The Wilful Sunflower

"Grace" is one of those words that, frankly, I find really easy to say; yet I'm not always sure what I mean by it.

Yes, we say that grace is "unmerited favour", but that just seems to plunge me deeper into the jargon jungle. "Unmerited favour" - is there really such a thing? Unearned, unearn-able?

Our world works on a "reward system": you work hard, you show results, you get promoted. It's always about results.

So this struck a chord this morning:

As much as we might believe in God's love, we feel deeply insecure in our relationship with Him. We remember our unforgiveness to the neighbour who wronged us - and Jesus' statement "Unless you forgive..." We hear the preacher say, "If you don't pray you won't have any power in your life," and recall the many times in the previous week we could have prayed and didn't.
from A God Who Heals The Heart, Steve Fry

I was like, "YES! That's exactly how I've felt!" Always that little bit of guilt chipping away, telling me I should have, could have, ought to have done more...

He talked about how we often respond to God out of fear instead of love, and I knew what he was talking about. How many times had I sinned and, knowing I need God, begged Him to forgive me? And I had not been sorry, not really; I'd only feared that He would turn His back on me. "If I had not confessed the sin in my heart, my Lord would not have listened," beat a rhythm in my ears. I wanted God to listen to my prayer. Ergo, I "confessed".

For years and years I prayed, wanting to find my security in God. It has taken that long to unlearn the patterns of my childhood and dismantle the conditioned responses that come from living in a result-oriented world. Even now, I'm still learning.

Isn't it sad that I know my God is perfectly trustworthy, that He loves me, and yet I can't seem to bring myself to trust in His love?

However, He's infinitely patient, I find; and He is, I discovered the other day, willing to do anything to help me trust Him.

I was reading Isaiah 7:10-20 and nearly fell off my chair when God told the king, "Ask me for a sign, Ahaz, to prove that I will crush your enemies as I have promised. Ask for anything you like, and make it as difficult as you want."

Do you realise what a HUGE offer this was? "Ask for anything, and make it as difficult as you want," God said. Wow!

The king, however, declined. "No, I wouldn't test the Lord like that," he said, sounding pious. But the end of the passage tells a different story: far from being pious, the king actually didn't trust God at all. He'd "hired" a foreign army to protect him instead.

And so God's offer becomes even more amazing. God was saying, "What can I do to prove to you that I can be trusted? Ask Me, and I will do it!"

See, the king probably thought, "What if the Lord doesn't come through for me? How do I know that this Isaiah guy is really from the Lord? Maybe he's just bluffing, talking off the top of his head. How do I know that God's really going to do what he says?"

And God not only knew this, He understood the king's fears and tenderly sought to allay them.

I saw a God who desperately yearned for His beloved people to trust Him. It was not beneath His dignity to prove Himself to them, if He could win their love and trust in return. The Almighty laid His heart bare, lowered Himself so much that He was willing to do anything the king asked - just to give the king that much needed reassurance. He stood there, open and vulnerable, aching. "Ask anything, anything at all!"

Imagine - the depth of His love!