Were it not for Grace

WERE IT NOT FOR GRACE

Take every single good deed I have done through 37 years of being a believer, and multiply them by the power of one million, and I could never earn one ounce of God’s redemption. It is all dung and refuse. No matter how long we preach on God’s grace we will never even touch the hem of that garment through words of human understanding. God’s grace is unfathomable and resists all human efforts. It cannot be measured, and just when you place upon it a definition you realize you seem to be just knocking at the door to an eternal library called grace.

The word slides so easily off the tongue and yet its power is inexhaustible. If my sin could throw me out of His grace I would already be a castaway. Where sin abounds, grace much more abounds. Oh yes, all of us in one way or another have tested the strength of His grace. And yet His grace was in reality never tested since it is prefect and far beyond the strength of sin. Once believed, and once given through faith in Christ, the sinner is swept into the family of God, and yet, we still fall short in our own strength. God does not condone sin, but now He deals with us as sons and not as enemies.

Blessed is the man to whom the Lord will not impute sin. That is not a license, that is a revelation of His grace. God cannot lie, and what He has purchased and what He has bestowed He will complete. How can we beckon our limited minds to soar that high? It would have been beyond us if God would have prepared a perfect place for us throughout eternity. But God went further, much, much further. The place in which God has prepared for us is His place. His place? Oh my, how can that be?

Grace, God’s grace. Drenched in blood and bearing those vicious and beautiful scars, grace came forth from the heart of God. Do we dare limit God to our doctrinal volumes, or will we one day see that our doctrines were only the scaffolding but the Risen Christ Himself was where that scaffolding led? Oh yes, the Lord Jesus in all His glory will not only be the proof of God’s grace, but throughout all eternity He will be the living and pulsating expression of that grace. Jesus IS the way and the truth and the life and the mercy and the love and the grace. In Him is where all the promises find their source and destination.

Of course the world cannot understand it, because we ourselves still cling to some bits and pieces of His glory. We ourselves are living as unfinished business waiting to be made complete in His eternal presence. And yet, while we see through a darkened glass it still shakes our being and creates a hunger for more. One day, one day of glory, we will behold the Author of this grace. Not limited to earthly senses, we shall behold Him with a knowledge and experience unknown to any man of woman born. And in order for us to remain living, we will be given new bodies which can survive and even embrace an actual vision of the Lamb of Glory. In His presence we will bask and worship forever. But we would never have this kind of eternity, were it not for grace.

Grace…grace…and only grace.

Watch and listen to this.