We all go about answering questions pretty much the same way. So, I say that to encourage Heather (not that she shouldn’t have written in I’m glad to have the question) and everyone else that there’s nothing magical about holding an office in the church, like pastor, and there’s nothing magical about having a degree and doing scholarship in the academy. No wonder he’s called “the apostle of grace.” There are 131 uses of grace in the ESV - 124 in the New Testament, 86 of which are from the apostle Paul, which means two-thirds of all the uses of the word grace in the Bible are in one author: Paul. I open my Bible and I get my concordance, and I look up all occurrences of grace in the Bible. In other words, what I do when I hear a question like this is something Heather could do or anybody could do. But this one is a softball to me because those verses that she is troubled by are some of my favorites.īut here’s one of the reasons I love this question: it gives me a chance to say to Heather and to everybody that we’re all really in this together, and I don’t have any special advantage over you in answering these questions except maybe that I’ve had a little more practice. Actually, some of them are too hard to love. Well, one of the reasons I love this question - and I know I say that a lot because I love what we do here. On the contrary, I worked harder than any of them, though it was not I, but the grace of God that is with me.’ I don’t understand ‘grace’ in these verses. “But I don’t understand it in the context of texts like 2 Corinthians 12:9: ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.’ Or 1 Corinthians 15:10: ‘But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace toward me was not in vain. That word is ‘grace.’ I often hear it defined as ‘unmerited favor’ or ‘getting what you don’t deserve.’ And I do understand it this way in the context of Ephesians 2:8 NKJV: ‘For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves it is the gift of God.’ “Hello, Pastor John! I’m shy to ask this question because I’m embarrassed to admit that I struggle to understand one of the most commonly used words in the church today. It is a recent email from a podcast listener named Heather.
What is grace? It seems like a simple question, but the answer has a lot of different angles to it.
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