For so much of my life I thought that God was indifferent towards me. I felt like I had to achieve some kind of spiritual status for Him to care. I bought into the exhausting idea that as long as I was praying, attending, and serving then I deserved His attention. While I now know that isn’t true, I sometimes catch myself trying to revert back to that thought process.
Truthfully, most of life works that way. You do something in order to receive something. We live our life earning, achieving, and deserving. And when you can’t earn, achieve, and deserve… then you don’t receive.
Thankfully God doesn’t work that way. His love, His presence, and His grace is for us wherever we are and whatever we are doing. He loves us, not because we can do anything for Him, but just because we are His. It’s a simple, but life altering reality.
Believe it or not, God’s grace is sweetest when we are faced with the fact that we don’t deserve it. There have been times, even in just this past week, when I’ve been helpless and the only thing I could do for God was choke back tears and cry out for help, yet His love and His presence did nothing but become more real to me.
Romans 5:1-2 describes it perfectly…
“ 1 Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, 2 through whom we have gained access by faith into this grace in which we now stand. And we boast in the hope of the glory of God.”
Romans 5:1-2
Grace isn’t just a thing; it’s a way of living life. It’s a place of knowing that God loves you regardless of your performance, service, or behavior. This means that if you are going through a rough patch, if you don’t have anything to offer God, if you don’t know what to say or do… then you are in the perfect place to rest in the place in which you stand, His grace.
Thank you for this Tyler. I totally connect with this need for grace and discovering it in the place where I admit that I don’t deserve it. It’s so easy to con myself into believing everything’s good, and that I have all my stuff together. But I’m really jacked up like everyone else.
Thanks again!
Thanks Kevin! I know what you mean.. It’s so easy to slip back into that mindset, I do it all the time. Thankfully, His hand is always extending grace and it’s never too late or too early to realize we need it.