One of the most difficult aspects of being a disciple of Jesus, for me, is grasping the concept of grace. I just don't get it. I might not ever get it completely, and there are many reasons why the idea of grace is baffling to me. It's ironic that after years of feeling suspicious of church camps, I've spent the majority of my spare time this summer volunteering at them. It's ironic that that's where the concept of grace hit me right between the eyes. We sang the following song at every session of one particular camp that I helped with. It's called "How He Loves." Read the lyrics:
He is jealous for me
Loves like a hurricane, I am a tree
Bending beneath the weight of His wind and mercy.
When all of a sudden, I am unaware of these afflictions eclipsed by glory. And I realize just how beautiful You are
And how great Your affections are for me.
And, oh, how He loves us so.
Oh, how He loves us,
how He loves us so.
We are His portion and He is our prize,
Drawn to redemption by the grace in His eyes.
If His grace is an ocean, we're all sinking.
So heaven meets earth like a sloppy wet kiss
And my heart turns violently inside of my chest.
I don't have time to maintain these regrets
When I think about the way
He loves us, O how He loves us,
O how He loves us,
O how He loves.
Before this summer, I probably sang this song fifty times. I sang it a lot of times. And I just couldn't understand it. Every time I think about grace, the first verse to come to my mind is, "Should we continue in sin so that grace may abound? Absolutely not!" But this song taught me that that's not all there is for me as a broken human who is clothed in Christ. When I was younger, I thought of grace as this lifeline that I had to call in when I really screwed up, and that if I did end up having to, I had to feel really guilty about it and walk around with my tail between my legs for awhile, until I could make it up to God.
I have a good friend. His name is Bob Strader, and he is one of the few people I know in life who is absolutely ecstatic about the fact that he gets to walk in grace everyday. I was talking to him during camp, as we were looking at some posters that hung on the walls in the room where we worshiped. One of the posters said, "I don't deserve grace because . . . " and the campers wrote out their reasons why they believed they did not deserve grace.
Bob laughed at that poster. He said, "Deserve grace? No one deserves grace. There is no real 'because.' That's a trick question." In that moment, I realized why I am so uncomfortable with accepting grace. Who wants to accept something they don't deserve? I don't. My strategy for avoiding grace my whole life has been either a) be perfect so I won't need it, or b) earn it by compensating with other good things that I've done. It hit me in that moment: in choosing to pretend like I don't need grace, I pretend like I'm in control--not God. In choosing to pretend like I don't need grace, I wake up everyday prepared to walk in fear.
Accepting grace is being more of the disciple I'm called to be. Accepting grace is submitting. Accepting grace is actually believing that God loves me. Accepting grace is courageous, because it means that I'm acknowledging in my heart that God is in control of my life, not me. And it means that I'm not undermining what Jesus did on the cross. Because if I don't need grace in my daily walk, I never needed Jesus in the first place.
Bob said those words, and then we sang that song: "If His grace is an ocean, we're all sinking." I started to cry, because I realized how desperately I wanted to drown in His grace. I wanted to wake up each day striving to walk worthy of my calling, knowing that if I failed, my afflictions were still eclipsed by glory. The last line of the verses says, "I don't have time to maintain these regrets when I think about the way that He loves us."
I cannot spend my life maintaining regrets about the times that I’ve needed grace because I screwed up. That’s me trying to redeem myself, when Jesus already did that on my behalf, years ago. People who walk in grace, who know they are walking in grace and are, therefore, constantly in a state of gratitude, have a glow. I want the glow. I want to rejoicing in the grace that has been given to me so fully that I never hesitate to extend grace to another human being, and I never forget that I am humble, weak, and broken, but that I am made so strong and whole in Christ.
“I’m speaking to you out of deep gratitude for all that God has given me, and especially as I have responsibilities in relation to you. Living then, as every one of you does, in pure grace, it’s important that you not misinterpret yourselves as people who are bringing this goodness to God. No, God brings it all to you. The only accurate way to understand ourselves is by what God is and by what he does for us, not by what we are and what we do for him.”
--Romans 12:3, The Message
Erin Daugherty
Abilene, Texas
