Purpose

Grace Upon Grace

Recently I have been thinking a lot about grace. Grace, as I have often heard defined, is “getting something good you don’t deserve.” Obviously, the best and most obvious example of grace is salvation that has been afforded us through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Yet oftentimes, this is where our consideration of grace ends.

 

John 1:16 however states that through Christ we have received “grace upon grace” (ESV). God’s ultimate grace comes through repentance and faith in Christ, but God’s grace is lavished on us through the fact that the sun shines another day, through the encouragement word of a friend, and through the comfort He provides the brokenhearted. God’s grace is abundant. And as the Psalmist often writes his “steadfast love endures forever” (see Psalm 136). God’s grace and love are extravagant, abounding and eternal.

 

What this has reminded me of is that we can be tools of God’s grace. Again, while the most excellent example of this is sharing the Gospel, we can also be instruments of grace by being quick to forgive, by showing love to those who don’t show love to us, and by serving others even when we can’t rightly expect anything in return. To do these things, and to do them for the sake of Christ, makes us ambassadors of His grace. And as we pour grace into others life, we will appreciate the grace that God gives us even more.

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Relationships

The Easy Serve

If you listen to romantic songs long enough, it can seem that the only genuine expression of love for someone is the grand gesture. TVs and movies give the same impression. Oftentimes it can appear that your love for someone is defined by how much you risk and how big of an overture you make in order to win their affection.

However, like many things in life, reality does not resemble this commercialized representation. People’s experience of relationships, including marriage, rarely match up to the Hollywood expression. This doesn’t mean that great love stories don’t exist – I firmly believe that they do – but the day-in and day-out of life doesn’t make for good TV and so what a “great love story” really looks like, and how it is portrayed on film, bear little resemblance to each other.

Unfortunately, this tension in people’s minds can lead to tensions in people’s homes. Individuals who claimed that they would climb mountains or swim across ranging seas for one another, aren’t willing to (joyfully) pick up the other person’s socks. We claim that we would do anything for the other person, yet we aren’t willing to compromise on where we go out to eat. Our visions of grand gestures are quickly swept aside as we fight for territory, selfish desires, and our way.

In all likelihood one of the reasons that picking up socks and giving way on where we go to dinner doesn’t feel like expressing love is because they seem like such “trivial” and “easy” things to do. (The irony of course is that if they are trivial and easy, why do we fight so arduously to have our own way?) We want the extravagant expression and yet in our everyday life we stubbornly cling to our defenses and our demands, failing to recognize that it only takes one moment to make a grand gesture, but a daily commitment to sacrifice for the good of the other is a far more difficult, and far more significant, act of love.

Our example of this type of love is of course Christ. His sacrifice on the cross is the ultimate expression of love, but that’s not all He did for His disciples. He washed their feet. He went to their family when they were sick. He did the seemingly “little” things and as such, I am convinced that His followers knew that He loved them far before He hung on a tree. And if the God of the Universe, the Savior of the world, was willingly to do these seemingly “little” things for the good of those He loved, shouldn’t we be willing to do the same thing? And if we are willing to serve well in those seemingly “insignificant” and “easy” things with love, don’t you imagine we will be better prepared to do the great sacrifices with the same kind of affection and grace?

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