Grace-Needs

"Grace-Needs"

This is the word the Lord gave me for 2015.

This is the word that has exploded in my heart.

My whole life is lived by His grace. I have extreme need of it even when I don't know it; especially when I don't know it.

We live in a time of the greatest dispensation of His grace in history. Scripture tells us His grace has been poured out so that we might see Him, acknowledge Him and receive Him into the very fiber of our beings; that we might recognize our need of a Savior and see Jesus that we might be reconciled to His Father, our Father.

So much has been written about grace, yet it remains elusive to our finite minds.  

We grapple to understand it, to capture it, to define it.

One of the most recent definitions I've heard is from Graham Cooke - "Grace is the empowering presence of God to enable me to become the person that God sees when He looks at me."

When I think of grace, I think of His empowering presence that enables me to do what in my flesh and left to my own resources, I cannot do.

Today -

23 - I need grace to fight the battle raging in my thoughts.
24 - I need grace to overcome the accusations of the enemy.

As I write my list today in my Grace-Needs Journal, I call upon the Lord for His grace and mercy.

Lately, I am recognizing so clearly just how needy I really am.  Honestly, it overwhelms me.

Today at church we sang these words:

"I'm falling on my knees

Offering all of me

Jesus, you're all this heart is living for."

"Offering all of me" - I became aware of how little that really is.  I am so broken, more than I know, and so lacking, so needy.  To put it in modern terms, I feel like He is getting the "short end of the stick!"  Yet when I offer all of who I am to Him, He takes it, lovingly takes it and pours His love, His overwhelming, overpowering love out to me.

Always

I feel the strength of your love

Everywhere I go, your love pursues me

So, today, this simply is my definition of grace -

Love!

A love that shatters, a love that gathers

A love that overwhelms,

A love that beckons,

A love that transforms,

A love unconditional, without boundaries,

A love that seeks the lowest places in me

to bring me to the highest places in Him.

A love not diminished by the sin in me.

A love not put off by my flaws, failures and neediness.

A love not dependent on what I do or don't do.

Along with this word - Grace-Needs - the Lord also gave me this Scripture for 2015:

"Now unto him that is able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that works in us.  Unto him be glory in the church by Christ Jesus throughout all ages, world without end.  Amen."

Ephesians 3:20-21

This, to me, today, is what His grace is all about.

I need that grace!