Quote On Grace

[outdeep]

I read this when on the treadmill at lunch.  I hope you find this encouraging:


If a random sample of one thousand American Christians were taken today, the majority would define faith as belief in the existence of God.  In earlier times it did not take faith to believe that God existed – almost everybody took that for granted.  Rather, faith had to do with one's relationship to God – whether one trusted in God.  The difference between faith as "belief in something that may or may not exist" and faith as "trusting in God" is enormous.  The first is a matter of the head, the second a matter of the heart.  The first can leave us unchanged, the second intrinsically being changed.

Such is the faith describe by Paul Tillich in his famous work The Shaking of the Foundations:  "Grace strikes us when we are in great pain and restlessness.  It strikes us when we walk through the dark valley of a meaningless and empty life . . .It strikes us when, year after year, the longed-for perfection does not appear, when the old compulsions reign within us as they have for decades, when despair destroys all joy and courage.  Sometimes at that moment a wave of light breaks into our darkness, and it is as though a voice were saying:  'You are accepted.  You are accepted, accepted by that which is greater than you, and the name which you do not know.  Do not ask for the name now; perhaps you will find it later.  Do not try to do anything now; perhaps later you will do much.  Do not seek for anything, do not perform anything, do not intend anything.  Simply accept the fact that you are accepted.'  If that happens to us, we experience grace."

And Grace calls out:  you are not just a disillusioned old man who may die soon, a middle-aged woman stuck in a job and desperately wanting to get out, a young person feeling the fire in the belly begin to grow cold.  You may be insecure, inadequate, mistaken, or potbellied.  Death, panic, depression, and disillusionment may be near you.  But you are not just that.  You are accepted.  Never confuse your perception of yourself with the mystery that you really are accepted.

Paul writes:  "The Lord said, 'My grace is enough for you:  my power is at its best in weakness.'  So I shall be very happy to make my weaknesses my special boast so that the power of Christ may stay over me" (2 Corinthians 12:9).  Whatever our failings may be, we need not lower our eyes in the presence of Jesus.  Unlike Quasimoto, the hunchback of Notre Dame, we need not hide all that is ugly and repulsive in us.  Jesus comes not for the super-spiritual but for the wobbly and the weak-kneed who know they don't have it all together, and who are not too proud to accept the handout of amazin' grace.  As we glance up, we are astonished to find the eye of Jesus open with wonder, deep with understanding, and gently with compassion.

-The Ragamuffin Gospel
By Brennan Manning

[Joe Sperling]

Dave---

What an encouragement!! That is exactly what I
needed to hear today---and every day for that
matter. It is truly amazing--the message of grace.
I shared with someone lately a verse that often
comes to mind at the strangest times. When I have
been in my deepest of depressions, or feel I have
failed God the most, or that he must be looking down
upon me miserably I will hear "There is none righteous,
no not one". And I know it is the Holy Spirit speaking to me. It's a reminder that I can do nothing to improve who I am before the Lord--I cannot be righteous by what I do or don't do--I am righteous because of what He has done and no work of my own. Sometimes it is so hard to
rest in the fact that we are "accepted in the Beloved".
Thank you for sharing that Dave.

--Joe

[outdeep]

This book has been helpful to me as I move through my middle-age-crisis years.  In some ways, as I am haunted by many past failures, I feel I am starting all over and learning anew and feeling in my heart that I am not an overcomer, but a flawed human in need of God's charity.


Often I have been asked, "Brenan, how is it possible that you became an alcoholic after you got saved?"  It is possible because I got battered and bruised by loneliness and failure, because I got discouraged, uncertain, gilt-ridden, and took my eyes off Jesus.  Because the Christ-encounter did not transfigure me into an angel.  Because justification by grace through faith means I have been set in right relationship with God, not made the equivalent of a patient etherized on a table."
…
Because salvation is by grace through faith, I believe that among the countless number of people standing in front of the throne and in front of the Lamb, dressed in white robes and holding palms in their hands (Revelation 7:9), I shall see the prostitute from the Kit-Kat Ranch in Carson City, Nevada, who tearfully told me she could find no other employment to support her two-year-old son.  I shall see the woman who had an abortion and is haunted by guilt and remorse but did the best she could faced with grueling alternatives; the businessman besieged with debt who sold his integrity in a series of desperate transactions; the insecure clergyman addicted to being liked, who never challenged his people from the pulpit and longed for unconditional love; the sexually-abused teen molested by his father and now selling his body on the street, who, as he falls asleep each night after his last 'trick', whispers the name of the unknown God he learned about in Sunday school; the deathbed convert who for decades had his cake and ate it, broke every law of God and man, wallowed in lust and raped the earth.

"But how?" we ask, Then the voice says, "They have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb."

There they are.  There we are – the multitude who so wanted to be faithful, who at times got defeated, soiled by life, and bested by trials, wearing the bloodied garments of life's tribulations, but through it all clung to the faith.

My friends, if this is not good news to you, you have never understood the gospel of grace.

Brennan Manning
The Ragamuffin Gospel

[Joe Sperling]

Dave----

Once again, thanks. And once again, it was what I needed to hear today.

God bless you, Joe

[al Hartman]

     Yes, Amen.  Thank you.

al