What are we talking about?

This Sunday will be the third meeting of our new Young Adults Small Group at my church, the class that I am leading and trying to expand.  If you are in the Junction area on Sunday morning at 10 a.m. please stop by and get in on the discussion.  As we continue in our study of 1 Peter this week we will be talking about a topic that means a lot to me.

Grace.

Just the word gives me feelings of comfort and security and joy.  It reminds me of God's undying love and my undeserved redemption and the fact that no matter how badly I screw up sometimes, God will not abandon me.  That idea is utterly amazing.

We are only in verse 2 of chapter 1 and when Peter talks about grace and peace he is giving a customary greeting to his readers, but the last sentence of that verse is so powerful it is impossible to merely gloss over it and quickly move on to bigger things.  This is big.  The idea that God has given us two incomparable gifts - grace and peace - is astounding. 

In my roughly thirteen years as a Christian I have been through many situations where I desperately needed the grace of God, only at the time I was so unclear on the concept that I instead made attempts at a minor form of penance.

When I would sin and found myself feeling so bad about it I decided I needed to pray more or read the Bible more or listen to more Christian music in order to earn back God's favor.  I got this idea I think from my Catholic upbringing.  When I was a child in the Catholic church, I was told by the priest after confession that I needed to recite ten "Hail Mary's" and five "Our Fathers" in order to be forgiven.  So as I grew up I maintained this crazy idea that saying more prayers or doing more good deeds would cancel out or at least make up for all the bad things I had done.  I carried this on for years until I finally began to understand grace a few years ago. 

I realized that God had already paid for my sins and that no amount of good deeds or prayers would make up for the bad.  I realized that God had saved me because of grace, not because I was a good kid.  I realized that no matter what I did wrong, God would still love me and care for me and be my Savior.  And those realizations changed my life.

So now, my desire is to help other people understand grace.  I hate seeing Christians beat themselves up about sins and feel like the worst person in the world because of them.  It breaks my heart to hear a person say that they don't feel like God can forgive them.  God forgave me for so much.  Nothing is beyond His forgiveness.  And nothing is too bad for grace. 

So this is what we are talking about on Sunday.  If you have any thoughts, I would love to hear them. 

What about you?  Have you ever struggled with the concept of grace?  Do you have a story too?