Ridiculous Grace

I used to love watching Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone. Serling would begin the episode with, “You unlock this door with the key of imagination. Beyond it is another dimension…” Serling would then introduce the episode.

I want us to unlock a door with the key of our imagination. What I’m about to share with you seems humanly impossible, because it is.

Imagine a father and a son. No matter how badly the son violates his father’s rules, when his son returns to his father with a contrite heart and confesses his guilt, his father forgives his son. More unbelievable is that even though his son has to suffer the consequences of his offense, his father does not punish the son.

I know; it’s ridiculous. How is the son ever going to learn to stop violating his father’s rules and break this maddening cycle of transgression? It’s obvious the father loves the son, but how much does the son love the father? The answer to the latter question is the key to open the door of our imagination.

If you haven’t figured it out by now, this is not about some alien life form from another dimension out in the twilight zone. It’s about me. It’s about you.

We don’t understand grace, and when we think we do, we usually cheapen it. Grace divine is unmerited favor, available to the sinner for salvation and the redeemed for victorious living. It is not a license to sin.

God gives this grace freely, but like the son in our imagined story, there are consequences to our sins. God will not bless our sinful patterns with Him, but He will forgive us:

“For the Lord God is a sun and shield; the Lord will give grace and glory; no good thing will He withhold from those who walk uprightly.” (Psalm 84:11)

The ridiculousness of God’s grace is imagined from our human minds. What father in his right mind would not punish his son for breaking his rules? What consequences could the son possibly experience without the fear of punishment?

If the son loves his father with a true love, then he will suffer a break in their fellowship. To know that you are not being punished as you deserve, and that your father’s love is not hindered towards you, that is a heavy burden to carry. It is an unnecessary burden because our Heavenly Father’s love exceeds our imagination and expectation:

“He has not dealt with us according to our sins, nor punished us according to our iniquities.” (Psalm 103:10)

The problem for me and possibly you is that we do not love the Father as He deserves and desires. As often is the case in our human relationships, we take our Father’s love for granted. The great tragedy in this is we fail to understand God’s will for our lives.

We miss this because we don’t spend time in His word and in prayer to learn from Him what His will is for each of us. We may read our bibles and devotionals, but we don’t meditate on them to glean heavenly wisdom. That deficiency is evidence of a lack of the preeminence of Christ in our lives. Paul reminded the Colossian church of this:

“For this reason we also, since the day we heard it, do not cease to pray for you, and to ask that you may be filled with the knowledge of His will in all wisdom and spiritual understanding; that you may walk worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing Him, being fruitful in every good work and increasing in the knowledge of God.” (Colossians 1:9-10)

When we allow ourselves to be filled with heavenly wisdom and spiritual understanding, God’s grace no longer seem ridiculous to us.

Furthermore, because of our knowledge of His will, our love for Jesus grows and develops us in our spiritual maturity.

Imagine that, if you will…

In Christ
Dave
Ps. 37:4

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    Copyright © 2018 David Jeffers

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