Be Strong in Grace

Be Strong in Grace

Several  years ago  I was in a situation that I thought was overwhelming. All my life people had called me a “Pollyanna” or told me I looked at life through rose-colored glasses.

One day it was as if someone took off my glasses and replaced them with another pair and suddenly a whole situation and particularly a person I had been very close to looked totally different. Had anything really changed – no – but my perception had changed . As daily I received more and more information from great Pastors who were determined I would see clearly, I felt like I was crumbling internally. How could I have been so deceived, how could I have been so blind?

As I began to unravel this situation I started to understand that my need to make people and situations perfect in my own mind caused me  to have a totally unrealistic, romantic view of life. As you can imagine in some ways it was like waking up from a really lovely dream and finding it wasn’t true. It was shocking.

At some point my great friend Margaret said to me “We just need more grace to make it through this.” Never have truer words  been spoken to me. I had a revelation of grace that was shallow and powerless. It stopped with forgiveness of my sins at salvation. To really deal with life, faulted humanity and my own less than perfect self I was going to need more understanding of grace.

Peter says in 1Pet 2:1 “Finally be strong in the grace of God.”
We need not just be people who are saved by grace, but leaders who are strong in the grace of God. In case you haven’t noticed yet lives, ours included are messy, our formula’s for Christian life don’t always work, good people do some really horrific things to each other and the righteous still struggle with sin and failings. We need the grace of God to live out our callings. We need grace from God for ourselves and for each other. 

Grace that is real and robust  means I know the people around me are faulted and human -and they will sometimes disappoint and offend me. I will disappoint and offend people. We are all people in need of Jesus.

When we are strong in grace we become like the palm tree that bends in the storm. More on that next week !

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