The "Other" Grace

Grace, grace, God's grace

Grace that will pardon and cleanse within

Grace, grace, God's grace

Grace that is greater than all my sin

We hear a lot about grace these days. Most times our minds wander to only one meaning: God's unmerited favor in saving sinners and fitting them for Heaven. It seems that we stop at that definition.

Grace extends beyond the salvation of our souls and spills over into the arena of the mundane. Only, we miss it. We don't see the grace in our work, our family life, or leisure time, or our umpteenth trip to the grocery store to pick up the item that we forgot the other empteenth times we went.

Why is that? Why are we content to have God's grace at salvation and forget about it when we're not having our personal devotions, or in church praising God in song?

I believe it's because we don't see how grace fits into those situations. We easily see how God extends His grace to penitent sinners, thereby sealing them with His Holy Spirit and rescinding His wrath justly due to us. But we don't see it anywhere else. We pray for grace in our day-to-day living, but we don't see it.

The idea of grace extends beyond the mere salvation, and I certainly don't mean to downplay that particular aspect of it.

I think we sometimes forget to distinguish between saving grace and the means of grace in living. Yes, all of grace can be summed up as unmerited and unearned, but the way that saving grace works out in our daily lives looks different than it did at the moment we were regenerated and raised to spiritual life. 

When examining the word translated 'grace' (see graphic above) we see that it is translated several different ways. The Greek word appears154 x's in the New Testament (ESV).  χάρις is translated as 'grace' 123 of those times. 

And when we look at how this word is used we begin to get a better idea of grace. For example, this word is used for grace in, 

• A knowledge of our guilt based upon the law of Moses (John 1:17)

• Grace for witnessing about Christ (Acts 4:33)

• Grace in forgetting past sins (1Cor 15:10)

• Grace in giving (2Cor 8:1, 6-7)

• Grace in doing good works (2Cor 9:8)

• Grace in Spiritual gifts (Romans 12:6) 

I certainly can't go through all 123 times this word is used as grace. But just from examining these verses briefly we see that grace was present is so many more areas than just salvation. It was a daily practice for the apostles and the early church. When we begin to see grace in every single area of our lives, and how God is using that grace to shape us, we begin to catch the vision to which God has called every believer to live up to. 

And that makes all the difference in the world. 

Grace to you,

Steven