Grace

“To the praise of his glorious grace that he freely bestowed on us in the Beloved.” Ephesians 1:6 NRSV

Grace as Unmerited favor. 

You are a person of unmerited favor.  The absolute goodness and mercy of God gifted to you without any striving on your end.  The forgiveness of God.  No matter what’s been done or undone, how far you’ve run, and no matter how long you’ve been keeping the distance – God loves you wholly and completely.  There hasn’t been a day when you have not been on His mind.  There hasn’t been a moment where He was not working for your good.  There hasn’t been a season when He was not longing to reveal the weight of His kind love towards you.

This week I read a story of a young man who had served his country in Iraq.  One evening in the middle of the night as he was filling large gas tanks one caught alight and subsequently caught him on fire – moments later he woke up on his back quite a distance from where he was working.  He was saved by two Iraqi civilians who did not have jurisdiction to be on the property or on the base.  They came to his rescue when he was alight and rolled him in the dirt till he was clear of the fire and flames.  He survived because of their willingness to enter his gravest moment.  What a visual image of God’s grace.   The mercy and grace of God has rescued us from our own undoing.  Each of us has created our own circumstances which have landed up burning us in some way or another.  God’s unmerited favor has saved the day.  His love, through Jesus (the Beloved in the Scripture at top) came for us and knocked us away from the fire, saving us and restoring us to relationship with God.  Each of us received something we couldn’t strive towards or earn in our own strength.  As the solider was saved by the generous hearted civilians willing to get in and near the fire themselves – so Jesus entered our pain and entered our mess.

Take a moment today to reflect on the sheer generosity of God toward you.  The beauty of His mercy and love.  The generosity of His heart towards you.  He loves you right now where you are with what you have.  He loves you generously in the midst of life’s pain, fears, anxieties and despair.  God’s love was perfectly timed and perfectly displayed with the gift of Christmas Season: the Son of God Jesus.  Immanuel: God with us.  This great love is not only an intellectual or logical sense of knowing but an experiential, deep rooted relational knowing in the heart (Ephesians 3:16-19). May God’s good grace be ever present for you in this season and the seasons to come.

For those who feel far from the heart of God in this moment – I can empathize with your pain, hurt or apathy.  My prayer for you is that you can trust again, lean in again to His presence and return to the love your heart once knew.

In Christ,

Paul