Most of my life I have struggled with God’s grace without even knowing what His grace was. Now, at twenty-three, I’ve known what grace is for a few years. I have studied it, written songs about it, tried to soak my heart in it through journaling, had many cups of coffee talking with others about it, and yet it is something I still can’t quite grasp in full. Why God has exchanged my sin for His righteousness is still the biggest mystery to me (even though I know the answer is “Jesus”). It doesn’t really matter how much coffee I drink, I won’t be able to stay up late enough to grasp, in full, His grace.

I wish I could take a picture of grace, stare at it for hours, and be captured eternally by its beauty. I had a dream a several months ago that still is fresh on my mind. I dreamed that I was in a field buried in between several beautiful fall-covered mountains. The sun was shinning, the wind was blowing, and the leaves of the trees blew a warm, yet cool air on my face. In the field with me was a beautiful red-headed little girl whom I was watching after for her parents. In awe of all around me, I tried to take a picture with my camera to capture the moment’s grace so I could remember in full what I had seen. After many attempts at taking the perfect picture, I began to get frustrated and discontent with the camera’s inability to capture and remember the breeze, sunshine, and mountains. Picture after picture, I began to feel a weight being placed on my heart; I felt imprisoned, weak, and incapable of moving. As I took my eyes away from the lens of my camera to look up, I could not see the little red-headed girl. In the open field, all I saw were the mountains, but they no longer were beautiful. I had lost the girl, lost the beauty, and lost hope for the photograph. I stood there imprisoned, longing to run and look for the girl, but unable to do anything at all.

After I woke up, I wondered why I had that dream. After journaling for a while, my conclusion was this: Instead of grace being like a photograph to hold onto, it is a moment that wasn’t intended to be captured. I spend all of my time trying to take the perfect picture, or trying to be perfect, that I miss the point of grace. Grace is grace because it’s not something I have accomplished. Grace is not as cheap as I thought it was. I don’t think I am actually supposed to “grasp” grace, but rather receive it, love it, experience it, and give it to others.

Receiving grace: I have always had an extremely hard time receiving grace from God. Deep in my veins, my blood pumps with legalism that has caused years of guilt and shame. After years of judging many people, the condemnation overflowed onto myself like a title wave of physical and emotional abuse. Most of my days prior to becoming a Christian, I felt like I was in a pitch-dark cave of guilt. Each time I would condemn myself, I was metaphorically striking a match to see where I was going. Every time the match lit up, all I saw was further darkness. Receiving grace is so hard for me. Grace intersected my life, when I realized that God wasn’t worried about my sin, as much as he was worried about me. The year I became a Christian, I read Hebrews 8:12 for the first time: “For I will forgive their wickedness, and remember their sin no more.” I’ll never forget a friend explaining to me “not only does God forgive you and not ‘remember’ your sins, Joel. God also seems you as righteous.” To know that I was a sinner before I became a Christian enslaved me to the law. To know that I am a sinner after becoming a Christian, and knowing that the God of the universe looks at me with compassion, breaks the shackles that I once locked up. Grace was no longer something that had to take a picture of to make it last longer.

Loving grace: I am starting to love grace more. In the past, I hated grace because it wasn’t something that I could do (or grasp). Now, even though I hate being helpless, I also love it when I reach the end of myself and am forced to commune with God. Learning to be a counselor, I am starting to fall more in love with grace. The more brokenness I begin to see in the counseling clinic, the more I know that apart from his grace I can be of no help. In the past I struggled with an addiction to pornography. Many nights, addicted, I would begin filling my loneliness with a one-sided relationship with pornography. I longed to be loved and desired, but it didn’t matter how long I indulged my eyes with lust, the women I lusted after never loved or desired me. It was those nights of enslaving myself to the prison of sin that I would reach my end, helpless over my addiction, shaking with anxiety and guilt. It wasn’t till in the middle of my engagement to my now wife that I stopped to think about what I was really feeling in the midst of the darkness. Sure I was guilty of sin, but underneath was a man longing to be loved and desired. Underlying my sin was a beautiful need: Grace. I needed to know that I was loved and desired by God. Despite my sin, God was crazy about me and I needed to love the grace offered in the gift of the Gospel.

“Even from my sins,” wrote St. Augustine, “God has drawn good.” Learning to love grace is kind of like learning how to be grateful for my sin. I think that grace reaches its fullness in my own heart, when I can become thankful for my own sins. Though I mess up and make mistakes, knowing that God is sovereign and doesn’t make mistakes gives me so much freedom. Ultimately, through learning to be a counselor, I have begun to see that sometimes sin has become the initial movement toward resting in God’s love. One of my first clients had a struggle with pornography. This struggle brought him into the clinic in hopes of defeating his addiction. In time, God used his initial sin struggle to begin to see many of the underlying areas of his life that has now led him to a field of freedom. He has absolutely fallen in love with God’s grace, which has empowered him to become a man who risks in relationships and be vulnerable.

Experiencing and Giving grace: In my first four months of marriage, I have had to ask my wife’s forgiveness probably more than a hundred times. Just like the super-spiritual saying “when two or more gather in His name, He will also be there”…well, when two or more sinners gather, there will be conflict. Dan Allendar said that we are all “sinned against sinners”. Just as must as we have been wounded, we have also wounded other people. Some of my favorite moments with my wife have come after fights; times after we have wounded each other. When we have both come to a point of helplessness and are able to feel the weight of our own sin toward each other, being able to give grace to one another and choose to sit in the chaos of our sin has moved us closer to one another. I think one of the reasons God allowed two sinners to be together was so that we would be able to love each other despite how sinful we truly are. Our covenant on our wedding day was not just with each other, but also with a God who loves us in this same way. For us, grace has been something that we have bumped into through our bumping into each other. In our sins against one another, they have cut to the core of who we are. The grace that we have given each other has had the power to wash out those wounds to provide healing.

Taken by Carrie Jo Pinckard

When I read a book chock full of good stuff, I have a really hard time getting through the book. A big (and self-righteous) part of me wants to retain all that is in the book, apply it to my life, and change me to be perfect Christian. The other (less obvious) part of me would love to simply grasp every morsel of truth in those books so that I don’t have to struggle. I think that’s probably why I have such a hard time with the ambivalence of grace. Because grace is to be bumped into and is found in moments, I hate that I can’t hold on to it because that means that if I can’t retain it, that I will have to rely on God and not myself. I’ve started to see class, books, sermons, and conversations a little different in light of grace. My growth as a Christian, as a counselor, as a person, etc… hasn’t come from my ability to retain all the lectures, points in books, conversations or sermons. My growth has come through those experiences of reading those books, having those conversations, and listening to those lectures or sermons. Being able to give grace to others and myself has brought significant freedom, which in time has caused me to love the Lord more. God has allowed me to experience his grace in moments; moments that remind me of the Gospel- My sin for His righteousness.

Advertisement