Grace in Life

It's amazing how God works through life's trials. This past week the Spirit has been convicting me on too many things to list. One of the areas that the Spirit's been teaching me is in the area of grace. I know this because not only did I come across grace through talks with friends, but this weeks bible study was about God's Grace and Sufficiency. To a non-believer that seems like a lot of coincidence, but for me that's a God thing.

In bible study we talked about the difference between grace and mercy. A.W. Tozer puts it this way in Knowledge of the Holy. "As mercy is God's goodness confronting human misery and guilt, so grace is His goodness directed toward human debt and demerit. It is by His grace that God imputes merit where none previously existed and declares no debt to be where one had been before." And again, "Grace is the good pleasure of God that inclines Him to bestow benefits upon the undeserving."

That is very comforting to know that God bestows grace upon the undeserving such as me. I only hope that as Christians we too can hand out grace to each other as generously as God does.

Confrontation and the Status Quo

This past week was difficult for me. As I now see, it was hard because my character was challenged. This last week was the first time in a long time I felt like I could have blown up on somebody; saying things I did not mean to say, yet saying them because I was so frustrated with the situation. During my weekly accountability time with some of my brothers in Christ, they saw me in a different light. A light that I choose not to show very often. As one of the guys put it, he saw fire in my eyes.

As the week unfolded, I felt like my willingness to serve had been taken advantage of. While I am in a unique situation to bear a large amount of responsibility, I found it hard to accept all of the responsibility handed me.

The problem I saw was that I was handed the task of making a huge part of an event fall into place. Sure I can handle that in a normal situation; however I was given 4 days to make it happen. It would have been fine if I had been part of the planning from square one, but it's an entirely different ballgame to assume the load 4 days from the event.

That was the problem. How did I react? I'm not sure. I would like to say I reacted rationally and clear headed. But I'm still not positive that's how I approached things. Given the short notice of my problem, I tried to confront the problem on short notice terms. My justification was that things would continue down the path of me taking more and more responsibility; unless I said something quickly. I was given the responsibility on Tuesday, gave it a day to become a little more level headed, and on Thursday I confronted the situation.

My current struggles arise from how things panned out. I realized Wednesday as I was rationally thinking through my actions that some of my frustration came from past wrongs that I decided to let slip. So Thursday's confrontation was more than confronting the current situation to encompass past and present problems. In my speech, I thought I was level-headed and non-condescending, but firm.

So as I start a new week I am searching for an equilibrium level between confrontation (hard love) and grace. I have previously thought that I should abound in grace much like Jesus and leave the hard love for God. But I have experienced this past week that hard love needs to be present. Even Jesus (my ultimate model) confronted the people selling sacrifices in the temple, so that God could shine through.