Saturday morning I was lying in my hammock watching the rays of sun peak around the leaves of the trees above me while I gently swayed back and forth in the breeze. It was a perfect day off: perfect weather, perfect trees to hang my hammock, perfect breeze, perfect opportunity to just sit and be with Jesus. So Jesus met me there in my hammock between the trees and inside the breeze.
And He overwhelmed me with His grace.
Grace is something in God’s character that I have not been able to fully grasp (who can?). And it’s even harder for me to accept most of the time. In fact, I’ve often caught myself with a skewed image of the Father’s heart and His grace. Whenever I would think about God giving me grace I’d imagine Him reluctantly handing me a small box with a little white ribbon tied around it. Inside the little box was grace and I envisioned Him giving it to me with a little bit of disappointment in His eyes and, afterwards, saying something like “Don’t mess up again.”
But Saturday was different. I have never been more aware of God’s grace and His willingness to give it to me because of Jesus. And before I knew it, I was crying.
I was so overwhelmed that He would offer me that grace so sweetly and openly and gladly. I couldn’t understand that part of Him. How could God gladly give me grace after everything I’ve done to hurt Him? It’s literally incomprehensible.
But I’m realizing that it’s okay not to understand.
I long to know God. I long to know His character, goodness, holiness and power. But I don’t ever want to get to the point where I feel like I fully understand those parts of Him; the point where I stop longing to explore who He is and the point where I am no longer overwhelmed by His presence and goodness. So even though I don’t understand His grace, I’m learning that it’s okay to not understand. I’m learning that He gives grace gladly. I’m learning how to accept it.
“Grace is the good pleasure of God that inclines Him to bestow benefits upon the undeserving. It is a self-existent principle inherent in the divine nature and appears to us as a self-caused propensity to pity the wretched, spare the guilty, welcome the outcast, and bring favor to those who were before under just disapprobation. Its use to us sinful men is to save us and to make us sit together in heavenly places to demonstrate to the ages the exceeding riches of God’s kindness to us in Christ Jesus.”
-Tozer
