It’s amazing how many people mistaken grace for mercy. Through faith, drink long and deep of the absolutely amazing grace of Jesus Christ.
As someone has said, “God can do more in five minutes that we can do in five years.” If we, through faith in Jesus Christ alone, receive the waterfall from the Waterfall Rock of our Savior, it will flow out. But God has said that He is doing this work. Of course the stone-hard ground needs to be softened. What are you doing standing under that waterfall? Get out here and start hacking at this stone-hard ground. Is it “common-sense Christianity,” as some Christian leaders have talked about? Actually, I think it’s counterintuitive to “common-sense Christianity,” which ends up looking like other works-based religions. By a constant gaze-shifting to focus on Jesus Christ alone as all our Hope, and our only Hope. “You are saved by grace through faith,” Ephesians 2 tells us. How is the grace accessed? Is it by simply knowing that it’s there? Is it by asking forgiveness (the “freedom-and-sin-and-forgiveness” cycle)? This grace, this empowering, transforming, life-giving grace is accessed through faith and only through faith, not by any works that we can do. Milky blue glacial water of Briksdal River in Norway You, as a truster of Christ Jesus, with the power of the Holy Spirit within, are no longer under that blinding light that to your horror is showing you every microscopic bit of dirt on your person.
Look at this one: “You are not under Law, but under Grace” (Romans 6:14-15). Read the New Testament with all its crucial references to grace, and substitute that meaning. It starts with “divine” and it ends with “of God.” There is no ambiguity about the fact that this is something only He has the privilege of doing.
My favorite is a little one that captures it all: “the divine inflow-outflow of God.” I love it. I’ve heard various definitions for the word grace through the years, but a lot of them seem to me to fall short. In all the New Testament, nobody gives grace but God. It’s popular now to talk about how we need to give grace to others, but the way people are using the word-meaning forgiveness and kindness and love-diminishes the meaning of the remarkable word “grace” until it loses the vital meaning it should have. I mean, giving grace is a prerogative of God alone. I don’t mean I’m incapable unless God helps me.
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