Grace… what does it even mean?
In the last few weeks, this has been a topic I have been thinking about quite a bit. What is Grace? What does it look like in my life? How have I experienced it? How am I showing it to others? How do I combine being sick with Grace? I don’t think that I have all the answers to all of these questions, but maybe some small incling into a few of them.
Grace has become so important to me at first, in the area of ‘am I showing grace to others?’. When people look at me and my faith, am I representing a grace filled faith? Am I the grace that Jesus has shown me to the people around me? In order to answer those questions, I felt like I needed to understand grace a little better. So I started reading more blog posts, aritcles and watching youtube videos. Oh boy, are there many different definitions and ideas about grace out there. The one overarching theme however that I could identify with was, that Grace is undeserved and shows pure unconditional love.
I shared my definition of grace on my last blog post, before I started my ‘research’, as
“Grace is God’s gift to me, that he saw me at my lowest, weakest, unworthiest point, and he still loved me! Not only loved me, but DIED for me! Died for me to give me a new life as a forgiven Child of God.”
I think what is now sticking out to me more than ever before is that grace goes hand in hand with so many other attributes like as love, forgivness, kindness. In some way, they all belong together. If I don’t have love, showing grace is impossible. If showing grace is my focus, I need to forgive. Responding in kindness to someone who is rude to me, isn’t that a showing of grace? Each of these attributes is very much important when it comes to our personal interactions and how people will see Jesus through me.
I listened to a podcast not that long ago, and the speaker was talking about how I as a Christian, we as a church, should really be showing a Gospel culture to the people around us. That podcast, was one of the reason I started lookig into this topic more. Gospel culture wasn’t a term I had ever heard before, so it was very intriguing and also somewhat convicting. The speaker ask the question, ‘does your life and your interaction, represent the gospel?’ Well, does it? What does that even mean?
When I think of the Gospel and what it all entails, of course the first thing that comes to mind, is that Jesus went to the cross and died for me, so that I could come to God the Father as a new creation, redeemed from sin. However, when I look past the ‘act’ of salvation, the gospel is so much more.
The gospel shows me unconditional love, grace, forgivness, kindess, gentleness, understanding and so much more. The Gospel is not filled with judgment, or rules. The Gospel is pure Grace shown to me, an undeserving sinner by the God of this world who didn’t find it beneath him to send his only son, so that he would die on the cross in my place. Because that really was MY place. It is pure love. God loved me enough to DIE for me. Can you imagine that kind of love?
Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends. John 15:13
What a friend we have in Jesus! Taking this definition, or rather say this approach in understanding the gospel, living out the gosepl means that I am living these attributes out towards the people around me. Living them out so that Jesus amazing act on the cross and everything that goes along with it, shines out through me. Taking it into a practical approach, a quote by Billy Graham sums it up perfectly in my opinion:
It is not my job to judge the people around me, it is not my job to convince them that they need to come to Jesus, it is not my job to force them to come to church, it is not my job to make them change their lives. My job is to LOVE them. God will do the rest.
Of course I share my faith, share my story, share my struggles, but I want to always point back to Him. I always want to show the love that He has given me and that I am wanting to give to the people around me. I am not the judge over people, or condemming whatever they are doing. That is not my place. I am here on this earth to glorify God, who has made me in His image, so that I can point back to Him and praise Him for the amazing wonderful things he has done in my life.
Some of you might be asking yourselves how I can still hold on to faith even with everything that has been happening in my life over the last year and a half. Or why Grace became so important to me now. Well, my answer would have to be that I have felt God’s grace pour over me more than every before, except maybe when I was saved. Never before in my life could I have said that I physically felt God holding my hand while laying underneath the monster of a radiation maschine. Never before have I felt this close to God. Never before did I have to rely this much on him to give me strength for every day. Never before did I understand how short life really is and never before have I felt the love of God more than going through my cancer journey. So why would I ever turn away?
“And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose.” Romans 8:28
I had read this verse so many times, but only recently has it started to make real sense. I don’t know all the good that may come out of situation. Maybe I will never know this side of heaven. What I do know though, is that the good that I have already seen (getting closer to God, my family, my friends, so many many more), as weird as it may sound, has already made it worth it. God in is grace knew, that even though I would struggle and would not like having this sickness (let’s be real, who would?) it would also be able to teach me so much and give me a deeper understanding of a concept I don’t think I will ever fully understand until I get to heaven, like GRACE.
For from his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace. John 1:16
