Grace is a funny thing. It’s one
thing that makes absolutely no sense in this world. It’s something that none of
us deserve, and yet God freely chooses to give it to us, no questions asked.
But most of us think this is not enough. We feel we need to earn grace without
realizing that all we need to do is just accept it.
Baptist theologian Charles Stanley
offers this experience of what grace is like. When he was in seminary, one of
his professors passed out the final exam in his class with instructions to all
the students that they had to read the entire exam carefully before they
started answering the questions.
It became evident that this exam
would be one of the hardest the seminarians had ever encountered. They wondered
how they would ever pass this barrage of increasingly difficult questions…until
they reached the final page. It said: “Now that you have read the entire exam,
you have a choice: you may either take the test as written, or simply sign your
name at the bottom of this page, and in so doing receive an ‘A’ on this exam.”
Dr. Stanley recalled that it took
him the better part of the day to get over this. If the professor’s goal was to
demonstrate how grace works, he certainly achieved it. No one deserved to get
an “A” just for signing his or her name on an exam, but the professor offered
it.
Mind you, not everyone accepted this
gift. One student took the exam and got a C-plus. Not a bad effort, considering
how hard the test was…but he could just as easily have gotten an A.
God gives us the gift of grace. But
the real question is not why God chooses to do this. The real question is
whether or not we are going to accept the gift.
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