Sunday, February 7, 2010
God's Grace
“Revolution Within, a Fresh Look at Supernatural Living” by Dwight Edwards.
....a quote from the book ...
“Our New Covenant gift of purity springs from something dangerous, something worth a fresh look – God’s grace.
Years ago my family first visited the Grand Canyon. It was a beautiful, clear day, and the sheer majesty of the sight before me took my breath away. So did the shortage of guardrails. Our young boys naturally wanted to race to the very edge and look over. My instinct was to hold them back, safe from any danger of falling. I was only too glad to describe the beauty to them if they would stay back ten yards or so. Somehow they didn’t like that idea. After all, to get the total impact, to fully appreciate the canyon’s awesome beauty, you must go right to the edge.
Grace is like that. If it’s to take our breath away and significantly possess our lives, we must go right to the edge –where the overwhelming astonishment of grace and the potential abuse of grace linger side by side.
All too often the church has erected safeguards and restrictions to keep people back from the danger of abusing grace and falling into license and lawlessness. In doing so we create an even greater danger –keeping people’s view of grace so distant that they fail to have a breathtaking appreciation for the real thing.
If grace makes sense to you, I doubt you’re close enough to really see it. The real thing defies comprehension...but not experience. Grace is God’s irrational, unimaginable kindness...
God’s grace goes beyond anything offered by the world religions. Virtually all faiths have justice as a primary tenet: Man gets what he deserves. Many religions also add the concept of mercy, which is man not getting all the punishment he deserves. Christianity alone introduces the full concept of grace –of getting, with no good reason, what we positively don’t deserve. Grace goes miles beyond mercy.
Grace is the most unreasonable thing in the world. It’s also the most powerful. Nothing is more effective for transforming lives, risky though it is...
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