A budding 5th grade clarinetist eventually asked her band director, “What’s that tiny little note before the big note in the fifth measure? I don’t get it.” That’s when the director explained what a grace note is.
A grace note on a musical score is ornamentation. It doesn’t
have to be; yet it is. Its note value doesn’t even count as part of the total
time value of a measure. Such a timing oddity can fluster even the best young
orchestral student. Welcome to the world of grace!
Grace is a large word with only five letters that precedes
every goodness we know. Grace is always previous. It always comes before.
When the Apostle Paul begins his letters to several young
churches he makes certain that they hear the word grace before they even get to read the words of mercy and peace.
The Hebrew people got the ordering of grace straight. Life
for them began not at sunrise, but at sunset. “There was evening and (then)
there was morning,” the first, second, and every day. When we finally shut down
our busy lives enough to fall asleep, that’s when God does much of His best
work.
As Eugene Peterson used to say, “We wake into a world we
didn’t make, and into a salvation we didn’t earn." Grace is underway before we
even reach the cornflakes. And we’ve seen that time and time again in our
47-week study of Genesis and over 31 years together!
It might be nice if Jesus had given us a plain definition of
grace, but He never used the word. For Him, grace was ever-present. It was
something to be appreciated and lived, not just talked about. That’s why John speaks
of the incarnation the way he does…”For the law was given through Moses; grace
and truth come through Jesus.”
So when grace shows up on our doorstep in odd-shaped
packages, it often takes us by surprise. It offers us help we never counted on
and love we never deserved. Even if it doesn’t supply us with what we want, we
come to realize that it provides us with what we need. No wonder Jesus avoided
trying to plastic wrap the rich reality of grace in a single word.
Of all the major religions in the world, only Christianity
proposes that God’s love is truly unconditional. No strings attached. No
conditions laid down. No qualifications required. Other faiths have their own
“earned approval strategies” to which Christians instinctively feel drawn.
Maybe we’re eager to believe that we deserve what we have. Whatever our flesh
tells us, grace is never anything a person can “get.” It is only a treasure
that one can receive. No wonder the grace-filled friends in our lives feel like
undeserved gifts.
In a memorable “Dennis the Menace” cartoon, Dennis and his
friend, Joey, are leaving Mrs. Wilson’s house loaded with a plateful of cookies
when Joey turns to Dennis and says, “I wonder what we did to deserve them?”
Dennis is quick to reply, “Look Joey, Mrs. Wilson gives us cookies not because
we’re nice, but because she is.”
So goes the arithmetic of God. He doesn’t love Jacob because
he’s a cheat or David because he’s an adulterer. God, in His infinite love,
loved Jacob because he was Jacob, and David because he was David. The same goes
for Esau and Saul. The gospel has nothing to do with our goodness, except as
some kind of by-product. It is not interested in our charm or brilliance. No,
the gospel demands us to remove ourselves from the center of attention and to
remember that grace always arrives as a gift from someone well outside of us. As
a friend of mine says, “Grace always flows downhill.”
Clear-thinking Christians love to underscore the priority of
grace for it is the center core of the gospel that can never be fully plumbed.
We don’t sight-read music full of grace notes better than anyone else. It’s
just that when we read the Bible and encounter the incarnate God, we find out
that we’re in much worse shape than we thought we were, and we are far more
loved than we ever dreamed. And it’s to this truth that I wish to speak this
Christmas Sunday – my last Sunday at Hebron.
In preparation for a message entitled “All Is Grace,” you
may wish to consider the following:
- If you know Tim Williams, do you remember his first sermon at Hebron in 1996?
- Do you remember how he came to preach at Hebron?
- What do you make of the context of Exodus 20:22-26?
- What is the Lord instructing His people and why?
- How important is the charge against Jesus in Luke 15:2 that He eats with sinners?
- What is the significance of His eating with them?
- What do the words, “And he came to himself” mean in Luke 15:17?
- Why is this story called the greatest story in Scripture?
- What’s at the heart of the older brother’s anger?
- What’s at the heart of his father’s response to it?
See you Sunday!
