What is GRACE?

Grace: The essential nature of God (agape) and the fundamental intention of God (redemption), freely given and apart from any merit on the receiver's part. Grace is merciful love, aimed at nothing other than incorporating the recipient into the body of Christ.

For that reason the Greek word for grace, charis, has to do with rejoicing and has been variously used to describe beauty, charm, goodwill, favor, and the like. Grace is the divine atmosphere in which we live, move, and have our being.

As the Son of God, Jesus came to earth "full of grace and truth" (John 1:14), and from his fullness we received "grace upon grace" (John 1:16). The Gospel accounts do not use the word grace extensively but show us what the offer of grace looked like in the life and ministry of Christ. God's ultimate act of unmerited love took place on the cross, when Jesus died for our sins.

Paul puts charis into the vocabulary of the New Testament, making it virtually synonymous with the gospel itself -- "the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ." Trained in the Hebrew Bible, Paul was able to link the earlier idea of God's covenant love with the Incarnation and culmination of that love in Jesus (Rom. 10:4). Thus to live in grace is to live "in Christ" and to allow Christ to live "in us." This, says Paul, is the secret of the ages now made known to us: "Christ in you, the hope of glory" (Col. 1:27). Or, in Jesus' analogy in John 15, we are to "abide in him" even as he "abides in us."

But grace is not merely a great truth about God; it is a transforming effect of the life of God in the human soul. To live in grace is to be changed "from one degree of glory to another" (2 Cor. 3:18). As we respond to God's ongoing offers of grace, we find ourselves becoming more like Christ in character and conduct. Such is the efficacious nature of grace.

Prevenient grace (literally, "coming before") is our experience of grace prior to our profession of faith or the action of grace that precedes any conscious growth. It is sometimes associated with conviction of sin, but it can also describe the way grace awakens us to new challenges and opportunities.

Saving (or justifying) grace is properly the activity of grace in our lives at the time when we profess our faith in Jesus and begin to live the Christian life as new believers. Yet we also know that God's grace "saves" us again and again as time goes by from all sorts of things and for a variety of reasons.

Sanctifying grace is God's grace working in us as we deepen our faith and mature as disciples of Jesus. Again, it cannot be contained in any single experience, and it extends over all the years of our Christian journey.

Finally, glorifying grace is the presence of God's grace with us at the moment of death, enabling us to experience what many of the saints have called "holy dying." It is the grace that underlay Jesus' words in John 14, that in the Father's house there are "many mansions" (v. 2, KJV), and because of him a place has been prepared for us.

The experience of grace is the presence of God in us for a lifetime -- before we were born and after we die. And for that reason, we use the term grace as a single-word description for so much of what it means to live the Christian life.

--Steve Harper
"Grace"
The Upper Room Dictionary of Christian Spirituality

From The Upper Room Dictionary of Christian Spirituality, edited by Keith Beasley-Topliffe. Copyright © 2003 by Upper Room Books. Used with permission. All Rights Reserved.