“Amazing grace! how sweet the sound,
That saved a wretch; like me!
I once was lost, but now am found,
Was blind, but now I see.”

“’Twas grace that taught my heart to fear,
And grace my fears relieved;
How precious did that grace appear
The hour I first believed!”

During the early years of being a Christian, I was taught that grace is “unmerited favor.” That makes sense. But that’s a fairly impotent definition, especially when describing something so grand as God’s grace.

In the last two posts, we’ve looked at Paul’s intimate experience of God’s grace and how this same grace is overflowing to Jesus’ apprentices for all sufficiency, in all things, at all times for every kind of beneficial activity for people and the wider community.

In light of these passages, God’s grace is something far more powerful and potent than “unmerited favor.”

While this may lack theological accuracy, I like to view grace as the powerful and dynamic fuel of God’s kingdom that works in our lives to accomplish what we cannot accomplish on our own.

So let’s take a look at another passage from Paul describing grace’s power.

“For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation for all people, training us to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright, and godly lives in the present age, waiting for our blessed hope, the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ, who gave himself for us to redeem us from all lawlessness and to purify for himself a people for his own possession who are zealous for good works.” Titus 2:11-14

God’s grace has appeared, unveiled to us through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus and bringing deliverance to everyone. We did absolutely nothing to initiate or deserve this unveiling of God’s grace. It truly is unmerited favor. But we start getting hints that it is also far more.

God’s grace engages us. It teaches, instructs and trains us. That requires effort on our part. We don’t passively receive grace. We actively engage and interact with it.

God’s grace trains us in two directions. First it trains us to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions. This is worth pausing over. In order to train us to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions, God’s grace must meet us in our places of deepest shame and humiliation. 

Think about your addictions, failures, missteps, rebellion, selfishness, and depravity. At the lowest, darkest, and most humiliating aspects of your life, God’s grace has appeared. God loves you so much that he’s willing to get dirty and join you in your muck. 

In 1Timothy 1:14-15, Paul applied Titus 2:11 more personally when he told Timothy, “The grace of our Lord overflowed for me with the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus. The saying is trustworthy and deserving of full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the foremost.” I suspect Paul had tears in his eyes and deep gratitude in his heart when he wrote those words. The overflowing grace we looked at in 2Corinthians 9:8 overflowed on Paul in the midst of his incredible sin and shame to save him.

So how does God’s grace save us? Again, by training us to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions and by training us to live self-controlled, upright, and godly lives. This juxtaposition between renouncing one way of life and embracing a new way of life is replete in Paul’s writings. In Galatians 5, Paul tells us to crucify the works of the flesh and to walk in the Spirit. In Colossians 3, he tells us to put to death whatever belongs to our earthly nature and to put on the new self and its virtues. Moving from one way of life to another requires training under God’s grace.

We have discussed this training program, as introduced by Jesus, in previous posts. To summarize, we are to rethink our entire lives and enter God’s kingdom or activity in the here and now (Matt 3:2; 4:17; Mark 1:15). We do this by becoming Jesus’ apprentices — being with him and interacting with him, to learn from him how to be like him. The foundation of this program is to adopt his relaxed and unhurried lifestyle and his practices (Matt 11:28-30), also known as spiritual disciplines. These disciplines are sensibly and wisely practiced through the direction and power of the Holy Spirit through the moments of one’s day. They open up windows of God’s presence so he can transform us. The spiritual disciplines engage us in the “art of indirection” — eventually learning to do what we currently cannot do by doing things we currently can do. So by practicing things we can do — solitude, silence, Bible study, memorization, prayer, community, confession and so on — God transforms us so we ultimately can do things we currently cannot do at this point in our lives. This art of indirection retrains our thoughts, feelings, will, body, relationships and soul in God’s activity and grace so that over time we become people who can naturally and easily do what Jesus did. We become like Christ. Or to borrow Paul’s language in Titus, we have learned to naturally and easily renounce ungodliness and worldly passions and to naturally and easily live self-controlled, upright, and godly lives.

Earlier I mentioned that I think of God’s grace as the fuel of God’s kingdom. When we engage God’s grace in Jesus’ apprenticeship program that I just summarized, we’re like a rocket taking off from its launchpad and breaking earth’s orbit. We are consuming incredible amounts of salvific grace and being propelled further and higher as we train with Jesus into his likeness. This is the salvation God’s grace brings to all people.

Yet, if we’re passive and simply wait for him to do something to us and in us without effort on our part, we’re simply sitting on the launchpad with tanks of unused fuel. His grace surely meets us in our lowest place. But this same grace must be ignited through training to continually propel us into a transformed life.

But wait, there’s more! God’s grace trains us so Jesus can “redeem us from all lawlessness and purify for himself a people for his own possession who are zealous for good works.” Jesus is building for himself an eternal community of people. People he has met in the darkest and shameful places in order to buy them back to himself. People he has purifyed by training them to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions and to embrace a new self-controlled, upright, and godly life. Now get this. Through that redemption and purification, Jesus is forming a people who are eager, excited, and enthusiastic about doing good works! Remember that phrase “good works” from the last post? These are the beneficial activities of love, joy, goodness, mercy, and compassion for the good of people and the wider community. God’s grace is creating an eternal community trained and formed into a people who are naturally and easily capable of all good works in this present age and the one to come! 

An eternal community of dynamic and transformative love.

Okay, so now I’m going to ask you to imagine something that may take this “theology train” right off the rails. I started this post with the first two stanzas of “Amazing Grace.” Here’s the last stanza:

“When we’ve been there ten thousand years, 
Bright shining as the sun,
We’ve no less days to sing God’s praise, 
Than when we first begun.”

Imagine being immersed and fueled by God’s immeasurably powerful and unending grace for the next ten thousand years, being part of an eternal community with Jesus at the center and that is eager and capable of doing unfathomable good in Jesus’ character and power throughout God’s universe.

What will you be like as that kind of person? What will you be doing with Jesus and others in that eternal community?

What about a million years from now? How about a billion years? Right now our minds struggle to comprehend anything beyond a few decades, let alone beyond “this present age.” But God is eternal. So is his grace. And so are we.