Grace for the Humble

     There is a remaining question.  How can we make this real in our daily lives?  In other words, how can I allow Jesus to be the husband my wife needs and the father my children need through me?  How can I walk moment by moment by this grace?  If Jesus is my life, why isn’t my life different?

     Those are real questions, aren’t they?  Those are the questions I want to consider over the next several weeks.  I confess to you that these messages come out of a genuine searching for the answer for my own life.  I want the life of Jesus to be real and active in me.  I want to get out of His way so that He can do whatever it is He wants to do in me.  I want to be so attentive to Him and so available to Him that my simplest actions are led by Him and please Him. 

     So I am going to ask a series of practical questions over the next several weeks.  How can I know that I am saved?  How can I love people the way He does?  How can I be available to serve in the things He wants?  How can I walk consistently by His grace?  How can I pray?  How can I overcome bad habits?  How can real change be made in my life?  And, when the time comes, how can I die by His grace?

     These are the practical things of the Christian life, aren’t they?  These are the things with which we really struggle.  Things of the mind, ideas and thoughts, are great but aren’t worth very much if they don’t produce fruit in our daily lives.  The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ is for our daily walk. 

     With these things in mind I want to avoid the usual questions from deep theology and get right to the heart of the matter.  I am not going to discuss the relationship of grace and law, no matter how interesting that might be, because very few people will find anything in that discussion to take home to their daily lives.  What I want to do instead is give us a working and living definition of grace.

     I have worked on a definition of grace for many years.  I have heard all kinds of ideas from different teachers and different denominations.  But every time I began to formulate a specific definition of what grace is, I found that I had to go bigger.  I finally came to the conclusion that grace is simply what God does.  I suppose you could say that grace is God’s activity on our behalf.  Let me say it this way: God loves you and grace is what He does because of that love.

     I found a picture that seems to illustrate the Biblical concept of grace.  The primary Hebrew word for grace seems to encapsulate this concept.  The word is “chane”, which means “to bend down toward another in kindness”.  There is another word which, I believe, corresponds to this.  It is the word, “Canaan”, which means to be humbled. 

     The concept of grace taught by the Bible is that the Lord, in His power and majesty, in His wisdom and love, bends down to us in our brokenness and humility to provide all our needs.  That’s grace.  

     This is illustrated throughout the Bible.  In the very beginning we have the picture of Adam lying lifeless on the ground.  He has been created from the dust of the earth.  He is perfect in form and in potential, but he is lifeless.  He lies there in his need.  He has nothing to offer, nothing in his hand to give, and yet the Lord bends down to breathe the breath of life into him.  Beyond weakness and brokenness, Adam has nothing of himself.  All that he becomes, he becomes because of the grace of God.  Because of His love, God breathes His life, His grace, into the man.

     Then, years later, the Lord looks on the earth and sees the depravation and wickedness of mankind.  There is nothing worth redeeming.  He says that all their thoughts are evil continually.  They are wicked and violent and selfish.  But there is one man who admits the truth.  One man agrees with God.  One man is humble before the Lord.  One man bows his heart toward the Lord seeking His mercy.  And the Scripture says,

 

(Gen 6:8 NKJV)  But Noah found grace in the eyes of the LORD.

 

     Now I have heard people say that Noah was chosen by God because Noah was the only good man left.  In other words, Noah was so good that God decided to use him to start all over with humanity.  But that isn’t true.  When did Noah find grace in the eyes of the Lord?  When God chose him before he was born.  In Genesis 5 we read that Lamech, Noah’s father, knew that Noah would deliver the people from the great wickedness before Noah was born.  When Noah had nothing to offer, no goodness or strength or wisdom, God reached out in His grace and blessed him.

     Again, years later, the children of Israel have escaped Egypt by the grace of God only to disobey Him and spend the next forty years wandering.  At the end of their wandering, as they are about to enter the land of promise, Moses tells them the reason for their suffering.
Deuteronomy 8:2-3 ( NKJV ) 2And you shall remember that the Lord your God led you all the way these forty years in the wilderness, to humble you and test you, to know what was in your heart, whether you would keep His commandments or not.  3So He humbled you, allowed you to hunger, and fed you with manna which you did not know nor did your fathers know, that He might make you know that man shall not live by bread alone; but man lives by every word that proceeds from the mouth of the Lord. 

 

     Remember the word I mentioned earlier that meant being broken or humbled?  It was Canaan.  That was the name of the Promised Land.  I suspect that there is an important lesson just in the name of the land.  The people of God were delivered from their slavery and humiliation in Egypt for the purpose of living a humble and broken life before the Lord.  If they did this, if they remembered that it was His power, His wisdom, His love, which had delivered them and would always sustain them, if they remembered to be humble before Him, He would make something great of them.  He would use them to tell the world of His love.  He would protect them and provide for them and they would have more joy than they could imagine… if they were humble before Him.