Copyright 2018 by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved
I am beginning to truly believe in something that has, in actuality, been unfailingly present in my 27 years as a follower of Christ. I am beginning to realize that it is one of the very deepest truths of my life. It is the actual outworking in my life of something that is a basic doctrinal truth of the Faith I have always known in my head, but which seems finally to be making its way into my heart. What I speak of is the known grace of God present and active in my entire adult life since my conversion in 1990.
What I’m finally coming to know in a visceral as well as an intellectual way is that His grace, His “unmerited favor” has always been there for me in the end no matter what I’ve felt, thought, and done in all those years, all of them. It’s been there when I’ve been at my lowest points. It’s been there through my worst acted out sins. It’s been there in my times of deepest joy and/or happiness in this life. No matter where I have found myself to be physically, spiritually, psychologically, emotionally, etc. the grace of God in Christ has saved me innumerable times from the “worst case scenarios” that I am so liable to find afflicting my mind and heart.
It has even been there when I have abused it through my own transgressions against a holy God. So many times, especially in years past, I have felt the fear that some sin has permanently separated me from my Lord. It is His grace remaining active in my life that has, blessedly, proved me wrong in every case. I know that without grace my life would have ended many times over, starting from the suicidal depression that first brought me to Christ and continuing through more than a quarter-century of deep trials. Without it, I believe being alive and active in my existence, I would have been destroyed in every sense of the word long before now.
That God’s grace has continued unbroken and saved me through those years of trouble both self-created and created by living in a fallen world under the thrall of the Enemy of my soul is to me a great miracle. In fact it is perhaps the most profound miracle in which I have participated, certainly not the only one, but maybe the greatest one….at least to me.
What it really comes down to is that my Lord’s grace truly has been sufficient for me. What the Apostle Paul was told by God in 2nd Corinthians 12:9, and what hundreds of millions of my brothers and sisters in Christ have experienced over the past 2,000 years, really has applied to my life too. If it seems a little odd to the reader that something known and accepted by so many others took so long for me to begin to really believe for myself, I understand. I spent many years living in a certain kind of fear for nothing and I do sometimes ask myself why it has taken me so long to get to this point.
I could write another entire essay on what I think those reasons were, but that is not the point of this one. Instead, it is a kind of personal declaration that what has happened to me is more important, at least at the moment I write these words, than why it has taken so much time to happen. This personal acceptance of grace having always been present in my Christian life (and maybe even before it in some sense) is a new and great blessing for me. It is something I wanted to declare in writing. It is something I wanted to make known to everyone.
Finally knowing the power of unending divine grace is great gain for me and, just by sharing it, perhaps it will help someone else to come to that same knowledge a bit faster than I did. I pray that will be the case because knowing God’s grace, “is sufficient”; really and truly knowing it, is something that at this moment I feel cannot happen too soon in the lives of so many who are struggling children of God, people who are still where I was for so many, most likely too many, years.