This semester’s Care Conversations deal with the important theme of “Hope with Grace”.
Each “Conversation” has been designed for personal reflection. They can also be used as a basis for devotional input with your leadership group, teachers and staff – even students.
I trust that you enjoy reading and that it will cause thinking, discussion, action and a deeper understanding of the God of all grace and hope.
Blessings, Brian
“The Bible’s purpose is not so much to show you how to live a good life. The Bible’s purpose is to show you how God’s grace breaks into your life against your will and saves you from the sin and brokenness otherwise you would never be able to overcome… religion is ‘if you obey, then you will be accepted’. But the Gospel is, ‘if you are absolutely accepted, and sure you’re accepted, only then will you ever begin to obey’. Those are two utterly different things. Every page of the Bible shows the difference.” Tim Keller
Hope with Grace – Part One
I’ve been engaged in regular conversations with a young man for many years.
During this time, he has spent numerous periods as an excited witness to Jesus, and several periods in the depths of sadness, anger and hopelessness, numbed by drugs and alcohol. Some of these periods have brought him close to death. He has begged on the streets for drug money; he has ended up in hospital emergency centres.
In our most recent conversation, after he had spent months in rehab and counselling, he recognised that his life was full of fears and doubts. That he never fully knows who he is, and how he is meant to live. When he turns back to Jesus, instead of feeling loved he condemns himself for his own unworthiness. In his words “I’ve let God down again.”
Hope is tightly linked with the grace of God. In fact, if He is not a gracious God, genuine hope is impossible. Instead, we can only trust in our own will-power, our own positive thinking and our own ability. The basis of hope then becomes either conditional or fatalistic. We must do all the right things to secure our hope or we cross our fingers and hope that hope comes. There can be no certainty – and when hope lacks certainty, life becomes hope-less.
The sobering thing is that we can all lose sight of God’s grace and mercy. We then try to wrestle back control of our lives. We fall into the trap that we are good people who earned our salvation and therefore when we fail the standard of righteousness, when we find ourselves entertaining sin, we feel a failure. Maybe this doesn’t result in drug and alcohol abuse and a total loss of dignity – maybe it simply becomes inventing excuses, or hiding the reality or living a double life.
If we can lose sight of God’s grace and mercy and thus have diminished hope – we can be sure that this happens in the lives of our young people also. We need to know that Hope is found in the great and generous grace of God.
Blessings, Brian