Today we celebrate the magnitude of God’s grace.
On these Sundays in Lent, we have been exploring the grace of God. We have been trying to look at various aspects of God’s grace. In the process, my hope has been to give us a greater appreciation of what God has given to us as a gift.
One of the challenges that I have when trying to describe the grace of God has to do with its scope. What that means is understanding what exactly God’s grace covers. This is what I had in mind when I considered the focus for this aspect of God’s grace. The magnitude of God’s grace is greater and more far-reaching than we truly understand. Because of the scale of what we’re talking about it can be difficult to truly appreciate what God has done.
God’s grace is the outpouring of his love on those who have offended against God’s holiness. The seriousness of the situation can oftentimes be minimized in unhelpful ways. We do not have a means of measuring how truly offensive our sin is to God’s holy character. The only indication we have of how awful our sin is is to consider the lengths to which God went to remedy our sin.
The sacrifice of Jesus upon the cross is the price God said would satisfy the offense. From a theological standpoint, the fact God entered into the world and chose to die so sinners might have access to God’s grace cannot be understated. No other man or woman was worthy enough to stand as a representative for the rest of mankind. So God chose to become like those who had offended him and offered himself in the life and person of Jesus Christ for the sake of those who could not restore the relationship to where it needed to be. So, what we could not do and what needed to be done God did for us.
The miracle of salvation is grounded in the reality that God must be true to himself at all times. And by virtue of what we find in Scripture, we can see that God’s love for his people had to find expression in spite of our sin. But that God’s holiness had to be upheld because of it. So how would God find a solution to this problem? He did it in Jesus.
Even in those moments when I find myself wondering why would God do such a thing for me, I must fight back the temptation to make myself the exception from God’s grace. The magnitude of God’s grace helps us to see the fullness of God’s love for sinners. Even for those who ultimately reject the grace he has freely offered to them. God’s grace is better than any person could describe. Better than the wildest imagination could conceive. God’s grace is better than our deepest fears.
So as we celebrate today the magnitude of God’s grace let us look forward with anticipation to Easter morning. That will be another opportunity for us to look back over our lives and see how much more God’s grace has been present than we had perceived in those moments we felt most distant.
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