Grace

Grace… It seems to be one of the simplest gifts, given to us by God, to understand. Yet for reasons unfathomable the hardest for people to give; both to themselves and others. 

I have, in my relatively short life, spent almost all of it both in church and helping my mother in Music Ministry. I have watched as Pastors, Bible study leaders, and well-known church members had the opportunity to extend the grace of God and instead chose to pass on judgements they had no right to make. 

This essay, however, is not about them. It is instead about those who place the greatest burden on themselves and forget to extend grace for their own mistakes. In the past six months, I have personally spoken with three or four individuals of varying religions about the concept of grace. And I have discovered that those who follow and live their religions tend to be the harshest critics of their own actions. 

One very close Muslim friend of mine was in the midst of a mental breakdown due to schoolwork and his obsessive desire to achieve perfection for God. We spent a week going around and around with the concept that God demands perfection, but knows we can’t achieve it. He was stuck in a endless cycle of self-defeat, because anytime he slipped up he could not bring himself to extend grace and thereby drove himself deeper into a dark hole of despair. His god demanded perfection, he could not achieve it. There was no way out. 

But the thing I reminded him of is that while God does expect and desire perfection from His creations, He knows we cannot achieve it and extends us the grace to keep living. For Christians this grace came in the form of Jesus Christ. He become our all covering sacrifice, taking on any and all sins that we ever have committed or ever will commit and by accepting the gift of salvation we can take full advantage of the grace given by His spilt blood. 

So why then do Christians feel the same pressures of perfection that members of other religions feel as well? 

I am willing to attribute a large portion of the blame to the way the Christian community, as a whole, handles sinners in their midst. We tend to expect perfection from one another and forget that we ourselves are not perfect either. And rather than loving our brothers and sisters as we would someone who wasn’t a member of our church, or our youth group or our Bible study, we expect them to be perfect because they are a Christian; after all, a sinner is just a sinner. Right?

Wrong.

We are all sinners, saved by grace or not. We are all imperfect. We all fail. And a member of the Christian community, that person sitting next to you on Sunday morning, needs grace and forgiveness just as much as sinner who “doesn’t know any better”. 

The second portion of the blame however, comes from our human pride. God expects perfection. He desires it and we, being prideful drive ourselves to achieve it. Even though we know we can’t. The end result of this messy thought process is that we have twice the guilt- guilt that we did not achieve perfection and guilt that we were prideful enough to think we could. 

Grace is critical. 

It comes down to this one thought. If God can extend grace to us, then who are we to say we will not extend grace to ourselves or others. 

The greatest example of this is in Christian women married to abusive men. I can think of one case in particular where the woman would not extend herself grace and remained with her husband because she had sinned and slept with him before they were married. 

She felt it was wrong for her to leave that marriage when she had sinned beforehand. When asked if she had prayed and confessed the sin to God she responded that of course she had. But she just could not bring herself to give the grace that He had provided, she felt she needed further punishment.

When God says, “Your sins are forgiven”, who are we to place ourselves at His level and say,

“Oh God, you don’t really mean that. I made a big sin. It’s way bigger than some little sin you can let go that easily. I’ll allow you to give me grace and forgive me when I’ve atoned enough for it.”

The answer is simple- we are no one. 

Psalm 103:12

As far as the East is from the West, so far has He removed our transgression from us.

Can we do that? Can our pitiful attempts at atonement take our sins so far from us that we will never see them again? No. Only God and His grace can provide us that relief.

When the Lord says,

“Your faith has saved you, go in peace.”

Let us go and be in peace.