What is Grace?

It struck me the other day how many "words" we use in the Christian faith (<-- that's one of them) that we take for granted, we rarely consider what they really mean.

You've maybe heard someone say, "that's just semantics" before as a way of suggesting that people are wrangling over definitions, not substance. But how we define words tells us what they mean. So, "semantics" are rarely just semantices.

I'm going to tackle a few of these words over the next several e-mails. I might add more reflections on Daniel in-between, but I'd like to tackle these. I'll be doing "faith" next. If there's another word that we use frequently that you realize you don't really understand what it means... shoot me an e-mail. I'll write a reflection on it.

So, what is grace?

This was one of the issues that became contentious at the time of the Reformation, so I might step on a few toes here. But I hope not. I'm just going to show you what the Bible says.

To get at the heart of that debate, the two "ways" of defining grace, let me suggest an illustration.

Picture two visitors at a hospital bedside. The first is a friend who sits beside you, holds your hand, and tells you he is on your side. His goodwill is real and it matters.

The second is a nurse who hangs a bag of medicine on a pole and opens the line into your arm. Nothing about her seems dramatic, but within the hour something in your bloodstream has actually changed. You do not merely have someone rooting for you. You have received something into yourself that is now doing what you could never do on your own.

When most of us hear the word “grace,” we think of the first visitor. Grace is God’s favor, His kindness, His decision to look on us with love rather than judgment.

That is true, and it is wonderful. But if we stop there, we miss half of what Scripture says.

The Bible speaks of grace not only as God’s attitude toward us but as a reality He pours into us, a gift that enters and transforms us from within. Grace is the friend at the bedside, and it is also the medicine in the veins.

The Greek word behind our English “grace” is charis. In ordinary Greek it could mean favor, kindness, or a gift freely given. Paul certainly uses it to mean God’s unearned favor: "For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God" (Ephesians 2:8).

Nothing we accomplish earns God’s regard.

Yet notice that the same verse already calls grace a gift, and a gift is something received, not just something felt. If it was Christmas time and a child didn't get a gift, and he looked at his parents with hurt feelings, do you think it would pass for them to say, "well, we feel a lot of favor toward you, isn't that enough?" Gifts are given. Gifts are received. The are not mere sentiments or feelings.

John presses this further. Describing what Christ brought into the world, he writes, "From his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace" (John 1:16). Received. Grace is not a change in God’s mood; it is something that passes from His fullness into our emptiness. The image is of a spring overflowing into an empty vessel, wave after wave.

Paul says the same in a different key: "hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us" (Romans 5:5). The verb is a pouring, an infusion. God’s love is not simply directed at us from a distance; it is poured into the heart, and the One who pours it, the Holy Spirit, comes to dwell there Himself.

Perhaps the boldest statement of all comes from Peter, who says that through God’s promises we "may become participants of the divine nature" (2 Peter 1:4).

Grace does not leave us as we were, merely forgiven. It makes us sharers in God’s own life. The early Church treasured this truth. Athanasius put it in a single pithy sentences: the Son of God “became man so that we might be made God” (On the Incarnation, 54). He did not mean we become divine by nature; he meant that grace lifts creatures into a real participation in the life of their Creator, as iron placed in fire begins to glow with a heat that is not its own.

There is a lovely grammatical detail in Luke’s Gospel that captures this. When the angel greets Mary, the text reads, ”Greetings, favored one! The Lord is with you” (Luke 1:28). The translation I prefer, though, is "Hail, full of grace!"

The word translated “favored one” is kecharitōmenē, a perfect passive participle of the verb built on charis. Greek uses the perfect tense for an action already completed whose effects continue into the present. The angel is not simply saying “God likes you.” He is naming her by what grace has already done in her and is still doing. Grace, in this greeting, is not a glance from heaven but a condition of the soul.

Why does this matter?

Because if grace were only favor, the Christian life would be a matter of knowing God feels kindly toward us while we struggle on with the same weakness, the same level of strength (or lack thereof) we always had.

But grace as infused gift means God supplies from within the very power He asks us to use. Paul, exhausted by his own weakness, hears the Lord say, "My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness" (2 Corinthians 12:9).

Grace is not a consolation prize for the weak; it is power operating in them.

This is why Paul can say two things that sound contradictory: "I worked harder than any of them—though it was not I, but the grace of God that is with me" (1 Corinthians 15:10).

He worked. Grace worked. Neither cancels the other.

Thomas Aquinas summed up the principle in a phrase the Church has loved ever since: grace does not destroy nature but perfects it (Summa Theologiae I, q. 1, a. 8, ad 2). The medicine does not replace your body; it heals it so the body can do what it was made to do.

Jesus gives the definitive picture: "I am the vine, you are the branches. Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing" (John 15:5). Sap flows from vine to branch. The branch does not admire the vine from across the garden; it lives by what flows into it.

How do we live this? Three simple practices.

First, ask. If grace is a gift that is actually given, then prayer is not a mere formality. Begin each day with a plain request: “Lord, give me today the grace I do not have.” Ask specifically, for patience with a particular person, for courage in a particular conversation.

Second, receive. The vessel must be still to be filled. Set aside a few minutes of silence, not to accomplish anything, but to let God be God in you. Contemplative prayer is nothing more than consenting to be poured into.

Third, cooperate. Grace enables, but it does not coerce. When you sense a nudge toward kindness, honesty, or forgiveness, act on it immediately. Each small yes widens the channel. Paul tells us to "work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God who is at work in you, enabling you both to will and to work for his good pleasure" (Philippians 2:12–13).

God does not merely smile at you from a distance. He has opened His own life into yours. Grace is already flowing. The question is whether you will hold still long enough to receive it, and then get up and let it move.

 

God Bless,

Judah