Grace: The Best Gift Ever

I’ve received some great gifts over the years. When I turned six, I got a pair of pink roller blades, which I was super excited about. They came complete with a pink helmet and pink knee, elbow, and wrist pads. That was also the year I had my first sleepover birthday party, complete with pizza and ice cream cake, which was a gift unto itself.

What makes a gift so great? I think part of the appeal of gifts is the fact that they are unearned. You don’t do something great and get a gift. We get gifts for our birthday simply because we were born, something we actually had no part in besides being a passive participant. For Christmas, we get gifts because Jesus was born. Again, we played no part in that, other than being the reason that he came. Still, we don’t do anything that make us worthy of gifts. If you have to be worthy, it’s not really a gift, it’s a reward.

Everything Is a Gift

When you stop and think about it, almost everything we have is a gift. Our lives are a gift. The air we breathe is a gift. Our families are gifts. Even the things we’ve bought for ourselves, the things that we have “earned” in some way, are really a gift. The ability to work is a gift. Though we may have earned the money, we haven’t earned the ability to think or plan or draw or build or whatever it is we do for a living. Those talents and abilities are gifts. Sure, we work to hone them, but the fact that we can do them at all is a gift.

James tells us that all good things are gifts coming down from the Father of Lights with whom there is no variation or shifting shadow (James 1:17, paraphrase). Every good thing that we have is a gift of God. That’s what grace really means.

Why Is Grace an Amazing Gift?

I’ll be honest, I didn’t really understand what grace meant for the first 20 or so odd years of my life. I didn’t get the song “Amazing Grace”. To me, grace was simply the fact that though we deserve hell, God is ever so kind as to let us into heaven. That didn’t seem that amazing to me. If anything, it seemed like the only kind solution. Plus, what good was grace this side of heaven? Grace might be amazing once we were dead and in heaven, but it didn’t seem to do much good here on earth.

Grace Is about More Than Heaven

The fact is that us being able to “get in” to heaven is just a small fraction of what grace is all about. Grace is the fact that God gives us anything good at all. We don’t really deserve it. God puts humanity in paradise, in the garden of Eden and then we doubt that God is really good. We start to think that God is holding out on us, and so we do the only thing he told us not to do. We still do the same thing today. It doesn’t look like fruit and there usually isn’t a snake involved, but we still doubt God’s goodness. We still take things into our own hands because we fear that God is holding out on us.

Grace says that he’s not. Grace says the opposite. It says that even though we’ve broken God’s heart and walked away from him, he still works to woo us back with his love. He still gives us good gifts. Sometimes those gifts are big like a marriage or a child or a fantastic job opportunity. Other times those gifts are small like feeling the sun on your skin or the taste of a homecooked meal or a wildflower in the midst of the weeds. Grace is getting good things that we don’t deserve, whether big or small. It means that everything is a gift, given and not earned.

The Dark Side of Grace

Grace has a dark side though, or at least a side that we don’t like to think about. If grace means that all good things are given and not earned, that means we can’t earn things. That means we can do all the right things and not get the thing that we want. We can long for something and work for it and check all the boxes and it all might be for nothing. All good things are given.

The Tension of Grace

Yes, we work hard. We’re in this weird tension with God where all good things ultimately come from him, but he wants us to participate in the world with him. He expects us to do our part. Biblical examples of this abound. We’re not to just sit and wait for God to act. We’re not to be irresponsible knowing that it’s all a gift anyway and therefore why even bother trying. No, stories like the parable of the talents remind us that God holds us accountable for our actions. God wants us to try. He wants us to work. His expectation is that we’ll use the gifts that he’s given us.

There’s no good way to really wrap our minds around this. I’ve heard some people say, “Pray like it all depends on God and work like it all depends on you.” I like the sentiment of that. It’s a simplistic statement that needs more nuance (for instance, while we should work hard, if we for a second believe that it all depends on us we take God out of the equation, so that’s a danger). However, it recognizes the tension that we can never escape from.

The Pressure Is Off

It depends on God. It depends on us. Mostly it depends on God. That really takes the pressure off. That means we can’t ruin our own lives. It doesn’t all depend on us. While parts might depend on us, the majority depends on God, therefore he is in control. Our decisions are not. Yes, they change our lives. Yes they have an impact on us. However, no decision we ever make will define us because God is in control. He decides who we are. He decides our ultimate path. We have a say along the way, but he is the one driving the car whether we notice that or not.

The gift of freedom, of not overanalyzing every little decision, of living confidently and without fear is all part of the gift of God’s grace. Knowing that he’s ultimately in control is one of the most freeing truths of the Gospel. So embrace the gift for all it’s worth!

PS: If you want to learn more about grace, check out my devotional 30 Days of Grace! You can get the first week for free if you scroll to the bottom of the page and enter your email address.

Photo by Ekaterina Shevchenko on Unsplash