I seem to be having a lot of 'Aha!' moments at the moment. I'm listening to a lot of preaches while I'm driving, which probably explains it, although my 'Ahas' are never quite what the preacher is talking about. I guess there's no accounting for the weirdness of my brain.
Occasionally I listen to 'Talksport' radio station, and you do get the feeling that a lot of the people who call in are angry. Whether it's an unsuccessful football manager, an untrustworthy politician or someone who doesn't mow their lawn enough, the callers want to see 'justice done'. Heads must roll! The feeling is that people should get what they deserve, and no better. There's not much grace on talksport.
There's not much grace in the world at all. It's hard to forgive someone who has made you suffer, however small a thing it might be. And if they aren't sorry, just forget about it. But without grace, car journeys end in road rage, relationships break down, parents disown their children, insults end in fights. A group of kids clashes with another group, driven by the need to 'get even', every act needing to be avenged, back and forth, being pulled further and further down as though by gravity. The world seems to be in moral decline, but nobody knows what to do about it.
I remember years ago hearing that when CJ Mahaney was asked "how are you?", he replied "better than I deserve." At the time I thought it was a good sentiment, but perhaps a bit over the top. It stuck with me though. Now, having mixed that with an awful lot of John Piper, I realised that 'better than I deserve' IS grace, the key to everything.
I never really understood why God made the world. I was taught that he was totally happy in his own company, and that he wasn't in need of anything that we could give. I was told that it was because of His grace, but I didn't really understand it. Surely it wasn't worth His effort, if we don't give Him anything except an awful lot of trouble?
But my new thought, that grace means 'better than I deserve', made something stand out to me. We DO give God something he didn't have before. We give him the opportunity to show grace! To say that we exist 'because of God's grace' misses something I think. We exist so that God CAN show grace. The Father can't show grace to the Son, because the Son is deserving of every good thing the Father can give. But for us, being created by God out of nothing, we obviously hadn't earned anything.
Grace is part of who God is, so to have no outlet for it limits the expression of His glory. For God to bless us with a universe to live in, all the amazing things He put in it, the friends and families we have, it's all grace. And most of all for Him to share His infinite glory with us tiny humans really is amazing grace.
Gods grace is even bigger than that though. The human race fell from that privileged position that God had made us to have. By living in a way that says we find other pleasures more glorious than God, and by trying to put ourselves at the centre of our lives, we separate ourselves from Him. We're given over to the eternal consequence of our arrogance. But He showed how amazing His grace really is, by giving up his glory and becoming human, to be punished and die for our failings and rescue us from our fate. Then He gives us eternal life, new bodies, an endless universe to explore, no sin, sickness or death, and Himself, an infinite God to treasure.
So it's no wonder that treating each other better than we deserve stops the downward spiral. Grace lifts us to places we could never reach by ourselves, it's the reason that God created everything, the reason He gave us life. We're made in God's image, so to cut grace out of our lives is to cut off a vital part of who God made us to be.
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