A thought about grace.

Most of you know that I am big on grace. For sure it is God’s grace and mercy alone that has allowed me to stand and live; in spite of all the times I have gone astray and gave up on trusting God and going my own way. As an aside I might add that one of the things I realized, and this is so simple, is that obedience is tied directly to trust. When we don’t trust God we will, more often than not, end up not obeying him either.

But let’s get back to grace for a few minutes. I learned that grace is not only that ongoing part of God’s character that operates in all of our life, and for all of our life. It is also has a finite dimension as well. For want of a better description I would call it a learning time. Any teacher knows that his pupils need time and space to learn what is taught and how to apply it; time to succeed and a time to fail. But with time and encouragement the pupil masters the subject and the successes increasingly outnumber the failures.

I think that God does the same for us when he is teaching us how to walk out our life in Christ. He gives us time and space to learn and master what we are being taught. God does not smite us on our first failure, or even our ‘enth failure. But he patiently helps us to stand up and try again. As God is patient with us we need to be patient with ourselves; realizing that as we ask and seek forgiveness each failure becomes another opportunity to succeed.

God will never test us beyond our ability to pass. He wants us to succeed; he wants us to graduate from glory to glory. The ultimate reward, diploma or what ever you want to call it, is an increasing Christ like appearance and we increasingly becoming Christ like in action (righteousness). Be confident and be at peace; everything we are not Christ is. Grace and mercy will indeed follow us all the days of our life.