Grace

At least two or three times a week I am told that I am sweet, kind, great, etc. While I appreciate these compliments, they are more of a reminder to me of my sinfulness, than a compliment that I accept the way it is intended. I cringe inwardly when I hear this and am once again reminded of my sinfulness. Only God knows how selfish and wretched I really am. It is clearly by God’s grace that I project something else publicly.

You have probably seen the video of the father and son (Team Hoyt) who do marathons and triathlons together. The son is paralyzed and the father carries him, pushes him in a cart, bikes with him strapped to the front of his bike, swims with him floating in a raft behind, etc. The son is able to participate in the ‘race’ because the father does all the work.

http://www.godtube.com/view_video.php?viewkey=8cf08faca5dd9ea45513

I watched that video today. I sat with tears streaming down my face as I identified with that son. I am utterly incapable of running in this race of life on my own. I am solely dependant upon the strength of my Father. It is by His amazing grace that I get out of bed in the morning, that I speak kindly to anyone, that I serve the sick and abused, and that I am able to hold up my head and breathe in and out of His love and joy all day long.

This epiphany, that I have had at least a thousand times before, led me to look at the nature of God’s grace in the book of Romans, chapter 8. For a change, I read it in The Message.

“Those who think they can do it on their own end up obsessed with measuring their own moral muscle but never get around to exercising it in real life. Those who trust God’s action in them find that God’s Spirit is in them—leaving and breathing God! Obsession with self in these matters is a dead end; attention to God leads us out into the open, into a spacious, free life. Focusing on the self is the opposite of focusing on God. Anyone completely absorbed in self ignores God, ends up thinking more about self than God. That person ignores who God is and what He is doing. And God isn’t pleased at being ignored.
But if God himself has taken up residence in your life, you can hardly be thinking more of yourself than of him. Anyone, of course, who has not welcomed this invisible but clearly present God, the Spirit of Christ, won’t know what we’re talking about. But for you who welcome Him, in whom He dwells—even though you still experience all the limitations of sin—you yourself experience life on God’s terms.”