Grace 1 - What is it? ...

Monday, Oct 27, 2014. When you walk through one of the crowded pedestrian roads in a European city on a Saturday afternoon, there will be some people on the road distributing presents. But usually, these presents are not given without a purpose. Companies try to give you something nice, to make you interested, to attract you to their products. The purpose is to make you buy something! This is a counterexample for grace.

Understand grace …

Grace means that something is given without hidden agenda. It means that something is given without using it as a tool to achieve something or get even more from the person you give it to. Grace means that something is given to do good to you, nothing else.

If something is given with a hidden agenda, we do not call it grace. If it is given, since it was earned, it is not grace. If it is given since there is some right to get it, it is not grace. Grace describes the situation where all this does not apply. If you do not have a right to get something, if there is no reason why you should get it, and if the one giving it does not try to achieve any particular purpose by giving it - except for the purpose of making you happy and doing something good for you, then we speak about grace.

Where in our world do we see grace in action? When it comes to business, grace is basically forbidden. You do not give things away without expecting more back. It would even violate the basic laws of commerce, if you would not try to increase your profit. Grace is not a category of our commercial world. It does not fit into our business world, it does not fit to production and optimization. Grace is far beyond all of these!

Grace as Human Choice …

Grace is something humans can choose. If you own something, you might give it away to someone just by choice. If you want to give it away, who should keep you from doing it. Ownership means that you can do with it what you want, usually. Usually people give things to others when they like them, or when they love them. We see grace when parents take care of their kids. We give presents to our friends. We like it if it pleases them, if it makes them happy!

When I was a student, we often had discussions about motives and motivation. Some fellow students said they think that all actions are egoistic - something like grace does not exist. In the discussion someone said: but when you give things out of love? And they replied: then you do it to make yourself feel better, so it is egoistic again. But this type of argument is stretching egoism in a way such that it becomes basically meaningless - everything is interpreted as egoistic by definition. Of course, making others happy can make you feel good. But it is still an action making the others happy in the first place, and if you do not expect anything back, it is grace. However: if you expect things back, it is no longer grace!

When it comes to God, we also speak of grace when God gives something to us which we do not deserve. When we do not have any right to get it, or when he does not have a particular purpose to get something from us with it, then it is grace.

We will need to talk more about the grace of God. We will find, that God is “full of grace”. Most (if not all) of his actions are done just to do good things to people. He does not need to do it. He loves to do good things - he is “good”. The culminating grace of God shows itself in Jesus, the Christ. In and with Jesus God give to us what we call the “fullness of his grace”. Let us follow this up, let us talk more about grace, about God and about ourselves! (Roland Potthast) ... more texts