What’s grace? What does it look like? How does it work? Perhaps the best way to understand grace is to set it beside justice and mercy. Justice, is getting what you deserve. If I break the law, and then go to jail for my crime, justice has been served. Now mercy, has been defined as not giving someone what they deserve. I deserve punishment, but when you extend mercy to me, your absolving me of that debt. Your saying, I’m not going to give you what you deserve. Now grace, is something altogether different. Grace is doing good to someone who deserves the opposite.
Let me give you an example. We’re all familiar with Victor Hugo’s book, Les Miserables. In that book there is a wonderful picture of grace. You know the story. The main character, Jean Valjean is a laborer working to support his sister and her seven children. After a long dry spell with no available work, he breaks a window to steal a loaf of bread for them and is caught and sentenced to five years of hard labor at the notorious prison of Toulon. Through misbehavior and escape attempts, Jean Valjean ends up serving 19 years, and Hugo describes his gradual emotional decent as all hope and love are quenched in the crucible of prison life.
One night, Valjean is sleeping on a stone bench on the street, when a woman suggests that he ask for lodging at a nearby house, which she does not mention is the modest home of the Bishop of the town. The Bishop takes Valjean in, feeds him and gives him a bed. And while Jean Valjean is deeply grateful, he’s also pretty hardened at this point, and in the middle of the night, he gets up, steals the Bishop’s silver utensils, and flees. The next day, he is picked up randomly and discovered to have the silver on him. The soldiers bring him back to the Bishop, but rather than pressing charges against Jean Valjean, the Bishop tells the soldiers that he had given the silver to the convict as a gift. And then he also gives Jean Valjean two heavy silver candlesticks.
And then he says, “Jean Valjean, my brother, you no longer belong to evil but to good. It is your soul that I am buying for you. I am taking it away from black thoughts and from the spirit of perdition, and I am giving it to God.” That’s grace! That’s what God has done for us.
And here’s the thing about grace. Grace is always expensive to the giver. Shocking to the observer and traumatic to the receiver. First, it’s expensive to the giver. You see, in order to extend grace to us, it cost God everything. Our salvation was not cheap. It’s been said, Salvation may be free, but it wasn’t cheap. It cost God His life. So we can’t ever say that sins not a big deal. Or that it doesn’t really matter. We can’t trivialize it in that way. Because our sin cost Jesus His life. Peter puts it this way, ‘We weren’t redeemed with perishable things like silver and gold. But with the precious blood of the lamb.’ So grace is expensive to the giver.
Secondly, grace is always shocking to the observer. This is what its talking about back in verse seven. When the angels see us and they see how wicked and sinful we are and then they see God pour out His grace on us, it blows their minds. We should be blasted. But God loves us!
Thirdly, grace is always traumatic to the receiver. Think of Valjean. That one act of undeserved kindness changed his life and shaped the rest of his story. Surely all of us are familiar with the story of John Newton. John Newton was the captain of a slave trading vessel in the 1700’s. Of course, he went on to repent of his sins and became a driving force in the fight against slavery. It was he wrote the words to this beloved Hymn.
Amazing grace! (how sweet the sound)
That sav’d a wretch like me!
I once was lost, but now am found,
Was blind, but now I see.
Truly this song is so beloved because it captures the essence of what it means to be saved by grace. Written by a man who understood the depth and depravity of the human condition. This song is our story.
God bless,
Daniel Bentley
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