Getting Grace

OK, so it's been awhile.  I'm engaged to be married to a blogger on July 19, 2014, 59 days from now.  So here's finally another post!

“Black grace,” my realtor, Dave, quipped on our way to get coffee at the Tim Horton’s drive thru.  Is getting grace as easy as ordering it on your way to work?  Well, yes and no, says this non-expert on the subject.  Not an expert, but someone who’s been meditating on how to get grace lately.

Yes, grace is obtained easily, not by works, Paul says, otherwise, “Grace is no longer grace.” (Rom. 11:6).  You cannot work for grace, especially the grace of salvation.  Nothing could be truer, and yet I often witness this dictum leading to an undue sense of fatalism.  Kind of like the guy who, because God is going to save who he’s going to save, spends his hours on the couch without a twinge of compunction to evangelize.

“I can’t change what God has already foreordained,” the couch potato snaps off the self-evident truth with the moral force of saying: “A circle is round.”  Thus, both Jesus’ Great Commission and Paul’s wish for perdition if he could only save his brethren according to the flesh are dispatched in one brisk tautology.

We know from both Peter (I Pet. 5:5-7) and James (Jas. 4:6) that God gives grace to the humble and that He opposes the proud, calling to mind Proverbs 3:34, where God scoffs at scoffers, but shows favor to the afflicted.  Further, James says we can humble ourselves—commands us to do so, really, and He will exalt us.

So, can you get God’s grace by doing something?  Only in the way you can be saved by doing something.  I remember weighing the options, thinking I didn’t want to go to hell, and making a decision to put my faith in Jesus Christ and His substitutionary death for me.  This seemed like I made the salvation happen—sort of.   Later I found out I did this because God had chosen me before the foundation of the world (Eph. 1:6).  I responded to His call and can only love because He first loved me (I Jn. 4:19).

I look at it this way: If God has chosen me and told me how I might obtain grace, that’s OK with me.  I have thought about the conundrum ever since I spent some time out in the desert fasting in February 2013.  Do I set aside time to listen to God?  To pray and attend to His word daily?  Not only this, but do I—like Nehemiah at court—listen at every crossroads to integrate what I have learned into my daily decisions and meditations?  Humility comes down to taking time to regularly hear what God wants and then doing what He tells you.  The opposite would be to go our own way and not take what God says into account.  I don’t think this is oversimplification.

When I shut out everything else in my life: food, technology, companionship, everything but water, clothing and shelter for several days, I experienced revival, a rebirth of love for God, and a surprising opportunity to share the gospel with someone whose siblings had been praying for her.  I sat next to this co-worker on a plane a thousand miles from home before I realized who it was.  Then I shared with her for two hours straight until the plane landed.

The trip to the desert was hard and a lot of it was unpleasant, but let me do that again!

We ought to be excited and motivated to pursue God’s grace, not passive and fatalistic.  Don’t we pray for grace even though it is by definition undeserved?  We can humble ourselves, and praying goes a long way in expressing our humility and dependence upon God if we do it from a pure heart.  God told Moses He will have mercy upon whom He will have mercy, but He also tells us He will favor the humble and needy.  So when we need God’s grace, we don’t need to throw up our hands and say, “Well, God’s going to do what He’s going to do,” even though that is obviously true.  What we should be doing is humbling ourselves, and having a conversation with God that prioritizes listening.