Living Proof of Grace
As I’m thinking about getting ready to head to Fireside Park tonight, you know, I’m still thinking about what I need, going over the logistics. I started thinking about the people I sit at the table with. I started to think about how sometimes things are seen.
I love what all the people that came before Jesus (I think they call it genealogy) say about grace, because God sure didn’t clean up the family tree before Jesus came through it.
I mean, look at the people that are in there. Tamar, Judah, Rahab, David, Bathsheba. These are some seriously messy stories. Bad decisions, sexual sin, broken relationships, adultery, failure, just people doing some really screwed up stuff.
And even after some of them had some amazing stuff happening in their lives, they still weren’t getting things exactly right.
Yet God didn’t hide any of it, and more importantly, He didn’t throw the people away because of it.
Somewhere along the way, I think we got this idea that God uses people after they finally get their crap together and become good enough to qualify, and that just ain’t the Gospel.
Grace has never depended on perfect people.
Paul tells us God chooses the foolish things of this world to shame the wise and the weak things to shame the strong (you’ll find that somewhere in the Bible), and apparently God had been doing exactly that for a long time before Paul ever wrote it down.
The family tree of Jesus is full of broken, complicated, unlikely people that God somehow worked into His story of redemption.
So maybe your past ain’t nearly as powerful as you think it is.
Maybe the worst thing you ever did doesn’t get the final say about who you become or what God can still do with your life.
Jesus didn’t come because some of us finally got good enough to qualify.
He came because none of us could.
That’s grace, folks, and for a whole bunch of us it ain’t just something we read about in the Bible. We’re living proof of it.
At least I am.
— Michael
