January 26th Newsletter

Christian writer Philip Yancey wrote a book, What’s So Amazing About Grace. No doubt he was thinking about the well-known words of John Newton’s hymn: “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound; that saved a wretch like me. I once was lost, but now I’m found, was blind, but now I see.”

While a good number of us can sing a stanza or two from memory, it still leaves us with Philip Yancey’s question. What is so amazing about grace anyway? Do we just sing it and forget it? Do we really believe what it says?

Really I don’t think most of us believe it. Do we believe we are “wretches?” The dictionary defines a wretch as “a despicable or contemptible person.” Is that what we really think about ourselves? I doubt it, but John Newton did. He saw what was in his sinful heart and told it as he saw it. He believed what the prophet Jeremiah wrote: “The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked…” Jeremiah 17:9.

Yet this is the reason we need God’s grace. Looking at my dictionary again, it states that, in the Christian sense, grace is “the free and unmerited favor of God, as manifested in the salvation of sinners and the bestowal of blessings.”

God’s estimate is that our wretched condition makes us unfit for heaven. The apostle John wrote concerning that holy habitation of God: “And there shall in no wise enter into it any thing that defiles…” Revelation 21:17. Hence, wretches such as we are, are unfit to enter God’s presence.

As a result, the suffering and death of the Lord Jesus are the manifestations of the grace of God. He gave His Son for our sin. This is exactly what is so amazing about grace!

And that is why the apostle Paul wrote: “For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of ourselves: it is the gift of God. Not of works, lest any man should boast” Ephesians 2:8-9. So the only question left is: Have we taken advantage of the grace of God or are we still trying to save ourselves through some inadequate and futile effort of our own?

Russ Nesbit