What is grace?
“Grace is the presence, event, and revelation of what the human cannot think or do or reach or attain or grasp, but of what is, in virtue of its coming from God, the most simple, true and real of all things for those to whom it is addressed and who recognise it. Grace is the factual overcoming of the distinction between God and humanity, creator and creature, heaven and earth – something that cannot be grasped in any theory or brought about by any technique or human practice…. Grace is God’s sovereign intervention on the human’s behalf. The work and gift of this grace of his is the freedom of the children of God – their freedom to call upon him as Father.”
—Karl Barth, The Christian Life: Church Dogmatics IV/4 Lecture Fragments (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1982), p. 72.
Grace is impossible for sinners to grasp. And as soon as we gather that it is impossible, we turn the “grasping of it” into a contest. Once we get it, we begin to work it! And the winner of the best “grace project” award gets a stint at “the head of the class”. Yet in the end, grace means that some with the wrong answers will be saved and some with the right answers won’t be. The salvation that came to the world was all of grace!
Ephesians 2.8-9; Luke 18.26-27; Matthew 25.31-46
Immanuel!
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