Lavish Grace

The way you picture God makes a difference in the kind of person you are becoming. Many of the most strident adversaries of Jesus were those who imagined God was more ready to kick people out than welcome them in. Consequently, they found one opportunity after another to pronounce judgment and to find reasons to exclude people from the community of faith. Throughout the gospels, you find them repeatedly grumbling that Jesus was welcoming sinners and eating with them.

Jesus offers a very different picture of God.  Over and over Jesus portrays God as one who does everything possible to make sure whatever is lost is found. Furthermore, God is the one who rejoices in the finding. God's mercy is not laxness, but love. In other words, God is bent toward mercy, toward lavish grace.

Early Christianity and early Methodism understood that part of becoming “bent toward mercy” was to begin practicing acts of mercy toward others. These acts of mercy were understood to be among the “ordinary means of grace.” Practicing works of mercy opens your heart to the grace and mercy of God, creating pathways for the Spirit to continue and bring to completion the entire bending of your heart and life toward love.

There are so many temptations to become judgmental in our increasingly polarized and self-justifying culture. There are so many who welcome the opportunity to step into the role once occupied by the Pharisees. The challenge during this season of Lent is to remove whatever is keeping you from believing, receiving, and sharing this lavish grace of God.

As a community of faith let us remember that our task is not to judge people for where they are on their journey, but rather to help them identify where they are and offer solid support for them to take the next steps in cooperation with God's sanctifying grace.

As this picture of a loving God becomes more real for us, may the lavish grace of God at work in us convert us into people who will go running after the lost, even while they are a long way off—not out of compulsion, but out of the joy of love.