Grace

GRACE

 

A certain man had a wife and a young daughter. This man was a drunk and rarely held down a job for too long. His family suffered terribly because he hardly provided for his family. They ended up living in a rat infested cellar in Chicago. One day his little girl became seriously ill, and a kind doctor came to that cellar to examine that little girl. Seeing that this child was in grave condition, the doctor reached into his pocket and pulled out some money and told that man to run, not walk, to the drug store and purchase this prescription.

The man left the cellar and as he approached the drug store he saw a saloon. And instead of buying the drugs his daughter needed he went into that saloon like he had so many other times and got drunk. It wasn’t long until his daughter was dead. And some people helped to lay her out for a viewing in the cellar. Some loving person bought her some new clothes and shoes in which to be buried.

The man returned home after being away as he had in the past, and no one saw him come in. But he noticed his daughter’s corpse and saw she was wearing new clothes and shoes. He quietly slipped off those shoes from his dead daughter’s feet and went and sold them in order to buy more alcohol. That man ended up living on the street, a hopeless drunk.

But one day that same man was passing the Pacific Garden Mission in Chicago and went in to find some warmth. There he heard a gospel preacher tell of God’s grace through Jesus Christ and that man was gloriously saved. And he eventually was trained and became an evangelist and was used of God to lead many to Jesus Christ.

How could God save such a man, you ask? Oh my dear brother and sister, we ought to be questioning how God could save someone like you and me. Do not attempt to measure the grace of God by the weight of sin. The vilest among us is a candidate for God’s redemption. One simple but genuine act of faith can save the Charles Manson’s among us. God’s redemption reached Jeffrey Dahmer and Susan Atkins and David Berkowitz and even me. Oh how we measure that which is without measure.

Do you not think God would offer His salvation to the monster who held those three girls captive? Would God withhold His offer from Timothy McVeigh? Would Christ die for the young man who murdered all those children? Did Jesus die for Osama Bin Laden? Does that repulse you? Does it surprise you? Please understand how vile you were and what God’s grace meant to your own soul.

And what was the man’s name whose story I told?

His name was Mel Trotter and you can read his own words HERE.

The word grace has been bandied about and defined in cold theological terms, but God’s grace goes beyond anything we can imagine here on earth. In order to fully understand the grace of God we must fully understand the holiness of God. But we as men have some idea of love and some idea of justice and some idea of mercy, but we have absolutely no idea about holiness. Since we have no holiness of our own we are clueless. Religion has said that holiness is what we do not do. Or religion calls some pompous man “Your Holiness”. But in reality we do not know nor can we know what holiness is. Holiness is the essence of God who is a spirit. And we do not even know what a spirit is.

So here we are partakers of God’s grace struggling to find some acceptable definition that can be shown on some overhead projector or in sermon notes. But find the most repulsive and vile sin, and watch as a sinner practices and even relishes in that sin, and then watch God receive that sinner and make him His child. Perhaps then we can understand what we do not understand...God’s grace.

Where sin abounds, grace does much moiré abound.