For from His fullness we have all received grace upon grace. John 1:16
What does the word grace mean to you as a believer in Jesus?
Are you looking at grace in the context of what God does for you? The many blessings you receive every moment of everyday?
Or are you looking at the word grace and thinking about how you love to receive it? Not just from the Lord, but from others when you don’t deserve it?
Or are you looking at the word grace and wishing it wasn’t so hard to extend to others when we don’t want to?
The hardest thing sometimes for me is to extend grace when I don’t want to or feel like it or dare I say when I don’t think the person deserves it.
But just because it is hard to do, does not mean I don’t have to do it.
I’ve received the grace of God in my life. I didn’t do anything to earn it, in fact I truly don’t deserve it, but God, from His fullness has bestowed on me “grace upon grace”. John 1:16 ESV.
As Whitney Capp says in her Bible study: The Melody of Grace: “Grace is God Himself.” (p. 15) It is not merely what He does, it is who He is.
God has bestowed on me, himself. That is the grace I don’t deserve.
God himself is the blessing.
I want that understanding that grace is God Himself to be what I receive and what I give to others.
God’s word in 2 Corinthians 12:9 tells us that “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.”
What makes me wrestle in unbelief with the sufficiency of God’s grace for me? What makes me lean towards my own self-sufficiency instead of His power that is made perfect in [my] weakness? What makes me resist feeling or being weak?
When we believe grace is God Himself, not merely what He does for us, then I can as the Apostle Paul goes on to say in that passage: “Therefore, (because God’s grace is sufficient and His power is made perfect in weakness) I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me…for when I am weak, then I am strong.”
The sufficiency belongs to God Himself, His power, His grace.
Grace upon Grace.