When I was in the midst of the mess of my life, it did not seem thrilling or exciting. It felt … overwhelming. Each step forward was a victory, but I constantly reflected on what I had done to my body. I partnered with guilt and shame.
It was when I was writing my memoir, Sweet Grace, God clearly showed me how His grace had been operating in my life for more than 30 years. And I understood the meaning of the passage, “But the law entered, so that sin might increase, but where sin increased, grace abounded much more.”2
God’s vision for every person is that we “grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.”3 How can we do that when we are constantly failing?
Grace Gets Rid of Failure
When we admit our sin and repent, God hurls all our failures into the deepest ocean, tramples them under His feet,4 removes them as far as the sunrise is from the sunset,5 and covers them with this amazing, very nebulous, but very real commodity called grace.
Grace was God’s idea. He knew we had to have a way to be forgiven. In the forgiveness, He removes our shame, picks us up, dusts us off, sets us on our feet and points us in the direction of our destiny.
Our failures may seem so great God could never forgive them, but as the passage says, more failure, more grace. From grace we take, and still grace remains!
Without grace, if we would fail one time, we would quit and no one would come to God because He would have no redeemed and sanctified work force. He gives us grace and forgives our sin out of love for all humanity. However, it does take us asking for forgiveness. For some reason that’s a difficult response.
Grace Sees us Differently
The deal is we don’t have to be afraid of what God thinks of us. When He looks at us, He does see our sin. He is not blind to our failures. Scripture tells us that in several places.6 However, He looks at us through His prophetic glasses of grace and love. He sees what we will become.
Paul says it so well in this verse. “For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, so that we should walk in them.”7
It’s awesome, but it does seem we do everything possible to thwart our destiny. We heap mounds and mounds of shame and guilt upon ourselves. We would rather live there than in the light of grace and forgiveness.
The lenses of grace see everything and yet, they focus on us as we will be, rather than where we are wallowing in our lies, weaknesses, strongholds and addictions.
The enemy has plans for us as well. “The thief does not come, except to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life, and that they may have it more abundantly.”8
He sees our lives and knows how to make something beautiful out of the jungle of our entanglements and issues.
“He who searches the hearts knows what the mind of the Spirit is, because He intercedes for the saints according to the will of God. We know that all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose.”9
