Grace. We sing about it. There are beautiful plaques and wall hanging that we hang in our homes. We name our girls Grace. We tell people to give more of it and we would like to receive it more often. But what is grace? Mercy and grace go hand in hand. Except they are so different. Many use them as analogies for what God has done for us. Sometimes that gets lost in the definition. Mercy is not receiving what we deserve. I go too fast, I get stopped by the police and I get a warning. That’s mercy.
Grace is getting a bit more complicated to where we not only don’t get what we deserve but we get extra bonus and blessing on top of what we don’t deserve. Grace is taking your car to have the dent hammered out, (yes it seems odd they hammer a dent to make it better, or better yet plunge it out) and they not only fix the dent, but rotate the tires, change the oil, fix that one headlight that hasn’t worked for awhile and then wash, buff and clean the interior. Now that’s grace! I paid for a dent to be fixed and I got a lot more I didn’t plan on, pay for or anticipate. It puts a spring in your step and a perk in your heart without caffeine!
The catch for me, is asking God for grace when I know I deserve consequences. I keep tripping over the same problem in my heart. God keeps forgiving me and giving me added blessings to remind me that I am valued, loved and wanted.
People don’t do that well. People seem to remember what I have done and am struggling with and add fuel to the fire and squirt that burning stuff on the logs so they reignite. I need grace, they give me selective mercy with an added handful of spite. We don’t understand mercy or grace because we don’t give it well. If we don’t know how to do something it’s hard to explain it. I ask kids to teach me what I taught them. That tells me if they have actually learned it. To teach something you really have to “get it”. To be graceful and to live in a world of responses filled with grace, we have to understand it. So many times we give a bit of mercy but we don’t do grace. We may not give someone a ticket they deserve but we remind them how wonderful we were to them everytime we see them. And most of us, or I will just speak for myself, I don’t fix the dent, change the oil, rotate the tires, clean the interior and wash the others cars in my life. It takes too much time and energy. And yet, we come to God with the dents in our life. He hands us back a clean car, far better than we could have every imagined or dreamed and simply says “here, drive it”.
How much deeper would we affect people with the love of God if we lived the grace of God ?
Special Touch Ministry 