Lucinda Secrest McDowell: 
Amazed by Grace

CHAPTER ONE
Amazed by Grace

a×¢mazed vb: overwhelmed with wonder

is name was Tom. Growing up in West Virginia , his best friend throughout childhood was Jack. Tom and Jack shared adventures and dreams. After graduation, both joined the service and were eventually sent to combat in Desert Storm.

Though their families didn’t know each other well, both having sons overseas gave them a bond. And both were quite relieved when Tom and Jack returned safely home to begin college studies.

Shortly after this homecoming, one gray day in December, Jack visited Tom at home. During their time in Tom’s room, a gunshot rang out. No one is quite sure what happened—but Tom was dead and Jack was alive.

Tom’s parents, Mark and Lou, were understandably heartbroken. Jack and his folks were also shattered. What’s a parent to do in such a situation? Mark and Lou, both followers of Christ, chose not to press charges against Jack or even subject him to an investigation. They felt his private grief over the death of his best friend was already more than he could bear. Instead, Tom’s parents reached out to comfort Jack and his family.

Lou even invited Jack’s mom, Mary, to her church’s women’s retreat, paying the way of Mary and her best friend. Two weeks after the shooting, both ladies were sitting in an audience listening to the Saturday evening presentation on grace. Their presence was a far more vivid embodiment of grace than any words of the guest speaker. How do I know? I was the out-of-town speaker for that weekend conference, led by God to teach on Galatians.

I have always found it difficult to define “grace” because, quite frankly, it doesn’t make any sense. But in preparing for the conference I had run across some words from Chuck Swindoll that seemed appropriate:

Let’s imagine you have a six-year-old son whom you love dearly. Tragically, one day you discover that your son was horribly murdered. After a lengthy search the investigators of the crime find the killer. You have a choice. If you used every means in your power to kill the murderer for his crime, that would be vengeance. If, however, you’re content to sit back and let the legal authorities take over and execute on him what is proper—a fair trial, a plea of guilty, capital punishment—that is justice. But if you should plea for the pardon of the murderer, forgive him completely, invite him into your home, and adopt him as your own son, that is grace.¹

When I innocently shared this illustration at the conference, I wondered what I would do if someone killed one of my own four children. Was it really possible to live out grace in such a way? My question was most certainly (and very surprisingly) answered that night in the presence of Lou and Mary. Actually, neither of them was able to make it through my whole talk, but the sharing and crying between them in the lounge was much more significant than my words to the two hundred others in the ballroom.

My choice of grace illustrations was not an accident—God had a divine appointment with all of us that weekend. He taught us more than we ever bargained for about grace.

Are you amazed by grace? Does the grace of God overwhelm you with wonder? Or are you baffled like the little girl in the cartoon who looks up at her minister and says, “Who’s this ‘Amazing Grace’ you keep talking about?”

Lewis Smedes says,

Grace is amazing because it works against the grain of common sense. Hard-nosed common sense will tell you that you are too wrong to meet the standards of a holy God; pardoning grace tells you that it’s all right in spite of so much in you that is wrong.

Realistic common sense tells you that you are too weak, too harassed, too human to change for the better; grace gives you power to send you on the way to being a better person.

Plain common sense may tell you that you are caught in a rut of fate or futility; grace promises that you can trust God to have a better tomorrow for you than the day you have made for yourself.²

My first memory of grappling with this theological term was as a freshman at Furman University . Browsing through the college bookstore I spied the catchy title Grace Is Not a Blue-Eyed Blonde. OK, I thought, I’m glad we cleared that up … but what is it? It has taken me more than twenty years to answer that question, and in the answers I find myself truly amazed!

Part of my confusion came from a misunderstanding of the difference between grace and mercy. They are not the same! However, these terms are related. The simplest way I’ve found to define them is grace is God’s giving us what we don’t deserve; mercy is God’s not giving us what we do deserve.

So the very nature of grace is that it is undeserved. To show grace is to extend favor to one who doesn’t deserve it and can never earn it. But what do we deserve as a result of our sin and efforts to take God’s place as controller of our lives? We deserve judgment and punishment. That’s where both mercy and grace comes in—God in His infinite mercy does not give us the death we deserve, but as an act of grace grants us forgiveness and new life.

Having been an avid student of the modern missionary movement, I am quite familiar with that wonderful phrase “Expect great things from God; attempt great things for God.” These words were first spoken by William Carey, the father of modern missions, who went to India in 1793. Not only did he translate all or parts of the Bible into more than forty languages and dialects, he was also a man of remarkable faith in God.

Imagine how surprised I was to discover recently that he, too, struggled with a full understanding of sin and grace. On his seventieth birthday, William Carey wrote to one of his sons:

I am this day seventy years old, a monument of Divine mercy and goodness, though on a review of my life I find much, very much, for which I ought to be humbled in the dust; my direct and positive sins are innumerable, my negligence in the Lord’s work has been great, I have not promoted his cause, nor sought his glory and honour as I ought, notwithstanding all this, I am spared till now, and am still retained in his Work, and I trust I am received into the divine favour through him.³

Did this attitude come with the insecurities of old age? Or was William Carey suffering from what we consider a modern ailment, “low self-esteem?” Or does he reflect the healthy realism of a mature Christian? Jerry Bridges believes that Carey’s attitude addresses two significant needs among all committed Christians:

… the need for humble realization of our own sinfulness, and the need for a grateful acceptance of God’s grace. Christians tend toward one of two opposite attitudes. The first is a relentless sense of guilt due to unmet expectations in living the Christian life. People characterized by this mode of thinking frequently dwell on their besetting sins or on their failure to live up to numerous challenges of the Christian life.

The other attitude is one of varying degrees of self-satisfaction with one’s Christian life. We can drift into this attitude because we are convinced we believe the right doctrines, we read the right Christian books, we practice the right disciplines of a committed Christian life, or we are actively involved in some aspect of Christian ministry and are not just “pew sitters.⁴

We can also become self-righteous when we look around at the sin of society and decide that, because we are not guilty of these more gross forms of sin, we must be pretty good people!

Either way, we stand in need of grace!

Certainly one of the most gifted writers in my own generation is Walter Wangerin Jr. In his book Little Lamb, Who Made Thee? he recalls his very first experience of grace. It was 1957 and he was fourteen years old, a self-appointed adult. Because it was a difficult time for his parents, Walter decided the way he could help them best was to look after his seven younger brothers and sisters and to make no demands on his folks.

But one night he was very sick, couldn’t sleep, and felt terribly alone in his “adulthood.”

Now I expected absolutely nothing. It never occurred to me but that I would have to handle this misery alone. I was an adult. Free. On my own.

But I must have been groaning out loud.

Because suddenly the hall light came on outside my door. Then the door swung inward. And there stood my mother … calm, quiet, and utterly beautiful.

‘Wally, what’s the matter?’

I was stunned. This I had not expected. Her presence and her voice alone—the familiarity of a voice which I had thought I’d never hear that way again—made me start to cry.

‘My stomach,’ I sobbed.

‘Oh, Wally!’

My mother floated toward me then and sat on the edge of the mattress, which sank to her weight. She put a cool hand to my forehead. ‘Yes, fever,’ she said. How long since she had sat beside me so? How long since she had kissed the little Wally? Long.

In the dark, her hair a nimbus by the hall light, she whispered, ‘Pull your knees up to your tummy. It’ll ease you.’

How holy the homely remedies! I did, and I cried and cried—for none of this should have been. I truly never thought that I could be a child again. Oh, I thought I had lost all that.

But I had a mother, after all, and she came to me. I was exhausting myself by protecting her in those days, not she me—and yet she came to me. I was fully adult, independent, self-sufficient; I had forfeited the tender mercy of a mama in the nighttime. Nevertheless, she came to comfort me—and like a baby I curled into the crook of her arm and wept.

This was the first and most memorable time that grace embraced me.⁵

But grace is more than “God’s unmerited favor” or even “God’s favor to those who actually deserve the opposite.” It is a reality in life. Bible teacher Kay Arthur puts it this way, “By grace you live, by grace you please God, and by grace you are freed from religion and released into a relationship with your heavenly Father. Grace is always based on who He is and what He has done. Grace is never based on who you are apart from Him or on what you can do.”⁶

Paul is the great Apostle of Grace. Of the 155 New Testament references to grace, 133 belong to him. The word grace is the anglicized Latin word gratia which was used to translate the Greek word charis, the word for gracefulness, graciousness, favor, or kindness.

This favor is the unexplained joy of God at giving something priceless to the totally impoverished. In other words, “Grace is God’s love in action on our behalf, freely giving us His forgiveness, His acceptance and His favor. Grace is essentially a redeeming activity of God in Christ. ‘For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God’ (Eph. 2:8). These words are true for the vilest and most degraded sinner; they are equally true for the ripest and shiniest saint. This grace base will never be replaced by something else.”⁷

Jesus never actually used the term grace, but He certainly exhibited it in numerous ways. One scholar observes,

He was never cross, never selfish, never impatient with people who had problems, never superior or judgmental. He never told people, ‘It serves you right’ or ‘I hope you get what’s coming to you’ or ‘That’s your problem’ or ‘Don’t bother me about it.’ He never disassociated Himself from anyone, as if some types or classes of people were below Him. Indeed, He moved easily among both the high and the low, and He was so much at home with the lower classes that His enemies used it to attack Him, saying that He was a ‘drunkard’ and a ‘friend of sinners.’ People liked Jesus. They found Him gracious.⁸

One of the uses of grace in the Old Testament finds its root in an old Hebrew term which means “to bend, to stoop,” eventually coming to mean “condescending favor.” This is vividly seen in members of royalty who may choose to “grace” a commoner by extending a hand to the crowd. Sometimes we even use it this way sarcastically, as in “Look, Debbie has decided to grace us with her presence tonight.”

The late pastor and biblical scholar, Donald Gray Barnhouse, puts it this way, “Love that goes upward is worship; love that goes outward is affection; love that stoops is grace.”⁹

I love the mental picture that “stoops” evokes in my own mind. I recall the numerous times as a mother I have knelt down to my preschooler so that I could enter her world face-to-face. I didn’t say to little Fiona, “Make yourself worthy and then I’ll come down there and play,” nor did I declare, “Because you have done this, that, or the other, I will now be with you.” My stooping came as a result of my love for her and my desire to share her life and shower her with blessings.

Isn’t that what God has done for us through His Son, Jesus Christ? He has condescended to enter our world face-to-face as a man (see Phil. 2), not because we merit or have earned this favor, but simply because of His great love for us and His desire to bless us.

That is the vertical dimension of grace that centers on our relationship with God. This kind of incarnational love was clearly demonstrated by a young Belgian priest and missionary, Father Damien. In 1873 he went to the Hawaiian island of Molokai to serve the more than eight thousand people of the Kalaupapa leprosy colony. These Hawaiians had been torn from their homes in the 1860s and banished to this isolated island to prevent the spread of that disease.

Father Damien nursed them, buried them, and built houses and churches in Kaluapapa. Each Sunday he would hold services, but very few lepers attended the church. Finally, one Sunday, Father Damien addressed his small congregation, “We lepers.” He had truly become one of them. During the final years of his life, many lepers came to know the compassion of Christ through the man who dwelt among them and himself died from leprosy in 1889. For he didn’t just tell them about Christ’s grace and love, he showed them.

Once called upon to explain this mystery of grace, Presbyterian minister Jack Miller told this story: “Two seventeenth-century theologians were debating on the nature of grace. One said that grace is like one parent’s guiding a toddler across the room to the other parent, who has an apple for the child. The nearby parent watches the youngster; if he almost falls, this parent will hold him for a moment so that he can still cross the room under his own power. But the other theologian had a different view. For him grace comes to us only in the discovery of our total helplessness. In his concept, we are like a caterpillar in a ring of fire. Deliverance can only come from above.”¹⁰

Later, Jack Miller’s wife Rose Marie shared with me that when she first heard this, she was more struck by the image of encroaching fire than by the rescue from above. I, too, have felt that way—trapped and almost engulfed with little hope of escape. But my new understanding of vertical grace is that Jesus Christ will reach down from above and rescue me. As Rose Marie says, “This is not merely supporting grace, but transforming grace.”

There is also a horizontal dimension to grace which centers on our relationships with others. Only when we have totally grasped the reality of God’s great gift of grace to us can we fully extend this grace to others with no hidden agenda or secret motive. Elisabeth Elliot observed, “Grace means self-giving, too, and springs from the person’s own being without consideration of whether the object is deserving. [Horizontal] Grace may be unnoticed. But those who are in a desperation of suffering will notice it, will notice even its lightest touch, and will hold it as a precious, an incalculably valuable thing.”¹¹

After figure skater Tonya Harding successfully sued the U.S. Olympic Committee to allow her to compete in the Winter Olympics in Norway , she proclaimed, “I’ve worked twenty years for this! It’s my right to skate in Lillehammer and no one can prevent me!”

Now, regardless of what you or I think about whether or not Tonya Harding should have skated in the Olympics, this whole real-life soap opera reveals the attitude of much of today’s society. Our society believes we deserve certain things and we’re willing (oh, so willing) to sue anyone appearing to thwart our rights. Some Christians have even fallen for this line of thinking: “If I follow all the rules and lead a good life, then God will prosper me and give me everything I deserve—success, material possessions, and good health.”

Actually, we don’t deserve any of these things. And, if the truth be known, it is only through God’s grace that we are allowed to experience any blessing. All of life is a gift! That’s what the Tonya Hardings of the world have missed somewhere along the way—by grace she made it onto the Olympic team, and by the graces of the Olympic Committee she was allowed to skate in Lillehammer, not because it was her right, but because it was a favor they chose to grant her.

Several years ago I went through a period of my own spiritual journey that I privately refer to as “My Grace Tutorial.” It seems that during those eighteen months God used every means necessary to get my attention and teach me how to live a life of grace.

One of the first things that had to go was my innate need to be in control. As long as I could maneuver people and events to work out in a desired way, then there was no need to trust God. Of course the way to resolve this was for God to give me what seemed like endless opportunities to depend on Him and Him alone. Most of those times I never deserved to be rescued, but God extended grace to me again and again until I finally understood it.

Before I was married, I traveled around the world quite a bit, usually alone. After one particularly long ten-hour flight, I landed in the airport of a poor, developing country. Our two-hour layover stretched into four without so much as an announcement. Outwardly I was seeking to project a calm business-like manner; inwardly I was about to pull out my hair from frustration. It was easy to tell who the Americans were in that waiting room—we were all at the ticket counter demanding a report!

Our third-world passengers took the situation in stride, obviously unruffled by the indeterminate delay as they calmly unpacked food and played games. About seven hours later, the plane departed—when it was ready. No amount of questions, complaints, or offers of help could get that plane off the ground! We were reduced to a posture of simply letting go and turning the situation over to those in control.

But letting go of control was most certainly not the only lesson God had for me during my grace tutorial. In fact, much of the time I learned while kicking and screaming (figuratively speaking). But in the end, His great love won out, and I began a new era in my walk of faith.

The Bible says that God is the Potter and we are the clay: “We are all the work of your hand” (Isa. 64:8). I was a potter once in the early 1970s (Wasn’t everyone back then?). I remember how important it was that the clay be exactly centered on the potter’s wheel or it would wobble and break as soon as the wheel picked up speed. Come to think of it, my life has been a lot like that clay.

“Does the clay say to the potter, ‘What are you making?’” (Isa. 45:9). I haven’t always enjoyed the pounding and spinning around, the pinching off of bits of extraneous clay, or the hot furnace of the kiln which was supposed to make me strong. I’m sure I even asked the Potter once or twice if He really knew what He was making.

I now realize that grace has been a vital factor in every spiritual lesson God has taught me. And even though I’m still on the Potter’s wheel, I decided to write about this journey, trusting that others might relate and perhaps be encouraged. Along the way I have discovered that this pilgrimage is an active one, not a passive one. So each chapter begins with an active verb, illustrating one more lesson learned the hard way in my grace tutorial.

Eleven years ago our family was packing to move from our home in Williamsburg , Virginia , when my dear friend, Genelda, came over and presented me with a gift of love amidst all the chaos and confusion. She had put this verse in needlepoint and framed it in gold: “My grace is sufficient for you” (2 Cor. 12:9).

It was a promise I clung to and carried to our new home, a colonial parsonage in a small New England town. Are you surprised to know that it was the first picture I hung or that we named this home “Gracehaven?” What a wonderful reminder to each one who lives here and each one who visits that God is enough, and He keeps all His promises.

Truly, I am amazed by grace!

Grace in Your Life

Why not use a notebook for your own grace tutorial and record your thoughts, observations, and answers to the applications suggested at the end of each chapter?

1.         Can you think of a time when you deserved certain punishment but were granted reprieve instead?

2.         How did you feel?

3.         Did that act of horizontal grace have any effect on your further actions?

4.         Think of someone on whom you can bestow the gift of grace this week. What will you do?

5.         God’s grace is a gift we don’t deserve. But many of us merely carry around the beautifully wrapped package and never bother to open it—to appropriate all that He has for us through His grace. Have you opened the gift? If not, why not accept God’s vertical grace to you now?

6.         What kind of vessel is God, the Potter, forming of you? Was it what you hoped or something totally different?

7.         Be assured that God only pounds and kneads in order to shape beauty from the rough clay. In what areas do you need to submit to Him today?

8.         Read the Book of Galatians and circle each use of the word grace by Paul. Make a list of what you learn.

9.         How does this word study affect your own practical theology of grace?

Grace Memory Verse

PO Box 34 /  Bolivar MO 65613-0034 /  Tel: (417) 326 5001 /   [HOME]    [QWP@USA.NET]
Resellers, bulk orders, book tables, churches, educational institutions: contact us for rebates