His Love Frees

For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God. (Ephesians 2:8)

Christianity didn’t make sense. I remember standing in front of a church pastor with my fist gripped in my pocket, wanting to smash his face. He was sitting in a chair, smiling at me, saying that God’s ‘grace’ through Jesus had achieved all that I need – I could recline on a chair as he was doing and sit in that grace.

“Just receive it” – but it didn’t make sense. Surely there was something I still needed to do? A religious ritual or similar? How could it be that easy? I was confused and angry but the pastor had no more to say. That was the ‘gospel’. A gift.

It wasn’t long after, on another day, that I finally made a decision to accept that gift of love by my creator. And my life changed. Of course, it wasn’t so ‘easy’ for Jesus Christ to offer that gift. It involved a great deal of suffering and death. Some people think of Christians as religious and weird. People that lean on the crutch of faith. People that believe in magic. People that believe events 2,000 years ago matter now, which is insane.

There was nothing magic or unreal about the execution of Jesus Christ. It happened. Blood, pain, weeping, death… and then an empty tomb. An event so ‘weird’ that it turned life upside down for many Jewish people living in Israel in the First Century, alongside others inhabiting that part of the Mediterranean coast. An event so traumatic that the Roman Empire itself was later brought to its knees – and even the emperor himself bowed to Jesus Christ. The King of kings is all we really need.

Grace: God’s riches at Christ’s expense.

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