Grace

Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. (Philippians 1:2 ESV)

What is grace? Grace in our language connotes beauty and elegance. A swan is a graceful bird. A ballet dancer is a graceful dancer. Someone who has kind and beautiful words for us is a person of graceful speech. In our modern usage, sometimes the opposite of grace is clumsiness. Someone stumbles and we say sarcastically (and humorously), "Well, that was graceful."

But what is grace? In many Christian homes it is the custom that when the family sits down together for a meal they bow their heads, join hands, and someone says 'grace'--not the word, but a prayer thanking God for the food and asking his blessing on it. Is that what grace is? A prayer?

Not exactly.

Grace is favor. How often have you said to someone, "Do me a favor . . ."? How often has someone said it to you? What is someone asking when he says this? What does it mean? Well, it means you are being requested to do something that you are under no obligation to do. To do someone a favor is to act, not out of debt, but out of kindness. That's what grace is. It is kindness. 

But not just kindness. Sometimes we are kind to others because they are kind to us. Conversely there are people to whom we are not kind because they are unkind to us. It's sort of a tit for tat. There's nothing too special about that kind of kindness. Jesus put it this way: "For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same?" (Matthew 5:46 ESV) Anybody can give tit for tat. Even the worst of sinners do that. Jesus expects us to love those who are unkind to us.

And that's what grace is. It is the unmerited kindness and favor of God. It is God loving the unlovely. It is God blessing the undeserving. It is God reaching down to the lowest and lifting him up to the heights. In this sense it is the opposite of merit--and the opposite of justice. It is God responding to bad with good. Grace is counterintuitive, fundamentally unjust, scandalous. And it is also the most wonderful word in the human vocabulary.

Grace.

Have you received grace from God? (You have. Much grace. No matter who you are. But we'll get into that later.) Go ahead and ask for it. No, you have no right to it. Of course not. By its very definition you have no right to it. It's not reward you're asking for, it's grace. And the God of all grace will never turn down that request from a penitent heart.

Would God be kind to an undeserving someone like you? Go ahead. Try him.