Grace is ….

Often we hear the phrase ‘By the grace of God..’

We all know what that means and we have come to accept grace as a common thing.

While processing an encounter with a driver in Bangalore, where I got upset with his behaviour, I realised that I was battling two sides of me – one might say the angelic versus the not so angelic side [pitchfork?].

I was reminded of what the Paul said in the bible:

“….I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my sinful nature. I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For what I do is not the good I want to do; no the evil I do not want to do, this I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it……When I want to do good, evil is right there with me….’

Paul continued to say that there is a war waging internally in the mind – something I can totally identify with. The war between serving God versus serving the sin in my flesh.

Sometimes I walk in the victory of God, other times I succumb to the victory of sin [eg.I harboured anger towards the driver and allowed it to fester till I was no longer objective in my thoughts].

Then it suddenly dawned on me that the grace of God is most evident when I succumb to sin. When I choose not to follow God’s victory, when I wilfully disobey, when I act out of ignorance, etc., oh how sweet is the grace – like honey in the comb – that takes away my guilt and covers me with righteousness that is from above.

Grace cannot be understood and received with holy fear, unless we acknowledge the wretched sin we struggle with.

An equation no mathematician can solve.