unwanted grace - intro

How do we respond to God’s unwanted grace?

How do we respond when God’s grace comes charging into our lives?

When it doesn’t knock on the door – or ask permission, or say how do you do, or have a nice day, or could we sit down and talk?

When it just barges in and takes over.

That’s the problem with grace, you know – it cannot be controlled; it is not predictable or rational; it cannot be owned.

Grace does exactly what grace wants to do when it wants to do it.

I can hear many of you protesting, objecting to the idea of unwanted grace.

Perhaps you’re saying, I want all of God’s grace I can get. There’s no such thing as unwanted grace.

Perhaps. Let’s see if this is true. Let me ask you a question.

Suppose we put two signs over these two doors,
One that says “Grace to have a great life, a wonderful family, a challenging and satisfying career, financial security, with excellent health right up to the end.”
And we had a sign over this door that says “Grace to die with cancer.”

Which line would you get in?

We don’t want the grace to die of cancer if we can possibly avoid it. Of course we want it if there’s nothing we can do about it, but none of us would get in the cancer line. That is certainly unwanted grace. None of us unwanted grace.

Or let me ask you this.

Let’s say your life is going well – a ministry that is strong and stable, or perhaps you’re very satisfied in a support role, very satisfied as a leader in your ministry, but you were challenged by someone in another strategic area, different from what you’re doing now – leading by email, contacting people by cell phone, not direct ministry – you don’t want to move up the ladder, to move into greater responsibility, to face greater pressure to travel and be gone one-third of the time.

But the pressure is there, and God’s unwanted grace is calling you, disrupting you demanding that you do something for God you don’t want to do.

How do you respond to God’s unwanted grace?

How welcome is God’s disruptive, life changing, redirecting grace?

- time to reflect -

By Bill Lawrence Th.M., Th.D.