot be the complete deal.

But if there is a bedrock message that the Christian gospel stands for, and wants proclaimed louder than any other, it has to be the message of God’s love freely demonstrated in His death for the world. This demonstration of love and grace is ever so simple and ever so relevant to all people in all walks of life, and throughout all the ages of human history.

Romans 5:20 tells us there is nothing we can do to outdo God’s grace, and there is nothing in heaven and earth greater than God’s grace. There is nothing you can do to make God love you more, and nothing you can do to make God love you less.

This is outrageous and runs absolutely against the grain of human reasoning. It is simply not how we humans do business on planet earth. We may well ask again and again, “What is grace?

• Grace is God saying, “I love you,” even when I hate myself and everyone around me.
• It is God saying, “You’re OK,” when even I myself don’t believe I am.
• It is you and I in the crowd shouting, “Crucify Jesus!” and Jesus saying, “I forgive.”
• It is you spitting at your neighbour, at yourself, and at God, and God saying, “I’m not holding their trespasses against them.”
• It is me holding the hammer in my right hand and the nail in my left hand, and nailing Love, Innocence, Goodness, Kindness, Compassion, Nobility and heavenly Royalty to the cross.
• It is Grace responding with “Father forgive them for they know not what they do.”
• It’s me saying, “You shouldn’t God; I don’t deserve it,” and God saying, “If you deserved it, it wouldn’t be grace.”

This God of grace astounds, confounds, discomfits and perplexes every human bone within us. This is God in Jesus Christ reinventing the wheel of salvation so that you and I would stop going round in circles.