“Grace can’t be explained; it has to be experienced … grace always has a story.” – Kyle Idleman
Grace is a word that we are all familiar with. We might think of it as a quick prayer at the start of a formal dinner. Or maybe a popular baby girls name. Perhaps you might think of a ballet dancer or figure skater moving gracefully around the room. You may of even heard it talked about in church.
But as the quote above says – grace is so much more than all that. It is not simply a word, a short prayer or even a religious concept…
Grace is an experience!
Over the past few years God has really deepened my experience, understanding and revelation of grace. Grace has become such a powerful reality in my life that even just hearing or thinking the word can often bring tears to my eyes, or tangibly move my heart very deeply, as I hear and ponder it.
To me, the concept of divine grace is one of the most beautiful things in the world!
This is mainly because I believe, know and have profoundly experienced – that divine grace truly is the ultimate foundational building block of unconditional love.
You cannot separate grace from love. They are fully dependant on one another. Unconditional love is only possible because of undeserved grace.
Of course, we are talking about a specific definition of the word grace. I am referring to the word as a Biblical concept, a spiritual experience. So before I move on, let me first attempt to describe to you what I SEE when I read, or hear, the word grace in this context.
In the Bible’s New Testament, grace is translated from the Greek word ‘charis’ which can be translated as God’s unmerited or undeserved favour and ability. To favour someone or something is to prioritise, show preference to, demonstrate a special kindness towards and basically give approval to that person or thing.
Normally in our day to day world we would show ‘favour’ to someone that we love more than others, ie. a spouse, child, family member, best friend, someone who has helped or shown us more kindness than others. We would rarely show ‘favour’ to someone who had been unkind, treated us badly or someone that we dislike.
Therefore we usually show favour (or grace) to people conditionally. We repay love for love, kindness for kindness, generosity for generosity, dislike for dislike, rudeness for rudeness, hate for hate. The way someone behaves or acts towards us dictates how we react, treat and respond to them in the vast majority of cases.
This is where ‘charis’ blows normal human behaviour and convention out of the water.
The whole point of the New Testament concept of charis is that it is wholly undeserved. There is no initial assessment about whether someone’s behaviour merits us favouring them. We decide to favour them – before we know how they will treat or respond to us. AND we choose to favour and show kindness to them DESPITE wrong, hurtful or negative treatment or attitude towards us.
Do you see how undeserved grace is the foundational building block of unconditional love?
Can you SEE how outrageously beautiful it is as a concept to me? However, the stunning nature of undeserved charis can never be fully explained in words. It has to be SEEN & EXPERIENCED. For us to truly get a life changing revelation of its glorious divine nature and intention you have to have lived through, and from, its awesome perspective. As the lyrics to this song show is so beautifully…
“And nothing ever LOOKED like this
The wonder of a world I missed
The clarity I find in GRACE
Never thought I’d SEE this way.
You’ve been there every time I fall
Been there through it all
All this time to SHOW me
The VIEW from here.”
– Stu Garrard (The View From Here)
Those words help to describe the profound transforming metamorphosis that occurs from the day, or season, that we truly begin to SEE via divine grace.
It revolutionises the way that we SEE the world. It completely changes our own perspective of God and humanity. We start viewing everything from the eyes of our hearts – rather than with our limited heads and minds. It is a wholly new ‘view from here’. And today I want to try and describe something of the view from the vantage point of divine undeserved grace.
“The view from here
So beautiful
It’s so beautiful…
… can you SEE it now?”
(Stu Garrard ‘The View From Here’)
The view from the outlook of grace is truly stunning. It is simply indescribably beautiful. As you look out at the world, you begin to increasingly see the beauty in each and every person you meet. Even when they are in a bad mood, even if they treat you terribly, despite their good or bad behaviour. You see hidden beauty within them and you long to reach, connect with it and draw it out from them. You feel a profound depth of love for them before you even meet or know them.
Undeserved grace is truly THAT radical!
Isn’t it beautiful?!
Can you imagine a world where everyone could see and treat others from that viewpoint?
But I can also hear the cynics among you mumbling: “Well that’s simply unattainable idealistic ‘world peace’ rubbish – who on earth can love to that depth? How can you love someone you don’t know or have never even met ... if you don’t know them – how do you know if that person really deserves your love?”
And all true Jesus followers should quickly reply with a resounding…
“We don’t! – But that’s the whole point of grace.”
How deserving someone is of love is taken right out of the equation.
There is nothing they could do to make us love them more. There is nothing they can do to make us love them less. We simply love them because we just love them. Full stop!
Isn’t it beautiful?
But…you might say… is it really possible to live like that? With that radical view of the world? Seeing every person you meet as uniquely, but distinctly, beautiful?
It is ONLY possible if you have ‘experienced’ that undeserved grace and unconditional love yourself first personally. You can’t view the world like that until you truly see and experience that level of divine love from the source of perfect, infinite, Divine Love Himself – Jesus Christ! When people have truly experienced divine undeserved grace and love. It will naturally flow out of them like streams of living water – to increasing measure, to everyone they meet. You can’t make it, will it or force it to happen. It should just increasingly become as natural as breathing, for those people who have truly surrendered to God’s unconditional love and grace.
However, unmerited grace is not a one-off experience alone. That is where it begins. But it’s real beauty is seen when people experience an ongoing deeper and deeper revelation personally. Day by day. Month by month. Season by season. And as they do it will just naturally transform the way they think, feel and behave until they increasingly drip and bleed undeserved grace and unconditional love to everyone they meet.
That metamorphosis has to be one of the most stunningly beautiful processes to watch happening in both yourself and others. Once you have seen and tasted what grace can do in your own and other people’s lives. Once you have experienced the restful ease of it’s transforming power. When you begin to rise up and view the worlds valleys and humanities brokenness from the lush green hills of grace.
You are never the same again!
However, the hidden glory of that transformation is that you will only truly experience it mesmerising depths, IF you begin from a place of witnessing the true extent to which it is undeserved. In your own life first… then in others second.
The truth is you will only experience grace in proportion to how much you acknowledge the depths of your own brokenness and weakness.
The divine key – given freely via Jesus Christ – to unlocking this view of undeserved grace and unconditional love in your own heart… Is surrendering to and receiving it’s ultimate core revelation…
That you have done nothing and can do nothing now, or in the future, to deserve miraculous divine perfect love.
The moment you believe you have done something that helps make you worthy of unconditional love and undeserved grace, you have voided the whole revelation and experience. You cannot experience grace by earning it – you can only receive as the ultimate gift.
You can only experience grace when you see how absolutely undeserved it really is!
And that is also humanity’s biggest hurdle to receiving the life transforming experience. Because humans like to justify how good and deserving they are; of respect, life and love. They have believed the lie that has completely corrupted people’s understanding and experience of love in our world – that love is something you give and receive because of how much you have earned and deserved it. This is why human convention dictates that you love those who love you, show kindness to those who are kind to you, and dislike and even hate those who dislike and hate you. Which makes the most sense to our human minds.
However…
People can’t see that it’s just that corruption of love that has polluted and destroyed our world, it’s inhabitants and all our relationships. The world is falling apart because it doesn’t truly understand and hasn’t truly experienced perfect unconditional love.
All this is because the truth is ‘weakness is the ONLY way’ to receiving that love. And unfortunately humanity hates feeling weak. We spend our lives trying to cover over and whitewash the cracks and crevices we ALL have. We will do anything we can to show off our strengths and sometimes go to any extreme to hide and cover over our weaknesses.
This results in our own ‘view from here’ being totally corrupted, polluted and full of both:
Pride AND shame.
Superiority AND inferiority.
Self-promoting AND self-hiding.
Self-prioritising AND self-loathing.
Arrogance AND false humility.
All of which will pollute and destroy perfect love.
Paul said in the Bible; “But he (God) said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me.” – 2 Corinthians 12:9
Anyone who has followed any part of my painful three year journey through a debilitating and devastating chronic illness will have heard and seen how it’s relentless waves have completely wrecked me again and again. I cannot begin to describe to you what has happened in my life over the past three and a half years. But perhaps I would say that, at times, it felt like a mixture of a devastating typhoon that ravaged its way through my life and attempted to destroy everything in its path. Whilst I sailed through its unrelenting storm in an exposed wooden rowing boat trying to not be completely sunk by the untamable wind and waves that seemed to strip me naked and constantly flood over me. On and off, I thought I was physically, mentally and spiritually drowning. Unable to cope or see a way through.
I can’t tell you how weak and vulnerable you feel when you are quite literally mostly bed bound and debilitated by a ‘life wrecking’, widely misunderstood, illness.
But as the never-ending storm raged and ripped through my life, stripping me of so many parts of my identity, dreams for the future and so much of what I could do, it revealed a deeper and deeper vulnerability. It exposed more and more of the real, naked, hidden and weak me. Until at moments I wasn’t totally sure what was left behind amidst the tatters of my old life.
Its destructive path at times completely overwhelmed me... but through it all... that still small voice of the Holy Spirit whispered…
“Weakness is the way”
“You can’t – but I AM can”
“Let yourself fall into My undeserved grace”
“Immerse yourself in My unconditional love”
And over time I began to SEE more and more of the depths of my Creator’s unconditional love – that could only be experienced through falling into and being completely immersed in His undeserved grace.
The old me who wanted to look, and be, so strong, the old me who struggled with pride and shame as the depth of her weakness was exposed, the old me who wanted to cover her nakedness with various worldly ‘fig leaves’ as Adam and Eve did after the fall…. Had to let herself be brutally killed off more and more – so that I could experience His ever increasing grace.
All of my heroic self-attempts to keep striving to be strong, all of my ugly self-reliance that tried to fight the battle on my own, all of my projected ‘able, high-achieving, pretentious’ self-identity had to be brutally crushed and wounded.
… until I could again see that we can do absolutely NOTHING to earn or deserve God’s divine favour. We cannot add – even a morsel – to His unmerited ability or His unearned strength at work within us.
“It would be so much more comfortable if God would keep us in our “strengths zone” wouldn’t it? But God keeps thrusting us into our “weakness zone” because it is only in our weakness that he is made strong”. – Christine Cane.
My Father, Lover and Friend… in His incomprehensible wisdom, allowed me to walk through the relentless ‘valley of the shadow of death and destruction’. So that I would learn to fall more deeply into Him. So that He could keep leading me like a Shepherd leads his scared lost sheep, up the greener, more peaceful, lusher mountainside. Up towards the higher ground where ‘the view from here’ would look even more stunningly beautiful than ever before.
My view of undeserved grace and unconditional love could only be widened and deepened when I truly realised that…
“It’s NONE of me… it’s ALL of Him.”
And that is what characterised His constant whispers to my soul throughout the storm…
“You can only do this through I AM’s undeserved grace. It’s My strength in your weakness. I didn’t build or design you to try and scale this mountain by your own human striving, strength and perseverance. I have allowed you to feel and see the depth of your weakness – so that you will see how much you need My grace. So FALL into My grace My precious, dependant, child and allow my SHALOM peace and completeness to STILL your heart again. And watch as you are saturated by My unconditional Love – so that when you look into the eyes of every person you meet, you will truly SEE with My eyes of pure unadulterated love.”
That is my ‘view from here’ which grows clearer and clearer each and every day.
That is why the word grace can cause me to catch my breath, bring tears to my eyes and deeply move my burning heart once again.
That is my story of undeserved grace.
That is what I need you to hear as you listen to my tragically beautiful tale.
Weakness is the only way to truly experience God. His grace can only be received as a mind-blowingly generous undeserved gift. His unconditional love is given despite our faults and failures. So that when we receive it – it will overflow to everyone we meet. In the stunning form of unconditional love for ALL people – regardless of how they feel about us in return.
The view from here is so very beautiful. It’s so beautiful… can you SEE it now?
“Christianity is not primarily a moral code but a grace-laden mystery; it is not essentially a philosophy of love but a love affair; it is not keeping rules with clenched fists but receiving a gift with open hands”. – Brennan Manning
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