The Discipline of Grace

Jerry Bridges, The Discipline of Grace: God’s Role and Our Role in the Pursuit of Holiness, 13-19. 

“Consider two radically different days in your own life. 

The first one is a good day spiritually for you.  You get up promptly when your alarm goes off and have a refreshing and profitable quiet time as you read your Bible and pray.  Your plans for the day generally fall into place, and you somehow sense the presence of God with you.  To top it off, you unexpectedly have an opportunity to share the gospel with someone who is truly searching.  As you talk with the person, you silently pray for the Holy Spirit to help you and to also work in your friend’s heart.

The second day is just the opposite.  You don’t arise at the first ring of your alarm.  Instead, you shut it off and go back to sleep.  When you finally awaken, it’s too late to have a quiet time.  You hurriedly gulp down some breakfast and rush off to the day’s activities.  You feel guilty about oversleeping and missing your quiet time, and things just generally go wrong all day.  You become more and more irritable as the day wears on, and you certainly don’t sense God’s presence in your life.  That evening, however, you quite unexpectedly have an opportunity to share the gospel with someone who is really interested in receiving Christ as Savior. 

Would you enter those two witnessing opportunities with a different degree of confidence?  Would you be less confident on the bad day than on the good day?  Would you find it difficult to believe that God would bless you and use you in the midst of a rather bad spiritual day? 

If you answered yes to those questions, you have lots of company among believers.  I’ve described these two scenarios to a number of audiences and asked, ‘Would you respond differently?’  Invariably, about 80 percent indicate that they would.  They would be less confident of God’s blessing while sharing Christ at the end of a bad day than they would after a good one.  Is such thinking justified?  Does God work that way?  The answer to both questions is no, because God’s blessing does not depend on our performance. 

…The point of this good-day—bad-day comparison is this: Regardless of our performance, we are always dependent on God’s grace…Some days we may be more acutely conscious of our sinfulness and hence more aware of our need of His grace, and there is never a day when we can stand before Him on our own two feet of performance, when we are worthy enough to deserve His blessing. 

[So, today, remember this truth:] Your worst days are never so bad that you are beyond the reach of God’s grace.  And your best days are never so good that you are beyond the need of God’s grace.”