Grace Is Bigger Than You Think

I have had to learn how to extend grace and possibly the even harder lesson, learning to receive it.

I'm not talking about the greeting card version or the cheesy bumper sticker theology of being nice to people who don’t deserve it. The actual, costly, sometimes inconvenient, occasionally infuriating practice of extending grace to people I love; my wife, my kids, friends and family…in the moments when it would be easier and honestly more satisfying to just be right about something. (Which I usually am…but I digress).

Marriage teaches you this and parenting hammers it in with precision.

Holly and I have had to learn that the relationship only flourishes when grace is the atmosphere we breathe together. It’s not the absence of accountability and it isn’t pretending things don’t matter or that consequences aren’t real. But something underneath all of that. The conscious decision that the other person is worth more than the wound, the relationship is worth more than the argument, and love sees through the present moment to the other side of it and chooses to walk with anyway.

That’s grace in the micro. The version we can see and feel and practice on a random night when someone said something careless and the temptation is to hold it rather than release it.

Honestly, most of us, have shrunk God’s grace down to something about this size. Wrapped in pretty definitions. You know the ones. Unmerited favor. Loving the unlovely. Getting something you didn’t deserve.

These definitions are not wrong. They are just not big enough. They are the micro when God has been operating in the macro from the very beginning of the story.

Grace Was Always the Move

Go back to Genesis. Not to the fall, but before it.

God creates. He speaks light, land, sea, creature, and human into existence. At every stage He looks at what He has made and calls it good. Not merely functional and ordered. Rather, “Good.” There is delight in the act of creation. There is generosity in the giving of it. God did not have to make anything. He made everything; and then He made it good. Precisely because generosity is not something God does occasionally. It is something God is essentially.

Grace is not God’s response to the fall. Grace is God’s character before the fall ever happened.

And then humanity fractures everything. And what does God do?

He comes looking. Where are you? (Genesis 3:9) Not in anger but in pursuit. The God who was not obligated to create anything is not obligated to come after what was lost. And He comes anyway and covers them with skin. Then sends them out with the promise of a seed who will crush the serpent’s head already embedded in the curse.

Grace was the first move after the fall. It has been God’s first move ever since.

Cain kills Abel and God marks Cain for protection. Noah is found righteous in a corrupt generation and God saves the world through him. Abraham is called out of paganism; not because he was looking for God but because God was looking for him. Joseph is sold into slavery by his brothers and God threads grace through the betrayal until the betrayer becomes the deliverer. The entire Exodus is grace. The story is God hearing the cry of a people who were not crying out to Him specifically but to anyone who would listen, and deciding that He would be the one to answer.

The grace of God has appeared bringing salvation to all people. (Titus 2:11)

Not to some. Not to the deserving. Not to the ones who got their theology right before the grace arrived. To ALL people. The grace of God in Christ is not a narrow beam aimed at a specific target. It is a flood that covers the ground before anyone decides whether to stand in it.

What Justification Actually Means

We have done something unfortunate with the word justification.

We have made it transactional. We have turned it into the moment when God decides (based on our faith, our prayer, our decision at an altar) to extend favor to us specifically. Which makes grace feel like something we activated. Something we unlocked by doing the right thing at the right moment. No.

Paul in Romans 3 says something that should reframe everything:

They are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus. (Romans 3:24)

Justified, past tense. Meaning “already.” By grace as a free gift.

The cross justifies all people. Again, All. The work of Christ on the cross is not a potential justification waiting to be activated by sufficient faith. It is the actual, accomplished, and completed reconciliation of God and humanity in the person of Jesus. The last Adam undoing what the first Adam did. The gap closed from God’s side before any of us knew to ask for it.

Which means faith is not the mechanism that produces grace. Faith is the response to grace that has already been extended. It is the turn and the recognition. The “I will go” of Rebekah; not earning the relationship with Isaac but choosing to enter it. (Genesis 24) The yes that receives what was already being offered.

Paul makes this distinction carefully in Romans 5:

God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. (Romans 5:8)

While we were still sinners, not after we repented nor after we believed correctly. We don’t have to clean ourselves up enough to merit the attention. “While.” The grace arrived before the response. The death of Christ happened before the faith and the justification preceded the acceptance of it.

This is the macro. The cosmic, historical, already-accomplished reality that our micro definitions of grace can barely contain.

The Hardest Thing

Here is what I have come to believe is the hardest thing for believers to actually do. It's not evangelism. It’s not suffering faithfully (though that's up there). And it’s not theological precision or moral consistency or showing up to church when you don’t feel like it.

It’s accepting grace.

Doing so fully without qualification. Without the internal asterisk that says yes but you know what you did. Without the performance of earning something that has already been given. Without the exhausting attempt to be good enough for something that was never conditional on your goodness.

We will extend grace to other people…imperfectly, inconsistently, but we will try, before we will receive it ourselves.

Because receiving it fully means admitting that we could not generate it. That's the gap between who we are and what God requires was not able to be closed from our side and the justification we walk in was not produced by our faith but received by it.  The truth is, we are not the hero of this story, but grace was on the move before we showed up.

This is not a passive faith. This is not theological excuse-making for bad behavior or indifference to growth. Grace does not negate consequences. Holly and I have learned that in our marriage. Grace walks with through the consequences, it does not eliminate them. You can be fully forgiven and still have to rebuild trust. You can be fully justified and still be in the process of sanctification. Grace sees through to the other side and walks with. It does not teleport you there.

But it does mean the foundation changes.

You are not working toward acceptance. You are working from it. You are not trying to earn the relationship. You are living inside one that was secured before you knew to want it. Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. Through him we have also obtained access by faith into this grace in which we stand. (Romans 5:1–2)

This grace in which we stand.  We don’t reach for it. We cannot maintain it by sufficient performance. “In which we stand.” Now. The ground beneath your feet is grace. You did not lay it and you did not earn the right to stand on it. Rather, you simply opened your eyes and found yourself standing on something that has been here since before the world began.

What This Changes

Everything. If you let it.

It changes how you read the Old Testament. It’s no longer a record of God’s conditional love toward a people who kept failing, but as a record of a God whose grace keeps showing up before His people know they need it. Grace is always the first move. Grace is always the pursuit. It’s always the covering and the promise embedded in the consequence.

It changes how you think about the people around you. The ones in your life who you have written off as too far gone. The cross says otherwise. The macro says otherwise.

It changes how you live. You’re  not striving toward something you might lose if you perform badly enough, but resting in something accomplished and extending it outward to the people in your life the way marriage and parenting have taught me to extend it. Seeing through to the other side and choosing to walk with.

This grace in which we stand.

It was always bigger than we thought.

And it was always for everyone.

The specificity, the beautiful, personal, intimate specificity, is in the choosing to live inside it. The turning toward it. The conscious and faithful move of not only saying “I will go”, but going.

But the grace itself?

That was never waiting on you to deserve it.

It was already there.