Grace, it's a mighty big word (Part1)

 More Than I Ever Realized

The more I have read through the Bible, the more I realize there are some words that seem small... until you really stop and study them.

Grace is one of those words.

If you had asked me a few years ago what grace meant, I probably would've said something like, "It's when God gives us something we don't deserve."

That's a pretty simple way of putting it, but I think that's about as far as my understanding went.

For a long time, I thought grace was mostly about salvation. God saved me by His grace because I couldn't save myself. End of story.

But the more I've read Scripture, the more I've realized that's only the beginning.

Somewhere along the way, I started living like I had to prove myself to God. If I had a good week reading my Bible, I felt close to Him. If I prayed more than usual, I felt like I was doing better.

If I stumbled, skipped time in His Word, or found myself struggling with the same old sins again, I felt like I had let Him down.

Maybe you've been there too.

Then I started noticing something. The Bible doesn't just talk about grace when we're saved. It talks about grace while we're living.

Paul wrote:

"Each time he said, 'My grace is all you need. My power works best in weakness.' So now I am glad to boast about my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ can work through me."

— 2 Corinthians 12:9 (NLT)

That verse hit me differently this time. God didn't tell Paul to try harder. He didn't tell him to become stronger. He didn't tell him to earn His help.

He simply said, "My grace is all you need."

That made me ask myself a hard question.

How much of my Christian life have I spent trying to earn something that God already chose to give?

The truth is, I'm still learning. I still have days where I don't spend enough time with God. I still struggle with sin. I still have attitudes that God has to work on.

I'm not writing this because I've figured grace out. I'm writing this because I think I'm finally beginning to realize how much I haven't understood it.

Grace isn't just how we enter God's family. It's how we walk with Him every single day.

And I have a feeling I'm only scratching the surface of what that really means.

When you hear the word grace, what comes to your mind first?


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

I am that guy

 Over the years, I have questioned many things that people have done or not done to make their situations worse. Over the last couple of weeks, I have seen people who have had to lose parts of their bodies because they didn't take care of their diabetes. I have seen people who have had cardiac issues because they didn't control their cholesterol. I have also seen what happens to people who haven't led the healthiest of lifestyles.  Well, I am here to tell you that I have done all of the above, too.  In 2010, I was doing well for myself. I was running all the time, I would do 5-6 miles several times a week, and once a week, I would do a long run from 11-13+ miles. I lost some weight, and I felt good about myself. I got hurt after running a simple 5k with my boys, which was essentially the end. I did buy a nice bike to ride longer distances with, but unfortunately, I just couldn't make that work for me the way I wanted it to. There was one exception: When I went overseas,...
Read more

I am struggling

 It has been a while since I posted anything and for that I am sorry. I have been struggling in my personal life for quite some time but it has really come to a head in the past several weeks.  I was having dinner with my son Kai and his now fiancé the other weekend and he was telling me about a podcast he has been listening to. He sent me a screenshot of it and I looked it up. The podcast was an episode of the Shawn Ryan podcast, I have heard some of Shawn Ryan's podcasts but mostly shorts on FB or YouTube. The particular podcast Kai was talking about is the one with Navy Captain Brad Geary. Captain Geary is the Commander of the Navy SEAL school and he has been under fire after the death of a sailor who was going through SEAL training. The part of the podcast that really hit home for me was when Captain Geary was telling about when he was in charge of a SEAL team that sustained extensive loss in a helicopter crash. He talked about the difficult decision he had to make to stay...
Read more

Desert Storm(part 2)

SECTION 1 — The Port The flight in was its own kind of stress. Fear wasn’t the driving force, but the uncertainty sat in everyone’s gut. None of us knew what we were flying into, how long we’d be there, or what things were going to look like once we hit the ground. We carried weapons on the plane, packs jammed everywhere, and zero room to move. Every seat was filled. Every aisle. Everything about it said the same thing: this is real now. Everyone thinks “desert” means heat. We sure did. We figured we’d step off the plane and just bake. Instead, we arrived in the dead of winter, and the first thing that hit us wasn’t heat — it was the cold. There was freezing rain, sharp wind, and absolutely nowhere to get warm. It wasn’t what we expected, and that only added to the whole “what exactly are we getting into?” feeling. We lived at the port in a massive warehouse packed with thousands of soldiers. No heat, no privacy, barely enough bathroom facilities for the number of people crammed in ...
Read more