What Is Grace?

Unfortunately, in today's English, the adjectives for grace, 'gracious' and 'graceful', are no longer well-connected to the idea of giving unmerited favor or being characterized by giving it. "Gracious" has more to do with simple courtesy than favor; "graceful" is about movement or form. A "grace period" is a temporary relief before you eventually have to pay up. These are, in a way, something good, but God's grace (and the grace we're called to give) is mostly aimed at the mud, the scoundrels, and the hurts of daily life. It's not genteel. Grace is undeserved -- you get it when you deserve something not so good. That means grace is also, by definition, unjust. Thank God that what goes around doesn't have to come around; otherwise we'd all be sunk.

The grace of God is given to all, freely. God gives you the faith that sets you straight, and gives you the Spirit that changes you so you have Christ's goodness. Thus, it is God's grace that lets loose the riches of God's love.

God keeps this grace from no one. However if you don't accept divine grace, it sits there without doing its full wonders on you, like an unopened and forgotten Christmas present. And we humans don't like the implications of the gift, namely, that we have no way to do this ourselves. So we tend not to take this divine grace until we have nothing else left and nowhere else to turn, and even then we might spurn it. Yet, if we open the gift of grace, the gift itself shows us how to give it to others. Grace is free, but it does not come cheap. The One who loves us pays for grace, by way of all the grief and sorrow that can only be found in someone who loves, right up to being executed over it. The same is true for us when we, like God, give unmerited favor to those we love, as God calls on us to do. There's more than enough grace to go around to everybody, more than enough to do the job. More than enough for you.

"Grace is but glory begun, and glory is but grace perfected."
Jonathan Edwards

"Grace is love that cares and stoops and rescues."
John R. W. Stott

"I do not at all understand the mystery of grace -- only that it meets us where we are, but does not leave us where it found us."
Anne Lamott

"Left with an unknowing dependence on grace in the instant of an arising desire, we very often truly do not know what to do. As frustrating and painful as the dilemma may be, there is a real beauty in it. It is precisely at those times of not knowing that we are most alive in realizing our need for grace."
Gerald May, *The Awakened Heart*, p. 122

Through many dangers, toils, and snares
I have already come
'tis grace hath brought me safe thus far,
and grace will lead me home.
---- "Amazing Grace", by John Newton