Four Kinds of Grace: Finding the Gifts God Left on the Beach
Every summer our family walks the beach at Westport hunting for agates. If you've never done it, I'll be honest, it doesn't look promising. It's mostly gray skies and miles of dull brown and black rocks as far as you can see. But pick the right one up, hold it to the sun, and the light pours straight through it like it's lit from the inside. My mom is the best in the family at spotting them. The rest of us pull up cloudy quartz and hold it out hopefully, and she just shakes her head and says, "Nope, no light getting through that one."
My son had zero patience for it at first. He'd last about five minutes before running off to play in the waves. But little by little he started to care, mostly because every agate in my parents' jars has a story attached to it, the summer someone was born, the year of the big storm. Then one day he was walking beside me, found a tiny one all on his own, and tore down the beach yelling, "I found the agate!" Grace is a lot like that. It's scattered all around us. We just have to train our eyes to see it.
This week we sat in the book of Matthew, where grace turns out to be so much bigger than we usually make it. Matthew doesn't reach for heavy theological words. He just tells a story. And in that story grace isn't one narrow idea, it's the whole varied pile of gifts God keeps pouring out on his children. Jesus said it plainly: if broken, imperfect parents still know how to give good gifts to their kids, how much more will our Father in heaven?
We looked at four different facets of that grace. Saving grace is God's power to rescue us, freely given and never earned, no matter how hard part of us wants to earn it. Common grace is his goodness handed out to everyone, the rain and sun that fall on the kind and the cruel alike, plus the roads, the hospitals, the lights in the building, all the ordinary blessings we rush right past without a thank you. Empowering grace is the calling and the gifts God plants in each of us so we can love the world in a way only we can. And transforming grace is the slow, mustard-seed work he does over time, quietly growing us and renewing everything around us.
Dallas Willard put it in a line I keep coming back to: grace is not opposed to effort, only to earning. We don't clock in and work for these gifts. We just open our hands and receive them.
So here's the thing to carry into your week. When you look at your own life, are you scanning for the agates, or are you only seeing the plain gray rocks? The grace is there, I promise. The hard part is just asking God for the eyes to see it.
We'd love to have you join us. Garden City Church meets every Sunday at 10:00 AM in Tacoma. Come as you are, whether you've walked with Jesus for years or you're just curious and checking things out. This is a place you can belong before you believe. Find us at gardencitynw.com for directions and what to expect.
- George Bedlion