Serving the High Plains
Serving the High Plains
In Acts 6, the first Christian martyr, Stephen, is described as a man full of grace. For your future Bible trivia conquests, note that there are only two people described as “full of grace.” The other one besides Stephen is the Lord Jesus.
What does it mean to be full of grace? There’s an old Seinfeld bit about having or not having grace, but that’s talking about something different. We want to know what the Bible means by grace.
The original Greek word that gets translated as “grace” in our English Bibles starts us moving in the right direction. It is charis, and its most simple, direct translation is, “gift.” A gift is not earned, but is freely given.
The book of Romans contrasts a gift of grace with an earned wage. If you do a job and get paid by your employer, you have not thereby received a grace: You have simply gotten what your work earned for you. Using the same sort of analogy, Romans also says that our sin earns the wages of death, but, again, in complete contrast, the grace of God grants eternal life through faith in Jesus.
Grace is not about getting what you have earned. Grace is getting what you haven’t earned. Even more, it’s about getting the opposite of what you’ve earned. This is at the heart of the good news we call the Gospel of Jesus.
The good news is that God, in his grace, is willing to “justify” (forgive, count as righteous) the ungodly, through faith in Christ. It would make all the sense in the world to justify the godly ones. But, the scandal of New Testament preaching is that God justifies the ungodly, the ones who don’t by any means deserve it.
This grace is between you and the Lord. I can’t peer into your heart and know whether you have experienced it. There are, however, some outward signs that can be observed. Anyway, there should be. When Luke said Stephen was “full of grace” he was talking about these outward things. Someone who has genuinely received this saving grace of God ought to be operating in daily life as if grace is real.
If you know what it means to be saved by a free gift of God, how can you go on treating people like you do? It shouldn’t be this way. If God has shown me grace, saving me in spite of myself, shouldn’t that make me deal with folks differently? Maybe, just maybe, I shouldn’t be so judgmental. It seems like God’s grace toward me ought to make me overflow with grace toward everyone else.
Call me crazy, but I don’t see another viable option here. I’m not always that-a-way with folks, though. I should be. We should be. The one who knows the grace of God should be easy to deal with, patient, kind, forgiving, and generous. Not to put too fine a point on it, but we practically deny our own gospel when we act some other way. Then we wonder why they’re not interested in what we have to say about Jesus.
Gordan Runyan is the pastor of Immanuel Baptist Church in Tucumcari. Contact him at:
