Sufficient Grace
There’s a song we often sing at my church that just kind of speaks to me each time. Here’s the part that is playing in my mind this morning:
Your grace is all-sufficient
It’s an all-sufficient grace
Your power and Your glory
Are forever on display
And Your loving kindness
Loving kindness
Is better than life.[1]
The thing is, we all want God’s grace. We want huge quantities of it. We might even think we deserve it. And it’s true that God freely bestows His grace upon us, not because we deserve it, but because of who and what He is.
If you are a Christ-follower, you are the recipient of His saving grace. We all know and love those verses in Ephesians 2:8-9: “For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God—not by works, so that no one can boast.”
If you’ve ever struggled with your own sinfulness, you might have been encouraged by the promise in Romans 5:20-21: “But where sin increased, grace increased all the more, so that, just as sin reigned in death, so also grace might reign through righteousness to bring eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.”
But there’s an aspect of God’s grace that most of us would rather not think about. This one comes to us in 2 Corinthians 12:7-10:
“Therefore, in order to keep me from becoming conceited, I was given a thorn in my flesh, a messenger of Satan, to torment me. Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from me. But 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. That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong.”
You see, the times when God’s grace become most precious to us are those times when we struggle—when we struggle with sin, when we struggle with sickness, when we struggle with evil, and even when we face loss through natural disasters or wars. Those are the times when God pours out an extra measure of His grace for us. When our own cups are empty, when we see no hope, when we come to the end of ourselves, we can know that His grace is sufficient—it’s an all-sufficient grace!
And, as Annie Johnson Flint said it so many years ago:
He giveth more grace as our burdens grow greater,
He sendeth more strength as our labors increase;
To added afflictions He addeth His mercy,
To multiplied trials He multiplies peace….His love has no limits, His grace has no measure,
His power no boundary known unto men;
For out of His infinite riches in Jesus
He giveth, and giveth, and giveth again.[2]
