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If you are not truly aware of grace in your life minute by minute, day by day, maybe it’s because your experience of grace is warped.
For example, could it be:
Do you see grace through your relationship with your parents or other authority figures?
Maybe they set high expectations for you, and you never received their approval. Or perhaps you received very little attention; or one parent deserted you. As a result of one of more of these factors, your experience of “grace” fell very short of what it should have been.
Do you see grace through your past?
You think you don’t measure up; you’re not smart or gifted. You’ve messed up too much, failed God too often. As a result, you have lots of guilt. Perhaps you’ve become cynical, feeling hopeless about any possibility of things changing.
If you’ve been looking at grace through the wrong lens, one of these or some other one, God’s grace has probably always seemed distant for you or it’s a mystery to you. And this probably reveals itself in one of several ways:
- You are always in performance mode, trying to secure God’s and others’ approval by being good, excelling in everything. Always trying to show yourself and others you’re okay, but it’s never enough.
- You have given up trying to find the grace you need, so you just sit on the sidelines and admire others, all the time blaming yourself.
- In fear of failure, you never step out on faith to do the good works God has called you to do.
You haven’t met grace yet—not totally, not completely.
You who are trying to be justified by the law have been alienated from Christ; you have fallen away from grace (Galatians 5:4).