Untiring Grace

Those who fear the coming triumph of grace sadly don’t know the love of which they are afraid.

They want a “gospel” that is really not “good news”—for its litany of “should,” “ought,” and “must” betrays that they don’t understand Jesus as the Author and Finisher of our faith.  They replace the long obedience of grateful love with hours of clenched teeth and self-flagellation, hoping He will notice and approve. They forget that “by His stripes we are healed.”

But I’m a witness that a day will come when each will meet the Love that will not let them go. Grace always knocks at shut doors, closed hearts, and frozen lives, awaiting that glad moment when we admit our helplessness and need.

If you know grace, then you’ve been warmed.

So stay in grace.

Grace Under Fire

Even in our ungracious world, there’s persisting admiration for the man or woman who demonstrates “grace under fire”—poised and composed under disheartening provocations. “It’s just a part of her character,” we enviously say, remembering how frequently we’ve fought our fires with fire.

And while there may be some gallant souls who didn’t consciously learn this grace from God, most we admire act graciously because they know the Giver of this gift.

Our growing awareness of how much we’ve been broken and how well we’ve been redeemed helps us sympathize with other broken people. It makes us long—yes, ache—to see their lives restored, renewed, rehealed. We live to give away what we’ve been given.

Grace had its origin in a love outside of us. It has its present—and its future—in loving well beyond ourselves.

So stay in grace.

The Number of Forgiveness

When we ask, “How often should I forgive?” we pretend what isn’t true—that there have only been a modest number of times when we required forgiveness. 

The answer from the Lord—and from an honest conscience—is that we ought to forgive as many times as we have been forgiven.  That number is unknowable, and, truth be told, steadily growing. 

Forgiveness is a way of being, not a sin-by-sin accounting system designed to make us all good recordkeepers.  It’s in the heart of Jesus to “not hold our sins against us,” to fully, wholly, and yes, joyfully erase the record of our sins when we confess and leave them.  And we’ll do the same for others when we candidly admit how much we’ve been forgiven.   

Grace knows no integers, no fractions, and no decimal points.  This is the life we live when we go walking with the Lord.

So stay in grace.

THE CHOICE THAT HEALS

Grace is always a choice—when God extends it to us, or we extend it to each other.

The decision to forgive, to not hold someone’s sins like death shrouds up against them, is always made in light of other options. No one can require God to love us unconditionally and forgive us unreservedly, for we are the broken, foolish ones who willfully transgressed His law.

And when the broken, foolish people around us disappoint or damage us, grace is a choice we make in echo of God’s kindness.

Only wounded hearts can offer forgiveness: only those with power to mete out penalties and vengeance can pour out grace instead. We are never more like Jesus than when we gift to those who injure us what neither they nor we deserve.

So stay in grace.

THE DAWN OF TRUST

Is there a greater joy than knowing for even one hour that you are in the center of God’s will—that through some miracle of grace, you are aligned with plans the Father made to win you back and win the hearts of those you love?

Is there a better confidence than the one which every Sabbath reminds you that “the earth is the Lord's, and the fullness thereof; the world, and they that dwell therein”? 

Can there be a deeper security than when Christ’s word of certainty penetrates your fears and doubts with the assurance, “He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together”?

The answers to those questions, friends, are “no,” “no,” and “no”—nothing "will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

Your hope will rise; your joy will find its wings. Trust is the dawn from which our daylight grows.

So stay in grace.

All of Grace, Grace for All

“He’s so much better than I am,” we say, proving just how little we know of someone else’s life. “She’s a saint,” we say admiringly, assuming that the woman we can see is always just as good as we imagine.

We assign a top-notch grade to behaviors we observe, and make assumptions that the life consistency we can’t achieve is somehow available to others.

But grace reminds us of the brokenness we share—each one of us—regardless of the estimate of others. Behind the fair façade of piety and cool, we each know just how far we fall below the expectations of our God—and how each well-lived life is only, always, saved by grace.

All ranks, all grades, all estimates are vanities and not realities. If you can find a soul not absolutely saved by grace, then you have found the rarest form of human life.

Give up your search: there is no other way.

And stay in grace.

Gracefully Wrong

Most of us inherited a God no kinder than we were—a deity whose major role seemed meting out tough penalties for willful or impetuous mistakes. 

Like primitive believers everywhere, we read His displeasure in thunderstorms, bruised knees, and lost puppies—for was there anything for which we weren’t somehow to blame?

So it is that finding grace is the great unlearning of our past, the sweet and joyful discovery that in Jesus, our sins aren’t being counted against us. What we sang in innocence was actually, fundamentally true: “Jesus loves me”—genuinely loves me. He can’t imagine a greater happiness than enjoying my trust and affection.

How glorious to have been wrong about it all—to celebrate the truth that undermines our youthful foolishness and fear. His perfect love still casts out fear, and makes us wise unto salvation.

By grace, our thinking—and our living—is renewed. So stay in grace.

The Hero of the Story

We come naturally by our self-absorption. From our earliest moments, we’re congratulated for taking first steps, trying new foods, mastering new skills, for learning how to navigate the myriad complexities of an ever-widening world. The story is, and has always been, about us—our goals, our striving, our gaining, our getting.

But then one day the world refused to be our private oyster.  There was no pearl inside—just grit and sand and disappointment. And we began to long from somewhere deeper than the ocean floor for rescue from our pain, our foolishness, our disillusion with ourselves.

Enter the selfless hero who became one of us to teach us how to find the joy. The Pearl of great price offers each of us His priceless grace. In Jesus, we discover One who never disappoints, who never falls short of saving us, who never walks away in righteous indignation from our follies and our failures. He’s the friend who knows both when to speak and when to be silent, when to laugh and when to weep—the incomparable companion who merged His story with our own. “In Him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28).

His gracious offer of relief and liberation alters every other storyline. And yes, this hero always gets the last word.

So stay in grace.

PLAYFUL, JOYFUL, WE ADORE THEE

It’s every parent’s greatest joy to see a child at play—freely, joyously at play. And children—of whatever age—only play when they understand they’re safe—deeply, seriously safe.

We don’t play on battlefields, in lightning storms, or when we doubt we’ll ever see tomorrow. And so the God of Scripture frequently must wait until we’ve outlived our fears before we grasp the fullness of His affection. We spend a lifetime learning just how richly we are loved, and why our God is always murmuring, “Fear not.” “Be not afraid.” Or better yet, “You can stop being afraid now.”

Our Father is supremely patient, waiting for the day when we—at last—discover how kind He has always been, and grow accustomed to His goodness. “Therefore the Lord waits to be gracious to you” (Isaiah 30:18).

Unwind the spool of anxious thoughts that keep you wondering if you are loved, if Jesus deeply values you. Your joy today will be in measure with your trust.

And stay in grace.

Better Than We Know

At the heart of all we call our faith is a deepening trust that God’s heart is kinder than we were taught and more persistent than we ever knew.

For Him, all comparisons ultimately fall short. He is wiser than the best father; more nurturing than the most empowering mother; more companionable than the closest sibling. “There is a friend who sticks closer than a brother” (Prov 18:34).  

And He offers us, both now and in the end, what family never can—a relationship that transcends our relatives’ best moments and redeems their worst dysfunctions.

God’s grace is the unyielding embrace of One whose love cannot be won, or lost, or altered, or improved.

Receive the grace you were destined for. And stay in it.

Grace Kneels

Ah, to be the wounded one—the one who gets to be the powerful forgiver.  We covet this rare role because we’re usually more sinning than we’re sinned against.  And when it comes our turn to show the grace once given us, we linger with the choice, as if it were a heavy thing to pardon what’s been done.

We can’t, of course, refuse forgiveness outright:  Jesus tied our own forgiveness to the habit of forgiving.  But first, a little groveling, we say.  Some real contrition, perhaps a tear or ten.  Some promises to never—ever—injure us again.

And so we fall far short of grace.  We strike a lender’s bargain with the sinner:  pardon only if the penitent submits to our superiority. 

But grace is always washing someone’s feet—abandoning all power in the goal to make the sinner whole.  We cannot—dare not—charge for what was freely offered us.  If it’s not free, then it’s not grace.

Remind yourself of how forgiveness made you valuable to you.  And stay in grace.

The Canopy of Grace

No solo star will make the night sky glow, or cause a child to wonder, or make us long for heaven. It takes a universe of lights—some bold, some near, some strangely warm—to build the canopy on which we see great sights and dream our greater dreams. So it is among believers: we are never solo stars. We all are stars in constellations built by God: your strength; my song; her witness; his compassion. There are, my friends, no accidents in how we come to faith. The great Creator so arranges lives and times that we find light—and we discover grace—through all who “shinelikestars in the world” (Phil 2.15). Discover now the joy of sharing faith with those Christ knows will build your hope. And stay in grace.

Sunrise Before Dawn

In the deepest of our darkness; 

When doubts were all that we believed; 

When stones of death had pressed to flatness 

Every glint of light or joy—

Just then the God-man stirred Himself;

Unwound the death-shroud from His face, 

And strode forth from our common cave to shout, 

“No power can keep Me in the ground!” 

This is the day our fears had claimed would never come. 

But here it is—and here He is—

Alive, so gloriously alive!

May hope and joy be resurrected—

For you; in you; with you; through you.

Now and always.

Stay in grace.

The Breath of Grace

Sometimes in a harried week, the Spirit’s voice breaks through with bell-like clarity: “You aren’t your own:  you’re bought with a price.”  Believers thus don’t own themselves—their work, their worship, marriages, or mortgages.  All things belong to Him whose grace still flows to deeply-wounded lives.  Grace heals all our brokenness—especially the pride that makes us claim all things depend on us. If Jesus is before all things—if all things hold together just because of Him (Col 1:17)—then we may trust all things to Him.  Breathe deeply of the joy best known when letting go and letting God.  And stay in grace.

The Gift of Grace

We dream of grace the way a child dreams of birthdays, imagining that once a year God might be as good as Scripture says He is.

And then to learn that God is good on every day; that Jesus is unimaginably and unchangeably kind; that He forgives our sins without resenting us, and embraces us as though we had given Him some great gift—this fills our mouths with holy laughter and all our days with deep amazement. It is not what we expected: it is not what we deserve.

We are the “gifted” ones—the blessed—on every day, in every way. 

Stay in grace—

Grace for Prodigals

“I once was found, but now am lost;

Had sight, but now am blind.”

Does grace still reach for us when we walk—or run—away from goodness? When we turn our backs toward home and seek amusements in a far country?

Nothing could be clearer than that Jesus is the Lord of second chances. When we have traded gold for trash, and walked away from all that’s holy, just, and good, we are—amazing!—not only eligible to return, but wrapped in welcome when we do.

Grace doesn’t wait on the front porch until the prodigal comes home. Grace follows him through every bad choice, each wasted opportunity until homesickness happens.

“I will arise and go to my Father,” we say, afraid the grace we knew might have been drained while we were gone. But then we feel the Father’s arms around us; we find how well the Father’s robe still fits; we taste the Father’s food in our mouths. And we can’t deny—or ever fully understand—the love that will not let us go.

“And grace will lead me home.”

Blessed Assurance

Is there a greater joy than knowing for even one hour you are in the center of God’s will—that through some miracle of grace, you are aligned with plans He made to win you and the ones you love?

Is there a better confidence than the one that every week reminds you “the earth is theLord’s,and everything in it, the world, and all who live in it”?

Can there be a greater security than when Jesus’ word of certainty penetrates your fears and doubts with the assurance, “He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together”?

The answers, my friend, are “no,” “no,” and “no”—"nothing will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

Your hope will rise; your joy will grow. 

Christ will keep you in perfect peace as you stay in grace.

Surprised by Grace

The grace of Jesus is endlessly surprising. 

When we’ve accomplished something big and lungs are swelling with self-importance, His quiet word advises us, "Humble yourself in the sight of the Lord."   

And when we’re feeling so low and wretched about ourselves that we think no one so holy and pure as Jesus would ever want anything to do with slime like us, His grace invites us—"Whoever comes to me, I will never cast out."   

When we’re planning revenge on an enemy who has wounded us and made us bleed, grace pries the anger from our fists: "Turn the other cheek,” He says.  “Love those who persecute you." 

And when we’re sure we’ve blown it big and ruined all our chances at forever, grace grips us with a love that never lets us go: "God sent the Son into the world, not to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through Him.

Grace is God’s always unexpected gift. 

So stay in grace.

Written in Red

The storyline is sadly clear: our foolish, broken choices lost for us what heaven gladly gifted us. 

But there is more to write: grace takes the pen, and writes—in red—“FORGIVEN” over all our sins. 

And then, like learning how to write again, we trace new characters that spell out “kindness,” “service,” “loyalty” and “love.” 

The story is not finished until He Who calls Himself the Word actually writes the last word. The Author of our faith will yet be the Finisher of it. And grace will lead us home.

So stay in grace. 

Unfettered Joy

Grace is a holiday—a holy day—that breaks the graveyard shift of sin. If grace does not result in joy, it's just because we've told it wrong or added foreign matter to it.

The rescued and forgiven heart leaps up to love the Lord, and only later learns to ask, “What may I do in gratitude?" 

His gift is proved more true and sweet when we take long vacations from our fears: that rippling laughter overhead is Jesus joining in our joy.

When He says "grace," He never adds a "but" or "yet"—or warns us to get back to work to earn what He has given. 

He who was and is and is to come is always God's delighted "Yes!" to us.