Grace Chronicles

(Over the next few days I'll be writing on my favorite subject--"grace")

Why do I think and write so much about grace? Because if God is keeping score, I haven't got a ghost of a chance. Mercifully, our debt is marked "paid in full," which just so happens to be written in red. Grace is also my favorite subject to read about. In The Alphabet of Grace, Buechner writes: "Life is grace. Sleep is forgiveness. The night absolves. Darkness wipes the slate clean, not spotless to be sure, but clean enough for another day's chalking." Another of my favorite grace quotes comes from Brennan Manning, author of The Ragamuffin Gospel, "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." 

In the end, grace is God producing in me what I could never manufacture for myself. "The perfect surrender and humiliation were undergone by Christ: perfect because He was God, surrender and humiliation because He was man. Now the Christian belief is that if we somehow share the humility and suffering of Christ we shall also share in His conquest of death and find a new life after we have died and in it become perfect, and perfectly happy, creatures. This means something much more than our trying to follow His teaching. People often ask when the next step in evolution–the step to something beyond man–will happen. But on the Christian view, it has happened already. In Christ a new kind of man appeared: and the new kind of life which began in Him is to be put into us" (C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity).

"But by the grace of God I am what I am: and his grace which was bestowed upon me was not in vain; but I laboured more abundantly than they all: yet not I, but the grace of God which was with me." (1 Corinthians 15:10, KJV)