Only by grace

I've got a spare hour on a Tuesday morning to take out of my hectic schedule and share something with you.

When we think of grace, we tend to imagine it as mainly applying to those of us who know Christ... but I think that's far from the truth.
Grace is a concept which encompasses many aspects of God's character. One aspect of grace is the undeserved forgiveness and love which Christians experience but there's a more general idea of it which I think magnifies its greatness ten-fold!
Even those who don't yet believe live under God's grace and God's grace governs every element of existence. Let me explain by starting with two biblical truths.

God is all-powerful. All things are at his command. Psalm 65 tells us that he stills the roaring of the waves and raises up mountains. Isaiah 45 says: 'I bring prosperity and create disaster; I, the LORD, do all these things.' Everything is under God's control, even bad stuff. He can make anything happen, he can do ANYTHING. Some people still struggle to understand this and still limit him.

Everything belongs to God. Psalm 24 says 'The earth is the LORD's, and everything in it, the world, and all who live in it; for he founded it upon the seas and established it upon the waters.' So everything which everyone has belongs to God because he made it. This is very important. Everything belongs to God. This verse forms the heart of stewardship (which I'll hopefully get round to doing an entry on soon!) but is also really important to understanding the wider concept of grace.

So those two truths combine to tell us that everything in the world and the world itself belong to God and that he can do anything he wishes with his creation.

When an unbeliever wakes up in the morning, they awake by the grace of God.
We were all rebels living in God's world - some of us still are. If you had slugs in your vegetable patch - crawling all over your lovely plants, covering them with slime and eating big holes in the leaves - would you hesitate before taking every single slug you could find and destroying them? Welcome to God's daily experience of earth - covered in little slugs taking advantage of his lovely vegetables, ruining them at the same time as stuffing their little faces with them. Sin injures God's creation at the same time as feeding off it. As Christians, we should become like bees, pollinating and spreading God's goodness, multiplying our blessings, not feeding off him parasitically. Think about that...

Why should God not just flick each and every little slug into oblivion? Why shouldn't he immediately seize each and every sinner and cast them into eternal damnation? But he gives life! He gives resources for life like oxygen and food and water! It's like putting special slug food out in the midst of your vegetable patch! It's madness... it's grace. God's judgement hangs over every individual, only his patient grace prevents it from falling.

The reason you didn't die in your sleep is grace. When you eat your bowl of cereal and you don't choke to death on it, that's grace! When you step out of your front door and you're not knocked down and killed by a car, that's grace! That is the way the world works; because the world is fallen, people die, people are killed... and its grace which means you're not one of them, that you're kept from that. We all live under God's grace, even unbelievers enjoy God's provision and his protection.

Even more than that though, when we think of God's incredible power and action in our lives, we can see that grace isn't just about survival but about WHO we are! The way we are raised, the way our lives pan out, massively effect who we become when we are older. Serial killers, dictators, mass murderers... there's nothing specially or innately evil about them. OK, brace yourself because grace is about to go even further than just you waking up in the morning. This deserves a line to itself.

It is only by God's grace that you don't go out every day and kill people.

I believe that we are all born equally sinful and it is purely situational and circumstantial as to how evil we become. God gracefully keeps some of us from experiencing the fullest depths which sin could take our lives to. There is nothing to say that when God formed Adolf Hitler in the womb, the life he breathed into him couldn't have been yours. I almost hold back before saying something like that... but it's what I believe. It is only by grace that we are kept from the greatest sins in our lives and from massive evil.
God has been at work in all the circumstances of your life to make you the person you are today.
This will be too far for some people. I ask that you take some time to think on it.

This aspect of grace is amazing and mind-blowing because it reveals God's phenomenal love and patience with humanity. He loves those little slugs so much that he'd rather try and turn them into bees than grind them down into the dirt with his heel. We all deserve that but grace says otherwise and that is just one reason why God is spectacular.