I like grace. I mean I really, really like grace. I like the idea of it. I especially like being the recipient of it from other people and from God. I love it when I am able to see past my own pettiness and show grace to others as well, though it’s not as often as I would like.

My favorite definition of grace is this: “God’s riches at Christ’s expense.” It has been definited as “God’s unmerited favor.” I have also heard that grace is getting what you don’t deserve, while mercy is not getting what you do deserve.

Brennan Manning writes, “My deepest awareness of myself is that I am deeply loved by Jesus Christ and I have done nothing to earn it or deserve it.” He also states, “To live by grace means to acknowledge my whole life story, the light side and the dark. In admitting my shadow side I learn who I am and what God’s grace means.”

I think he is better than just about anybody outside the Bible at really grasping and defining and explaining grace. I know that there are consequences to my sin, but to think that grace covers the penalty and the punishment from God is sometimes overwhelming. Why should I be given grace? I can’t think of one good reason.

I do think we are given grace to show it to others. We can say, “This is what God is really like. He’s not out to get you. If He really wanted, He could strike every single human on the planet dead with a single thought. He woudn’t even have to say a word. He would be totally justified, because we are all sinners with desparately wicked hearts who fall short on a daily basis. But He doesn’t, and that’s grace.”

Honestly, most Christians suck at showing grace. We can give you a law and point to a verse that backs it up (whether that verse is used in its historical and cultural context is beside the point). If you don’t measure up, we are good at labelling you and condemning you and turning our backs on you. Not many people are really good at demonstrating the grace of God.

Lord, make me an instrument of your grace. You have shown grace to me too many times to count, starting at the moment of my birth to the point where You made me alive in salvation to even just this moment. Help me to love the unlovely and to be patient with those everyone else has given up on and to reach out to the lonely and the outcast in their plight. Help me to see Jesus in the face of the orphan and the widow, the poor and the leper. Help them to see Jesus in me as I reach out in compassion with a cup of cold water and my testimony of Your faithfulness.

Left to myself, I am cold and callous and unloving. Only You can love them through me. So thank you for your grace by which I stand and take the next breath.

As always, I believe. Help my unbelief.