Excerpt from, "Knowing God", by J. I. Packer
His Restoring Grace Waits for You
What is grace? In the New Testament, grace means God's love in action towards men who merited the opposite of love. Grace means God moving heaven and earth to save sinners who could not lift a finger to save themselves. Grace means God sending his only Son to descend into hell on the cross so that we guilty ones might be reconciled to God and received into heaven. "God hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin, that we might be made the righteousness of God in him" (2 Corinthians 5:21).
The New Testament knows both a will of grace and a work of grace. The former is God's eternal plan to save; the latter is God's 'good work in you' (Philippians 1:6), whereby He calls man into living fellowship with Christ (1 Corinthians 1:9), raises them from death to life (Ephesians 2:1-6), seals them as His own by the gift of His Spirit (Ephesians 1:13), transforms them into Christ's image (2 Corinthians 3:18), and will finally raise their bodies in glory (Romans 8:31; 1 Corinthians 15;47 -54). It was fashionable among Protestant scholars some years ago to say that Grace means God's loving attitude as distinct from His loving work, but that is an unscriptural distinction. In (for instance) 1 Corinthians 15:10 – 'by the grace of God I am what I am: and His grace which was bestowed upon me was not in vain: but I labored more abundantly than they all: yet not I but the grace of God which was with me' - the word 'grace' clearly denotes God's loving work in Paul, whereby He made him first a Christian and then a minister.
What is the purpose of grace? Primarily, to restore man's relationship with God. When God lays the foundation of this restorative relationship, by forgiving our sins as we trust His Son, He does so in order that henceforth we and He may live in fellowship, and what He does in renewing our nature is intended to make us capable of, and actually to lead us into, the exercise of love, trust, delight, hope, and obedience Godward – those acts which, from our side, make up the reality of fellowship with God, who is constantly making Himself known to us. This is what all the work of Grace aims at – an ever deeper knowledge of God, and an ever closer fellowship with Him. Grace is God drawing us as sinners closer and closer to Himself.
How does God in grace prosecute this purpose? Not by shielding us from assault by the world, the flesh, and the devil, nor by protecting us from burdensome and frustrating circumstances, nor yet by shielding us from troubles created by our own temperament and psychology; but rather by exposing us to all these things, so as to overwhelm us with a sense of our own inadequacy, and to drive us to cling to Him more closely. This is the ultimate reason, from our standpoint, why God fills our lives with troubles and perplexities of one sort and another – it is to ensure that we shall learn to hold Him fast. The reason why the Bible spends so much of its time reiterating that God is a strong Rock, a firm defense, and a sure refuge and help for the weak, is that God spends so much of His time bringing home to us that we are weak, both mentally and morally, and dare not trust ourselves to find, or to follow, the right road. When we walk along a clear road feeling fine, and someone takes our arm to help us, as likely as not we shall impatiently shake him off; but when we are caught in rough country in the dark, with a storm getting up and our strength spent, and someone takes our arm to help us, we shall thankfully lean on him. And God wants us to feel that our way through life is rough and perplexing, so that we may learn thankfully to lean on Him. Therefore, He takes steps to drive us out of self-confidence to trust in Himself – and the classical scriptural phrase for the secret of the godly man's life, 'to wait on the Lord'.
This truth has many applications. One of the most startling is that God actually uses our sins and mistakes to this end. He employs the educative discipline of failures and mistakes very frequently. It is striking to see how much of the Bible deals with men of God making mistakes, and God chastening them for it. Abraham, promised a son, but made to wait for him, loses patience, makes the mistake of acting the amateur Providence, and begets Ismael – and is made to wait for 13 more years before God speaks to him again (Genesis 16:16 – 17:1). Moses makes the mistake of trying to save his people by acts of self-assertion, throwing his weight about, killing an Egyptian, insisting on sorting out the Israelites private problems for them – and finds himself banished for many decades to the backside of the desert, to bring him to a less vainglorious mind. David makes a run of mistakes – seducing Bathsheba and getting Uriah killed, neglecting his family, numbering the people for prestige – and in each case is chastened bitterly. Jonah makes the mistake of running away from God's call – and finds himself inside a great fish. So we might go on. But the point to stress is that the human mistake, and the immediate divine displeasure, were in no case the end of the story. Abraham learned to wait for God's time. Moses was cured of his self-confidence (indeed his subsequent diffidence was itself almost sinful! – See Exodus 4:14). David found repentance after each of his lapses, and was closer to God at the end then at the beginning. Jonah prayed from the fishes belly, and lived to fulfill his mission to Nineveh. God can bring good out of the extremes of our own folly; God can restore the years that the locust has eaten. They say that those who never make mistakes never make anything; certainly, these men made mistakes, but through their mistakes God taught them to know His grace, and to cling to him in a way that would never have happened otherwise. Is your trouble a sense of failure? The knowledge of having made some ghastly mistake? Go back to God; His restoring Grace waits for you.
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