Man is born broken. He lives by mending. The grace of God is glue. —Eugene O’Neill (1888-1953)
Be nice to nerds. Chances are you’ll end up working for one. —attributed to Bill Gates during a high school graduation speech
When learning to read and write, teachers first taught us “sight words.” These are basic words like a, and, big, blue, can, go, jump, little, look, make, me, my, not, one. Once we get those down, we can forget about them and move on to more adult-sounding words like “antidisestablishmentarianisms”—the longest word in the English dictionary, right?
Wrong. You can’t not use them. They are the glue that holds language together, but you might be tempted to think you have outgrown them as you grow up.
Grace is a Christian sight word. It might seem overused sometimes, but it’s not! Nothing works in Christianity without it—not even the big Christian words like soteriology and ecclesiology. Nothing. Because of that, you can be assured of a couple of things:
- We must always keep grace before our eyes. Our tendency is to want to live out of the flesh. So we constantly have to remind ourselves that it is grace in which we live.
- The evil one hates grace and tries to destroy and distort it every chance he gets.
For certain individuals whose condemnation was written about long ago have secretly slipped in among you. They are ungodly people, who pervert the grace of our God into a license for immorality and deny Jesus Christ our only Sovereign and Lord. (Jude 1:4)
Under the influence of the deceiver and the tendencies of the flesh, humans “change the grace of God” into many things: An excuse for inaction, a justification for sin, and a smokescreen for unbelief. So we have to constantly remember the pure and powerful meaning and purpose of grace.
Master Teacher, don’t let me ever think that I have grown up and graduated from grace! Instead, saturate my soul with its potent presence! Let me see grace as an absolutely indispensable Christian “sight word” that glues everything together. Show me today where I don’t see grace as important, then live that grace through me. Amen.