Culture is infiltrating our understanding of grace, and is thereby stealing away its profound meaning and explosive power. Our culture scoffs at the idea of calling someone to account or of love being anything other than a no-matter-what acceptance. This inability to reconcile grace and truth is primarily our culture talking. We have a difficult time reconciling grace and truth, even though these are the exact adjectives used to describe our Christ in John 1:14. But when it is actually applied to spiritual matters, I think we tend to lean toward the belief that "giving grace" means never pressing, never holding a line of truth or calling someone away from the cliff of self-destruction. We're equating letting someone see our messy house with them "giving us grace". Oftentimes we're not even talking about spiritual matters. This is what I think we often mean when we say we should give grace: that we give free passes. We celebrate and extol it, but I think we also misunderstand it, especially when it comes to giving grace to others. The phrase stuck with me because I've actually been thinking about this for a while now: What do we mean when we say "give grace"? What do we mean when we say that we need to learn to "give grace to ourselves" or "give grace to our children"? Grace is a word we often throw around but struggle to define. My friend was referring to something itty bitty, something that hadn't required much from me other than a small favor. Last week, a friend in an email wrote, "Thank you for giving me grace." I've heard that phrase a thousand and one times, but for some reason it continued ringing in my mind for several days after.
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