Grace We Struggle to Accept:
The Embrace of Grace
Grace, prt. 2
Wildwind Community Church
David K. Flowers
3/20/05
I want to start today’s message on an uncharacteristically heavy note. I have a few questions for you, and they’re the kind of questions that may not be easy for you to answer. These are personal questions, so I’m not asking anyone to answer out loud, but I do hope you’ll take them to heart. These are three sets of two questions each, ready?
What is the closest you’ve ever come to being accepted unconditionally – knowing someone loves you and accepts you for exactly who you are? What mistakes have you made in your life trying to find acceptance?
Okay, next two questions. How does insecurity drive you? To rephrase that, how do you see your need for security playing out in the way you approach relationships? Second, how has your search for security led to your doing things that made you LESS secure?
Final two. Do you carry around in your heart a basic sense of being worthwhile, or a basic sense of being worthless? Where does your sense of being worthwhile come from – who you are, or what you do?
WHEW! That’s tough, isn’t it? The answers to those questions are not very comfortable to think about, are they? In fact I would venture to say that even to scratch the surface of the answers to those questions begins to chip away at the veneer some of us have laid over the top of our most painful mistakes, our deepest regrets, our most humiliating faux paus. You know there’s a reason for that. There’s a reason why those three sets of questions can bring up so much emotion so quickly. The reason is because when I ask those questions, they are centered on three of the deepest needs that every human being has.
First, we have at the core of our being a need to be accepted. Can you argue with that? Sure, there are those who don’t seem to have that need, but those people, like the rest of us, are motivated by it. It’s just that the need drives some to acts of outrageous – sometimes even pathetic – desperation, locks some away in quiet places of pain, and hides itself in others in displays of arrogance or pride. We’re either looking for acceptance, or engaged full-time in convincing ourselves we don’t need it. We are looking for a relationship with a person who will completely accept us, just the way we are, warts and all, so to speak. We’re looking for that person who will not take our bad moods personally, not think it’s always about them, be patient as we sometimes respond in ways we ourselves don’t understand, always assume the best about us, and display this boundless love for us that we understand to be complete acceptance.
How many arguments between spouses spring from the way each partner (consciously or unconsciously) expects this acceptance from the other, and feels hurt and angry and betrayed in those times when it is not forthcoming? How many hurt feelings are the result of feeling left out, like an outsider, like we are not accepted? How many children have grown into hurting and dysfunctional adults because their constant striving for the acceptance of their parents met with constant frustration? How many human beings in this world – how many human beings in this church – are walking wounded because, try as they may, they cannot secure the acceptance they need?
Second, each of us has a deep need not only to be accepted and loved unconditionally, but to be secure in that knowledge – to know it won’t come and go, it won’t change when someone is in a bad mood, or hasn’t slept well last night, or is hungry or obsessed with their own problems. We need to be accepted, but we also have a deep need to be secure.
We need to know that the person who loves us, who accepts us without condition today, will continue to accept us and love us without condition tomorrow. How many mistakes have we made trying to hold on to something precious to us? What desperate measures have you resorted to in your life to be secure in a relationship that meant something, maybe everything, to you? Security. We all crave it. We’re all seeking it. We want to feel secure in who we are and are looking for someone not only to accept us, but to promise that the acceptance will last forever. We are weary from relationships that begin with great promise, and end in great pain. Some of us have grown cynical and become jaded because our need for security has been dashed against so many rocks. Some of us are products of those parents I talked about earlier – the kind of parents that only accept us under certain circumstances, and communicate that we are only okay when we are behaving, performing well in school or on the athletic field. There’s no security in that, and it leaves us starved as adults for the security we need.
How many people do you think there are in this room right now – people sitting all around you – who have shown up here today with their game face on but are turtling themselves more every day – pulling their head into a shell – tired of getting stepped on all the time and having just decided it’s easier to never take any risks – less painful if you just refuse to put yourself out there. We all deeply need security – someone who will love us and accept us unconditionally, and who will keep doing that tomorrow and the next day and the next day – someone we never have to wonder about.
The third incredibly deep need we each have is the need for significance – the need to feel like we matter – that we count for something – that our being in this world is better than our NOT being in it. Everybody wants to matter, to feel special, to sense a purpose behind their lives.
Why do we usually find that it hurts when we are ignored or do not get credit for a great idea? Because we need to feel significant. We want to feel like we are contributing something special to this world, and we are deeply hurt when we are ignored – it makes us feel insignificant – like we don’t matter.
Again, everyone has this need, but we respond differently to it. Some believe they matter but that no one else realizes they matter. If you think you matter but feel like no one else realizes it, maybe you expect too much of others. Sure you matter, but so does everyone else! Or maybe you just make bad choices about the people you surround yourself with. Surround yourself with people who affirm that you matter. Because you do. And you will never rise higher than the people you listen to most closely.
Some have lived most of their lives feeling that they are not significant and have decided it’s a fact and they’ll just have to deal with it. I assure you those people are locked up in a kind of pain that is difficult for some of us to imagine. And what I often see in people like this is that they are surrounded by people who tell them constantly how much they matter, and they simply refuse to listen. Some of you are like that and you’re sitting there right now listening to this message. And for you I have just one question. Why won’t you listen? See there’s a reason. Belief in your own insignificance is serving a purpose for you. If you can be honest with yourself and figure out what that purpose is, you could be on your way to a new life. Is that a scary thought? If so, maybe that’s why you don’t listen.
Some believe they are significant, but only when they perform – I only matter when I’m successful, when I get the promotion, when my spouse tells me I’m awesome, when I bring home the paycheck, when I reach my goals, when I keep my life under control.
Acceptance – Security – Significance. We crave them – we need them. We either spend our lives pursuing them, or pretending we don’t need them. Either way our response to those three needs determines how we live our lives. Our deepest regrets and most profound mistakes were made mostly as we pursued one or all of these three things.
We’re talking about Grace right now. Last week we looked at how grace is hard to understand because we are strangers to the way God lives – giving us all his completely unmerited favor – showering us with love we could never deserve – and how that is so foreign to us. So we don’t understand it.
But not understanding something has a natural consequence. We struggle to embrace, to accept, things we don’t understand. In the remaining moments of this message I want to talk to you about the embrace of grace. There is an intended double meaning behind the phrase “the embrace of grace.” The first meaning is that God has you in the embrace of His grace – his undeserved love and favor. The second meaning is that most of us struggle to embrace the grace God has for us, to accept it, apply it to our lives, allow it to bring us freedom from the deep cravings we have for acceptance, security, and significance; cravings that have so often led to humiliation and incredibly painful mistakes that in some cases have saddled us with regrets we carry to this day.
The difficulty in accepting God’s grace, God’s love for us, is not a new thing. In ancient times King David was thinking about the way God loves us one day, and wrote these words, which we can now read in Psalm 8:
Psalms 8:3-6 (NLT)
3 When I look at the night sky and see the work of your fingers— the moon and the stars you have set in place—
4 what are mortals that you should think of us, mere humans that you should care for us?
5 For you made us only a little lower than God, and you crowned us with glory and honor.
6 You put us in charge of everything you made, giving us authority over all things—
You can sense David’s amazement that God should even think of us at all, much less love us, and set us apart from the animals as uniquely special to Him.
The Christian notion of a God of infinite grace is difficult to accept. That’s why Christianity is the only world religion that speaks of a God who loves us without limit and because of nothing we have done. Judaism, Hindu, Buddhism, Islam – they all have lists of things you must do to earn God’s favor. Christianity is the only one that says, “Forget about it. You can’t earn it anyway. But good thing for you, God has given it to you freely.” It’s incredible to think about folks, and that’s why we’ve come to call it, “Amazing Grace.” Grace is so amazing we don’t understand it. So amazing we find it hard to accept. Listen to how amazing God’s grace is.
Ephesians 2:1-10 (MSG)
1 It wasn’t so long ago that you were mired in that old stagnant life of sin.
2 You let the world, which doesn’t know the first thing about living, tell you how to live. You filled your lungs with polluted unbelief, and then exhaled disobedience.
3 We all did it, all of us doing what we felt like doing, when we felt like doing it, all of us in the same boat. It’s a wonder God didn’t lose his temper and do away with the whole lot of us.
4 Instead, immense in mercy and with an incredible love,
5 he embraced us. He took our sin-dead lives and made us alive in Christ. He did all this on his own, with no help from us!
6 Then he picked us up and set us down in highest heaven in company with Jesus, our Messiah.
7 Now God has us where he wants us, with all the time in this world and the next to shower grace and kindness upon us in Christ Jesus.
8 Saving is all his idea, and all his work. All we do is trust him enough to let him do it. It’s God’s gift from start to finish!
9 We don’t play the major role. If we did, we’d probably go around bragging that we’d done the whole thing!
10 No, we neither make nor save ourselves. God does both the making and saving. He creates each of us by Christ Jesus to join him in the work he does, the good work he has gotten ready for us to do, work we had better be doing.
In verse 8 Paul says, “It’s God’s gift from start to finish.”
Paul writes in Romans:
Romans 6:23 (NLT)
23 For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life through Christ Jesus our Lord.
Jesus said in Matthew 10, “freely you have received, freely give.”
God lives with open hands. God does good things for us and gives us blessings without regard for whether or not we will show appropriate appreciation. God does not protect himself and reach out to us only when he becomes confident that we will not abuse his grace – God puts himself out there for us, knowing we WILL abuse it, that many of us WON’T appreciate it. God’s ways are not our ways.
My friends, because of God – because of Jesus – you are accepted. God reached out to you, accepted you, loved you, at a time when you were helpless to reach back.
John 15:16 (NLT)
16 You didn’t choose me. I chose you…
God, and God alone, has accepted you just exactly the way you are. God, and God alone, knows your strengths, your weaknesses, your sore spots, your hurts, your sins, your vulnerabilities and has accepted you anyway.
Because of Jesus you are secure. God, and God alone, has promised not only to love you, but to never stop loving you. Not ever. I used it last week, I’ll use it again:
Romans 8:35-39 (NIV)
35 Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword?
36 As it is written: "For your sake we face death all day long; we are considered as sheep to be slaughtered."
37 No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.
38 For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers,
39 neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Ephesians 3:17-19 (NLT)
17 And I pray that Christ will be more and more at home in your hearts as you trust in him. May your roots go down deep into the soil of God’s marvelous love.
18 And may you have the power to understand, as all God’s people should, how wide, how long, how high, and how deep his love really is.
19 May you experience the love of Christ, though it is so great you will never fully understand it. Then you will be filled with the fullness of life and power that comes from God.
Paul says we can experience this love, even though we can’t ever hope to really understand it. He says God’s love for us is wide – you can’t see across it from one edge to the other, like space. It is long – you can’t see to the end of it, like the Great Wall of China. It is high – you can’t see to the top of it, like Mt. Everest. It is deep – you cannot reach the bottom of it – like the ocean. It is expansive beyond imagination. That means you are secure in it. You can never get away from it no matter where you go. Heck, I don’t need to explain that, the Bible says it better than I ever could:
Psalms 139:7-12 (NIV)
7 Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence?
8 If I go up to the heavens, you are there; if I make my bed in the depths, you are there.
9 If I rise on the wings of the dawn, if I settle on the far side of the sea,
10 even there your hand will guide me, your right hand will hold me fast.
11 If I say, "Surely the darkness will hide me and the light become night around me,"
12 even the darkness will not be dark to you; the night will shine like the day, for darkness is as light to you.
Psalms 118:1 (ESV)
1 Oh give thanks to the Lord, for he is good; for his steadfast love endures forever!
There is nowhere you can go to get away from this love. You are safe in it. You are secure in it.
Finally, because of Jesus you are significant. In Corinthians Paul is comparing our relationship with each other in the church to the way a human body works. He says:
1 Corinthians 12:14-27 (MSG)
14 I want you to think about how all this makes you more significant, not less. A body isn’t just a single part blown up into something huge. It’s all the different-but-similar parts arranged and functioning together.
15 If Foot said, "I’m not elegant like Hand, embellished with rings; I guess I don’t belong to this body," would that make it so?
16 If Ear said, "I’m not beautiful like Eye, limpid and expressive; I don’t deserve a place on the head," would you want to remove it from the body?
17 If the body was all eye, how could it hear? If all ear, how could it smell?
18 As it is, we see that God has carefully placed each part of the body right where he wanted it.
19 But I also want you to think about how this keeps your significance from getting blown up into self-importance. For no matter how significant you are, it is only because of what you are a part of. An enormous eye or a gigantic hand wouldn’t be a body, but a monster.
20 What we have is one body with many parts, each its proper size and in its proper place. No part is important on its own.
21 Can you imagine Eye telling Hand, "Get lost; I don’t need you"? Or, Head telling Foot, "You’re fired; your job has been phased out"?
22 As a matter of fact, in practice it works the other way—the "lower" the part, the more basic, and therefore necessary. You can live without an eye, for instance, but not without a stomach.
23 When it’s a part of your own body you are concerned with, it makes no difference whether the part is visible or clothed, higher or lower. You give it dignity and honor just as it is, without comparisons.
24 If anything, you have more concern for the lower parts than the higher. If you had to choose, wouldn’t you prefer good digestion to full-bodied hair?
25 The way God designed our bodies is a model for understanding our lives together as a church: every part dependent on every other part, the parts we mention and the parts we don’t,
26 the parts we see and the parts we don’t. If one part hurts, every other part is involved in the hurt, and in the healing. If one part flourishes, every other part enters into the exuberance.
27 You are Christ’s body—that’s who you are! You must never forget this. Only as you accept your part of that body does your "part" mean anything.
Did you get that, my friends? Only as you accept your part in the Body of Christ does your part mean anything. Your significance comes from what you are a part of. We’re all familiar with the idea of a team. Michael Jordan could have been a great basketball player even if he had just spent his life playing on the street and never joined the NBA. But in the NBA, Michael’s significance as a player came from the Chicago Bulls. The Bulls made him a champion. And yes, Michael Jordan made them champions too. But they gave him the platform to be a star. Your significance as a human being comes from who God is and what he has done, and wants to do, in your life. It’s not whether you get that promotion, it’s not whether your spouse praises you a certain day, and you know what? My friends, it’s not even what you happen to think about yourself. All of that is completely irrelevant and immaterial to the fact of God’s total acceptance of you, the security you can have in his everlasting and unchanging love and grace toward you, and the significance that is brought to your life because God created you, loves you, and has given you a part to play in making a difference in this world.
God’s grace is hard to understand, therefore it is hard to accept. Look how many people grew up believing and singing, “Jesus Loves Me,” but have made such painful mistakes because they have not accepted God’s amazing grace. So many have so many regrets because they have searched for ultimate acceptance, security, and significance in other people – who are searching for the same thing! So I want to encourage you to consider reaching out to God for his grace if you have not. You won’t be perfect. Not now – not ever in this lifetime. But God will help you learn to live in this grace and in this love, help you learn to feel his acceptance, to know you are secure in his love, to know you are significant because you have found the source of life. Don’t be afraid to embrace what God wants to give you.
Romans 8:11-14 (MSG)
11 It stands to reason, doesn’t it, that if the alive-and-present God who raised Jesus from the dead moves into your life, he’ll do the same thing in you that he did in Jesus, bringing you alive to himself? When God lives and breathes in you (and he does, as surely as he did in Jesus), you are delivered from that dead life. With his Spirit living in you, your body will be as alive as Christ’s!
12 So don’t you see that we don’t owe this old do-it-yourself life one red cent.
13 There’s nothing in it for us, nothing at all. The best thing to do is give it a decent burial and get on with your new life.
14 God’s Spirit beckons. There are things to do and places to go!
And so there are. This Easter season I hope you will consider giving God, giving Jesus, a foothold in your life – letting Him be the leader. He deserves it. And you know what? So do you.
