For Saturday October 12 2013
Our reading for today is The first two chapters of Grace, More than We Deserve, Greater than We Imagined by Max Lucado
Scripture John 8:1-11, Psalm 6
Lucado assures us that God can change our hearts. "God answers the mess with one word:grace." He goes on to ask if we really know what grace means. We use the word often enough, but with little or no thought as to its actual meaning. He suggests we settle for wimpy grace; a type of grace that never causes too much trouble or asks for a response.
So how do we long for something and then settle for something else? How to we long for salvation from our selves, our sins our pestilential human nonsense and then settle for more of the same. Easy we're human and our nature is perverse. "Grace comes after you," Lucado writes. I thought of The Hound of Heaven by Francis Thompson. The notion that God hounds us with His grace, He humbles himself even unto a cross and our ways leave us we are truly dead to sin when He indwells in us; this notion arrests us, holds us captive. God sinks in deeper.
Lucado puts it this way (paraphrasing): from insecure to god secure we are given a heart transplant, a transplant where God sees hears knows the heart of Jesus which covers our dead tired sinful heart, paying out grace to cover our sin.
Chapter 2 begins with a look at John 8:1-11, noting especially that Jesus stoops lower than anyone when he writes in the dirt with his finger. "He says grace is a God who stoops," again the visual image is of humbling.
In the passage from John 8 Jesus stands and asks, "where are your accusers?" The question is simple, but pair this with the meaning of the name Satan as the accuser and the event takes a turn. Jesus stands between the woman and her accusers, Jesus stands between us and our accuser, even The Accuser, though our sentence is death he brings grace and life.
Jesus doesn't condemn the woman nor does he condemn us. John 3:16-17 tells us that Jesus did not come to condemn but to save.
Next meeting:
October 26th, 9:30
Chapters 3 of Grace, More than We Deserve, Greater than We Imagined by Max LucadoChapter 1 of Whatever Happened to The Gospel of Grace, James Montgomery Boice
Chapter 1 of The Doctrines of Grace, by James Montgomery Boice
Scripture: Genesis 21:1-21, Psalm 32
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