>> The Reach
The human heart was made for connection—with God, with one another, with meaning that outlives the dust.
And yet everywhere you go, from the narrow alleys of Karachi to the busy malls of Kuwait City, you can feel the same invisible tension pulling at people’s souls.
Everyone is reaching—reaching for peace, reaching for assurance, reaching for a sense that their lives count for something beyond the paycheck or the prayer mat.
Even among my Muslim friends in the Middle East, that yearning is not hidden. It rises quietly in a whispered du?a?, in the early-morning shuffle toward the mosque, in the tired smile of a shopkeeper closing his stall just before sunset. Humanity’s reach for God is sincere. It’s the best of us. But it’s also the story of our exhaustion.
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1. The Search for Acceptance
Every culture builds its own ladder to heaven.
For the devout Muslim, it is the daily rhythm of salah, the alms of zakat, the fast of Ramadan, the pilgrimage of Hajj—acts meant to prove devotion and earn mercy.
For the secular Westerner, the ladder looks different but climbs the same direction: performance, image, success, influence.
Each is a promise whispered by a trembling heart: If I can just be good enough, maybe I’ll be accepted.
But ladders, by nature, are unstable.
The higher you climb, the more you shake.
One misstep and you start again from the ground.
I remember sitting with a taxi driver in Lahore during the last nights of Ramadan. He was gentle-voiced, gray-bearded, and clearly weary from fasting.
We talked about life, about faith, about how tired we both were of ourselves.
When I asked how he would know if Allah had forgiven him, he smiled faintly and said, “Brother, Allahu a?lam. God knows best.”
And then he shrugged, not in defiance but in surrender.
That phrase—Allahu a?lam—was more than reverence; it was resignation. It meant he could never truly know.
How different that is from John’s certainty:
> “These things have I written unto you that believe on the name of the Son of God; that ye may know that ye have eternal life.” (1 John 5:13)
Grace begins where ladders end. It starts when the climb is over and the arms of God take hold.
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2. The Distance of Uncertainty
The beauty of Islam is its reverence. The tragedy of Islam is its distance.
God is exalted—yes. Merciful—yes. But also utterly unknowable.
The believer is always reaching toward a light that never quite reaches back.
When a Muslim says, Allahu a?lam, he means it with awe; yet those same words can quietly close the door on intimacy.
It’s a holy silence that keeps love at arm’s length.
I once stood outside a mosque in Turkey just after Maghrib prayer.
The call had faded, the streets were soft with twilight, and a man beside me said, “We pray because He commands, not because He speaks.”
That sentence stayed with me.
We pray because He commands, not because He speaks.
In Christianity, the command of God and the voice of God are the same person.
“The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” (John 1:14)
The God who commands also communes. The one who is All-Knowing became knowable.
When Jesus walked the dusty roads of Galilee, He was not humanity reaching up—He was divinity reaching down.
He was God spelling His name in human skin, showing us that holiness and nearness are not opposites.
Every other faith tells people to climb. The gospel says, God came down the ladder Himself.
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3. The Heart of the Gospel
At the center of Christianity is not an ethic, not a ritual, not even a religion.
It is an event. A cross planted in the soil of history where divine justice and divine love met and refused to part.
Other faiths give instruction; the gospel gives intervention.
I remember explaining that once to a friend in Baghdad.
He was proud of his discipline, proud of his prayers, but he carried the same hidden fatigue that every honest soul knows.
When I said that salvation was a gift, not a wage, he looked offended for a moment.
Then he said quietly, “If it is free, why does anyone try?”
I told him, “Because love makes effort joyful.”
He thought for a long time, then nodded slowly.
That’s the paradox of grace.
It doesn’t abolish obedience; it transforms it.
It turns duty into delight.
We don’t obey to be loved; we obey because we are.
The cross doesn’t say do more; it declares it is finished.
Paul captured that when he wrote,
> “By grace you have been saved through faith—and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God—not of works, lest any man should boast.” (Ephesians 2:8-9)
Grace is not the reward for reaching; it’s the rescue of those who’ve fallen.
That’s why the gospel must always sound scandalous—it takes from the climber and gives to the collapsed.
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4. Reaching for Certainty, Finding a Person
If faith were only philosophy, then doubt would be an intellectual problem.
But faith is relationship, and doubt becomes a cry of loneliness.
The difference between religion and redemption is this:
religion seeks information; redemption seeks incarnation.
Allahu a?lam ends the conversation.
Emmanuel—“God with us”—begins it.
Maybe that’s why Jesus spent more time touching than teaching, healing than debating.
When the leper said, “Lord, if You are willing, You can make me clean,” Jesus did not answer with theory.
He stretched out His hand and touched him.
The reach of grace is not theoretical—it’s physical, relational, present.
That touch still moves through the centuries.
It reaches the man in the mosque courtyard, the woman lighting a Sabbath candle, the skeptic scrolling through headlines at midnight.
It reaches me, and it reaches you.
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5. The End of the Ladder
What, then, do we do with our ladders?
We lean them against the cross.
Every rung of human effort finds its fulfillment in the wood of His sacrifice.
When Jesus cried, “It is finished,” He wasn’t saying, I am finished.
He was announcing, The distance is over.
The unreachable God had reached all the way.
The gospel isn’t about climbing out of guilt but falling into grace.
It’s not about trying to know enough but trusting the One who already knows best—and still came close.
That’s the astonishing reversal of the Christian story:
God, who could have remained the unknowable Almighty, chose to become the knowable, touchable Savior.
We no longer live by Allahu a?lam—“God knows best.”
We live by Abba Father—“God knows me.”
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>> The Hold
When grace first finds us, it feels like a rescue.
When it stays with us, it feels like rest.
Many believers know how to be saved from their sins but not how to be held in their salvation.
We trust Jesus to open the door to heaven, yet we keep living as though He might close it again when we stumble.
But grace, when rightly understood, doesn’t just forgive—it keeps.
It is not a handshake; it is a handhold.
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1. The Mystery of Being Held
In Pakistan, I once watched a father guide his little boy across a chaotic street, horns blaring and rickshaws zig-zagging like insects.
The boy’s fingers barely reached his father’s palm, yet he kept saying, “Abba, I’m holding!”
But it wasn’t the child who kept the grip—it was the father.
That picture has never left me.
It’s how God relates to His children.
Jesus said,
> “I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish; no one will snatch them out of My hand.” (John 10:28)
Our safety is not in the strength of our hold but in the strength of His.
We are kept by grace, not by grip.
To be held by grace means that your security rests not in your performance but in His promise.
Faith may tremble, but His fingers never slip.
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2. Conditional Mercy vs Covenant Love
In Islam, forgiveness is real but conditional.
Mercy depends on repentance, on obedience, on the unknown weight of the scales on Judgment Day.
Even the Prophet’s own mother, according to Sahih Muslim 4:2129, was denied forgiveness because she died before the revelation.
The hadith records Muhammad saying, “I sought permission to beg forgiveness for my mother, but it was not granted.”
That verse used to trouble me when I lived among Muslim friends who loved their parents deeply.
I would see them standing at gravesides reciting al-Fati?ah, their lips moving with reverence, their eyes moist with uncertainty.
There was always that unspoken question: “Was it enough?”
Grace answers that question once and for all.
At Calvary the verdict changed from “try harder” to “it is finished.”
In Christ, mercy is no longer conditional; it’s covenantal.
He bears the conditions so we can receive the relationship.
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3. When You Know You Are Loved
The greatest misunderstanding about grace is that it breeds laziness.
People fear that if forgiveness is free, obedience will vanish.
But when love is genuine, freedom strengthens commitment.
In Istanbul, a friend once told me, “If Allah forgave me before I repented, I would lose all motivation to obey.”
I smiled and said, “When Jesus forgave me before I even asked, that’s when I finally wanted to obey.”
He looked puzzled but curious—because it’s true:
when you know you’re loved, effort becomes joy, not duty.
Paul, once the proud Pharisee climbing his own ladder, became the humble missionary who said,
> “The love of Christ constraineth us.” (2 Corinthians 5:14)
That word constraineth—compels, surrounds—means love became the boundary that kept him on course.
Grace didn’t make him careless; it made him unstoppable.
He no longer worked for acceptance; he worked from it.
Someone once wrote that nothing so enters into the motives of conduct as an abiding sense of the pardoning love of Christ.
Jesus Himself said it first:
> “Her sins, which are many, are forgiven; for she loved much.” (Luke 7:47)
That’s the secret of holy living.
The truest obedience doesn’t spring from fear of judgment but from gratitude for mercy.
The more we understand we’ve been forgiven, the more we love;
and the more we love, the more our lives reflect the One who forgave us.
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4. Faith That Rests
To be held by grace is to cease striving for what you already have.
The believer’s life is not a balancing act between guilt and goodness; it’s a settled reality in Christ.
The Sabbath itself becomes a living parable of that rest.
Just as Israel was told to stop their labor and trust that God would provide, so every Christian learns to lay down self-righteousness and trust that Christ’s work is enough.
We don’t rest because we’ve finished everything; we rest because He has.
I once experienced that lesson vividly in Kuwait.
The temperature was well above 110 degrees, and everything in me wanted to keep moving from shade to shade.
But one afternoon a friend said, “Sit. Drink. Rest. You don’t gain strength by moving; you gain it by stopping.”
He wasn’t preaching, yet he summarized the gospel better than many sermons.
Grace calls us to stop running from God and let Him hold us still long enough to heal us.
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5. What Holds a Life Together
Fear fragments us.
Guilt drives us.
But grace integrates us—mind, heart, and action.
Look at Peter.
The same man who denied Jesus three times became the apostle who preached fearlessly before thousands.
What changed him?
Not a new discipline plan, but a new awareness: the risen Lord had sought him out by the lake and said, “Feed My sheep.”
Grace had re-written his failure into purpose.
Every held believer carries that same story.
The place where you fell becomes the place where His hand lifts you.
The memory of sin turns into the monument of mercy.
That’s why genuine Christianity is never self-righteous.
We’re not the clean boasting over the unclean; we’re the rescued helping others find the hand that caught us.
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6. Held in Weakness
Paul’s thorn, your addiction, someone else’s despair—grace does not erase weakness; it redefines it.
“My strength is made perfect in weakness,” God told him. (2 Corinthians 12:9)
If our grip were flawless, we’d never know His.
When you’ve walked through doubt, or failure, or fear, and found that God’s presence remained unbroken—that’s when grace stops being a doctrine and becomes a dwelling.
It’s no longer a theory you defend; it’s a hand you depend on.
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>> The Response
When grace holds you, something begins to change inside.
Not all at once, not dramatically at first—but steadily, deeply, and irreversibly.
The same hands that lift you from guilt begin to reshape your character.
It’s no longer about climbing to prove you belong; it’s about walking as one who already does.
This is where salvation stops being a theory and becomes a testimony.
This is where forgiveness grows legs.
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1. The Evidence of a Held Life
The surest sign that grace has taken hold is not perfection—it’s transformation.
A person held by grace doesn’t stop sinning out of fear; they start living out of love.
They forgive quickly, because they’ve been forgiven much.
They give generously, because everything they have was first received.
When grace takes root, the fruit changes.
Think of Zacchaeus.
He climbed a sycamore tree to see Jesus.
The crowd saw a crooked tax collector; Jesus saw a man ready to be found.
Before the day ended, Zacchaeus was on his feet promising restitution and generosity.
Grace didn’t lecture him; it liberated him.
When I lived in Iraq, I met a man who’d lost nearly everything during the war.
His home was destroyed, his job gone, but his faith remained strong.
He invited me to tea one evening and said, “Brother David, before the war I prayed because I feared Allah’s anger. Now I pray because I miss Him when I don’t.”
He smiled through tears.
That’s the shift grace makes.
Fear turns into friendship.
Obligation turns into communion.
Grace doesn’t erase religion; it redeems it.
It keeps the discipline but fills it with delight.
It keeps the reverence but adds relationship.
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2. Reaching vs. Resting
To reach is to live in fear: “Have I done enough?”
To rest is to live in faith: “Christ has done enough.”
Reaching is fueled by anxiety; resting is anchored in assurance.
That’s why Jesus invited us,
> “Come unto Me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” (Matthew 11:28)
I once watched a man at a mosque in Albania kneel to pray, rise, kneel again, and repeat the pattern several times.
After the prayer, we spoke for a few minutes, and I asked, “Why do you repeat it so much?”
He said softly, “Because I never know if it was accepted.”
That’s the ache of every heart that doesn’t yet know grace—the inability to rest.
But when Jesus says, “Come unto Me,” He’s not inviting us to a ritual; He’s inviting us to relief.
We no longer live in constant audit mode with heaven.
The Judge has become our Father, and the case is closed.
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3. The Forgiven Become Forgivers
A forgiven heart cannot hold grudges.
That’s the irony of grace—it frees you to release others.
Unforgiveness is a form of spiritual hypocrisy: wanting mercy for ourselves while denying it to someone else.
But once you realize how completely you’ve been pardoned, you stop measuring how much others owe you.
When I lived in Turkey, a neighbor once cheated me on a minor transaction.
He expected anger.
Instead, I told him, “We’re still friends.”
He stared at me like I had spoken another language.
Later he said, “Only people who know they’re forgiven can talk that way.”
That small moment taught me more about witness than any sermon I’ve preached.
You cannot share what you do not have.
But when you know the weight of your sin has been lifted, it becomes natural to lift the burdens of others.
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4. Grace in the Fire
Some people think being held by grace means being kept from hardship.
But grace doesn’t always rescue us from the fire—it refines us in it.
Job said,
> “Though He slay me, yet will I trust Him.” (Job 13:15)
When grace holds you, even unanswered prayers become sacred ground.
It doesn’t mean you enjoy pain; it means you trust purpose.
In Afghanistan, I visited believers who had suffered persecution.
One man told me, “They took my shop and beat me, but they cannot take the peace that holds me.”
He was not pretending to be brave—he was describing grace.
That’s what it means to be held: no matter what falls from your hands, you remain in His.
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5. The Sabbath as a Living Witness
For us, the Sabbath becomes the weekly rehearsal of this truth.
Every seventh day, we lay down our tools and our attempts to prove our worth.
We step out of production mode and into presence.
Sabbath rest is not laziness; it’s loyalty to grace.
When the world shouts produce more, perform better, prove yourself, the Sabbath whispers you are loved, you are enough, you are Mine.
Keeping Sabbath is our way of saying, “I am not holding on to the world’s ladder; I’m resting in God’s hand.”
When others see that peace, they see the gospel embodied.
It’s not our arguments that convince them—it’s our rest.
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6. Grace That Reaches Forward
Being held by grace doesn’t make life easy; it makes it eternal.
The grip that holds you today will carry you into tomorrow.
And one day, when faith gives way to sight, you’ll realize that every moment of your journey—from the reach to the rest—was never your doing.
It was His.
Sometimes I imagine that first moment in heaven when we see the marks still in His hands.
They’ll be the eternal reminder that we didn’t hold on to Him; He held on to us.
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7. The Invitation
Maybe you’ve spent your whole life reaching.
Maybe your faith has been a treadmill of trying, repenting, and trying again.
Maybe, like my friend in Lahore, your heart says Allahu a?lam—God knows best, but you’ve never been sure if He knows you.
Tonight, the gospel says He does.
He knows your name, your failures, your fears.
And still, He says, “Come.”
You don’t need to climb another rung.
You don’t need to prove another point.
You just need to fall into the hands that already hold you.
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8. Appeal
Lord, teach us to rest in what You’ve finished.
Help us to stop climbing when You’ve already come down.
Hold us when our grip fails, forgive us when our faith falters,
and fill us with the love that moves mountains—not because we earn it,
but because You’ve given it.
Amen.
