My friend Dr. Rod Rosenbladt told me a story of how he’d wrecked his car when he was sixteen years old after he and his friends had been drinking.
Following the accident, Rod called his dad, and the first thing his dad asked him was, “Are you all right?” Rod said yes. Then he confessed to his dad that he was drunk. Rod was naturally terrified about how his father might respond. Later that night after Rod had made it home, he wept and wept in his father’s study. He was embarrassed, ashamed. At the end of the ordeal, his father asked him this question: “How about tomorrow we go and get you a new car?”
Rod says that he became a Christian in that moment. God’s grace became real to him in that moment of forgiveness and mercy. Now nearly seventy, Rod has since spent his life as a spokesman for the theology of grace. Rod’s father’s grace didn’t turn Rod into a drunk – it made him love his father and the Lord he served.
Now let me ask you: What would you like to say to Rod’s dad? Rod says that every time he tells that story in public, there are always people in the audience who get angry. They say, “Your dad let you get away with that? He didn’t punish you at all? What a great opportunity for your dad to teach you responsibility!” Having this sense of the law is universal. The apostle Paul claims it is written on each person’s hearts. Even those who don’t believe in God struggle with self-recrimination and self-hatred as much as believers. Some of us even compound our sense of guilt by heaping judgement upon judgement, intoxicated by the voice of “not-enoughness” until we have effectively usurped the role of the only One who is actually qualified to pass a sentence.
Rod always chuckles when he hears that response and says, “Don’t you think it wasn’t the most painful moment of my whole life up to that point? I was ashamed; I was scared. My father spoke grace to me in a moment when I knew I deserved wrath … and I came alive.”
Isn’t that the nature of grace? We know that we deserve punishment and then, when we receive mercy instead, we discover grace. Romans 5: 8 reads “While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” God gives forgiveness and inputes righteousness to us even though we are sinful and while we were His enemies (v. 6, 8, 10).
BOTTOM LINE:
Our offenses are infinitely greater than a sixteen-year-old getting drunk and wrecking his car, yet God’s grace is greater still. The grace of God always prevails. When we finally come to the end of ourselves, there it will be. There He will be. Just as He will be the next time we come to the end of ourselves, and the time after that, and … until we meet in glory, safe at home…
NEXT UP:
We tend to make prayer the preparation for our service, yet it is never that in the Bible. Prayer is the practice of drawing on the grace of God NOW!
Drawing on the Grace of God — NOW! June 26 Utmost for His Highest. Updated version
PS:
Added 7:20 AM from dailylightdevotional.org June 29
Evening
Remember not the sins of my youth, nor my transgressions. Psa. 25:7
I have blotted out, as a thick cloud, thy transgressions, and, as a cloud, thy sins. Isa. 44:22
I, even I, am he that blotteth out thy transgressions for mine own sake, and will not remember thy sins. Isa. 43:25
Come now, and let us reason together, saith the LORD: though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool. Isa. 1:18
I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more. Jer. 31:34
Thou wilt cast all their sins into the depths of the sea. Micah 7:19
Thou hast in love to my soul delivered it from the pit of corruption: for thou hast cast all my sins behind thy back. Isa. 38:17
Who is a God like unto thee, that pardoneth iniquity? … he retaineth not his anger for ever, because he delighteth in mercy. Micah 7:18
Unto him that loved us, and washed us from our sins in his own blood, … to him be glory and dominion for ever and ever. Amen. Rev. 1:5