What Does Grace Mean

What Does Grace Mean?

With a topic like this I feel like Captain Ahab going after Moby Dick with tartar sauce on his sword.  Eager though I am, and optimistic, this is a daunting topic.  And here I go. 

I think Thomas Merton gives us a great word on grace: “A saint is not someone who is good but one who experiences the goodness of God.

That is grace.  Others have declared it “receiving the unearned favor of God.”

Unearned

Undeserved

I turn to my favorite writer on the subject of grace – Brennan Manning:

“All that is good is ours not by right but by sheer bounty of a gracious God.”

In a later passage from The Ragamuffin Gospel, Brennan says: “My deepest awareness of myself is that I am deeply loved by Jesus Christ and I have done nothing to earn it or deserve it.”

Sometimes … most of the time, I am amazed that God would even recognize me, call to me, and dare to possibly use me, much less forgive me.  But by the grace of God this is possible.  It is a miracle of God’s magnificent grace.

Do you believe that God loves you in sickness and in health, He loves you when you are pretty good and pretty bad? 

Do you believe He loves you when you are brilliantly astute and when you are dumb as a door knob? 

Do you believe He loves you in the singing of the morning birds and in the evening thunder storms? 

Do you believe God loves you when the election goes your way and when we are threatened with nuclear annihilation? 

How about when your daughter is valedictorian, and when your son is in reform school?

Grace says this … God loves us through it all. 

In peace, in turmoil, in good, in bad, in right, in wrong, and in any other metaphorical situation you wish to name, God loves us and His grace is extended to us. 

As the hymn so nicely puts it:

His love has no limits,

His grace has no measure,

His power has no boundary

known unto men;

For out of His infinite

riches in Jesus

He giveth, and giveth

And giveth again.

Philip Yancey puts a nice finishing touch on grace.

“We run toward the light of Christ.  It makes sense for the one who has experienced the power of forgiveness of Christ.  We want to be near the one who accepts us and loves us at our worst.  We feel something in that embrace that other life experiences cannot offer.”

~What’s So Amazing about Grace

What does grace mean?

I am loved, and so are you.  We are loved as we are, not as we should be.

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