June 13, 2012 – sheaoakley.com

His Grace is Sufficient

Grace is more powerful than our worst moments.This can be an incredibly comforting truth for the struggling believer to meditate upon. Many of us have an unfortunate tendency to believe that God’s sovereign grace is not sufficient to deliver us out of any trial or tribulation that comes our way. Even more than that, we doubt that it can deliver us when the trials and tribulations in question are ones we have brought upon ourselves. It is in the throes of such self-inflicted difficulties, often severe difficulties, that we are most likely to forget that one of the best practical definitions of grace is “unmerited favor.” When a child of God cries out to Him for mercy, with a spirit that at least desires the desire for repentance, He responds with that favor. We often do not get what we deserve and even if we do the grace of our Lord carries us through.

If I had a dollar for every time I thought myself “beyond the pale”, guilty of some action or thought or mood that would forever destroy my relationship with God, I think I would be a millionaire. My 30+ years of faith have seen great turmoil of mind and spirit. At times, particularly in my early years, I have looked at the sin that remains in my life and felt that only divine justice could be left for me. During such seasons the harder passages of scripture seemed to leap off the page and into my desperate heart, while those promising mercy and compassion from the One I call my Lord disappeared as if written in vanishing invisible ink. These have been the worst moments of my existence. More than once I have nearly despaired of my spiritual life in Christ, the only life worth possessing. Many times all I could weakly pray was this: “God have mercy on my soul”.

Now this is what you must know, reader. Every time I have prayed this prayer of desperation, or one like it, God has eventually restored me to my right mind and to a place of comfort and hope. He has done this for me over and over and over again during these past two decades. When this happens to you on enough occasions you finally begin to believe in both the power of the grace of God and the fact that this grace applies even to you.

Some Christians seem to believe that if you sneeze you can lose your salvation. There are two primary reasons to hold to such hyper-Arminianism. One is because you are a legalistic Pharisee who gets some kind of pleasure out of inciting fear in those you think spiritually inferior to yourself. The other is because you are a person who is constitutionally fearful, often with some “help” from people who have done great wrong to you in this life. This is usually compounded with difficulty in forgiving those people. Because of this latter problem you who have known what it is to be an innocent victim of abuse may even, frankly, find yourself being a bit pharisaical towards others at times. Misery loves to make company and un-forgiveness seems to lead all too easily to self-righteousness.

The reason I spent the last paragraph describing this spiritual condition is because it is a state that breeds resistance to, and disbelief in, grace. If it sounds autobiographical that is because it is. I have been all these things, a hyper-Arminian, pharisaical, unforgiving victim of abuse; so coming to believe that grace can embrace, sustain and transform even such a person as this is, of course, very precious to me. Since I’ve met more than a few people who share my character flaws I write this now because I hope it can be a similarly precious reality in their own lives.

Now this is the thing to remember and it is not something most biblical Christians aren’t familiar with either because this thing is right out of the Word of God and it is this: God’s grace is sufficient. It is sufficient for far more than our fearful, disbelieving hearts can sometimes grasp. Its sufficiency, I believe, even extends to that fear and disbelief. As long as we are humble enough to sincerely ask for both grace to save and grace to change that grace will be provided us in superabundance, grace not only sufficient to deliver us from death, but more than that grace sufficient to put us back on the right track in this Christian life.

And, yes, even fear and disbelief can be finally destroyed by this gift of a supremely loving God. Over time this has been my own blessed experience. I pray it will be yours as well.