The Gift We Don’t Deserve: Understanding God’s Grace
We can’t earn God’s grace — it’s freely given through His love, mercy, and the sacrifice of Jesus Christ.
God’s grace is not something that can be earned. It is a gift from Him to us. You can’t bargain with Him to earn it or barter with Him to convince Him to bestow it upon us. It is His gift to us because we are His creation and He loves and cares for us eternally.
Only He can determine if we are deserving of it or not.
The Bible makes perfectly clear that we, as mere human beings, are not perfect. We are all flawed and we all will fall prey to sins and sinning throughout our lives. Only one person who walked this earth was perfect. That was God’s only son, Jesus Christ.
We, on the other hand, were born into sin thanks to our ancestors Adam and Eve, and we are unfortunately prone to continue to sin as well. We are called to try to be more Christ-like in our actions, but many times, often times, we will fall short. Be wary of anyone who claims that they are perfect or are telling you that they are living the perfect life like Jesus Christ, because they are not.
God gives us grace, His love, His forgiveness, because He loves us as His creation and because He has mercy on us. He knows that we can never be entirely perfect like his son Jesus whom he shared and sacrificed for us.
What He does ask us to do, though, is to accept Jesus as our savior to make us worthy of His grace.
God wants us to believe and accept that Jesus came to earth as a man yet he was God as well. He wants us to accept that this man, the son of God, walked the same path as us, felt the same pain as us, lived a similar life as us, and then eventually made the ultimate sacrifice to save us and to wipe away our sins.
It was so for the man who was crucified on the cross right next to Jesus at his very last moment on earth and it can be so for us as well.
God knew, being as imperfect as we are, that we could not do the same as Jesus has done for us on our own. But He loves us so much that He gave us and sacrificed his only begotten son to do it for us.
We do not receive the Grace of God for anything that we have done or could possibly do. We receive it because of what Jesus did for us. In return, God just wants us to acknowledge this sacrifice.
He wants us to accept his son Jesus Christ as our savior. He wants us to realize, believe and accept that Jesus died on the cross to wipe away our sins. And He wants us to believe that on the third day he rose again because only God could do such a miraculous thing.
After doing all of that, Jesus eventually ascended into Heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father, leaving with us the Holy Spirit to guide and protect us in his stead.
We are not, and never will be, deserving of the grace of God. Even so, we often say in passing, ‘There but for the grace of God, go I.” Never a truer statement has been expressed.
We must appreciate that we receive the grace of God because, bottom line, He is good and he loves us in spite of our faults and our failings. We should keep trying to be like Jesus in our actions and in the way we live our lives, but even if we slip up, God is always there to catch us and get us back on track.
I can’t imagine where we would be without such a loving, forgiving God whose grace follows us in our lives, even though we are sinners.