In our lives with God, we have a reach problem. Not God’s. Ours.
We want to reach God. Isn’t that what prayer is supposed to do—knock on Heaven’s door and get us an audience? Aren’t we beggars God can’t refuse.
The truth is that it is not the earth to heaven distance that is our biggest problem. It’s our push to do it ourselves. Try harder. Pray harder. Do good harder. Reach and reach farther
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While spiritual growth involves discipline and good habits, we may be missing the most important element: God’s reach to us. We call it grace.
There are lots of definitions for grace, but I have always used this one:
Our world tells us to reach for ourselves. But God says our arms aren’t long enough. We need His.
Sometimes need and want are too far apart. We replace what we need with what we want and it pushes what we need farther away. We need Someone to reach out to us, show us a better way.
Grace is that reach.
Think of someone pulling you back from the edge of cliff so you won't fall. Think of someone throwing you a lifeline when you swam too far from a safe shore. Think of someone carrying you out of burning house. Those are all pictures of God’s reaching grace.
It’s just that we don’t think we get too close to the cliff or swim too far away or live in burning houses. Our ignorance doesn’t see the grace; our ignorance sees intrusion.
Or we think grace is one-time vaccine against sin. We don’t understand that we need God’s reach every day. We need tounderstand the everyday grace of God.
God seeing me trying too hard or not hard enough and reaching out to say, “Let Me help you.”
:God reminding us of our original creation in His image.
Grace is God’s invitation to an Eden walk so we know we have been found out but not shamed.
Grace reaches us with persevering love to remind us that He does not give up on us. Not ever!
God’s reach to save us from the self-destruction our stubborn self-will causes.
Grace is God protecting us from the could-have-been’s we never need to experience.
God’s unfailing love re-directing us toward the life only He can provide.
And God saying, “I have top-shelf gifts you can’t reach but I want to give.”
On days when we come up short with unfinished lists, unmet needs, unresolved issues; grace waits to hold us, restore us, and especially remind us that whern we are not enough; God is. We can live every day in the anchored understanding we have been rescued by God’s reaching grace is to live a life we could not design.
Take a moment to think about God’s reach for you. Consider how you can’t reach God without His grace. Even the thought to reach toward God is a grace-implanted thought, of God reaching out to you. Let your needy heart find true safety in God’s incomparable, undeserved, never-failing reach for you. Then, live there. Only as we let God’s amazing grace reach us, protect us, grow us, and empower us can we know how amazing God's grace really is.