Sunita had tickets to attend the Pope's
visit at the Washington Basilica, She also had the tickets to attend the
gathering at the US Capitol. Both days were cloudless and brilliant in
Washington. Praise the Lord for you all who love Jesus and serve Him
faithfully. We are part of the great cloud of witnesses. We are in the holy
journey together. This journey is worth taking. Let us all finish it well by
the grace of Jesus alone. It is all by His grace.
We, as Christians, all we know that
GRACE is the central and defining element of the Christian faith. God’s love
and forgiveness cannot be earned — it comes as a free gift. Philip Yancey, in his book, "What’s So
Amazing About Grace?", tells the following story:
“A vagrant lives near the Fulton Fish Market on the lower east side of Manhattan. The slimy smell of fish carcasses and entrails nearly overpowers him, and he hates the trucks that noisily arrive before sunrise. But midtown gets crowded, and the cops harass him there. Down by the wharves nobody bothers with a grizzled man who keeps to himself and sleeps on a loading dock behind a Dumpster.
“Early one morning when the workers are slinging eel and halibut off the trucks, yelling to each other in Italian, the vagrant rouses himself and pokes through the Dumpsters behind the tourist restaurants. An early start guarantees good pickings: last night’s uneaten garlic bread and French fries, nibbled pizza, a wedge of cheesecake. He eats what he can stomach and stuffs the rest in a brown paper sack. The bottles and cans he stashes in plastic bags in his rusty shopping cart.
“The morning sun, pale through harbor fog, finally makes it
over the buildings by the wharf. When he sees the ticket from last week’s
lottery lying in a pile of wilted lettuce, he almost lets it go. But by force of
habit he picks it up and jams it in his pocket. In the old days, when luck was
better, he used to buy one ticket a week, never more. It’s past noon when he
remembers the ticket stub and holds it up to the newspaper box to compare the
numbers. Three numbers match, the fourth, the fifth_all seven! It can’t be true.
Things like that don’t happen to him. Bums don’t win the New York
Lottery.
“But it is true. Later that day he is squinting into the bright lights as television crews present the newest media darling, the unshaven, baggy pants vagrant who will receive $243,000 per year for the next twenty years. A chic-looking woman wearing a leather miniskirt shoves a microphone in his face and asks, “How do you feel?” He stares back dazed, and catches a whiff of her perfume. It has been a long time, a very long time, since anyone has asked him that question.
“He feels like a man who has been to the edge of starvation and back, and is beginning to fathom that he’ll never feel hunger again.”
What did that beggar to do deserve receiving several million dollars? Absolutely nothing! He had not even bought the winning ticket. All he did was pick it up and cash it in to receive his prize. Someone else had thrown it away as though it was useless, but he saw its potential worth. He had not worked for a long time. He did not earn the money. The check was given to him as a free gift, without conditions. He did not have a job or an education. He did not have to do anything but accept the check.
Having a relationship with Jesus, our Lord and Savior, does not depend on how well we do or how perfect we are. It is based solely on the mercy and grace of God. This is good news for us who are failures. We read in the book of Titus: “But when the kindness and love of God our Savior appeared, He saved us, not because of righteous things we had done, but because of His mercy. He saved us through the washing of rebirth and renewal by the Holy Spirit” (Titus 3:4-5). Here is the unique message of the Christian faith. “God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting men’s sins against them” (2 Corinthians 5:19). This frees us from guilt and legalistic perfectionism. We understand that we can never be perfect and that our relationship with God is based solely on grace. The Bible says, “But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions — it is by grace you have been saved” (Ephesians 2:4-5).
According to Phil Yancey, “Grace means there is nothing we can do to make God love us more.... And grace means there is nothing we can do to make God love us less.” The guilt and condemnation is gone and a settled peace comes upon our hearts as we realize we don’t have to do anything to gain God’s acceptance — we already have it. Our relationship with God is not based on how good we are, but on the character of a gracious and forgiving God who loves us more than we can ever understand. Ain't our God cool? Hallelujah, what a Savior!
In Christ,
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