Grace: It's Not What You Think

Grace is a hard concept to figure out.

Here's what I know so far. Man sins. Man sins again. And again. It starts out that God makes people atone for their sins by offering sacrifices in the form of food or dead animals, but after a while it's clear that the compounding problem of sin, cannot be made amends by a few meek sacrifices. So, we change the rule book. Jesus comes down to earth, takes a brutal punishment, and makes amends for every sin that has been or will be committed. Done. Well, I guess. Except that there are still questions like, why even be good at all it's all forgiven? Is there something that can't be forgiven? Can I sin too much?

It seems necessary that the only way to understand grace is to understand relationships. Do your purposefully try to hurt or let down your spouse, kids, or family? Most people would and should give a resounding no to this question. But, that doesn't mean that we don't still let down and hurt the people we love. In a healthy relationship, we forgive and move on. There is no amount of times that it's too much, and even though we're forgiven we rarely desire to repeat the situation. Perhaps, this is the same attitude that we must take with God. Do we desire to let him down? Do we desire to hurt him? If we really love God, we will do the things that make him happy! However, the great thing about grace is that those time when we do make him unhappy, he forgives and keeps no records of wrongs.

I understand all this, but maybe the issue if I'm honest is that when I'm sinning I don't think about how this is hurting God. In fact, I'm pretty good at separately God from parts of my life. But, that's the issue. If I really loved God I would let him into every area of my life, and I probably would have a harder time sinning, knowing that I'm hurting God.

Grace is being able to have second chances that make us able to do something differently the second time.

Jesus said "If you love me, you'll obey my commandants"

So, maybe it's not grace or sin, but being able to realize that the more we have God in our life, the easier it is to give and receive grace. Grace is the gift that God has given to us, but to fully understand it we must focus on learning to love God, then we will truly know what it means to be forgiven.