What if the grace message, and its present manifestation as a movement, isn’t for the world? What if it is only for the church? Absurd? Consider before you dismiss.
What do you know about grace? It is the power of a gift which enables us to be in the presence of God despite all that we have done to keep ourselves away from Him. It is what keeps us from the fires of an eternal conscious torment. It is what has bought our very being from the masters of our demise, the tortures of our soul. It is what turned our lives from the curse of a living hell into the eternal blessing of divine love. Grace is the reward of a sacrifice we couldn’t make but were willing to commit to defend our image of a God who punishes any who claim to be in the image and likeness of His glory. It is unmerited, unfathomable, undeniable, unlimited, and unifying.
Stop now, for a moment, drop whatever additional superlatives you might seek to add to my description and ask yourself this: Where did I hear or learn about this?
I am very certain none of this language, metaphorical overtones or symbology originated in the daily world you inhabit. The “world” which the church is so eager to profess they are not part of, that environment which God so loved that He sent his only begotten Son into, quite possibly doesn’t give a care to your thoughts about grace simply because they’ve been living in it a whole lot better than the cloistered folks of the church have.
What if the message of grace is intended to get you off your bigger-than-life ego and into the enormous process of being divine? How would you function in a world which thinks nothing of God and everything of living in the gift of the creation He offers them moment by moment?
Consider the mind set which thinks how we must bring people into our environment to convey to them how they aren’t worthy to be in the presence of God except for the grace He offers them; even still, how now they may be in the presence of people who understand this claim to be true about everyone. How do you handle the type of person who has never felt they weren’t in the presence of God all the while being apart from the people of God?
The church likes to think that they are the only ones who know the secret handshake, the hidden sayings, and the proper protocol to entertain the Creator on a day of rest. In this manner they view themselves as the 1% crowd who possess the riches of the world. Rarely do we realize the poverty of our neglectful interactions with the 99% who are grateful without regard, unencumbered by ceremony and liberated from tradition.
The church has embellished grace as the blessing of God without considering how you only thought it so in the curse of your living. Yet, it took a church to tell you your life was a curse first so you could distinguish the blessing grace offered you. How is it we never understood that grace has always been part and parcel of living? There isn’t a grace for the world which is any different than a grace for the church.
According to God’s way of looking at things, you might say that the world is more in tune with what church should be than what church attempts to portray. And portray is the proper term because it denotes to perform an act or dramatization, that when finished, allows the performers to remove their masks and return to their routines in living until the next performance. Church folks will never agree with Shakespeare that all the world is a stage, simply because they need a break from the masks.
Instead of proclaiming that there is a world out there for grace to affect, why not return to a world in which grace is the effect.
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