Guest Post: "Rhythms of Grace"

by Katie Bernier

Originally posted on http://notunredeemed.com/

Grace. It’s so much more than just undeserved favor or merit and pardon from sin.  Grace is the ability to abide in Christ. It’s the strength to walk through painful circumstances.

Grace is the promise of humility. “God resists the proud but gives grace to the humble.” Pride says “I’ve got this, I can do this, or I’m in control.” Humility is having God’s view of the situation, and with His perspective comes grace, and freedom. Freedom from expectations of others, freedom from sin and freedom from ourselves.

“Grace isn’t leniency when we have sinned.  Grace is the enabling gift of God, not to sin.  Grace is power, not just pardon.” -John Piper

Grace is power. Power to live 1 John, and be “in Christ”.

I need grace. I need lots of grace. When I began to pray to understand grace I had no idea the road the Lord would take me down to understand ‘grace in it’s various forms’. I assumed I would mess up and sin, and I would come to understand grace. But grace is oh so much more! Grace grows from humility, so God went for the root – pride.

The circumstances that are teaching me grace are also humbling me in their simplicity. I’m tripping over health issues and changes in several significant relationships in my life. Things I thought I could handle, things that aren’t a big deal to anyone else. Simple things are leaving me begging for grace and desolate for His presence.

It’s not the size of the issue that brings you to your knees, but that fact that you get to your knees that matters. That humbles me. And there is where the grace begins. 

When life is spinning out of control, grace is what keeps us sane, what gives us something to hold on to. 

When the fluff of life and our comfort is stripped away, we recognize grace through humble lenses; sunshine, a prayer, a smile, sleep, peace, His whispers in the dark – these are evidence of grace all around us.

The more I need grace, the more I see others around me need it too. You don’t know others need grace till you need it yourself, and you can’t give grace until you have received it. 

C.J. Mahaney says grace is remembering that every “Individual has been previously acted upon by God. That’s the divine perspective we must begin with or else we will be tempted to look for others deficiencies rather than for evidence of grace in their lives.” – Humility – True Greatness

We can encourage others by pointing out the grace of God in their lives, as we recognize it in our own.

Grace has many, many, forms. And we are told to administer them to each other. “Each one should use whatever gift he has received to serve others, faithfully administering God’s grace in its various forms.” 1 Peter 4:10 ESV

In order to administer God’s grace (and receive it) we must first recognize what grace is. I’m still learning that, but I encourage you to look for the rhythms of grace in your life. They are there – they just go undetected in our frazzled rushing about. Grace is God getting the glory. 

Is He getting the glory in your life?

Nancy Wilson: From Shattered Pieces to Stained Glass

The sun was shining through the stained glass window, bringing to life the scene of Jesus with the little children gathered around him. The sound of small voices filled the room as the Sunday school kids learned to sing “Jesus Loves Me.”

“Yes, Jesus loves me, yes Jesus loves me, yes Jesus loves me, the Bible tells me so,” went the chorus.

Three-year-old Nancy believed these words as she sang them, but didn’t fully realize their meaning until later in life. Meanwhile, she continued to attend Sunday school and sang in the choir throughout her childhood and high school. 

Now 65, Nancy Wilson said what she had to learn 30 years ago, through grace, is that “it’s one thing to believe, another to accept Christ into your heart.”

“It is only when I had spent my life in sin,” she said, “and realized that this world offered me no peace, no hope and no future, that I finally asked Jesus to be Lord of my life.”

She can recall several times in her life when God tried to get her attention, but she said the most vivid of these memories is of the moment she was “a bottle of pills away” from ending her life. A televangelist was on TV at that time inviting people to come to God, and she decided to accept and pray with him. 

Shortly after she prayed, she said she got a phone call from a Christian friend, and told her what she’d just done and had planned on doing. They then prayed together. 

“Only weeks before, I had been in her home cursing God for my life,” she said. “Divorced, two teenage sons who wanted to live with their father instead of me, soon to be unemployed, I certainly did not feel like God was in charge of my life.”

But from then on, she said God was in full control of her life. 

She found a job and moved to New York, started attending church, and made many new Christian friends. 

“Today, I am so thankful for His loving kindness to me, His Grace, His forgiveness and the knowledge that His work is not complete. I look forward to Heaven, but I am learning to live in the joy of knowing Jesus as my Lord and Savior.”

She said if she was speaking with someone who does not know this joy, the one message she would want to leave with them is this: “Christ died for you and wants you to know He loves you. He wants you to accept His sacrifice as a gift so that you might spend eternity with Him.”

Roy Bunger: A Story of God's Grace and Faithfulness

Roy Bunger, 54, grew up with parents who believed in God, brought him to church on a regular basis and read to him stories from the Bible. But he said as a young child, he didn’t like church at all. His spiritual life as a teenager was somewhat of a rollercoaster ride, going from diligently reading the Bible and praying at 14 years of age, to rebelling and drifting away from his faith as an older teen. 

What he describes as his “wake-up call” came when he was a young man in the military returning home for his father’s funeral after a sudden death. He said during that time, he remembered in great detail what he’d learned about God as a child and young teenager.

“It was at that point, with Mom’s help,” he said, “that I first openly committed my life to Christ. It’s been a long road since then. I have strayed, backslid, sinned, repented, and through it all God has been wonderfully faithful and abounding in mercy.” 

Bunger enjoys poetry and song, and often relates it to his life. “For me,” he said, “it so aptly and preciously communicates meaning and beauty.”

One such work is one of John Newton’s “Ol­ney Hymns,” first published in 1779:

Strange and mysterious is my life.
What opposites I feel within!
A stable peace, a constant strife;
The rule of grace, the power of sin:
Too often I am captive led,
Yet daily triumph in my Head,
Yet daily triumph in my Head.

I prize the privilege of prayer,
But oh! what backwardness to pray!
Though on the Lord I cast my care,
I feel its burden every day;
I seek His will in all I do,
Yet find my own is working too,
Yet find my own is working too.

I call the promises my own,
And prize them more than mines of gold;
Yet though their sweetness I have known,
They leave me unimpressed and cold
One hour upon the truth I feed,
The next I know not what I read,
The next I know not what I read.

I love the holy day of rest,
When Jesus meets His gathered saints;
Sweet day, of all the week the best!
For its return my spirit pants:
Yet often, through my unbelief,
It proves a day of guilt and grief,
It proves a day of guilt and grief.

While on my Savior I rely,
I know my foes shall lose their aim,
And therefore dare their power defy,
Assured of conquest through His Name,
But soon my confidence is slain,
And all my fears return again,
And all my fears return again.

Thus different powers within me strive,
And grace and sin by turns prevail;
I grieve, rejoice, decline, revive,
And victory hangs in doubtful scale:
But Jesus has His promise passed,
That grace shall overcome at last,
That grace shall overcome at last.

Bunger said over the past few years, God has taught him many valuable lessons, three of which specifically relate to each other. The first, he said, is that “selflessness is the key.” He pointed out there are many “self-sins” that can drag people down and make them miserable, such as self-pity, self-love and self-seeking.

The second lesson, he said, is to “have no agenda of my own.” He said he realized he’s spent the majority of his life trying to get the things he wants, and pursuing things that aren’t necessarily sinful, but in a way that became sinful.

“I would choose a course of action that appealed to me,” he said, “without much reference to [or even thinking about] God’s will and His claims on my life. Then, if I prayed at all, I would ask His blessings on plans which I’d already made. No wonder I was often frustrated and empty, and even if I managed to get what I wanted, it was hollow.”

But through some hard times and trials the past few years, he said he realized his need to put God first, and seek Him and His will for his life, putting aside distractions. 

The third lesson, he said, is in the privilege of serving others and representing God as he strives, through grace, to pour out his life for His glory.  

He said what God’s grace means to him is the “wonderful heart of love which He has, to reach out to the filthy, the downtrodden, the utterly broken, and begin to heal them and make them His children. He makes us, the undeserving, like His Son, Jesus, and is in the process of making us shine in His very image. He pours His goodness and joy into us, slowly at first since we are so broken and fragile that we can hardly bear it without falling to pieces.”

As Jesus said in Bunger’s favorite Bible passage, Matthew 9:12-13, “…It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. But go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have not come to call the righteous, but the sinners.”

Sandy Minnick: A story of man’s betrayal, a heart’s loneliness and God’s faithfulness.

One of Sandy Minnick’s favorite Bible verses is Romans 8:28, which reads, “And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.”

 

“Wow, has that ever been true,” she said. 

But she didn’t always know this in her heart as she does now. She said there was a time in her life when things were so bad she even reached the point of writing a suicide note to her oldest daughter, although she couldn’t bring herself to go through with it. 

“I had never felt emotionally lower than I did at that point in my life,” she said. “I cried all the time, could barely function at work, and thought about suicide many, many times.“

Her husband of over 20 years, with whom she had three children, had informed her he no longer loved her and wanted a divorce.

Minnick was raised Roman Catholic and brought her children up in the same faith. Her oldest daughter, however, had been attending Grace Bible Church in Catawissa, where she enjoyed listening to the sermons. The same weekend that Minnick received the divorce papers, her daughter invited her along to church.

She said she woke up that Sunday depressed, but her daughter encouraged her to get ready to go, so she went, reluctantly finding a seat in the back row in case she felt she couldn’t stay.

The sermon that Sunday was on “Love and Marriage,” and Minnick said the pastor spoke on divorce and what it means to be in a Christian marriage. 

“I could barely breathe and my daughter kept squeezing my hand telling me it was okay,” she said. “I knew that day, that I was meant to be in that church for a special reason.”

God didn’t immediately fix her life. 

Her husband still went through the divorce. 

She still describes it as the worst time of her life.

She said, however, that Jesus came into her heart during the worst time of her life, becoming the best part of her life. 

“Christ knows exactly everything we are going to go through in this life,” she said. “I firmly believe that He gives us these trials to draw us closer to Him…People will always fail and disappoint us, but He will never leave us.”

She said she now longs to help others who are going through similar trials and don’t know Jesus, and she would tell them to “love God and ask Him for His guidance, and to come to know him personally.”

Another of Sandy Minnick’s favorite Bible verses is Phil. 4:13.

Minnick now serves in various ministries in her church and town, and was even able to travel on a mission trip to Kenya, Africa in January. She’s proud of her children, who are now all grown. Her oldest daughter, who she said “is a believer and married to a wonderful Christian man,” recently blessed her with her first grandson. 

“I never dreamed that my life would be so fulfilled,” she said. “I love my church and my church family and I love the Lord with all my heart.” 

Guest Post: "Strike Three"

by Stacy Pelz

Originally posted on www.dailysurrendertojesus.com

Sitting on the curb listening to the deep rumble of rigs on the freeway. Tears falling on asphalt as I lean over my knees, holding them close, rocking away the feelings of failure and guilt. My dad's new car now mangled by my one careless moment of inattention, was now towed away, but I was left to wait in the parking lot of a nearby restaurant. The sun was shining, birds cooing, people smiling as they stepped by me on break for lunch, but I only saw the shadow of black between my feet, head bowed with shame, for the scenario seemed altogether too familiar. A brief distraction teamed with too much speed, and the third of my father's cars... totalled.

I remembered the words of my driver's ed teacher... "You have to pass this test to get your license, but the real test begins after you pass." I had failed the real test.

Perhaps my last failure could be blamed on the black ice, but this one... this momentary neglect while merging onto the freeway made me shake my head at the silly girl who just two years before rushed into the room proudly waving that slip of paper exclaiming "100%!" with head held high. Such a different posture from this girl waiting quietly for dad to arrive.

Empty of thought, struggling for ease of breathe, numb, until I saw a familiar set of shoes beside me and an arm of love wrapped gently around my shoulder. "Dad, I'm so sorry about your car!" Perhaps 2 could be forgiven, but 3? That was surely asking too much. 3 strikes and you're out, right?

But my compassionate father understood 70 x 7, and his arms of forgiveness held a little tighter as he whispered words of honeycomb, "A car is replaceable. But you are not."

That was when I first noticed the cement being prepared for pouring into a new life. The churning of thoughts, and glimpses of understanding... Cement for a new foundation. That was when God first whispered the word grace into my life.

"You are a forgiving God, gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and abounding in love"

"He said to me, 'My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.' Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ's power may rest on me."
(Neh 9:17, 2Cr 12:9)

Will you boast with me, about our weaknesses, so that Christ would be glorified? So that His grace would be brought to light? When, in your life, have you walked in failure only to see the faithful hand of God come through with grace?

Cindy Fisher: A Story of Grace, Trauma and the Power of Prayer

God’s grace is found in many different shapes, sizes and places, some obvious and others unexpected. For Cindy Fisher, then 29, it showed up in the trauma unit of the Allentown Sacred Heart Hospital.

When she, her husband and her daughter were in a serious car accident, they ended up in two separate hospitals. After being cut from the car with the use of the “jaws of life,” and life-flighted to the hospital, Fisher was diagnosed with Traumatic Closed Head Brain Injury and a broken jaw in several places.

The doctors told her family she was lucky to be alive, but there wasn’t much hope for full recovery. They needed to prepare themselves, as her brain function would likely be extremely diminished.

Her husband and daughter’s injuries were less severe, and although still in need of care at home, they were soon out of the hospital. She, however, remained there for another month. At the time of her discharge there were more questions than answers, and a decision had to be made. 

Should she be placed in a nursing home?

Who would care for her? 

Her family quickly decided against the nursing home, and her sister acquired the needed equipment to care for her in her home.

 “With the grace of God,” Fisher said, “our families made changes that interrupted their everyday lives to care for our special needs.”

This was no small task, and required much personal sacrifice.

“I was the most difficult to car for,” Fisher said. “I had lost my short term memory and most of my lifetime memories, my fine motor skills had disappeared, and I had continual hallucinations. A minute seemed like hours to me.”

Although recovery was a long process, she didn’t have to go through it alone. She was supported and prayed for by family, friends and various churches.

From left: Cindy, Lloyd and Melissa Fisher at Melissa's Graduation from Nursing college in 2008

Now 55, Fisher praises God each day for her family, friends and life. After her recovery, she was able to continue her roles as a wife, mother, sister, friend and now grandmother of two. 

“I truly believe in the power of prayer and God’s grace,” she said. “I know in my heart that I would not have come this far without God’s grace.”

She has known God since she was a child and was baptized twice—first at the age of 12, then at 22 when she felt she better understood the reasons for it.

When she meets people who are in similar situations to what she went through, she hopes her story will be an encouragement to them as she keeps them in her prayers. 

Jennifer Schreiner: Finding the Right Path

The paths of God's children are marked with grace.

Jennifer Schreiner was five years old when she first decided to follow the path of Jesus and give her heart to Him. 

About 19 years later, however, she found herself on a different path. It was then, she said, while she was hanging with the wrong crowd and no longer living for God, when her mother was praying, asking Him to get her attention.

And He did. 

Through a pregnancy. 

Unable to take care of a child at that point in her life, she placed the baby for adoption. 

At first it was difficult finding the right match. One couple was suggested to her, but she knew them and felt it would be awkward. So, she kept looking. Another was found, but then fell through a couple months later. Then, five different people at different times suggested the first couple, and she began to wonder if it was of God.  It worked out, and that couple ended up adopting the baby.

Today, she recognizes God’s hand in the adoption. “The family I didn’t want to adopt her at first," she said, "has been the best family she could have had."

Although it was a hard time in her life, looking back, she now sees it as God’s grace. “I’m not sure I would have been able to do it if I was not turning to God,” she said.

She pointed out that it was also through the love and non-judging attitudes of her family and church that helped her through the difficult time and lead her back to the path of Jesus.

Today she rejoices not only for the grace of God in her own life, but also in the life of the child who was adopted almost 10 years ago and became a child of God at the age of five.

Jennifer is now married and she and her husband Brad have two daughters. 

When she meets people who are going through similar situations to what she went through, she says she wants them to know that, “no matter what you have done, God wants a relationship with you.” She goes to God daily for strength and when things get tough, knowing that He is in control is a big deal to her, because that means she doesn’t have to fix it.

Her favorite verse in the Bible is Micah 6:8, which says, “He has told you, O man, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” (ESV)

 Click here to learn about God's story of grace for your life.

Whatever paths your life has traveled, God's grace has always followed.

Brittani Bradford: A New Creation

Confused. Grieving. Searching.

That’s how Brittani Bradford, a 22-year-old college student, felt entering her third semester as a photography major at Luzerne County Community College.
 

Sometimes she’d try talking to God, but wondered why He would listen.
 

Then she started hanging out with a friend from class, a religious person who seemed to have a positive attitude and offered decent answers to her questions. To her surprise, this new friend didn’t run away the next time she saw her, and eventually invited her to a Christian concert at the nearby Cross Creek Community Church. 
 

Although she’d heard of Leeland, the band that would be playing, and liked their music, she didn’t want to go, and began looking for an excuse not to.
 

The date of the concert was November 7, the same day that would have been her Aunt Vicki’s 38th birthday, had she not died a few years before. Still trying to deal with her Aunt’s death, Brittani didn’t know where to turn. 
 

“Of anybody in the world, why her?” she wondered. 

Since a church seemed to be a logical place to deal with grief, and since she was unable to come up with a valid excuse not to, she went. She figured it would be filled with lame, bogus-sounding preaching.
 

“And it kind of was,” she said.
 

But then Leeland Mooring, lead singer of the band, said something that caught her attention. He talked about what it means to be a “new creation,” a concept found in the Bible in II Corinthians 5:17. He talked about something she longed for: starting over.
  

It was then she decided she wanted Jesus in her life.
 

“Some people would say you could do that on your own,” she said, “but I truly believe you can’t…without God in your life.” 
 

Today, Brittani is a new creation.
 

Her favorite Bible verse is II Corinthians 5:17, which says, “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he [or she] is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come.” (English Standard Version)
 

She’s the first to admit that she’s not perfect. She’s still growing. Recognizing Jesus in her life is still new to her, and her life wasn’t automatically fixed and put into order when she came to God.
 

But she knows He’s there. She knows He’s listening. No matter what.
 

And she wants people who are in the same spot she was before all of this to know one thing:

There’s always hope.

Click here to learn about God's story of grace for your life.