⁷ “Blessed are those
   whose transgressions are forgiven,
   whose sins are covered.
⁸ Blessed is the one
   whose sin the Lord will never count against them.”^[b]

Allow me to begin in an environment I know very well. The Church. In the church the word grace, the Greek word “charis”, is used in two very powerful contexts. First of all, grace is that which we receive from God through Christ as Jesus comes to this world as one of us, lives fully and completely the law of God on our behalf, then dies in our place so that which Adam forfeits in the garden can be reclaimed by us as gift of God’s grace. Jesus did not have to come into our world. He did so as an act of love and mercy. Jesus did not have to give himself over to the authorities in order to bear in his body what each of us deserves. He did this as an act of grace. Jesus did not have to shed his blood for us. He did this as a supreme act of grace. Jesus did not have to go the full way and give his life as a ransom for many. He did this as an act of underserved, unmerited, unimaginable favor, which we call grace.

This concept is difficult to grasp in our world. Because of our personal investments in things we call “justice”, “fairness”, and “equality”, we find it very difficult to emphasis “grace” the way the Biblical worldview would demand, or the way some say Jesus did. Our culture has created all these little “slogans” that drive us toward un-grace. “You get what you deserve”, “You are what you eat”, “You reap what you sow”, are as much a part of our thinking as the songs we hear on the radio. We often are carried along by the wind of our time with phrases like, “pull yourself up by your own bootstraps”, “God helps those who help themselves”, or “Trust is not given, it is earned.” We use these phrases not only to guide our lives, but to define our particular cultural expressions of truth. We do this in the church as well. Though none of these sayings are part of the Gospel Message brought by Jesus, and in many ways are in direct contradiction to Biblical Truth, we hang our proverbial hats on them as if they are the sacred writings of God on the walls of our sanctuaries. Grace is fine and dandy, as long as it is a word used in Easter sermons and extended to people we love, but ask me to make it the essence of how I live and treat people, even people who have wronged me, then “you reap what you sow” and “God helps those who helps themselves” will do me just fine. We seldom stop to consider that embracing these life principles and living them out often makes us enemies of the very gospel we claim to proclaim – “that God was in Christ reconciling an underserving and unfaithful world to Himself.”  (Italics added by me.) More later, Peace/Out