Grace Remembered

Grace is an important idea for the Christian. R.C. Sproul calls it “the essence of all theology.” Grace simply defined is “the unmerited favor of God” and is a topic you simply can’t escape in the New Testament (it is used over155 times). Yet, despite the fact that we read about grace in God’s Word, we sing about grace in our churches, and we name our daughters and churches after it – the remembrance of God’s grace does seem to be noticeably absent in our day-to-day lives. Sure, we tack “by the grace of God” or “all by God’s grace” at the end of sentences at times, but if you were to scan back through all the conversations you have had over the last week, how many of them were dominated by or centered around the topic of grace?

Too often when we speak of God’s grace, we relegate the conversation or the topic to God’s saving grace. But what about God’s sanctifying grace? What about His glorifying grace? What about His persevering grace, or preserving grace? Biblically, there is so much to God’s unmerited favor toward us even beyond our salvation. Grace isn’t merely the thing that puts you into God’s kingdom; it is so much more than that. We would do well to study and understand the grace of God – and to speak about its power and effect in our lives. Christian, you would do well to remember grace’s role in our lives. Because ultimately that is the problem, isn’t it? We are distracted away from the grace of God, and we focus on seemingly everything else.

Where does this problem come from? We are prone to wander from the grace of God because we are so prone to forget the grace of God. We have become grace amnesiacs, unable to recount or recall the the intimate details of God’s grace with any type of clarity or conviction. We remember so well that “your adversary, the devil, is prowls around like a roaring lion seeking someone to may devour,” but we so often forget that “goodness and lovingkindness will pursue me all the days of my life.” This isn’t because we don’t have enough grace in our lives; it is because we don’t rehearse and remind ourselves of this grace with the same gusto that we do the other areas of the Christian life. We are well versed in our sin. We talk about it a lot; we confess it; we ask people to hold us accountable for it; we ask for forgiveness for it – as well we should! These are all good and godly things to be doing, but are we as well versed in the grace that abounds even more than the sin? Do we put in the same amount of energy to see grace embraced and remembered as we do to see sin killed? In the scales of your heart, which side seems to have more weight placed upon it: God’s grace or your sin? We would do well to see these scales more balanced. To know that the sin on the scale has been bought and paid for by “the grace of God that has appeared bringing salvation to all men.”  We would do well to train ourselves to spot grace the same way we spot sin. The Christian ought to be better skilled at spotting the works of God’s grace in the life of their fellow Christian than the works of the flesh. Yes, Christian, kill sin, put off the deeds of the old man – and also put on the deeds of the new man. This is what a heart that has been transformed by grace should pursue.

So let us seek to make the grace of God as important to us as it was to the authors of the New Testament. Let us greet one another with grace, pray for others to have grace abounding in their lives, recall to each other of God’s overwhelming grace to us, point out where we can see grace’s effect in the lives of believers, and leave one another with a reminding word of the powerful grace of God. Let us practically put grace in its proper place in our lives as “the essence of all theology.”