Amazing grace

So what is so amazing about grace? As well as being a really good question is is the title of a book by Philip Yancey which I have been intending to read for some years. On my last visit to the UK I bought a copy of it and it has been sitting tantalizingly on the coffee table since I got back.

The well known hymn may hold a clue here:
Amazing grace, how sweet the sound,
that saved a wretch like me.

It is by grace that we are saved from ourselves and the results of our actions. God calls it sin, society has many words for it but whatever words we use for it, it is lethal - literally, and it is everywhere. Sin leads to death and unfortunately for us, we have all sinned. We cannot help ourselves. I challenge you to live a week without sinning, no? How about a day? 24 hours without thinking or doing anything which is wrong. Still can't do it? How about an hour? Can you manage an hour without sinning, no? Me neither! We are in a mess and if we stop for long enough to think about it we realise our predicament.

It might be tempting to compare ourselves to others. We could find someone else who in our view is "worse" than we are and compare ourselves to them. We would then conclude that we are "not so bad". The problem is that not so bad is not good enough. It is like being a dirty rag and comparing ourselves with other dirty rags, we may be more dirty or less dirty but we cannot escape that fact that we are dirty.

To come to God and enter His presence we have to be clean, pure, holy because God is a holy God. Therein lies our problem, we are not and never can enter his presence because of the sin which dirtys us and dirtys humanity. This is what Easter is all about, God in Jesus took the initiative to come and help us out of the predicament we have got ourselves into. He dealt with our sin by taking what we deserved, death and separation from Him, upon himself on the cross and he showed that he had triumphed over it when he rose to life on the third day. Now through Jesus we are washed clean and able to come to him at all times. We could do nothing to help ourselves but thankfully we didn't have to. Christianity is the only religion where God takes the initiative. We cannot do anything to save ourselves and so God did it for us. In all other religions one has to earn salvation. This is grace that God gives us what we don't deserve because he loves us.

We who have received so much grace should be gracious. We should live like Jesus of whom it was said he was "full of grace and truth". Here comes a challenging question, how are we the church doing? Is the church which is the body of Christ full of grace and truth? Lets reduce it a little to the churches where we live, are they places that are known for their grace? If we were to ask people on the street to describe the local church would they come even close to seeing it as a place of grace and truth?

I suspect we have some work to do in living out the grace we have freely received in such a way that society around us looks on in wonder and cannot understand us. Philip Yancy writes "Grace is the church's great distinctive. It's the one thing the world cannot duplicate and the one thing it craves above all else - for only grace can bring hope and transformation to a jaded world."

Lets live in such a way as to bring hope and grace wherever we are and to whoever we meet.