contemplating grace

God has been teaching me grace tonight. The dictionary.com definition of grace is this: "a disposition to be generous or helpful; goodwill. Mercy; clemency." I've always associated grace with mercy and clemency, but never really approached it in its other aspect: a disposition to be generous or helpful; goodwill. It is simply astounding to me: despite all our sin, despite our sinful natures, despite all the times we sin (either on accident or on purpose, either once a day or forty times a day), God's grace through Jesus lavishes upon us not only mercy and clemency, but generosity, help, and goodwill! God doesn't just take our sinfulness and stomp it underfoot, nor does He just throw it to the bottom of the ocean; He makes a move forward, holding out His hand to help us, being generous with His love and joy, and He even blesses us with His goodwill! He calls us friends, not just acquaintances, and He walks with us, talks with us, smiles with us, laughs with us. Grace isn't just about being forgiven, it's about being brought up into intimacy with God.

If there is one thing life teaches me over-and-over, it's that, to put it simply, "I suck." I really do. I echo David Crowder in his song Wholly Yours: "But the harder I try, the more clearly can I feel the depth of our fall, and the weight of it all; and this might could be the most impossible thing: Your grandness making me clean."

Wholly Yours is, as it speaks to me, a song totally about grace. And David Crowder confesses what many of us hide: we pursue perfection, we pursue righteousness, but we mess up a lot. Sometimes our failures seem to drastically outweight our successes. It sickens us, disturbs us, disheartens us, depresses us. We clam up, curl into fetal positions, and whimper as we hope--pray, and pray like we've never prayed before!--that God will pass over us, that He will see the blood on the door and let us live.

The problem is, we don't understand grace. We think we need to earn grace, or at least earn our forgiveness. So when we sin a lot, or mess up big time, we think, "Oh no, this is it, now He's pissed," and we shiver in our beds and look outside at the flickering lightning, wondering which one will be heaven-sent through the window, killing us as we sleep. If we understood grace, understood that grace isn't based on what we do, but based on what Jesus has done, and if we understood that it isn't just about forgiveness, but God inviting us into the divine-enriched life, perhaps we wouldn't find ourselves, in a sense, mortified, but, rather, timidly approaching the Throne, bowing down before God, and pleading, "Consume me!" As David Crowder writes in Wholly Yours: "Here I am, all of me; finally, everything! Holy, holy, holy; I am wholly, wholly, wholly... yours. I am wholly yours. I am full of earth and dirt and you!"

David Crowder begins his song, "I am full of earth; You are heaven's worth. I am stained with dirt, prone to depravity; You are everything that is bright and clean, the antonym of me. You are divinity! What a certain sign of grace is this: from a broken earth flowers come up pushing through the dirt." This is truth: as I am, flesh-and-blood, I am full of sin, I am stained with the sinful nature; this sinful nature sticks its head out in various outward performances of sin. Contrasted to God, I am pitch black and He is pure and snow-white. I am a sickly, frail, insignificant human and He is the Divine King, the Creator of the Universe. And here is the sign of grace: through my broken, decrepit, sinful life, a flower of hope, a flower of beauty, comes poking through the dirt, brilliant and lovely and unparalleled in splendor! Grace.

The most difficult thing with grace is accepting it. By our natures we want to earn it; we're uncomfortable with just taking something so big, so huge, so beautiful, something that is not just forgiveness, but is also an open channel of intimacy with God. All my life I have struggled to accept forgiveness; I have usually tried to earn it somehow, either by punishing myself or doing something extraordinarily good, trying to rack up points with God and just "feel better." But the heart of grace is this: we don't deserve it and we can't earn it; it's God's gift to us. He wants intimacy with us, and we get to choose whether or not to engage with that intimacy.

So where do I now stand? Do I keep on sinning, confident in the grace that God bestows on me? No! I see what grace is. I see how awesome and beautiful it is. I see how filthy and prone to depravity I am. I see the dirt and stain in my life. And then I see, at first, that flower poking through. And then another flower, and another. And as I mature, as my intimacy with God deepens, the handful of flowers becomes a garden, then blossoms into a tropical forest lush with all kinds of colors and ripe with the songs of birds and the crawling of insects, buzzing with life. This is the act of grace on our lives. I come face-to-face with this, and I fall shaking before God, and weeping tears of joy, tears of thankfulness, and I echo Lawrence Tuttiet and cry out, "Father, let me dedicate!"

Father, let me dedicate, all this year to Thee,
In whatever worldly state Thou wilt have me be:
Not from sorrow, pain or care, freedom dare I claim;
This alone shall be my prayer, glorify Thy Name.

Can a child presume to choose where or how to live?
Can a Father's love refuse all the best to give?
More Thou givest every day than the best can claim
Nor withholdest aught that may glorify Thy Name.

If in mercy Thou wilt spare joys that yet are mine;
If on life, serene and fair, brighter rays may shine;
Let my glad heart, while it sings, Thee in all proclaim,
And, whate'er the future brings, glorify Thy Name.

If Thou callest to the cross, and its shadow come,
Turning all my gain to loss, shrouding heart and home;
Let me think how Thy dear Son to His glory came,
And in deepest woe pray on, "Glorify Thy Name."

If we must in grief and loss Thy behest obey,
If beneath the shadowy cross liest our homeward way;
We will think what Thy dear Son once for us became,
And repeat till life is done, glorify Thy Name.