What is Grace?

(This was originally published at the Grace Pages.)

It surprises me how often, when I write about grace, people respond with the question, What is grace, anyway? It's a word that is a major part of my day-to-day spiritual vocabulary, and yet, I expect in common with other Christians, it's a word I've never thought much to actually define.

Grace isn't just another word for forgiveness or acceptance, even though it encompasses for me both those things. It isn't as if all grace is good for is getting us forgiven, and then something else takes over from there. Grace is the source of action, too. It's what empowers us to do good, to follow Jesus, to walk in the Spirit. We don't use up God's grace right at the beginning and then live under our own steam from then on.

I suppose I'm just pussy-footing around here, describing the effects of grace, but still not defining what it actually is. So let me plump for a definition that's been circling round in my head for the last five minutes: Grace is God's unreserved self-giving. It's God freely giving himself to us, the Almighty sharing with us all that he is.

"Unreserved" is the part most people struggle with, especially when we read about judgment and condemnation and that sort of thing. Traditionally, the thought of judgment has been considered the opposite of grace, the proof that God's grace is limited, conditional, unavailable to some. So, let me add two thoughts that might sometime come in useful in grappling with these matters: Firstly, judgment as an expression of God's unreserved self-giving, part and parcel of his love and grace rather than antithetical to it (perhaps what the writer to the Hebrews calls the discipline of sons); secondly, maybe judgment is a matter not of God withholding himself, but of us moving out of the way, placing ourselves outside the flow of grace.

Grace: God's unreserved self-giving.

-Dave