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What Does God's Grace Mean To Us?

© Susan Padezanin

God's grace remains basic to everything else. What does it mean to United Methodists? We all have different ways of stating it because we all experience grace uniquely and personally. For some, it has been a sudden, life-transforming moment when the assurance of God's love has come like a stroke of lighting. For other, it has been a slowly developing and deepening realization of the depth of God's love, nurtured by a caring family and loving church. Common to all is the sense that God's love is not merited. We cannot claim to have earned it; it is freely given and received in faith. Common to all is recognition that we have received this gift through Christ. We will perceive this in different ways, too. However, to speak of Christ is to remind us that grace is not just an idea, not an abstraction. God's love can be expressed to us through Christ because Christ was both human and divine. Our faith is that the love of Christ, which we have seen and felt, is the love of God.

Despite our differences in ways of expressing this, grace has two very important implications for all of us. First, it means that there is absolutely no room for self-righteousness. We are all sinners, we are all imperfect, we are all dependent upon God's gift. That means we cannot think of ourselves as being better than other people. Our shared need for God's grace means that there is no basis for human pretense.

The other implication is that we do not define ourselves based on particular moral rules. There is a place for moral principles and rules, the Methodist and Evangelical Brethren traditions have given them great emphasis. However, our life does not flow from them. Our life is transformed by God's grace, not by our conformity to specified rules. United Methodists have not always been as clear about that as our faith would suggest. Sometimes United Methodists have indeed defined themselves by what they don't do--for example, giving the impression that a Methodist is primarily somebody who doesn't consume alcoholic beverages. Sometimes that is what we take spiritual "standards" to mean. But the roots of our faith are far more profound. The "standard" is God's grace and our loving response to God, God's creation, and fellow humanity. John Wesley was very clear about that: grace is prior to works.