Saturday, May 5, 2012

Falling From Grace

There's a common saying in American language that says people "fall from grace". The most recent example was in a new article regarding media moguls, comparing the rise and fall of Rupert Murdoch to William Randolph Hearst, and the fact that many media moguls suffer this "fall from grace". Grace is defined as "favor, goodwill, mercy, clemency, pardon; a manifestation of favor, especially by a superior." Humanity has a history of building people up into larger than life symbols of their hopes and dreams, only to gleefully rip them off the pedestals they were placed on, most of the time without their desire to be placed there in the first place. Many times the ambition of the person in question turns into hubris which precedes their "fall". God tells us in His Word that His grace is "sufficient" unto us, to cover a multitude of sins and mistakes. We cannot fall from His grace because there is more than enough to cover any and all of the mistakes, sins and times that we miss the mark. But we still continue to talk about people who have fallen from His grace. We give human attributes to the Creator of the universe and apply our own failure to offer sufficient grace to one another to the Almighty. We think that He cannot possibly have enough grace to cover those things that we refuse to cover with our own grace toward one another. The irony is we refuse to offer the grace to others, or expect that God will refuse that grace to them because we won't while at the same expecting that God has enough grace to cover all of our missteps, misdeeds and sin. How human of us. The next time you begin to fault someone for "falling from grace" take a moment to ask yourself if you expect God's grace to cover you in the same situation. If you do, then you must give that same grace to the person you want to condemn.