The Surprising Revelation of Grace – by Desmond Ford

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Mar 9, 2016 2101

You don’t really have to preach a lot about law because everybody knows something about law. A murderer knows he ought not, a thief knows he ought not, an embezzler knows he ought not, and the adulterer knows he ought not. But you do have to preach about grace because we don’t know grace naturally.

Grace is a surprising revelation. The great Judge, the great Sovereign, the great King who knows everything about me, ought to punish me. He certainly ought not let me get anywhere near where he lives. But grace says that God does not reward us according to our sins or punish us according to our iniquities; that God is exceedingly kind and merciful, forgiving iniquity, transgression and sin.

The picture I like best is in Luke’s account of the Sermon on the Mount when he says God is kind to the unthankful and to the evil. Now most of us feel very sensitive regarding ingratitude, we forget that when Christ healed ten lepers only one came back to thank him. Instinctively we know ten ought to, and we are all hurt by ingratitude. Yet here is a God who is kind to the ungrateful and to the evil, who sends his rain on the just and on the unjust, calls his sun to shine on the evil and the good. So the heavens above where the sun shines is for everybody and the sun so shines so that if there is only one person, provided you are not hiding indoors, you the one person get all the benefits of the sun.

The love of God is like that. All our sins are like a grain of sand compared with the mountain of the love of God, the grace of God. All our sins are like a spark falling into the ocean of the love of God. God is more willing to forgive our sins than a mother is to go and save her child from a burning building.

– Des Ford. Rom 8:27-32. Adapted from “The Theological Dilemma: The Relationship Between Law and Grace.”