1Cor.15:10 - But by the grace of God I am what I am: and his grace which was bestowed upon me was not in vain; but I laboured more abundantly than they all: yet not I, but the grace of God which was with me.
The grace of God is one of the Bible’s big subjects that must be prayerfully and carefully studied. Grace is a difficult word to define because it resides in the very heart of God and hones close to the essence of things that matter most. Without a doubt, there is a world of meaning wrapped up and encompassed within that one word. Someone has once said that to define a word is to also confine it and that is certainly true of the word grace, so we tread lightly and reverently here.
Many of us have no doubt heard the phrase, ‘But for the grace of God there go I’. This saying is used mostly when we hear of someone who has had a string of bad things happen or maybe ones who have chosen a wrong path in life and are now suffering terribly for it. We rightly acknowledge that we are no better than anyone else but God has made the difference; He has intervened and we have been spared from many disastrous circumstances. ‘But for the grace of God, there go I’.
However, as we look closer at our verse, Paul gives us some interesting insight into what must be a very important aspect of God’s grace. Paul had just made reference to the fact that before he met the Lord he was Saul, the chief persecutor of the church. His one aim was to hunt down Christians, men, and women, and murder them, or at the very least, shackle them and imprison them for their beliefs. He humbly acknowledged that he was not fit to be an apostle because he adamantly opposed the teaching of the original apostles and stood strongly against everything that was taught by them. He even watched close by with a feeling of gratification as he approved of the heartless and brutal murder of Stephen. Before Jesus had gone to the cross, He had forewarned His disciples that the time would come when whoever would kill Christians would do it with full confidence that they were doing God’s service. There are some extremely hard-hearted people in the world but truly no one is as hard-hearted as murderous religious zealots. This was where the young Saul’s mind was at; he sincerely believed that by killing Christians he was pleasing God.
Many times we see people who are very vocal and loud in their opposition to faith in Jesus, but we do not know what is going on within them. We can only go by what we see on the outside but, God looks deep within all people and sees the very intentions and motives of the heart. God saw within the man named Saul, a little boy whom He had called from his mother’s womb and had planned a destiny of greatness for him. A couple of years after Stephen’s death, Jesus appeared to Saul in a very dramatic fashion, on the road to Damascus, and did a powerful work in him, turning him from Saul the persecutor, full of hatred, to Paul the passionate, full of love. And all of this was done by the grace of God.
Notice closely in our verse of Scripture what Paul does not say. He does not say, ‘But for the grace of God there go I’. He was indeed a hard-hearted religious zealot but the grace of God came into his life and transformed him into a servant and called him to be an apostle. ‘I am what I am by the grace of God’. The grace was not something that kept him from the negatives of life; the grace was something that altered him and placed him into the positive plan of God. And not only did that grace change Paul but, that grace became the ongoing, enabling ability of God in his life. He was able to labour ceaselessly because of the grace, he even went so far as to say that he wasn’t the one labouring; it was actually the grace of God which was with him. Sometimes we are amazed at certain people and how they are able to do what they do but, perhaps, we should be crediting God who placed a grace-gift within them that empowers them onward in their service.
What lessons can we learn from this verse, and what application does it have? One lesson is that it does not matter what our past has been like; it does not matter where we have been; it only matters where we go from here; it only matters that we receive the grace of God and do not cause it to be given to us in vain. Let’s not frustrate the grace of God; let’s cooperate with Him; yield to Him and believe that the past is finished and gone. We cannot even inhale the recently exhaled air; it is used up; it is gone. We only have the present tense moment, right now, to accept the gracious gift of God; a gift that empowers us to forget failure and equips us with what we will need to continue to run our race and to finish the course that we have been assigned to. Someone has aptly said we shouldn’t be surprised that God does indeed work with imperfect people because He only has one kind of person to work with; welcome to the human condition. Oh, how I need this grace and how thankful I am that I have it. How about you?
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