Grace and Peace.  Titus 1.4

Grace and Peace.  There is something about this pairing that shoots straight to my heart.  It sounds good, it sounds right, and if you stop and think about it, what greater thing could you offer someone, what kinder sentiment? 

May God the Father and Christ Jesus our Savior give you grace and peace~¹

Paul knew grace.  His entire life had been turned upside down by the grace of God—by the grace of God, I am what I am—he said of himself.² And so, to Titus, who he left to create order in the church at Crete, he offers grace and peace, knowing there is no peace without grace.

Ah, grace.  How to define it, how to grasp its beauty and power! 

I know nothing, except what everyone knows —

if there when Grace dances, I should dance.³  

Grace captured: “You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous person, though for a good person someone might possibly dare to die. But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”⁴

Aye, that is grace dancing.  God reaching down for imperfect man, costly though it was to him.  God’s very language is the language of grace, and he is in the business of extending to us his favor, even though we do not deserve it. God isn’t concerned with fairness in the way we are; actually, grace is strange because there’s absolutely nothing fair about it.

Tis a difficult thing to comprehend, grace is not about fairness or deservedness.  And then I remember, "I don’t think the way you think. The way you work isn’t the way I work," God decrees. "For as the sky soars high above earth, so the way I work surpasses the way you work, and the way I think is beyond the way you think.”⁵

Read and answer these questions slowly:  What’s your experience with grace?

  Have you known and accepted God’s grace?

     Has the infinite grace of God changed you?

       Do you flow in grace – giving and receiving it freely?

          Hmmm . . . can’t really know love without grace

              For love ‘believes all things’, bears all things,

                  and gives the benefit of the doubt . . .⁶

                      That is grace.

The drippings of grace … longing for a scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited. — C. S. Lewis

Ah, it seems that I am more apt to extend grace to others, especially when it comes to their sin or their pasts—you know, their struggles.  Yet I hold a harsh line with myself.  I remember as a child singing the old hymn I love, “Grace Greater than all our Sin,” –‘seems good for everyone else, but for me, the bar is higher.  Wait---what is greater than all my sin--my expectations of myself?  No, God’s grace.

Makes me think of the song I love by Building 429⁷-

‘When no one else knows how I feel, your love for me is proven real.  ?When no one else cares where I’ve been, you run to me with           outstretched hands, and you hold me in your arms?again . . .  I need no explanation of ‘why me’, I just need confirmation?‘only you’ could understand the?emptiness inside my head . . . ?I am falling down upon my knees?to find the one who gives me peace . . . Ah, and I’m connected with grace again.’  I’m reminded that his ways are not my ways. 

God said, “. . .I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion.”⁸

God doesn’t wait for me to come to him . . . he runs to me, with arms outstretched.  And in his arms, I remember how to dance again.  Now that is amazing grace.  I will ask you again: have you experienced that grace? 

Christine