Pages

Saturday, May 12, 2018

God’s Amazing Grace

Webster’s 1828 Dictionary defines grace as “The free unmerited love and favor of God, the spring and source of all the benefits men receive.” God’s many faces of grace is like the dew. It covers and drenches His people as we rest quietly, bringing vitality to all. God first pours out His grace (his action-love) to us in salvation. Then into every aspect of our journey to enable us to do life. Grace is God’s unearned and undeserved favor, contrasting with our performance. A performance-to-please mentality can never fully satisfy our inner ache for God.

God designed humanity to be most alive when we live in full allegiance to Him. It’s God’s amazing grace that fuels this process, like high-octane gasoline fuels a high performance auto. God’s grace transforms us, sustaining us in the ups and downs of our journey, in times of ease and also during fiery trials and gnarly temptations.

Our entire life is a gift of His grace. At salvation, God plants us into His amazing grace, His rich soil for flourishing growth (Romans 5:2). Ephesians 1:3-13 is unparalleled in its description of provision from the Father, Son and Spirit, initiating to freely give all we need for our life and godliness. Three times Paul drives this home with: “To the praise of His glorious grace.We can also fall short of God’s grace by not fully embracing it, experiencing roots of bitterness instead of His lavish grace (Heb. 12:15). And God designed our lives with certain portals that are wide open to receive God’s outpoured grace. So I encourage us all to cooperate by developing habits that fully align with our design (I call them “transforming responses”). Here are a few “means of grace.”
 
  • Study God’s Word, learning to saturate our lives with Scripture.
  • Meditate on Truth, taking time to reflect so it penetrates deeply.
  • Practice Relationship-Based Prayer, joining God as we adore Him and ask for His desires and our needs in life.
  • Fasting, saying “no” to something in our lives in order to focus intensely for a time on what God has laid on our hearts.
  • Solitude and Silence, blocking out the hurry and scurry of life to rest quietly in God’s awesome presence, scattering “One-Minute Sabbaths” throughout our days and weeks.
  • Serving Others, since God is a Giver at heart. He uses our measure of generosity as His measure to pour back into our lives (Luke 6:38). Serving itself is its own reward.

Of course, even as we focus on God’s amazing grace, it’s equally important to be full of both grace and truth (John 1:14). Joy and freedom are the keynotes so develop good habits as a response to the grace-laced life of Jesus, rooting ever more deeply into the soil of amazing grace.

This is Reflection #42 in my book, Foundation Stones. I also have a web-site with tools, books and "more than Bible studies" that have helped me to live out of this spiritual DNA, www.JimFredericks.com

No comments:

Post a Comment